Part 7
The impression of the celebrated writer offered a startling analogy with the effect which this fragment of conversation produced upon me. It was very true that I never spoke of my father, but how false that I had forgotten him! On the contrary, I thought of him constantly. I never walked along the street, I could not look at any piece of our furniture without the remembrance of his death taking such possession of me that I was almost ill. But with this was mingled a fearful astonishment that he had gone forever, and it was all confounded in a kind of anxious apprehension, which closed my mouth when any one talked with me about him.
I know now that my mother could have known nothing of the workings of my mind. But, at that time, as I heard her thus condemn my heart, I experienced a profound humiliation. It seemed to me that she was not acting toward me as it should be her duty to act. I felt that she was unjust, and because I was timid, being still a young boy and shy, I became irritated at her injustice, instead of trying to tell her how I felt.
From that moment it became impossible for me to show myself to her as I was. And whenever her eyes sought mine to learn my emotions I felt an irresistible desire to conceal from her my inmost being.
That was the first scene--if anything so insignificant can be dignified by so big a name--followed by a second which I will notice in spite of its apparent unimportance. Children would not be children if the events important to their sensibility were not puerile.
I was, at this period, already passionately fond of reading, and chance had put into my hands a very different kind of books from those which are given as prizes at school. It was this way: although my father as a mathematician knew little of general literature, he loved a few authors whom he understood in his way; and when afterward I found some of his notes on these authors, I learned to appreciate the degree to which the feeling for literature is a personal, irreducible, incommensurable thing to borrow a word from his favorite science there is no common measure between the reasons for which two minds like or dislike the same writer.
Among other works my father owned a translation of Shakespeare in two volumes, which they put on my chair to raise my seat at table. They left me without thinking how these volumes illustrated by engravings would very soon incite my curiosity to read the text. There was a Lady Macbeth rubbing her hands in presence of a frightened physician and a servant, and Othello entering Desdemona’s chamber with a poniard in his hand, and bending his black face toward the white, sleeping form, a King Lear tearing his clothing under the zigzags of the lightning, a Richard III. asleep in his tent and surrounded by specters.
From the accompanying text I read, before my tenth year, fragments which made me familiar with all these dramas which exalted my imagination, in so far as I could seize the meaning of them, without doubt because they were written for popular audiences, and admit an element of primitive poetry, and an infantine exaggeration.
I loved these kings, who, joyous or despairing, defiled past at the head of their armies, who lost or gained battles in a few minutes, I enjoyed this slaughter accompanied by a flourish of trumpets behind the scenes, the rapid passages from one country to another, and the chimerical geography. In brief, whatever there is in these dramas and especially in the chronicles that is very much abridged, almost rudimentary, so charmed me, that when I was alone I played with the chairs, imagining them to be Lancaster, Warwick, or Gloucester.
My father, who had an extreme repugnance to the troublesome realities of life, relished in Shakespeare that which is simple and touching, the profiles of women so delicately drawn; Imogene and Desdemona, Cordelia and Rosalind pleased him, though the comparison may seem strange, for the same reason that he enjoyed the romances of Dickens, Topffer and even the child’s play of Florian and Berquin.
Here we may see the contrasts which prove the incoherence of artistic judgments which are founded upon sentimental impression. I also read all these books, and those of Walter Scott, as well as the rural tales of George Sand, in an illustrated edition. It would certainly have been better for me not to have nourished my imagination on elements so incongruous and sometimes dangerous. But at my age I could not understand more than a quarter of the sentences, and while my father was toiling at his blackboard, combining his formulas, I believe that the lightning might have struck the house without his knowing it, carried away as he was by the all-powerful demon of abstraction.
My mother, to whom this demon is as much a stranger as the beast of the Apocalypse, did not wait long, after the first hours of our trouble had passed, before she rummaged the room in which I studied; and, under an exercise, she discovered a large, open book--Scott’s “Ivanhoe.”
“What book is this?” she asked, “who permitted you to take it?”
“But I have read it once already,” I replied.
“And these?” she continued, in looking over the little library where by the side of schoolbooks, were, beside the Shakespeare, the “Nouvelles Génevoises” and “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Rob Boy” and “La Mare au Diable.” “These are not suitable for a person of your age,” she insisted, “and you may help me carry all these books into the parlor, and put them in your father’s library.”
