Part 35

'Une Critique,' one of Desjardins's earliest essays, strikes the note of his life and writings at a time when he himself was unconscious of its portentous meaning to his world and his literature:--

"Whatever deserves to be, deserves the best attention of our intellect. Everything calls for interest, only it must be an interest divested of self-interest, and sincere. But above all we must labor--labor hard--to understand, respect, and tenderly love in others whatever contains one single grain of simple intrinsic Goodness. Believe me, this is everywhere, and it is everywhere to be found, if you will only look for it....

"The supremacy of the truly Good!--here lies the root of the whole teaching--the whole new way of looking at things and judging men....

"New views of the universality of our world, of poetry, of religion, of kindness (human kindness), of virtue, of worth!... Think it over; these are the objects on which our new generation is fixing its thoughts, and trying to awaken yours. This it is which is so new!"

Translation of Madame Blaze de Bury.

[Illustration: signature]

THE PRESENT DUTY

There are many of us who at times have forgotten our personal troubles, however great they were, by picturing to ourselves the moral distress of souls around us, and by meditating on the possible remedy for this universal ill. Some remain serene before this spectacle; they resign themselves to fatal evil and inextricable doubt; they look with cold blood on that which is. Others, like the one who speaks here, are more affirmative because they are more impassioned, more wounded, knowing neither how to forget nor how to be patient, nor yet how to despair peaceably; they are less troubled by that which is, than by that which ought to be; they have even turned towards that which ought to be, as towards the salvation for which their whole heart is calling. It is their weakness not to know how to interest themselves for any length of time in what does not in some way assume the aspect of a duty that concerns them. They do not contest, in fact, that it is a weakness not to be able to look with a disinterested eye on disease, corporal or spiritual; a weakness to feel the necessity of having something to do at the bedside of the dying, even if that something be in vain,--to employ the anguish of one's heart in preparing, even up to the supreme moment, remedies in the shadow of the chamber.

We are in a state of war. It would be almost cowardly to be silent about our intimate beliefs, for they are contradicted and attacked. We must not content ourselves with a pacification or truce which will permit us with facile weakness to open all the pores of our intelligence to ideas contrary to our conviction. It is necessary on the contrary to gird ourselves, to intrench ourselves. There is to-day, between us and many of our contemporaries, an irreconcilable disagreement that must be faced, a great combat in which parts must be taken. As far as I can see this is what it is. In a word, are subjection to animal instinct, egoism, falsehood, absolutely evil, or are they merely "inelegances"?--that is to say, things deprecated just at present, but which, well ornamented and perfumed with grace, might not again attract us, satisfy us, furnish us a type of life equivalent after all to the life of the sages and saints; for nothing shows us with certainty that the latter is any better than the former. Are justice and love a sure good, a sure law, and the harbor of safety? Or are they possible illusions, probable vanities? Have we a destiny, an ideal, or are we agitating ourselves without cause and without purpose for the amusement of some malicious demiurge, or simply for the absurd caprice of great Pan? This is the question that divides consciences. A great subject of dispute; surely greater than that of the divinity of Jesus Christ, for example, than that even of the existence of a personal God, or of any other purely speculative question you please; and above all, one more urgent: for there are counter-blows in it, which frighten me in my every-day existence,--me, a man kept to the business of living from the hour I awake to the light until the hour I go to sleep; and according to the answer I may give myself on this point, is the spirit in which I dig in my little garden.

Personally I have taken sides, after reflection; after experience also, I do profess with conviction that humanity has a destiny and that we live for something. What is to be understood exactly by this word humanity? In short, I know not, only that this, of which I know nothing, does not exist yet, but it is on the road to existence, on the road to make itself known; and that it concerns me who am here. What must be understood by this word destiny? I do not know much more; I have only, so far, dreams about it, dreams born of some profound but incommunicable love, which an equal love only could understand; my conscience is not pure enough to conceive a stronger conviction; I only affirm that this destiny of humanity, if it were known, would be such that all men, ignorant or simple, could participate in it. It is already something to know that, in short, I see at least by lightning-flashes, from which side the future will shine; and I walk towards it, and live thus, climbing up in a steep dark forest towards a point where a light is divined, a light that cannot deceive me, but which the obtruding branches of a complicated and apparent life hide from me. That which will bring me nearer it is not arguing about the probable nature of the light, but walking; I mean, fortifying in myself and others a will for the Good....

