Part 4

Your social state is an exhibition of madness. The Roman slaves had a life less hard than that of many of your work-people. After the Semitic fashion, you make even the women work! Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure. You give to work all the hours of your days, some to get bread, others to achieve a pleasure that fatigue prevents them from enjoying, and others again, the maddest of all, to increase their wealth. You have reached that degree of imbecility in which labour is looked upon as not only honourable but sacred, when, actually, it is but a sad necessity. You have lifted this necessity to the rank of the virtues, when it is, without doubt, no more than the vice of a perverted being for whom life, short as it is, is only a lengthy tedium.

I

And of this work, which at least allows us to breathe and to eat, there is not enough for all. Thousands of beings in the most civilised towns die every day of hunger, and with a slow death. They are in agony for ten, for twenty years ...

HE

Increase and multiply. That is the work of my father. He was seized with a sort of jealous and mischievous love for the Jews, a sufficiently restless little people, and showed himself curious to encourage their natural pride so far as to make it immoderate. The result was comic and sad. These ignorant Bedouins believed themselves destined to dominate the world, and then disappeared as a nation at the very moment when this domination was accomplished. A singular fate for the Jews, to have given mankind a religion in which they do not believe themselves!

Alas! At the request of my ageing father, who began to find these prolific barbarians tedious, after having tried to enlighten Jesus, who had too many disciples, I interested myself in Saint Paul. I came to him as I have come to you; he was dazzled, and believed that the vision had given him a divine mission. I followed him in his journeys. His energy amused me; but at Athens, I ranged myself with his opponents, whose laughter I excited. Later on, I let him die without consolations; his pride sufficed him.

I thought this man less mad than the other thaumaturgists who, like him, amused the crowds, but the idea of God went to his head, and he began to believe in me, supposing me omnipotent. It was then that I ceased to visit him, for I do not care to make myself the facile accomplice of religious divagations. Left to himself, he went on hearing me; my voice sounded like a buzzing in his deaf ears. His faith grew measureless, and he accepted martyrdom. How different from the charming Epicurus, for whom our conversations were never more than a lofty diversion! But this Paul, although hallucinated, was not incapable of a certain imposture, and it was assuredly to magnify himself in the eyes of fools that he pretended to have been ravished to heaven. It is true that he believed in my resurrection. What tales! One would say that men only give words a precise meaning in order to have the pleasure of using them in an opposite sense. Your brain plays very singular tricks. The dead are dead. The dead are not dead. The dead are living. The dead alone are alive. What jugglers you are!

I ceased to do anything but amuse myself with the developments of the new religion. It produced very charming feminine souls. What a priceless creature was Saint Cecilia, what an ingenuous lover. Perhaps no other woman has known nights so delicious as those that Cecilia passed with the angel who came to visit her....

I

Valerian found Cecilia praying in her bed with an angel.

HE

Poor Valerian! He never suspected the purity of his betrothed. He loved her too well to be disturbed even by the evidence. And so he well deserved the eternal crown that the Church decreed him. If women were better cognisant of the story of that excellent young man, with what favour would they not decorate his memory and his image! Cecilia never ceased to love him. An enchantment enveloped these simple hearts. I completed their happiness by letting them die in ecstasy with the certainty of finding beyond death their interrupted kisses, and of finding them eternal.

I learnt, my friend, to understand the peculiar beauty that the new religion concealed within itself; it held more grace than the purest paganism, and I know not what of simplicity and tenderness that I had not met before. Stoic insensibility became ridiculous; suffering was the fashion; the crowns of roses were changed to crowns of thorns. There were long centuries of stupor, and when the human soul awoke again and wished to smile, its smile was half of melancholy. Perhaps men will never recover from the wound that Christianity has given them. Sometimes it has seemed to heal over; at the slightest shock, at the slightest fever, it opens again and bleeds. Happy are those who suffer! That insensate saying still haunts your enfeebled hearts, and you fear joy, from vanity. You accepted the anathema hurled at the happiness of living by a few despairing Jews, and when you have laughed you ask pardon from your brothers, because it is written: "Happy are those who suffer."

Man, who is always making a pretence of revolt, is the most obedient of domesticated animals. He has accepted the most infamous prescriptions of all the moralities in turn, and among you it has always been a title to honour to kneel before a decalogue and receive blows from a rope on the back. The great hypocrites have always been your chosen masters, and one still hears you neigh at the idea of sacrifice. Your sensibility has flowered ill; your intelligence is inadequate. It has always shown itself the dupe of the directors of conscience who have succeeded each other on your shoulders. The preachers of virtue rarely practise it. You have always had to deal with thirsty throats whose only care has been to make you believe that the fountain has been poisoned.

