Part 3

It is a fact, and one must keep it in mind when he passes judgment upon trees or upon men. It is a fact, and that is all. Nevertheless, if the tree has been uprooted by a violent tempest, there is nothing left but to call the wood-cutters, who are the judges of trees. If they inquire into the cause of the disaster, it will be through pure curiosity; their business does not lie there; they know their duty and will perform it.

When we shall have exhausted all the arguments for and against all the degrees of responsibility that may be discovered in a healthy or a sick person, we shall find ourselves in agreement with the social wood-cutters, with the magistrates, on the necessity of removing and forever ridding society of him. Then, having once more become philosophers, we shall try to reach agreement upon this point: that it is a matter not of administering punishment but of preserving ourselves; our interest should be centered not upon the author, but the purpose of the crime. Let us not even speak of crime; let us speak of danger. Ah! How simple it all would be, or at least more simple than at present, if the notion of criminal act was superseded by that of dangerous act. The idea of crime is a metaphysical idea; the idea of danger is a social idea. The opinions of MM. Baudin, Faguet and de Fleury, which frighten M. Grasset, are in principle highly acceptable. On the occasion of each new crime society cannot institute a new philosophical debate nor set about resolving questions which, ever since there have been men who think, have troubled human thought. For some time they have not been asking the jury for their opinion upon the materiality of a fact; they subject them to an examination in philosophy. It's ridiculous.

There are on one side the assassins and on the other the assassinated. What difference does it make to me whether the fellow who'll split my head be an _apache_ or a lunatic? What does matter to me, is to live. I feel intense compassion for the sick, but I am very anxious that persons suffering with madness be shut in.

All men are ill, said Hippocrates. We all need care; so I see nothing wrong about criminals attracting special attention from the medical corps. There are so many interesting cases among them!

THE INSURRECTION OF THE VERTEBRATES

It is well known how the spiritualists tried to capture Pasteur, because his theories, denying spontaneous generation, seemed to them his consecration of the old dogma of a Creator. Pasteur never professed such ideas; he limited himself to pursuing brilliantly his profession as a scientist. It was not without a feeling of sadness that, pestered by the admiration of a too pious gentry, he wrote to Sainte-Beuve, I believe: "Let us continue our labors, without giving heed to the philosophic or religious deductions that may be drawn from them."

Well, here is that same gentry trying, very maladroitly moreover, to turn to their profit the results of a new scientific theory which is beginning to make a stir in the world,--the law of vital constancy. M. Dastre expounded it the other day at the solemn session of the Institute and demonstrated its supreme importance. If one is eager to keep abreast of intellectual novelties, one should possess some notion of this recent scientific theory; just as one would blush not to possess any notion of Darwin's labors and the theory of evolution, which has now become a part of general culture.

Man is the product of an evolution the origin of which is contemporaneous with the very origins of the world. He has as ancestors not only men, but reckons in his genealogy all manner of animal species. His descent from the monkey through the medium of a semi-human form that is still little known, is today authenticated. The monkey, like all other mammals and also the marsupials (kangaroo, opossum) is a transformation of a reptile; the reptiles, to continue, were born of fishes, who are the first vertebrates to appear, and the fishes in turn descend from the annelides, humble little marine animals. But let us not go any farther back than the fishes, for, in this species we possess a certainty that may be daily demonstrated. At a certain stage of its development the human embryo has the chief characteristics of a fish. All of us were, at a certain moment of our unborn life, fishes; this is as certain as the most easily verified scientific fact. From this piece of evidence, and a hundred others, it has been possible to draw up this aphorism, which unites the evolution of the individual to general evolution: "Every individual, in his embryonic development, goes through the same phases through which the evolution of his species has gone in traversing the ages."

This monumental discovery of the transformation of species is, as we know, due almost entirely to Darwin. It is he who propounded and demonstrated the principle of evolution. But if, in his so abundant books, he explained the _how_, he did not discover the _why_. He registered facts, but did not show why these facts should have been absolutely necessary. It is this gap which the theories of M. Quinton now fill, at the same time confirming in a brilliant manner the selfsame principles of Darwinism, evolutionism and transform-ism. Before M. Quinton, one might, strictly speaking, with a semblance of good faith, contest _Darwin's conclusions: henceforth, it is impossible_: the facts are interconnected; we know their necessary, implacable cause. Thanks to M. Quinton, evolutionism should rather be termed _revolutionism_.

