Part 5

None the less, I am not pitiless. Physical evil breaks my heart, and it is precisely that which is altogether beyond my power, that which is without a remedy. Life eternally devours itself. Every organism is a prey. The living is eaten alive. Every animal is a feast, and every animal is a guest. The healthy state is to be a feast. The gods do not escape this dilemma; they are so organised as to be a durable feast, that is all. They resist the attacks of the infinitely little, as a mountain resists a colony of ants. But let time pass, and century after century go by, and the ants will have got the better of the mountain, though they are, nevertheless, destined themselves to perish under invisible bites.

We shall see, as I have already told you, and it pains me to think of it, humanity disappear, and with it all the? animal species that people the earth to-day. Other forms are elaborating in the mysteries of eternal matter. The water of the oceans ferments and swells with life round the magnetic poles. That which is born rises tirelessly against that which has been born. The sorrow of living is the obscure consciousness of feeling oneself dying.

But when I see humanity disappear, it is at first in the manner of the ants and the bees, and of all the other animalities, once intelligent and creative, now reduced to mechanical existence. You will come to resemble marvellous clocks. Your mathematical complexity will be the admiration of the intelligences which have succeeded your own.

Their multiple and contradictory activity will stop sometimes, struck by surprise, to observe the sureness of your movements, and you will still be one of the terms, though no longer the same, in the disturbing problem of intelligence and instinct.

I have also sometimes thought that on your earth there would be a slow return towards primordial unity. Every organism would be re-absorbed into that formless yet living jelly, which has been differentiated, little by little, in the course of time, into myriads of dissimilar beings. The movement, after reaching its climax, would retrace its steps. Evolution would continue in retrogression. The vertebrate would become once more the annelid, the annelid the nothing that creeps like a spot of oil on the surface of water.

As for the destruction of our solar world by a cataclysm, it is a theatrical idea, but though theatrical, not impossible. It is at once dramatic and vulgar, within the reach of everybody, and without philosophical or scientific interest. Anybody can conceive a shock, and a bursting in pieces, as he conceives a fire, a wreck, or an explosion. If it is the truth, it is without interest. The truth is a bridge that must be crossed to gain the other side of the stream.

He rose. The young women, enchanted, shook their dresses, and arranged the folds of them. Elise threw me a tender look and joined her companions, who were already moving away.

HE

Just so. Let us walk a little. Besides, my discourse is nearing its end. We have stirred up many ideas. In putting them in their places in your head, you will consider them with care. Order is almost the whole of knowledge.

Come. The morning is about to be born, the real morning, and I do not wish to disturb that to which men are accustomed. I have never done so. The duty of the gods is to respect logic.

We took a long walk through the fresh, flowering paths. It seemed to me that the familiar garden became an immense and magical forest. The perspectives stretched out under tall trees to a stream that flowed slowly under the poplars that edged it. Then the stream disappeared; it was a glade where roebuck passed in troops. We went on and the appearances changed continually. At certain moments I found again the garden of my summer mornings, with its lawns, its flower-beds, its trees, from which doves kept falling, its paths, its seats; I seemed to hear the laughter of the children, the disputes of the players, the murmur of the couples. All this went on in my head, accompanied by my friend's words, and I was drunk, with love, with ideas, and with loveliness.

HE

We have settled several great questions with the logical intrepidity of our minds....

I

As for me, I hear and I believe.

HE

An understanding auditor is half of the discourse. The solitary sinks and loses himself in the whirlwind of his reasonings. A word, even a look, is enough to give him back his equilibrium.

I was saying, then, that we have done like the philosophers. We have solved the great questions of metaphysic, by attacking them at the head, that is to say at the part that is unattackable. To their affirmation of an absolute and at the same time conscious god, we have opposed, as we have a right to do, a simple and categorical denial. We could take up the attack at the other end, begin from ourselves, seek our cause, find God, seek the cause of God, and so on to infinity. However large a number one conceives, a larger is always possible. And so this terrible God recoils as one draws near him into the depths of the abysses, and the tired intelligence, like a huntsman who yields to the ruses of his quarry, turns round, goes home and thinks of supper, that is to say of practical life.

These subtle games give the mind a juggler's skill. They are neither without attraction nor without utility, but they are games. Drunkenness is to be found in them, but not happiness. Now, happiness is the important matter. One must be happy. Let us, then, limit ourselves to the affirmation that the world is not governed by an intelligence at once infinite and conscious. For lack of another word, let us stop at the idea of chance, as in the time of my dear Epicurus. Nothing has been found more beautiful, more clear, nothing that better satisfies the mind of a man or the mind of a god. It comes to the same thing as saying: that which is, is. This simple proposition admits of no objection; it defies every sophism and every artifice.

The idea of God is only the shadow of man projected in the infinite. Make use of this sentence as supreme refutation and you will find few minds capable of disentangling its meaning or even of relishing its irony.