The moralist is the eternal old man who makes a terrible picture of love to the young girl of whom he is amorous. Advice that fetters the development of energy is always hypocritical, that is to say interested, advice. There is also the naïve imitation of hypocrisy; there are the fools, the vain, the subaltern rogues: but these are the masters whom it is necessary to unmask.

I

What! Have there never been sincere great minds, true friends of mankind?

HE

What I have just said to you must not be taken tragically. The greatest hypocrites are never perfect hypocrites. There is in them always one part of sincerity. The exercise of sincerity is the most natural thing in man. It needs a strong will to create a fictitious character for oneself; it also needs much talent, perhaps even genius. The hypocrite, in showing himself under a fictitious aspect, diminishes his pleasure in living; he will recover it in its entirety only when he has moulded to his pattern a great number of disciples; hence the proselytism of all the great creators of social lies. But hypocrisy ceases when the new environment has been created, itself the creator of new characters. The early Protestants feigned a certain rigidity of manners in order to depreciate the Papists. This hypocrisy became traditional, then hereditary, and it is with veritable good faith that the Calvinists banish from life all that might make its beauty and its sweetness. The Catholics, for strategical purposes, have set, in their sermons at least, a still higher value on the scorn of pleasure, and it is in all naïveté and good faith, like the Calvinists, that they prescribe several virtues whose practice would fling humanity back beyond the state of savagery. The philosophers, moreover, do not to-day hold views different from these, and they would be much astonished, from what they say, to see civilisation, with its delicious complications, fall into ruin, and make the earth like the fields where once was Troy, and the deserts where rises still the phantom of Timgad.

The moral theories of humanity and the form that they give to its daily life must be separately considered.

I have spoken to you of the great hypocrites. There have also been men of great simplicity. Neither have had on the general march of events the influence you might suppose. The world of ideas and of words is one world, and the world of facts and of action is another. They doubtless react on each other, but so slightly, so gently, and with so much delay, that their reciprocal influences are very hard to establish. Hardly before the last fifty or sixty years have the social ideas of Christianity seemed occasionally to take an active form, and then with what timidity! Perhaps Christianity will one day be realised in practice, but it will then have long disappeared as religion, philosophy, or system of ethics. And a new discord between thought and life will be apparent.

Even this much post-dated realisation of the great social doctrines is, perhaps, only an allusion. The field of thought and the parallel field of action are finite; and so the same thoughts must return after a turn of the wheel, and the same acts. Their coincidence, near or distant, is perhaps fortuitous. It is in vain that you think and speak; action enrolls itself upon another plane, and the two planes are perhaps eternally incapable of intersection.

At most it is admissible that the vague spectacle of things inspires in man a chirruping like that which takes the birds at sunrise. But would you say that it was this chirruping that made the sun rise? Your reasonings on the power of ideas, which would make them the creators of action, resemble that supposition. The ideas of man can never be other than ideas after the fact. The future? Do you even know what sort of weather we shall have to-morrow? The future that you pretend to forsee is only a past arranged by your imagination and your sensibility. You believe that what you wish to happen will happen. Children!

The exercise of thought is a game, but this game must be free and harmonious. The more useless you conceive it, the more beautiful you should wish it to be. Beauty; that is, perhaps, its only possible merit. In any case you must not permit in it those little creeping ideas that haunt corrupted brains, as wood-lice haunt rotten wood.

I

Our thoughts, then, are freer than our actions?

HE

One can more easily retain in them the illusion of liberty. We are all of us, men and gods, in the power of destiny, and nothing happens that is not the logical and necessary consequence of previous movements of eternal matter. We are vessels fitfully carried by winds and currents towards an unknown end; but it is one thing to descend the unconquerable stream steering between the rocks, and another to spin rudderless and derelict. Thought is a rudder that must never be loosed nor entrusted to unworthy hands.

But these ideas are very general, and can scarcely, I think, bring you much consolation. I am like the apocalyptic preachers who replace reasoning by personifications of abstract things. I have not come to you to offer you models of eloquence or stimulating enigmas. If I make yet one more effort in favour of men, I wish it to be unambiguous and clear. But, alas! there are questions where the very gods lose themselves like children in a forest. The reason of things escapes us as it escapes yourselves. We too are dust of infinity, a little more brilliant, that is all.

Our assemblies, however, consider some problems as solved. They trouble you still. We have enslaved them, and our intelligence is their master. I will put their solutions in your hands, and then we will go for a walk in this springtime that perhaps you will never see again....

I

Never? Never?

HE

So beautiful, so tender, so limpid, so perfumed. I have no power over your human destiny and do not know it. Before descending....

I

And how, master, did you descend among us?