There are in this theory, two things to consider: life itself, and the environment amid which it develops. Life is a fixed phenomenon. It began in a marine milieu, at the very beginnings of the world, and it tends constantly to preserve, through all the transformations of a terrestrial milieu, the original conditions of its appearance. As a consequence, the most highly developed animals, the superior animals, among which man takes first place, are those which have been able to preserve in the interior of their bodies, in the form of blood, a vital milieu almost identical with the original marine milieu,--the environment in which life was born: in fact, the degree of saltness in our blood represents the saltness of the sea at the moment life made its appearance, and, moreover, our internal temperature represents the mean temperature of the globe at the moment our species was born.

The terrestrial milieu is unstable. Its heat has constantly diminished. Formerly, in the most remote epochs, the vicinity of the poles, now an ice-covered and inaccessible extent, had a climate hotter than that of the tropics. Life was born amid this tropical environment, at the bottom of an ocean that had a far higher temperature than the Caribbean sea or the sea of Java. Nevertheless the poles grew colder and all the other parts of the world as well. Then animal life found itself faced with this alternative: either to accept the new conditions of the milieu, or to rebel against these conditions,--struggle and maintain internally despite the external temperature, the high temperature of its origin.

That is a solemn moment in the drama of the world. What is to happen? If the new conditions are accepted, it spells fatal decline. If they are repulsed, it means a magnificent future development. Almost all animal life submitted: it is today represented by the lowest class of living creatures: the invertebrates. A single representative of the animal world revolted, made a prodigious effort, entered into strife with the hostile milieu and dominated it: the vertebrate. Thus life, in its superior aspects, affirmed itself from the very earliest times as an insurrection.

M. Quinton, says: "The vertebrate stands forth as marked by a particular character, which distinguishes him from the rest of the animal kingdom, giving him a position apart, above. While the balance of the animal kingdom accepts, or rather undergoes, in the face of the progressive shrinking of the seas and the cooling of the globe, the new conditions that have come about, and to which it can yield only at the cost of intense suffering, the vertebrates give evidence of a special power; they refuse to accept the conditions and confronted by hostile circumstances maintain the sole conditions favorable to their existence.... They are not, then, like the invertebrates, the passive toys of circumstances that dominate them, but, in part, the masters of the fundamental conditions necessary to their welfare. In the midst of the physical world that surrounds him, ignores him and oppresses him, man is not the _sole insurgent_, the only animal in revolt against the natural conditions, the only one tending to found, in an instable, hostile medium, the fixed elements of a superior life. The simple fish, the simple mammal ... hold the essential physical laws in check. When man attacks the natural forces that surround him, in order to dominate the hostile elements in them, he first participates of the genius of the vertebrate."

I have purposely underscored the words _sole insurgent_. These words, in fact, indicate the orientation of our efforts the moment we attempt to apply the biological principles enunciated by M. Quinton to the social domain. Far from teaching stagnation, resignation, acceptation, he counsels on the contrary, if one understands him, revolt against all that bars the progress of life and the maintenance of its highest conditions of power and intensity. These ideas are related to the basic ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy: we must grow or succumb. It is the same with individuals and persons as with the animal species: those who accept the conditions provided by their traditional environment, those who do not react, are condemned to decadence: they are invertebrates. The traits of a superior organism, on the contrary, are reaction through deep, continued evolution, or by a brusk revolution against the mediocrity of the milieu which tends to dominate and reduce it.

In certain places it is freely asserted that the peoples of the future are the wise peoples slumbering in the tradition of a political order, of a religious order, or a moral order: those peoples, on the contrary, are in their decline. But there is something worse: there are political--or social groups that dream, not of attaining to the genius of the vertebrate, which spells perpetual combat against the hostility of the environment, but of becoming once again invertebrates, and of falling asleep gently in the lap of ancient traditions.

There is, according to the theories of M. Quinton, in the social realm as in the biological, a fixed point, and one that must remain fixed unless decline is to set in, and that is life; but we must not confuse life with the environment in which it evolves. Life is constant and the milieu is variable. The most diverse political and social institutions have been successively imagined by man to assure, according to the needs of the moment, the development of his life. And as, in the course of time, they have appeared to him insufficient, he has rejected them to imagine others more in confirmity with his requirements: and thus social progress appears as a necessity, in the same way that anatomical progress has transformed an ocean worm into a fish and the fish into a mammal or a bird. In the two cases there is a certain end sought. It is for man to create for himself the social conditions that will permit his life to maintain its loftiest aims.

When the social conditions that the old regime brought about in France appeared to men unsuited any longer to the maintenance of their life, they acted like good vertebrates,--they revolted. Civilization is nothing but a succession of insurrections, now against the hostility of physical forces,--especially against the cold,--now against social forces, which, after a period of usefulness, tend almost always to evolve in the direction of parasitism.

