Part 4

_V._--Thanks, sir. See you again. Almanacs! New almanacs! New calendars!

There is, perhaps, a slight error in Leopardi's reasoning. It is not because our life has been bad that it would be a burden to begin it all over again. Even a happy life lived twice would scarcely possess any greater pleasures. The element of curiosity must be taken into account. There is no human being, however resigned to the monotony of a becalmed existence, who does not in the bottom of his heart hope for some unforeseen event.

But is it really true that this idea is not contained in Leopardi's dialogue? It is there, although hidden, and doubtless I have taken it from there. Wherever it may come from, it is true, at least if it be applied to life as a whole. For everybody cherishes the remembrance of hours, and sometimes days, which he would gladly live over again. It is often one of the occupations of men to seek to create in their lives circumstances that plunge them for a moment back into the joys of the past, even if they must pay for this momentary resurrection with subsequent pain....

Leopardi, who was a distinguished philologist, an excellent Hellenist, a great poet and an ingenious philosopher, endowed with eloquence, was unable to discover happiness or even peace in the exercise of these multiple gifts. His health was of the most wretched; his heart, left empty, sounded in his bosom at the slightest shock; he was timid and his nerves quivered at every jar, like those harps which were in fashion during his youth. He was born four years before Victor Hugo and died young, without having tasted fame, while Manzoni, who was destined to fill an entire century, had been for a long time known throughout Europe. Is the source of Leopardi's pessimism to be sought among these divers causes? That is hard to believe. The invalid, far from cursing life, is filled with hope; he is an optimist, and wishes to get well; he knows that he will recover. He is not the person with whom to speak of the infinite vanity of all things. It would rouse his fury to listen to the condemnation of those boons that are momentarily out of his reach but which he is preparing to seize and reconquer. Scarron was more sickly and more deformed than Leopardi, yet he was none the less a gay, all too gay, fellow. As for not being understood, or at least, not being received at one's proper value,--there is nothing in that to make a healthy mind pessimistic. The superior man, after all, scorns the opinion of men so long as it remains only an opinion,--that is to say, a matter without practical consequences. And this was Leopardi's situation, for he could have lived in independence upon his scant, but honorable patrimony.

Pessimism is related to character, and character is an expression of physiology. The case with writers, philosophers and poets is exactly the same as with men of other professions. They are gay, sad, witty, morose, avaricious, liberal, ardent, lazy, and their talent assumes the color of their character.

If one were to make a study of literature from this point of view,--a procedure which would not lack interest,--one would very probably discover a great number of pessimists, or, as they were called formerly, sad spirits. There are few men of worth who have not at times found a bitter taste to life, even among those who, like M. Renan, professed eternal joviality. There is no great writer without great sensibility; he is capable of keen joys, and of excessive pain as well. Now pain, which is depressive, leaves deeper traces in life than joy. If intelligence does not rule, if it does not intervene to establish a hierarchy, or an equilibrium of sensations, then the sad ideas triumph because of their superior numbers and power. Renan's serenity is perhaps only the apathy of indifference; Goethe's serenity represents the victory of intellect over sensibility.

Pessimism is neither a religious sentiment nor a modern one, although it has often assumed religious form and although the most celebrated pessimists belong to the nineteenth century. The Greeks, who knew everything, knew the despair of living: the pessimism of Heraclitus had preceded the optimism of Plato. There are few pages more bitter than those in which the naturalist Pliny summarizes the miseries of human life. Nature casts man upon the earth; of all animals he is the only one destined to tears; he cries from the moment of birth and never laughs before his fortieth day. And after having enumerated all the evils and the passions which desolate mankind, Pliny concludes by approving the ancient Greek epigram: "It is best not to be born or to die as soon as possible."

Leopardi has scarcely done more than paraphrase these elementary ideas, but this he has done with abundance and ingeniousness. So funereal is his spirit that he throws a veil of mourning over the most charming things: "Enter a garden of plants, herbs and flowers," he says, "even in the gentlest season of the year. You cannot turn your glance in any direction without discovering traces of misery. All the members of this vegetable family are more or less in a 'state of suffering.' There a rose is wounded by the sun that has given it life; it shrivels, blanches, and withers away. Further on, behold that lily, whose most sensitive, most vital parts are being sucked by a bee.... This tree is infested by a swarm of ants; others, by caterpillars, flies, snails, mosquitoes; one is wounded in its bark, tortured by the sun, which penetrates into the wound; the other is attacked in the trunk or in its roots. You will not find in all this garden a single small plant whose health is perfect.... Every garden is, in a way, nothing but a vast hospital,--a place even more lamentable than a cemetery,--and if such beings are endowed with sensibility, it is certain that non-existence would to them be far preferable to existence." Leopardi here commits the error of him who wishes to prove too much. His pessimism abdicates reason, and the sentence about nothingness being preferable to life, which in Pliny was beautiful and philosophic, acquires in the Italian philosopher a somewhat ridiculous sentimentality.