So I carried them, three at a time, some almost too heavy for my small arms, into the cool room furnished in haircloth. With her white hands in their black mitts, she took the books and arranged them alongside of the big treatises on mathematics. She closed the glass door of the bookcase, locked it, and put the key on the ring with others, which she always carried with her. Then she added severely:
“When you wish a book you may ask me for it.”
I ask her for one of those books, but which one? I knew so well that she would refuse me all those which I had any desire to read! I have already shown too plainly that we did not think alike on any point. I complain of her having put a stop to my liveliest pleasure, less perhaps because of the prohibition than for the reason she gave. For she believed it to be her duty to repeat the phrases on the danger of romances, no doubt borrowed from some manual of piety, which appeared to me to express exactly the contrary to that which I had experienced.
She made the danger I had run in this indiscriminate reading the pretext for occupying herself more closely with my studies and directing my education. This was her duty, but the contrast was too great between the ideas into which my father had precociously initiated me and the poverty of her mind, which was furnished with impressions positive, mean, and almost vulgar.
I went to walk with her now, and she talked with me. Her conversation was confined to my bearing, my manners, my little comrades, and their parents. My intellect, which had been too early trained in the pleasure of thought, felt stifled and oppressed.
The motionless landscape of extinct volcanoes recalled to me the grand convulsions of the terrestrial drama which my father formerly traced. The flowers which I plucked my mother would hold for a few minutes, and then let fall almost without looking at them. She was ignorant of their names, as she was of those of the insects which she compelled me to throw down as soon as I had picked them up, saying they were unclean and venomous.
The roads among the vines no longer led to the discovery of the vast world to which the genial word of the dead had invited me. They were simply a continuation of the streets of the city and the misery of daily cares. I seek in vain for suitable words to express the vague and singular ennui of a mutilated mind, of a rarefied atmosphere which these walks inflicted on me.
Language was created by men to express the ideas of men. The terms are lacking which correspond to the incomplete perceptions of children, to their penumbra of soul. How can I tell the suffering, which I did not myself comprehend, of a mind in which were fermenting high and broad conceptions, of a brain upon the border of the great intellectual horizon, and which had to submit to the unconscious tyranny of another brain, narrow and weak, a stranger to all general ideas, to every view either ample or profound?
Now that I have passed through this period of repressed and thwarted youth, I interpret the smallest episodes by the laws of the constitution of mind, and I take into account that fate, in confiding the education of such a child as I was to the woman who was my mother, had associated two forms of thought as irreducible the one to the other as two different species.
These details, in which I find the proof of this constitutive antithesis between our two natures, come to me by thousands. I have said enough on this point so that I may content myself by noting with precision the result of this silent collision of our minds, and to borrow formulas in the philosophic style, I believe, that by this wrong education, two germs were prepared in me: the germ of a sentiment and the germ of a faculty; the sentiment was that of the solitude of the individual, the faculty that of internal analysis.
I have said that in the order of sensibility as in that of thought, I had almost immediately felt that I could not show myself to my mother as I was. I thus learned, though I was scarcely born into the intellectual life that there is in us an obscure incommunicable element. This was in my case a timidity at first--then it grew into a pride. But have not all forms of pride a common origin?
Not to dare to show ourselves is to become isolated; and to become isolated is very soon to prefer one’s self. I have since found, in some recent philosophers, M. Renan, for example, this sentiment of the solitude of the soul, but it was transformed into a triumphant and transcendental disdain; I have found it changed into disease and barrenness in the Adolphe of Benjamin Constant, aggressive and ironical in Beyle.
In the poor little collegian of a provincial lyceum, who trotted through the slippery streets of his mountain town in winter, with his cartable under his arm and his feet in galoshes, it was only an obscure and painful instinct; but this instinct, after being applied to my mother, grew more and more applying itself to my comrades and to my masters. I felt that I was different from them with this difference: I believed that I understood them perfectly and that they did not understand me. Reflection has taught me that I did not understand them any better than they understood me; but I also see now that there was really this difference between us, that they accepted their person and mine simply, purely, bravely, while I had already begun to complicate myself by thinking too much of myself. If I had very early felt that, contrary to the word of Christ, I had no neighbor, it was because I had begun very early to exasperate the consciousness of my own soul, and consequently to mate of myself an _exemplaire_, without analogy, of excessive individual sensibility.