I do not speak to you of the gods of the nurses, of the little naughty children, and of the good labourers. People sometimes amuse themselves in narrating my appearance on earth, and I am to be seen, in these poor tales, drinking thin wine, gossiping with housekeepers, encouraging strikes, singing the _internationale_, denouncing silk dresses, furs, and white gloves. I appear to the astonished populace as a half-tipsy dolt and a good fellow, and yet at sight of me civilised men fly for their lives and give place to the mob. The divine ideal of the priests does not much differ from this, and, after all, if I had to choose, I should perhaps prefer the company of labourers to that of seminarists. But I have never been accessible to such humble desires, and, moreover, I am not God, I am only a god. That is why I laugh at the confusion of the catechisms, of the pious dreams and of the revolutionary dreams alike. I have no power, but I have never desired either the reign of equality or that of sanctity. I would rather breathe your flowers than your souls, your women than your intellects. Your flowers! Shall I tell you? We have no flowers; we have only those that grow wild in our uncultivated fields, our pathless forests! The gods do not work....

My master plucked a magnificent pearly rose, a rose as lovely as a woman's face, and remained for a long time silent. I understood that he was meditating. He murmured--

"Work: this rose is a work...."

He compared it in his mind to the frail graces of the eglantine.

HE

All is contradiction. I would say no more. Those who created this rose are not those who enjoy it. No payment is the equivalent of the pleasure I feel in breathing its scent; and I, I have done nothing but pass by, and pluck it. Men rebel. How will you prevent them from rebellion? They are right....

He stopped, observing, but without seeing it, the delicious landscape that surrounded us. The emotional silence was only disturbed by the murmur of the bees, the shrill cries of the little birds, or the light falling of the doves who dropped from the trees with a noise of silk dresses.

I was chewing bits of grass, with an air, like his, of preoccupation, but I was thinking of next to nothing.

HE

They are right. And yet rebellion is useless. It is ugly. Happiness is not in revolt. You should find a balance. You do not know how to rest. I did not scorn work just now, but praised idleness. Take these two ideas and plait them harmoniously together. Your life, short as it is, would be as good as ours, if you were to succeed in uniting these two alternatives. The same people should turn by turn rest and work. But, to make oneself worthy of leisure! Perhaps more intelligence is needed to know how to do nothing than to know how to work.

The present state of things cannot last. But can one ever tell? And if, by chance, it should last? Then, there would be formed two castes among men. They exist already in sketch, they would come to exist in precise drawings with violent contours. It would be almost impossible for a slave to become a master. But a master would always be able to become a slave. Your masters of the day are only slaves who, freed for a moment, will necessarily fall back into the servitude that is their destiny.

You see, I am amusing myself with prophecy. None the less, what I know of the order of things is what is apparent to the eyes of all. Do not take my words too seriously. On the whole, since men have had laws, these laws have not varied. No doubt, from that moment, your evolution was complete. Perhaps you will never be able further to modify yourselves, if not by external means. Hence the need of material progress, which is only grandiose vanity. At the end of the swiftest journeys, the man and the woman meet face to face, seeking in each other's eyes the motive of living, that is to say happiness.

Earth has become a narrow cage for you. However, birds that you are, it is your cage, and you are forbidden to leave it. You can paint it in the tenderest colours; it is a cage, and it is your cage. You will no longer go to heaven, the stars have fallen. If this heaven of which the childhood of humanity dreamed is a paradise, all the seats in it are taken. We have no need of you, and are happy where we are; we shall never give place to you. Besides, at what moment would you undertake the journey? At your death? When one is dead, it is a little late for travelling. The immortality of the soul was without doubt the masterpiece of the ecclesiastical imagination. With this truth in his pocket, a man may wander through all countries, and always find servants. The woman who has lost her lover kisses the feet of the impostor who promises her the renewal in the beyond of her temporal felicities. The priest offers his slipper with indifference. They are the happiest of men, for they have ended by believing in a fable so productive. How should they deny the truth and beauty of this marvellous tree whose fruits are gold and love together?

Those who promise a terrestrial paradise are no less baleful to human energy. They too teach sacrifice, the scorn of the present hour, and walking and working with eyes fixed on the future. Priests of religion, priests of politics, all sell very dearly the tickets of a lottery that will never be drawn. Do they know it? Tile merchants of perhaps are not necessarily merchants of lies. Some of them are the first to be duped by the secrets they have inherited, and they make victims of themselves for the vanity of leading a more numerous troop of victims to the sacrifice.

A tradition encourages you to honour the martyr for his faith. The martyr is only an obstinate man. He is in the wrong, since he is conquered. The death that menaces him should have enlightened his understanding.

The wise man has but one belief: himself; the wise man has but one fatherland: life.