Jouffroy, perhaps with this page in mind, has put tender souls on guard against any belief in the sensibility of plants: let us leave that to the reveries of Pythagoras,--so noble, from other standpoints,--or to the fairy tales, whither we may go of an evening in spring to pluck the rose that speaks. But if he had possessed a more intimate knowledge of nature, and of the relations between insects and plants, what a picture at once admirable and cruel would not Leopardi have been able to draw! Those mosquitoes, upon whom he looks as allies of the caterpillars in ravaging the leaves of some cherry-tree, are ichneumons, and it is the caterpillars themselves that they have come to attack, piercing them with a long, hollow borer which permits the mosquito to lay in the very flesh of the caterpillar eggs which, when they become larvae, will gnaw the living flesh like terrible little vultures.

If Leopardi had known this and many another thing,--if he had known that every living creature is in turn prey and depredator, in turn eater and eaten, he would have considered with even greater bitterness the arrival of the new year, which hastens from the very first days of its springtime, to impart full strength and full passion to the instincts of life and devastation.

Leopardi despairs: he is, therefore, a weakling. His humble almanac-vendor is made of better clay. He hopes; he wishes to live and live happily; he possesses at least a little of that energy without which other gifts prove only too often to be blemishes and burdens.

THE COLORS OF LIFE

It was formerly the custom in such provinces as Normandy, for example, or Britanny, to consecrate children to the color blue. The vow was limited to a certain number of years,--seven, fourteen, or twenty-one,--probably because of the virtues of the number seven, as considerable as they are mysterious. Most often the final figure was decided upon,--the age of reason, says the Church, which considers it never too soon to place its hand upon the conscience and the will. It was charming for the little girls, though somewhat monotonous; on the contrary, it was troublesome to the little boys. But it seems the custom was efficacious in warding off the illnesses of childhood, and that it drew to the "consecrated one" the protection of the gods--I mean, of the Virgin--and of the celestial court. The divine personages, inhabiting the sky, which is blue, were in fact seen in blue by the popular imagination, and to adopt their color and assume their livery was to put oneself in the shelter of their power and win their good grace.

Women, through an analogous, though much more complicated and varied symbolism, often select a color and match all the elements of their toilette to it as far as fashion permits. It is exceedingly difficult to ascertain the reason for their choice. They themselves are at a loss for explanation. Often they believe that they have chosen the color or the shade that best frames their complexion or that harmonizes best with the color of their hair. But often they go astray. Those who are fond of bright blue would look far prettier in very pale green or in deep red, for example. They admit this, but for form's sake only: a secret power holds them to the color that they have desired through instinct,--the color under which they will live, under which they will know love and all the joys and all the tears of life.

Not only women, but men have their color. We seem to do the choosing, but it is nature that imposes it upon us,--it is she that dedicates us to the shade that shall be our favorite atmosphere.

One who will never feel merry amid red hangings will grow cheerful amid green or yellow. Astrologers say that we are dominated by a planet that controls our destiny. This is not very easy to understand. On the contrary, nobody would deny the rôle played in our lives by colors. Would such and such a woman have evoked the passion which is today her happiness if her gown, on that evening, had been rose and not mauve? Who can tell? It requires so little to entrance the eye and so little to provoke it. A false note, and the concert that was thrilling us fills us with laughter. If Cleopatra's nose, said Pascal, had been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed. As for me, I believe that Cleopatra rather resembled Dido, who, according to Scarron's mot, was "somewhat snub-nosed, in the African style." Perhaps it was really the happy shade of her tunic, the harmonious hue of her peplum that vanquished Antony and brought him to the feet of the queen of Egypt. History, which so often gossips beside the point, is mute upon this capital question. Nevertheless, were I to write the life of Cleopatra, I should write it in green,--Nile green, of course,--and nobody, I believe, would have the effrontery to contradict me.