We have on one side undecided and lukewarm allies, on the other adversaries; and we are forced necessarily to combat. This necessity will become clearer each day; ... it is the "antagonism of negatives and positives--of those who tend to destroy and those who tend to reconstruct."... There is no question here, be it understood, of knowing whether we are deceiving ourselves in choosing such or such a particular duty; that I would concede without trouble, having always estimated that our moral judgments, like our acts, have need of ceaseless revision and amelioration, according to an endless progression. There is a question of much more; of knowing in an absolute manner whether there be a duty for us or not.... Good is in fact that which ought to be. Like Christ, who according to St. Paul is not a Yes and a No, but a Yes, duty is a Yes; to slip into it the shadow of a possibility of a No is to destroy it....

The men of to-day are thus negatives or positives, as they range themselves under one opinion or the other. And they must range themselves under one of the two. They cannot escape. The question which divides us, to know whether we live in vain, imposes itself upon every one who opens his lips or moves his finger, upon every conscious being who breathes. That So-and-so never speaks of it, never thinks of it, may be; but their lives answer for them and testify loudly enough. I confess that at first sight the negatives seem for the moment the more numerous. They include many groups, which I shall not enumerate here. I range with them the charming uncertain ones, like M. Renan and his melodious disciples, the sombre and nihilistic Buddhists; all those to whom the law of the completion of man through the good is indeed foolish and chimerical, since their lives imply the negation of it: I mean to say the immense multitude of those who live in any kind of way, good easy people, refined possibly, from caprice, coquetry or laziness, but in complete moral anaesthesia.

Now we come to the positives. They include first of all, true Christians, and all true Jews, attached to the profound spirit of their religion; then the philosophers and poets who affirm or sing the moral ideal, the new disciples of Plato, the Stoics, the Kantians, famous or unknown, to whom life alone, outside of all speculation, is a solid affirmation of the possibility and sufficiency of the good. That the

## actions of these men and women, on the way to creating themselves free

beings, human beings, have the same value as doctrine, cannot be denied. They labor and suffer here and there, each one in his own cell; each one making his own goodness consist in the realization of what he believes to be the absolute good; making themselves faithful servants of something; existing outside of themselves; the city, religion, charity, justice, truth even, or beauty, conceived as modes of adoration.... All these compose, it seems to me, one and the same Church, having the philosophers and poets of duty for doctors of divinity, the heroes of duty for congregation. These may be called by the general name of "Positives."

Let our eyes be opened: everything that surrounds us is vitiated; many of the children playing on the promenades are sickly, their little faces are often enough marked with livid blotches, their bones are often enough twisted, sad symptoms of the degradation of parents. At every street corner are distributed libertine productions by traders in the depravity of the weak. If any one wishes to recognize the furnace of vice burning within us, let him observe merely the looks cast upon an honest woman as she passes, by respectable men, old men. What savage expressions intercepted under the feverish light of the electric lamps! What tension, what spasms of covetousness! What hallucinations of pleasure and of gold! Tragic matter here, but low tragedies _a la_ Balzac, not those acted under an open sky by heroes. A few pistol-shots from time to time, a few poisonings, some drownings: that is all that transpires of the interior evil. The rest passes away in suppressed tears, brooding hatreds, in accepted shame. In such confusion the consciences of the best, of the most disinterested ones, lose the cleanness of their stamp. "You are smiling there at an obscenity," said I to a friend; he protested; then reflecting, agreed with me, quite astonished that he had not perceived it. Honest men are troubled by all this circumjacent corruption. And rightly so, for at the bottom they are parts of it; they are distinguished from it only by more cleanliness, education, elegance, but not by principle.

In fact, from top to bottom, all this society lives on sensation; that is the common trait through it all, and it is graded according to the quality of its sensations.... Fundamentally there is only sensation, with here and there unequally subtle nerves. There are no terms less reconcilable one to another than research of sensation and moral obligation. There is nothing more opposed. Therefore he who expects all from his sensations depends absolutely on externals, upon the fortuitous things of life, in all their incoherence; he is no longer a self-centre, he feels himself no longer responsible, his personality is dissolved, evaporated; it does not react, and ambient nature already absorbs him, like some dead thing....

And this is where we are. I recognize then the evil; I see it in its extent. Nevertheless, to paint this lamentable picture once more is not to show our moral ideas. Our moral idea is what we believe touching the life which shall be best; it is not exactly our life.

Ever since the antique Medea of Ovid uttered that cry, many others, one after another, have groaned over the fact that, seeing the best and approving it, they yet follow the worst--alas!