HE

What a little girl's question! I come on earth as easily and as naturally as you go to America. How? The knowledge would be very useless to you, and could only tempt you to puerile and dangerous experiments. But there is another question that you dare not ask me, and to which I shall reply, for it is in your head if not upon your lips. Dearest children, bring us more flowers, bring us fruits, give us your smiles.

The three young women awoke, and came to present their brows to us. My friend offered me her lips by mistake; I took advantage of this, which made her blush. She fled, rejoining her companions.

It was clear and hot, though the sun was not visible. The light seemed to come from everywhere, and objects threw no shadows. This phenomenon, instead of frightening me, increased my sensation of happiness. It seemed to me that I had reached at last a state of beatitude long desired. Love sang in my heart. I observed with tenderness the folds of my friend's white dress, which floated behind her as she ran. Her garland of flowers fell, and, as she stooped to pick it up, her candid breasts showed at the edge of her corsage. I could not prevent myself from rushing towards her, in a frenzy, my mouth full of kisses and troubled words.

I

You have not hurt yourself?

ELISE

But I have not fallen.

And she laughed, while she was fastening her hair. I had taken the garland, meanwhile, and was inhaling it like a bouquet. That made her laugh still more.

I

Flowers, Elise, have no longer their own odour when they have slept in your hair or on your neck; it is as if they had become you. It is your fragrance that I breathe....

ELISE

As you like....

Elise also no longer knew very well what she was saying. Or was she, perhaps, reading my heart! Like my master, she had just replied to a prayer that I dared not formulate.

I stretched out both arms to take with open hands the flower that I desired, the flower that was being given me, but Elise was already in flight. I caught her up in the middle of a thicket of lilacs. It was there that she gave me my happiness.

Her dress, which was only a tunic, fell slowly, unveiling the loveliness of my divinity, who seemed to me to be Beauty herself. She was so beautiful that my admiration, for an instant, was stronger than my desire. My transport had carried me to the summit of a mountain so high that I became dizzy and my head spun. When I came to myself, it seemed to me that I had put on a new dignity, and that the resurrection that had snatched me from a delicious death was my entry into a more precious life.

My friend, once more dressed in her robe, her garland of flowers on her refastened hair, was picking branches of lilac. I rose to help her, for an enormous sheaf was already filling her white arms; she gave it me, and then she made a harvest of pinks and roses, and we returned to my master.

He did not seem to have noticed our absence. He praised the flowers and breathed their scents, thanking my friend, who was blushing a little, for her graciousness. The two other young women came back with cherries and early peaches, less soft than their rosy cheeks. I followed the example of my master, who kissed the hands of the young fruit-bearers, and congratulated them on being the picture of pleasure, of abundance, and of generosity.

Instead of sitting down, they crouched at the feet of their master, and offered him the finest of the fruits, looking in his face for signs of content. There was a divine charm in this simple, pastoral picture, and, for a long time, I observed it with joy. These three beings seemed in such perfect communion that the sweetest aroma of peace surrounded their bodies. Satisfied, he touched their cheeks and their hair.

HE

Children, I love you.

They took again their places round the table. My friend, who had leaned her head on my shoulder, sat up to welcome them. They spoke in a whisper.

HE

I would tell you, my friend, in answer to your secret desire, that our life, up there, or rather yonder, is very different from the life of men. To begin with, the gods are very few in number, two or three thousand at most, men and women. I say, men and women, because that is all we are, with superior faculties. Raise by many powers the genius of your geniuses, and you have the measure of those among us who dominate the others. The lesser among us are also gods, that is to say that their sensibility, their intelligence, their force and their beauty attain a degree that you can with difficulty conceive. Your arts, your sciences, your noblest passions are instincts in us; indeed, we attach but small importance to them. The length of our life has ended by teaching us the uselessness of all that is not pure sensation, and our principal care is the cultivation of our senses, which are, in fact, highly developed. We deliver ourselves to every pleasure with a divine frankness, and it would be difficult for those of us who have not associated with men to understand the meanings you have given to the words lust, gluttony, and idleness. On the other hand, the pleasures of relativity are unknown to us, and we are ignorant of vanity, deceit, envy, or anger. Our pride is only the consciousness of the force that we feel is living in ourselves.

Our women differ little from yours, that is to say that they bear the same relation to us as yours to you. We do not consider them inferior but different, and this difference makes our common happiness. They are admirable creatures of pleasure, but the pride that is natural to them makes them selfish. My friend, even for a god, above all for a god, perhaps, your women equal ours. They know how to forget themselves in love; they know how to find their happiness in the happiness that they give. If their senses are less delicate, their flesh less odorous, their arts of pleasure more rudimentary, their hearts are more sensitive. Ah! to read in their eyes their gratitude for the pleasure they have given.

The three young women, who had listened attentively, lowered their heads, smiling at each other out of the corners of their eyes. My friend, however, dared to speak.