Writing lives or stories in such and such a color is one of the things I have recently tried to do, and the attempt has in some instances proved to be a rather delicate affair to manage. There are blue women; there are rose ones, and mauve and red; that is to say, they may be scarcely represented except in association with one of these colors or shades. Conceiving an old maid who had retained her good looks, who was very pious and yet of very equivocal habits, I could see her only in violet. The story is violet from beginning to end; it was impossible for me to introduce a different hue; I would have felt that I was committing a gross offence against harmony. The lady is vowed to violet: to place upon her head a blue or rose hat would have been a sort of sacrilege which would have terrified even her. Can this be the reason why her narrow life as an old maid found late in life so many happy, if perverse, days? Without a doubt, for violet, which is her color, is also her logic, and it is always well to have respected the logic of one's destiny.

Now, in thus amusing myself, I have not made any pretensions toward reforming esthetics, nor toward revolutionizing the conditions of the art of writing. I have simply been playing with a box of pastels, loving the colors for themselves, one by one, somewhat in the manner of the great and singular artist Odilon Redon, whose flowers are so real that one is moved to smell them.

We have our favorite colors. Tastes and colors.... This aphorism is not at all so frivolous as one might believe. Nietzsche, who was by no means a superficial spirit, cites it willingly. It is an argument that favors individualistic philosophy and freedom of thought. It is an argument, too, and not the least valuable, that supports determinism and the philosophy of necessity. For the colors we love are not dictated by choice but by a secret sympathy which it is impossible for us to reason out. The study of tastes and colors should form part of psychology. Perhaps there might even be discovered here the elements of a new science. Being fond of red or of green is not a matter to be dismissed with indifference.

A preference for red indicates rudeness, and the fondness for green reveals tenderness of character. It is known, moreover, that red is an excitant, while green induces repose, and meditation. The studios of the firm of Lumière, where photographic plates are prepared, were at first provided with red panes of glass; but this led to such effervescence,--the men and women, after several hours of red gazed at one another with such sparkling eyes, that it was necessary to have recourse to panes of a soothing color. Men that come from large cities, overexcited by the disharmony of sounds and colors, can regain a bit of calm only amid the forests and the prairies or at the sea-shore, which is green when it is not blue. Blue is the most soothing of colors, and it is doubtless thanks to its blue sky that the South may endure the brilliancy of its springs, the purple of its autumns.

Color has its importance. Before making friends with anyone, before undertaking the conquest of a woman, observe what their favorite colors are. Think at the same time of your own, and try to make happy combinations. If you are fond of red, take to yourself a dash of blue, thus forming an agreeable lilac; and if it is blue that charms you, do not reject yellow; this combination will give you all the shades of green and will assure you lifelong peace. How many misfortunes have been caused by the maladroit mixing of hostile colors! But above all, beware of violet. There is no more perfidious hue; it is, among the colors of life, the least stable and the most hypocritical.

THE ART OF SEEING

Mon voyage dépeint Vous sera d'un plaisir extrême. Je dirai: J'étais là; telle chose m'advint: Vous y croirez être vous-même.

(The tale of my travels will be extremely pleasant to you, I'll say: "I was there; such and such things happened to me." You'll imagine that you're there yourself.)

"Alas!" the loving dove would have replied, if he had taken courses under M. Claparède, professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. "Alas! What faith may I have in your testimony? You will tell me what will take place in your head and I'll not have the consolation, as a reward for your absence, of knowing your real adventures!" But this was not what La Fontaine had in mind. In his day they believed in the value of testimony offered in good faith. An eye-witness inspired full confidence. People bowed with mute deference before the honest man who said: "I was there; such and such things happened to me." And the custom continues. Nevertheless, in certain places, they are beginning to show a little less confidence. They have been observing and reflecting and have arrived at the conclusion that the majority of men report far less what they have seen than what they believed they saw. They repeat much less what they heard than what they believed they heard. A dozen persons having witnessed an accident will present a dozen different accounts, or, at least, accounts that do not harmonize exactly. Still better, among the dozen there will be one, perhaps, who will have seen nothing, and another who will have seen the contrary to what his companions saw.