THE PESSIMISM OF LEOPARDI

Leopardi has never been widely read in France. While Schopenhauer has achieved a certain literary popularity, Leopardi has remained, even for scholars, in the shade. This is due in large measure to the mediocrity of his translators and his commentators....

Leopardi's poetry is difficult to enjoy. M. Turiello says that it is obscure even to Italians of the present generation. It is true that Leopardi is somewhat addicted to archaism and that, moreover, the Italian language has since his day undergone rapid development under the influence of French. His prose, despite its severe form, now too concise and now a trifle oratorical, is more approachable.... But if translation, is always a difficult task, it is particularly difficult to translate Leopardi.

In prose as in verse he is a pessimist more by nature than as a result of reasoning. It is his sensibility rather than his intellect that speaks. He constructed no system; he gathers his impressions, his observations, and attempts, not without arbitrariness, to generalize them. His philosophy is entirely physiological: the world is bad because his personal life is bad. He conceives the world in most terrifying fashion, and supposes that if all men do not judge it as he does, it is because they are mad. Optimism, in fact, is fairly widespread. While there is life there is hope. The fable of Death and the Wood-cutter is a fair symbol of humanity's out-look. On the other hand it is certain that literatures and philosophies, even those which aim to produce laughter as well as those which exalt life, are generally pessimistic. There is a tragic background to Molière's plays and a gloomy background to Nietzsche's aphorisms. Absolute, beatific optimism is compatible only with a sort of animal insensibility and stupidity: only idiots are constantly laughing and are constantly happy to be alive. Absolute pessimism, however, can develop only in certain depressed organisms: its extreme manifestations are plainly pathological and connected with maladies of the brain.

Schopenhauer affirms that life is evil, yet he loves it and enjoys it. Let fame come, and he expands with cheer. His character is by no means gloomy. He is at the same time a philosopher and a humorous writer. Leopardi never knew these expansions. He affects to despise even glory, for which he nevertheless labors. But he, too, is a keen, witty spirit, although ever bitter; and he, too, is a humorist. He certainly takes pleasure in writing. If he does not know life's other joys, he knows that of being able to impart a beautiful, puissant form to a lucid thought. Nevertheless his existence, much more logical than Schopenhauer's, is in exact accord with his philosophy. Sickly, isolated, not understood, Leopardi lacked the strength to react; but if he allowed himself to be swept along by his sadness, it was at least in full knowledge of the fact. He questions his despair and enters into discussion with it. And this questioning presented us with those fine dialogues which, together with a few thoughts, were gathered together under the title _Operette Morali_.

Leopardi died in 1837. His writings seem of this very day. Almost all the questions touched upon with unparalleled sagacity in the Dialogue Between Tristan And A Friend are such as still interest philosophers and critics. "I understand," says Tristan, "and I embrace the deep philosophy of the newspapers, which, by killing off all other literature and all other studies of too serious and too little amusing a nature, are the masters and the beacon-light of the modern age." Already, in his day, the flatterers of the crowd were saying, like the Socialists of today: "Individuals have disappeared in the face of the masses." Already sober stupidity affirmed: "We live in an epoch of transition," as if, resumes Tristan, all epochs and all centuries were not a transition toward the future!

The theme itself of the dialogues is the idea of the wickedness of life and the excellence of death. It recurs time and again and Leopardi manages to avoid monotony only by the ingeniousness of his imagination, the beauty of his style, the keenness of his wit. For example, the magnificent passage in which, after having said that although the world is rejuvenated every spring it is continually growing older, he announces the supreme death of the universe: "Not a vestige will survive of the entire world, of the vicissitudes and the infinite calamities of all things created. An empty silence, a supreme calm will fill the immensity of space. Thus will dissolve solve and disappear this frightful, prodigious mystery of universal existence, before we have been able to understand or clarify it."

Without a doubt. But in the meantime we must live, or else die. And if we choose to live, it is reasonable to do our best to adapt ourselves to life. Pessimism has but the slightest of philosophical value. It is not even a philosophy; it is literature, and, too often, rhetoric. This man is a bit ridiculous, tranquilly pursuing his existence, daily adding a page to his litany of death's delights. In short, Leopardi, like many another man, humble or exalted, suffers from not being happy; his originality consists less in taking pleasure in his suffering, which is not very rare, than in finding reasons for this pleasure and expounding them logically and resolutely. His sincerity is absolute.

Considered in opposition to the base reveries of the promissors of happiness, this literature is useful. But it is good that it should be rare, for if we finally got to take pleasure in it alone, it would prove only depressing. Life is nothing and it is everything. It is empty and it contains all. But what does the word _life_ mean? It is an abstraction. There are as many _lives_ as there are living individuals in all the animal species. These lives are developed according to curves and windings of infinite variety. It is the height of folly to bring a single judgment to bear upon the multitude of individual lives. Some are good, others bad, the majority colorless, according to every possible degree. In this order of facts there is no justice, and the reign of justice is particularly chimerical in this case, because the joys and sorrows of a life are related far less to the events by which it is crossed than to the physiological character of the individual.

Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be fully felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heart-beats and these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous grief nor a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.

Whether we deal with the transcendental theories of Schopenhauer or the melancholy assertions of Leopardi, we arrive at the same conclusion. Pessimism is not admissible, any more than is optimism. Heraclitus and Democritus may be dismissed back to back, while fearlessly and with a moderate but resolute hope, we try to extract from each of our lives,--we men,--all the sap it contains, even though it be bitter.

Leopardi was not only the poet and the moralist of despair. At the age of seventeen he had already achieved note as a scholar and a Hellenist, with his Essay Upon Popular Errors Of The Ancients (1815). During the two years that followed he produced several dissertations on the Batrachomyomachia, on Horace, on Moscus, and Greek odes in the manner of Callimachus, the perfection of which was such that it was believed some forgotten manuscript had been brought to light. Niebuhr affirmed in 1822 that the Notes On The Chronicle of Eusebus would have done honor to the foremost German philologists. Leopardi had reached this point when in a flash his personal genius was revealed to him, and then there appeared his Poems, followed by his Moral Tracts. He died at the age of thirty-nine (1837), leaving a series of labors of which each separate division achieves perfection: the scholar, the poet, the writer of prose, the translator, the man of wit are equally admirable in Leopardi. Were it not for the lingering illness that accompanied his deeply sensitive career, he would have been one of the most luminous geniuses of humanity. His originality lies in his having been the most sombre.

II

"The three greatest pessimists who ever existed," said Schopenhauer one day,--"that is to say, Leopardi, Byron and myself,--were in Italy during the same year, 1818-1819, and did not make one another's acquaintance!" One of these "great pessimists," Leopardi, happened just at this time to be writing a little dialogue that might well be reprinted at the beginning of every year. It would always seem new.

Life is bad, says Leopardi, and here is the proof: nobody has ever found a man who would wish to live his life over again exactly as it happened at first:--who would wish even, at the beginning of a new year, to have it exactly the same as the year just past. What we love in life is not life such as it is, but rather life such as it might be, such as we desire it to be.

But since this Dialogue Between The Passer-By And The Almanac-Vendor, if it has ever been translated, has remained buried in unreadable volumes, here is a version of this excellent, though somewhat bitter, page:

_The Almanac-Vendor_.--Almanacs, new almanacs! New calendars! Will you buy some almanacs, sir?

_The Passer-by_.--Almanacs for the new year?

_Vendor_.--Yes, sir.

_Passer-by._ Do you think it will be a happy one,--this coming year?

_V._--Oh, yes, sir! Certainly!

_P._--As happy as the one just past?

_V._--Oh! Far, far more so!

_P._--As happy as the one before that?

_V._--Far, far more.

_P._--As happy as which other one, then? Wouldn't you be glad to have the coming year the same as any one of the recent years?

_V._--No, sir. No. That would hardly please me.

_P._--How long have you been selling almanacs?

_V._--For twenty years, sir.

_P._--Which of those twenty years would you prefer the new year to resemble?

_V._--I? I don't know.

_P._--Can't you recall some year that seemed happy to you?

_V._--Upon my word, no, sir.

_P._--Yet life is a good thing, isn't it?

_V._--Oh, yes indeed!

_P_.--You would be willing to live these twenty years all over again, and even all the years since you were born?

_F._--I should say so, my dear sir. And would to God that were possible!

_P._--Even if this life were to be exactly the same that you lived before,--no more no less,--with the same pleasures and the same sorrows?

_F._--Oh, that! Indeed no!

_P._--Then what sort of life would you wish?

_F._--Just a life, that's all,--such as God would grant me, without any other conditions.

_P._--A life left to accident, of which nothing would be known in advance,--a life such as the coming year brings?

_F._--Exactly.

_P._--That's what I, too, would desire, if I had my life to live over again,--what I and everybody else would wish for. But that means that fate, up to this very day, has treated us badly. And it is rather easy to see that the common opinion is, that in the past evil has triumphed greatly over good, since nobody, if he had to go over the same road again, would consent to be reborn. That life which is good is not the life we know, but the life we do not know,--the life ahead of us. Beginning with the new year, fate is going to deal kindly with us,--with you and me and everybody,--and we are going to be happy.

_V._--Let us hope so.

_P._--Well, let me see your handsomest almanac.

_V._--Here you are, sir. It costs thirty cents.

_P._--Here's your money.