ELISE

But we are also grateful for the pleasure that is given us. Our sensibility is not only in our hearts.

I

Women do seem to have no other pleasure than the pleasure they give.

ELISE

I do not believe that.

HE

Dear creature of pleasure, it is none the less true.

ELISE

It is true, since you say it, but these women are not true women.

HE

They are different from you, my friend; that is all. But I agree with you; true women both give and receive.

ELISE

That is true indeed!

I

Divine friend, how I love you!

ELISE

And I, I detest you.

I stretched out my arms to draw to me those lips that I desired, but she took my hands in hers, and kissed them passionately.

HE

And you envy the gods!

I

I envy neither the gods nor any man, and I desire no other woman, since I have known Elise.

HE

My coming upon earth, this time, will at least have given happiness to one human being.

ELISE

Or two.

I

What a dream! Do not awake us!

HE

You shall not be awakened.

The two young women looked at me curiously. I even thought that I discerned some sort of pity in their eyes. My master divined my thought.

HE

Yes, my friend, they are immortals. They came as I have come. Is it more surprising to see goddesses on earth than to see a god?

I turned towards Elise, paling with emotion.

HE

She too. But do not be afraid, for she loves you, and love has given her a heart exactly like your man's heart. She has become a woman in giving herself to you, and she will never leave you.

ELISE

Never. Never so long as you live, my mortal lover. Never, and your memory shall share my immortality.

I

Now I understand the superhuman happiness I found in your arms, O queen! But is that possible? Have the times of mythology returned?

HE

You see it. They have never been abolished, moreover, unless in your beliefs, unless in what you believe that you believe. For is not Christianity, just like the religions it thought it destroyed, the story of the relations between gods and men? Does the visit of a dove to the loveliest of the Jewish women differ so much from the visit of the swan to the voluptuous Leda? The spirit in which you consider these divine anecdotes, changes with the centuries, but the anecdotes are always the same, because love is always the same. If your priests were to hear me, they would say that I blasphemed, I who was that swan, I who was that dove. But when they say that I was the son of the dove, they think they are stating a great truth, and perhaps they are right, since that fable has changed the colour of heaven. But the colour of heaven will change again, and they will not perceive it.

All your science hitherto has consisted in giving different names to different appearances. Some day, perhaps, you will learn that the same thing happens always, that is to say nothing, and you will leave the illegible romance of the infinite, and live your own lives. It is worth the trouble. Some day you will learn this, and you will be much astonished at having lost centuries upon centuries in vainly observing phenomena of which you perceive only the broken reflections in a sea that is shaken by the storms of your imagination.

The life of the gods, my friend, differs from yours in this above all, that it is for them without finality. Our acts are sufficient to themselves, and we do not look for their justification in immediate or distant consequences. The wretchedness of your activity is, that it foresees repose. Our end is in the act; yours in the effects of the act. But, since happiness is in the act, you pass it by, and when you rest it is in weariness and boredom. For us, to live is to act, and to act is to be happy. Perhaps, rather than supermen, we are superior animals: intuition serves us as instinct, and if sometimes we know regret we are always ignorant of remorse. Passion, which may mislead us for a moment, leaves us satisfied, as soon as we have obeyed it, even if our desire has been unable to realise itself in its entirety, even if our curiosity has had to stop half-way. There remains to us then the having exercised against an obstacle our faculties of action; we bear no malice against the obstacle. We are like children who have lost in a game, and are, all the same, very happy to have played.

I

True, man wishes to win, always to win, and, beaten, if he does not suffer in his vanity, he suffers in his pride.

HE

Which is not a genuine pride. Pride worthy of the name does not rebel against superior forces. It yields as quickly as possible and retires into itself, proud of what it is and disdainful of what it is not. Your human pride is often no more than a blind folly. The pride of the gods is clear-sighted. But what need have you of knowing us, since you have no power over us? Your prayers move us, as the songs of the birds move you, according to our mood; we find them painful or agreeable, and in either case pass on, thinking of serious matters, that is to say of the living of our lives. The gods, my friend, are selfish, and, if they busy themselves with men, it is from caprice, in order to vary their pleasures. Your joys, to tell you the truth, touch us more nearly than your sorrows, and, if we had the power, we would more willingly send new happinesses to the happy than joys to the doleful. For we hold in great scorn intellectual disorder, and unbalanced sensibility: now unhappiness is produced by one of these two troubles, or by both. He who is master of neither his nerves nor his thought does not seem to us very worthy of pity. Help, moreover, would be useless to him. Help would be for him no more than the brief sunbeam that passes between two storm-clouds that the wind has separated for a moment. And then, we have no power. Ruled, like you, by destiny, we contemplate the eternal movement of things, with a more perspicacious eye, but as powerless to alter their course.