I have made many observations in regard to this subject. One of these observations is that, if by accident I have had direct and exact knowledge of an event reported by a newspaper, the newspaper report will very often be in contradiction to the facts personally known to me. Another observation is, that every time I have read the description of a place that is familiar to me, the description, in almost every case, has seemed to me inexact, incomplete,--in short, false. Huysmans was a meticulous observer; more than any one else he possessed the gift of seeing things well; his sharp eye pierced and bored into men and things. More, he had a passion for exactness, and he would scour all Paris to verify the color of a door or the height of a house. He would have considered it a sort of literary crime to describe anything he had not seen with his own eyes. Well! This man with the miraculous eye said to me one day, speaking of the Bièvre, a little stream which at that time still flowed in the open, between the fortifications and the Botanical Garden: "There is where you may see the last poplars of Paris." This old Parisian, who loved the banks of the Seine, had never beheld its poplars, some of which are truly wonderful, as at the Pont Royal,--the poplars which grow almost along its entire distance. A year ago, a group of us, all serious-minded gentlemen of Paris and of the quartier, were discussing the number of arches that comprise the bridge of Saints-Pères. One may walk every day across a bridge without knowing the number of its arches, but one of us who confessed that he had looked at this bridge from the barge or from the quay perhaps a thousand times in his life, was unable to settle the matter for us. I knew a librarian who was exceedingly fond of the Memoirs of Casanova and who mangled his name, calling him always, and emphatically, Casanova de Seignalt instead of Seingalt, which is the right form. I have been conducting regularly, in the same review, for some twelve years, a chronicle under the title _Epilogues_; one of my friends, a fellow staff-member of the same review, has said or written to me at least ten times: "I have read your latest _Episodes_...."

This reminds me of the English historian Froude, with whom Dr. Gustave Le Bon recently entertained us, dealing with this very question of testimony. Froude possessed a genius for seeing things exactly opposite to what they really were. A curious example of this is given; it concerns the description he gives of the town of Adelaide, Australia. "I saw at our feet," he said, "in the plain cut by a stream, a city of one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, of which not one has ever known or ever will know, the least uncertainty upon the matter of the regular return of his three meals per day." Now, Adelaide is built upon a height, and, at the time Froude visited it, its population, half as numerous as he said it was, was a prey to a terrible famine. And this is the testimony of a grave personage, with a European reputation,--one of the English historians most esteemed by those who have not read him.

"If Froude had lived several centuries earlier," adds M. Le Bon, "all his affirmations would have been held as precious documents, since they came from an eye-witness whose good faith there was no reason for suspecting. How many very serious histories are written with details as little trustworthy as this!"

Jules Simon was astounded "that so many honest persons contradict each other when giving accounts of events that they have witnessed. At every step I encounter this frightful spectacle. Man is least sure of his own spirit. He is not sure of his eyes: the fact is that his eyes and his memory are in strife with his imagination. He believes that he is seeing; he believes that he is remembering, and he is really inventing."

This is what explains those ancient and modern, and even contemporary tales of miracles, apparitions and wonderful happenings that are often attested by a large number of witnesses. The number of witnesses signifies nothing, nor does their honesty or their good faith. On the contrary, good faith, in the matter of testimony, is an element to be on guard against. It is far better to deal with bad faith, which betrays itself always by some blunder. Saint Paul attests that Christ resurrected was beheld by more than five hundred persons; well, it is a matter of doubt now as to whether there ever existed a person named Jesus and surnamed the Christ. Thousands upon thousands of persons in the Middle Ages, and even later, saw the Devil, and, adds M. Le Bon, if unanimous testimony may be considered as proving anything, one might say that the Devil is the personage whose existence has been best demonstrated. Gregory of Tours, an historian of evident good faith, was present during his life at hundreds of miracles, which he describes most complaisantly. He saw them, controlled them: yet the majority of them are pure extravagances, inadmissible in our day even by the most obtuse of pietists. Contemporary history and Judicial reports prove to us constantly the worthlessness of evidence. At the time of the _Liban_ catastrophe, when the vessel went down in broad daylight as the result of a collision, it was impossible to learn from the surviving members of the crew whether the captain was or was not on the bridge at the time of the accident. Some had seen him there, while others swore that he was not on the bridge. In a certain criminal trial it becomes necessary to identify a person who has been but glimpsed; they succeed in identifying him, but only by influencing the witnesses, placing them on the possible track or upon that which justice desires them to follow. According to M. Claparède's experiments, a person of whom only a glimpse has been got, if the witnesses are not influenced, is hardly recognized by one person in four, and at that hesitantly.

Really good observers are very rare. Napoleon pretended to recall every face he had looked upon once. This has become legendary, but it is not quite so. He confused all the names. One day, he sees a certain face in a deputation and thinks that he recognizes it. It was a scholar who was well known in that day, named Ameilhon. The following dialogue takes place: "Aren't you Ancillon?"--"Yes, sire, Ameilhon."--"Librarian of Sainte-Geneviève?"--"Yes, sire, of the Arsenal."--"Continuator of the History of the Ottoman Empire"--"Yes, sire, of the History of the Low Empire." After which Ameilhon, enchanted with the honor, went off, declaring everywhere most emphatically: "The emperor is amazing. He knows everything." And we, in our turn, might say: men are amazing; they imagine that it is enough to have witnessed an event to be sure of that event! The matter is far more complicated. Certainty is difficult to acquire.