* * * * *

Such a sorrow is to-day profound and universal; there where vice abounds, sorrow superabounds. It is no longer that melancholy born of the insufficiency of external reality, once for all recognized, that felt by Obermann and proud romanticists; but a humble, narrow, ragged rancor, mixed with disdain, with disgust, born of our insufficiency to ourselves, perceived thoroughly. Never, I believe, have we been more generally sad than in these times. And it is that which saves us; I find here our greatness. He alone is lost who feels himself at ease and healthful in evil; consciences without anxiety are the only hopeless ones. Let us hope then, for it cannot be denied that we feel we are very ill. It is apparent that we are in labor with something which shall be our cure. The symptoms of this painful labor are not lacking. The works which are appearing now, pre-eminent in form, but obscure and hesitating in principles, bear signs of the stress in which they were conceived; soon they will seem merely specious. In the poetry, romance, painting, music, of to-day, how many exquisite works are born, not of energy guided by love, but only of a dream of energy, a dream of love, on the shores of inconsolable exile! The truth is, we no longer know what to become; when any one of the antique misfortunes strikes us,--death, abandonment, ruin,--we no longer bear it as our fathers did. We no longer know the dignified, peaceful mournings of old; but under an unexpected stroke, the torment, the complicated rending in the heart, show that it has been secretly undermined. We feel indeed divided within ourselves, and we need to be unified; but the inward unification is possible only for the absolutely debauched or the absolutely good man; there is no _via media_; half-virtue rends us....

Our spiritual life being in truth miracle and mystery, I do not know how to explain what each one knows so well; I do not know how there is developed within us that sublime state known and described under different names by Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Tauler, the author of the 'Imitation,' Shelley, Emerson, Tolstoy: but I know that such a state, which we all know by experience, merits alone the name of positive morality.... Well then, history shows that what is true of each one of us personally, is true of society.

THE CONVERSION OF THE CHURCH

While a purer spirit is visibly awakening in ailing humanity and turning it again to Christ, the religion of Christ is rejuvenating. His church is no longer motionless. Thus, in the midst of a great confusion, two religious movements which correspond with one another are defining themselves with sufficient clearness.

On the one side, men without any precise faith, and who thought themselves without any faith, have perceived that they carry within themselves that which they sought: an explanation of themselves, say a principle of salvation. At whatever point these thinking men arrive, it is apparent at the present that they are progressing in the way of the Evangel, and following the path of the cross.... On the other side, the Roman Catholic Church, governed by a vigilant Pope, has declared herself. She has spoken of love, at the moment when all were thirsty for love and self-forgetfulness; she intercedes for the suffering masses, at the moment when others were going to do it outside of her, perhaps against her. And more, she is resolutely to-day accenting spirituality, after having so long accented ritual or policy. The new spiritualists and the renewed Christians are thus pushed forward to a meeting with one another by the need of their practical co-operation, and also perhaps by the consciousness of their intimate kinship. They are marching from both sides, with the same rallying cry, Fraternity and sacrifice! Here they are flying from the city of the plain, where a material civilization reigns, and claiming to suffice all; they are emigrating, they know not whither, if it be only towards the heights; there they are descending from their high, narrow, clerical, shut-in fastness.

The conversion that the Church should make is a conversion of the heart. It must become again a school of true liberty and love. Herein lies all the anxiety of the moment; and the great Catholic question lies not between the Church and the Republic, but between the Church and the People, or rather between the Church and the pure Spirit. By loving the people in truth, and by making itself the people, it is clear that the Catholic Church would simply be returning to its original source. Now, returning to its original source is, in a word, all that the Church should do; and that which, following her example, all old institutions should do so as to live and to make us live. To last, means to be re-born perpetually. In truth, each one of these institutions was born in former times, from a definite need of the soul. And at first they responded exactly to it, and that is why they prevailed; all their strength came from the fact that they were necessary; their weakness comes from the fact that they are no longer so. At first the religious community was formed of the imperious necessity of a deliverance from evil; it was not for ornament, not for the charm of burning incense under arches; ... neither was it formed to do what kings, warriors, and judges are sufficient to do; these last would have absorbed it, but they cannot,--although they try to do so every day; but they can never do so, unless the Church abandons her own functions to usurp theirs. She would then, by forgetting her destination, commit suicide. But even then, another church would form in response to the spiritual hunger and thirst which never ceases. Thus the whole problem of the existence of an institution is to remain forever necessary, and therefore faithful to its original source.