Do not imagine that I am teaching you the vulgar selfishness of the comedies and the drinking songs. Oneself may cover a world. The brutes are the only solitaries. A man's sensibility is a surface whose extent he alone is capable of measuring. One being often includes many beings. If it does not include at least two, it is not human, perhaps not animal; it is one of the stones in the road under the feet of other men. True selfishness is a harmony.

But this harmony must be composed by oneself, and woven with one's own hands. To receive happiness ready-made would be offering one's neck to the rope. Christianity found a very beautiful formula:--to work out one's salvation. Now that is a personal work. If some one should propose a method to you, examine it. If you are being offered salvation already prepared, turn away your head: the food is poisoned.

Also, I bring you no commandment. I submit a system to you: the living of one's life. What do those movements of the world matter to you that do not touch your sensibility? Keep your tears for your own pains, and for those that scratch you like brambles as you pass. There is no other ethic than this: the conquest of pain. If it wounds you, be silent, and think of your revenge. Words are snares. Joint responsibility? Have you felt the prick? No? Then you have no share in the responsibility. Do not judge by the intellect the affairs of sensibility, and, when your business is to understand, be insensible to all that is not reason.

I

But how conquer pain?

HE

Physical pain is the business of your doctors.... The remedy for moral pain is confidence in oneself. To yield to pain is to accept the worst of humiliations. To suffer because of a woman is to make oneself the slave of a woman. But there are moments when it must be pleasant not to deny one's pain. One makes a pleasure of it.

1

I have known such moments.

HE

There are unconquerable evils. Then the idea that life has an end will help to support the weight of it. Finally, my friend, there is the supreme act that your resigned morality blames, the act the vision of which gave so much energy to the careless life of the ancients: there is suicide.

Suicide is a monster that one would have to train oneself to observe with calm. Compared to certain physical evils, to certain pains, to certain forfeitures, it would soon appear as a friend, very ugly, but cordial. Does it not deserve the gentlest names? Is it not the consoler? Is it not deliverance?

But one must not play with suicide. Amorous children have made of it a gesture as puerile as their souls. This supreme refuge from great pains should not be the remedy for little deceptions. If your morality had chosen, instead of the teasing rôle of a jealous old maid, that of an amiable and prudent friend, it would have taught you the art of wrestling with Destiny, and, when her grip is invincible and cruel, the supreme feint, which is to vanish in smoke. To have made a cowardice of suicide is a singular idea. It is explicable in the order of religious beliefs; it is mad for the man who believes neither in the survival of the soul nor, above all, in future compensations.

Since, whether you will or no, my friend, death is your destiny, at least live. Do not always look at your feet, but do not look too far before you. To be born, to appear, to disappear: forget the last term. Human wisdom is to live as if one were never to die, and to gather the present minute as if it were to be eternal.

I

If the present minute could but last for ever!

HE

Why not? How long have you spent with me? Do you know? Two hours or an eternity?

I

It seems to me that I have always known you, always seen you, always heard you.

HE

Very well! That is how to live.

I

Do you, who deny blessed eternity to men, give it them by your presence and your words? Who are you then?

HE

Have I not told you? See, he doubts already.

I

It is that I am too happy.

HE

Poor men, divine sensations are too strong for the fragility of your nerves. What would you do with an eternity? You would spend it in trembling lest you should lose it. Happiness, for you, is not possession but desire. When you no longer have anything to desire, boredom comes, sits down on your knees, and slowly crushes you. You find the woman who has made you drunk heavier than a mountain when the drunkenness passes away, and you groan if the head that is still wet with your kisses leans too lovingly on your arm or on your shoulder.

You find happiness only in closing your eyes; on opening them again you find boredom. Since you do not know how to live, dream, believe. You would be glad, would you not, if you were able to doubt my words? Well! I give you leave. Do like so many other men. Accept the practice of a belief that makes you laugh, and of an ethic that you scorn ...

I

No, no, I am free! You have loosed my hands, you have taught me to breathe.

HE

Ah! So the method I propose to you is not so bad! I believe, indeed, that, of all those that can rule the life of a wise man, it is the most voluptuous. If doubt has no longer a place in your intelligence, put it into your actions. Knowing the vanity of everything, of religions, of philosophies and of ethics, submit outwardly to customs, to prejudices, and to tradition. Time your step to the rhythm of the popular mind.

I

What! Submission?

HE

Do you prefer revolt?

I

I am not a slave.

HE

Very true. But liberty is an internal joy. One is the more free the less one seeks to appear so. A woman is less beautiful when she has divulged her beauty. A man is less free when he makes a parade of his liberty. One must hide one's good fortunes.

