The Simple Life Part 8

The artificial life engenders artificial thought, and a speech little sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons: when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of originality and initiative is upon us, and plat.i.tude and monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or m.u.f.fle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not covered their sin.

To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our solicitude as educators.

Let us have for this comrade of childhood--a trifle uncivilized, it is true, but so gracious and friendly!--all possible regard. We must not frighten it away: when it has once fled, it so rarely comes back!

Ingenuousness is not simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called, who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret out nave things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent their being children at all;--as if before the ripe fruit of autumn, flowers did not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, and all the fairy springtime.

I ask indulgence for everything nave and simple, not alone for the innocent conceits that flutter round the curly heads of children, but also for the legend, the folk song, the tales of the world of marvel and mystery. The sense of the marvellous is in the child the first form of that sense of the infinite without which a man is like a bird deprived of wings. Let us not wean the child from it, but let us guard in him the faculty of rising above what is earthy, so that he may appreciate later on those pure and moving symbols of vanished ages wherein human truth has found forms of expression that our arid logic will never replace.

XIV

CONCLUSION

I think I have said enough of the spirit and manifestations of the simple life, to make it evident that there is here a whole forgotten world of strength and beauty. He can make conquest of it who has sufficient energy to detach himself from the fatal rubbish that trammels our days. It will not take him long to perceive that in renouncing some surface satisfactions and childish ambitions, he increases his faculty of happiness and his possibilities of right judgment.

These results concern as much the private as the public life. It is incontestable that in striving against the feverish will to shine, in ceasing to make the satisfaction of our desires the end of our activity, in returning to modest tastes, to the true life, we shall labor for the unity of the family. Another spirit will breath in our homes, creating new customs and an atmosphere more favorable to the education of children. Little by little our boys and girls will feel the enticement of ideals at once higher and more realizable. And transformation of the home will in time exercise its influence on public spirit. As the solidity of a wall depends upon the grain of the stones and the consistence of the cement which binds them together, so also the energy of public life depends upon the individual value of men and their power of cohesion. The great desideratum of our time is the culture of the component parts of society, of the individual man. Everything in the present social organism leads us back to this element. In neglecting it we expose ourselves to the loss of the benefits of progress, even to making our most persistent efforts turn to our own hurt. If in the midst of means continually more and more perfected, the workman diminishes in value, of what use are these fine tools at his disposal? By their very excellence to make more evident the faults of him who uses them without discernment or without conscience. The wheelwork of the great modern machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, incompetence or corruption may produce here disturbances of far greater gravity than would have threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of the past. There is need then of looking to the quality of the individual called upon to contribute in any measure to the workings of this mechanism. This individual should be at once solid and pliable, inspired with the central law of life--to be one's self and fraternal. Everything within us and without us becomes simplified and unified under the influence of this law, which is the same for everybody and by which each one should guide his actions; for our essential interests are not opposing, they are identical. In cultivating the spirit of simplicity, we should arrive, then, at giving to public life a stronger cohesion.

The phenomena of decomposition and destruction that we see there may all be attributed to the same cause,--lack of solidity and cohesion. It will never be possible to say how contrary to social good are the trifling interests of caste, of coterie, of church, the bitter strife for personal welfare, and, by a fatal consequence, how destructive these things are of individual happiness. A society in which each member is preoccupied with his own well-being, is organized disorder. This is all that we learn from the irreconcilable conflicts of our uncompromising egoism.

We too much resemble those people who claim the rights of family only to gain advantage from them, not to do honor to the connection. On all rounds of the social ladder we are forever putting forth claims. We all take the ground that we are creditors: no one recognizes the fact that he is a debtor, and our dealings with our fellows consist in inviting them, in tones sometimes amiable, sometimes arrogant, to discharge their indebtedness to us. No good thing is attained in this spirit. For in fact it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal enemy of universal law, that obstacle to brotherly understanding which is ever presenting itself anew.

In a lecture delivered in 1882, M. Renan said that a nation is "a spiritual family," and he added: "The essential of a nation is that all the individuals should have many things in common, and also that all should have forgotten much." It is important to know what to forget and what to remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily life. Our memories are lumbered with the things that divide us; the things which unite us slip away. Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his part of agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, public officer, proletary, bourgeois, or political or religious sectarian; but his essential quality, which is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated to the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theoretic notion of it. So that what occupies us and determines our actions, is precisely the thing that separates us from others, and there is hardly place for that spirit of unity which is as the soul of a people.

So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. Men animated by a spirit of particularism, exclusiveness, and pride, are continually clashing. They cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment of division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps up in their remembrance a stock of reciprocal ill-will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad feeling with its consequences.

It must be rooted out of our midst. Remember, forget! This we should say to ourselves every morning, in all our relations and affairs. Remember the essential, forget the accessory! How much better should we discharge our duties as citizens, if high and low were nourished from this spirit!

How easy to cultivate pleasant remembrances in the mind of one's neighbor, by sowing it with kind deeds and refraining from procedures of which in spite of himself he is forced to say, with hatred in his heart: "Never in the world will I forget!"

The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It softens asperities, bridges chasms, draws together hands and hearts. The forms which it takes in the world are infinite in number; but never does it seem to us more admirable than when it shows itself across the fatal barriers of position, interest, or prejudice, overcoming the greatest obstacles, permitting those whom everything seems to separate to understand one another, esteem one another, love one another. This is the true social cement, that goes into the building of a people.

THE END.