Let us add that civil society cannot maintain itself without also constant rejuvenation,--becoming young again; it also exists only by the

## active consent of willing minds. It is essential for the harmony of the

whole that each person should be an individual and not an automaton. As men, divided by the external accidents of habit, condition, fortune, and united by that which is fundamental within them, the weakening of that which is within them disintegrates them; and thence the principal cause of our divisions comes from hardly any one to-day being in his heart that which he appears to be. Therefore, to bring back diverse conditions to their original source and to the reason of their being, to re-establish the principle in the centre of the life of each, is to do the work of unification. To say to the priests, "Be primitive Christians, imitate the chosen Master," is, socially speaking, a good

## action which all Christians and non-Christians should applaud, for the

salvation of all depends upon it. The remedy of our malady, without doubt, lies not in having all France to mass, but first that all should make their faith the rule of their actions. That which lies at the bottom of our consciences is the thing by which we are brothers.

TWO IMPRESSIONS

From 'Notes Contemporaines'

Two impressions have remained with me. They date from a month's wandering in Switzerland, at a time when there are no tourists to be met. The first is of the exquisite scenes of wintry Nature, as she shows herself at this season, when none come to visit her--still, reposeful, silent, veiled--how much more touching and impressive than when profaned by the summer crowd! This is the moment when the Jura should be seen! The pine woods on the hills are but faintly powdered with snow, and the patches of dry rusty vegetation beneath lie on the gray stones like the broad red stains of blood. Seeds hang here and there on the bare branches, mixed with the tendrils of the wild vine, or with ghostly clusters of what were the flowers of the clematis. The falling leaves are golden; those already fallen are of an ashen gray. The delicate tracery overhead is of infinite complexity, exquisite in its endless detail; and the whole of this disrobed Nature, in its unadorned simplicity, has an impress of sincerity that reminds you of the drawings of Holbein. Flat pools of shallow water lie about, carpeted with mosses and mirroring the sky; the smoke of the huts rises upward gaunt and straight. No one is near; there are no passers-by; and there is no sound, except that of a waterfall, fuller in its rush than at any other season. Silence--a silence so fragile that the step of a single wayfarer on the road would be enough to break it--reigns undisturbed, and covers everything like a winding-sheet.

My second impression is of another kind, though almost as comforting, at least by the contrast; it was given me by the conversation of the peasant folk, plain humble mountaineers. The speech and thought of these men is plain and direct, devoid of artifice, clear and fathomable; they furnish you an unvarnished tale of their own simple experience--the life experience of a man, no more! They neither invent nor disguise, and are totally incapable of presenting either fact or circumstances in a way that shall suggest to the hearer another or a different sense. Our woeful habit of ridiculing what lies indeed at the bottom of our hearts they have never learned; they copy, line by line and stroke by stroke, the meaning that is in them, the intentions of their inner mind. In our Parisian haunts, it seems to me that their success would be a problem; but they are heedless of "success"; and to us, when we escape from our vitiated centres, from an atmosphere poisoned by that perpetual straining after effect, the pure undressed simplicity of these "primitives" is as refreshing as to our over-excited and exhausted nerves are the green, quiet, hidden nooks of their Alpine solitudes. With them there is no need of imaginative expression; the trouble of thought is useless; their words are the transparent revelation of their beliefs. The calm brought to the hyper-civilized spirit by this plainness and directness of Nature is absolutely indescribable; and when I came to reflect on the profoundness of mental quietude--I might say of consolation--that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and where this outward seeming is absent, they are completely at a loss.

Well-bred Frenchmen rarely if ever have or pronounce an opinion, or pass a judgment--unless with a playful obliquity of judgment, and on things in general. They assume an air of knowing what they are talking about, and of having probed the vanity of all human effort before they have ever attempted or approached it; and even this indifference, this disdain, this apparent dislike to the responsibility of so much as an opinion,--even this is not natural, not innate; its formula is not of its own creation; it is but the repetition of what was originated by some one else. The truth is, that in our atmosphere all affirmative

## action is difficult; it is hard either to be or to do. This habit of

irony has destroyed all healthful activity here. It is a mere instrument of evil; if you grasp it, it turns to mischief in your hands, and either slips from and eludes them, or wounds you, as often as not, mortally.

SIR AUBREY DE VERE

(1788-1846)

[Illustration: SIR AUBREY DE VERE]