My friend, I have shown you the philosophy of the gods. Accept its method if you feel yourself strong enough to follow it without despair. We are, and that suffices us. Can you say as much? you who cannot take a step towards happiness without taking one towards death? Hope, if you have need of hope. Drink, if you are thirsty. Do you think that I am jeering, and that, after having treated you as a god, I am treating you first as a man and then as a child? No. The truth is that every question immediately receives in my mind all the different and even contradictory solutions that can answer it. I see, would you believe it, the six sides of the cube at one glance. I know that the least reasonable of things is reason; I know that nothing is more cruel than sentiment. There is not one of your systems of which I cannot make a circuit in two or three thoughts. They are curious ruins; some of them still attract such a concourse of people that one forgets that they are ruins. Travel, and make pilgrimages. I have favoured the materialism of Epicurus, Saint Paul's Christianity, Spinoza's pantheism. Have I spoken to you of Spinoza? I loved him much also. We used to drink milk while we were discovering the identity of reality and perfection. He was one of the two completely happy men I have known; the other was Epicurus. Spinoza found happiness in asceticism; Epicurus, in pleasure. They both lived smiling. I regretted them equally. There are two masters for mankind, and nearer to mankind than myself.

I remember one of Spinoza's propositions: "Each man necessarily desires or repulses, according to the laws of his nature, what he considers good or bad." That means: every one naturally desires to be happy. Great commonplace, and great truth: there is no other philosophy, there is no other method. Virtue is, to be happy.

They are, then, very wicked, those among you, who, keeping power, that is to say force, in their own hands, use it to forbid men access to the road that displeases themselves. What! I should have used my power to undeceive Cecilia, whose innocent kisses were prayers, whose life was a happy walk towards martyrdom and heaven! What infatuation, to believe oneself in possession of the truth, and, then, what childishness, to believe that the truth is necessarily useful! My friend, what is true is true, and what is beautiful is beautiful, and between these terms, and between all that could be inserted, there is no necessary relation. I smile at human illusions, but I would not make them one in a single and compulsory illusion.

You love Elise; obey your desires even if they seem absurd to you. She will do the same for you, and you will both taste great joys.

We had returned, little by little, to our starting point. The young women joined us near the rose-garden. A different light had replaced the springtime brilliance that surrounded us. The real morning had just been born, a clear, cold winter morning. I wished to pluck a rose, but they disappeared as I stretched out my hand. Elise took my arm and pressed close to me.

ELISE

I am cold.

I doubted her divinity, I doubted myself, and the enchanted, luminous night I had just lived. My master's last words were disturbing the certainty that he had at first established in my mind. I, who had believed myself a god, became again a man.

HE

That is the effect of doubt. Then you no longer believe in me?

I

I believe in you.

Instantly, things recovered their magical appearance, and I was happy again. I gently pressed Elise's arm, and she looked at me with tenderness.

Meanwhile, the two young friends, who were walking before us, had come upon the steps of the Museum. We followed them. They examined in silence the cold nudity of all those women of stone, but sometimes I heard them laugh.

ELISE

And so these are your women.

I

They are not our women. These figures represent our ideal of the goddesses.

ELISE

Truly, this one is like me.

I

There are women as beautiful as that among us, but one does not know them. Each one of us thinks he has held in his arms the most beautiful woman in the world; when he reflects, he is no longer very sure of it, for, in the depths of his desire, an image ceaselessly forms, and ceaselessly vanishes, whose beauty no created thing could equal.

ELISE

So reality always deceives you. How do you manage to be happy?

I

We have desire.

I had spoken like a man, and not like one whose mistress is an immortal. Elise seemed indifferent to the obscure sorrow that darkened my words.

My nature now was double. When I thought of my master, of Elise, of the hours passed in the garden, I felt that I was caressed and upheld by warm waves of joy; when I considered the things of earth, I was cold, and I was sorrowful.

Elise left me once more to go and join her companions. My master called me. He was seated at the entrance to the hall, and was looking at nothing.

HE

I have still a few words to say to you, and these are the most important. You must forget our conversation.

I

Master, it is impossible. It is part of myself, it has entered into my flesh, into my blood, into my bones.

HE

Ah, well, you shall know then that I could have told you the exact opposite, and that that also would have been the truth. Another god may descend and speak to you and give you other teaching. In which will you put your trust?

I

Master, you disturb me. Can such a miracle be repeated?

HE

When one believes in a miracle, it may become a daily occurrence. You see, you would do better to forget.

I

I shall not forget.

HE

And what if I were to prove to you that I do not exist, that I am only a part of yourself, that responds to another part of yourself?

I

Master, I believe in you, and not in myself.

HE

Behold man with a true Christian nature, man after the fall! You will never wash away sin, or, rather, you will never wash away penitence. Why do you not hold your own against me? What a domestic animal has man become! Have you not at the bottom of your heart a secret desire? Does the god that I appear to you satisfy fully your need of worship and humiliation? Speak, my friend, I am what you desire that I should be. Choose. The phantasmagorias are at your command.

I