My father had endowed me with a premature curiosity of mind. As he was not there to direct me toward the world of positive knowledge, this curiosity fell back upon myself. The mind is a living creature, and as with all other creatures, every power is accompanied by a want. It would be necessary to reverse the old proverb and say: To be able is to wish. A faculty in us always leads to the wish to exercise it.
Mental hereditary and my early education made an intellectual being of me before my time. I continued to be such a being, but all my intellect was applied to my own emotions. I became an absolute egoist with an extraordinary energy of disdain with regard to everyone else. These traits of my character appeared later under the influence of the crises of ideas though which I have passed and of which I owe you the history.
§ II. THE MEDIUM OF IDEAS.
The diverse influences which I have just rather abstractly summarized, but in terms which you will understand, my dear master, had first this unexpected result, to make of me a very pious child, between my eleventh and my fifteenth year. If I had been placed in the college as a boarder, I should have grown like my comrades whom I have since studied and for whom there has never been a religious crisis.
At the period of which I am writing, and which marked the definite advent of the democratic party in France, a great wave of free thought rolled from Paris into all the provinces; but I was the son of a very devout woman, and I was subjected to all the observances of religion. I find a proof of what I have told you of my precocious taste for analysis in the fact that unlike all my young companions, I was delighted with the confessional. I can say that, during the four years of the mystic crisis of youth, from 1876 to 1880, the great events of my life were these long séances in the narrow wooden box in the church Des Minimes, which was our parish church, where I went every fortnight to kneel down and speak in a low voice, with a beating heart, of what was passing within me.
The approach of my first communion marked the birth of this feeling for the confessional, mixed with contradictory elements. I believed, consequently, my little sins appeared to me to be veritable crimes, and to confess them made me ashamed. I repented, and I had the certainty that I rose pardoned, with the delight of a conscience washed from every stain. I was an imaginative and nervous child, and there was for me in the scenery of the sacrament, in the cold silence of the church, in the odor of vault and incense which filled it, in the stammering of my own voice saying, “My father,” and in the whispering of the priest responding, “my son,” from behind the grating, a poetry of mystery which I felt without understanding.
United with this, there was a singular impression of fear, which was derived from the teaching of Abbé Martel, the priest who prepared us for our first communion. He was a small, short man, with an apoplectic face, and a grave, hard blue eye, a man who had been educated in a provincial seminary still penetrated with Jansenism. His eyes, when from the pulpit of Des Minimes he was talking to us of hell, saw visions of terror, and this sensation he communicated to us.
I rejoice that he is dead, for if he were living I might see him enter my prison, and who knows what might happen then? Perhaps I should suffer a recurrence of those emotions of terror which his presence used to inflict. The constant themes of his discourse were the small number of the elect and the divine vengeance.
“Who could hinder God,” said the priest, “since he is all-powerful, from forcing the soul of the man who has committed murder to remain near the body from which it is separated? The soul would be there, in the mortuary chamber, hearing the sobs, seeing the tears of the friends, and yet forbidden to console them. It would be imprisoned in the winding-sheet, and there during days and days and nights and nights it would be present at the corruption of the flesh, which was once its own, there among the worms and the rot.”
Such images and such ferocity of invention abounded in his bitter mouth; they followed me into my sleep; the fear of hell was excited in me almost to madness. The Abbé Martel employed the same eloquence in presenting the decisive importance to our salvation which the approach to the communion table would have, and so my fear of eternal punishment led to a scrupulous examination of my conscience.
Soon these close meditations, this looking as through a magnifying glass at my slightest deviations, this continuous scrutiny of my inmost self, interested me to such a degree that no sport had any attraction for me in comparison. I had found, for the first time since the death of my father, an employment for this power of analysis which was already definitive and almost constitutive in me.
The development thus given to my acute sense of the inner life ought to have produced an amelioration of my moral being. On the contrary, it resulted in a subtility which, in itself alone, was a corruption, at least from the point of view of strict Catholic discipline. I became, in the course of these examinations of conscience, into which entered more of pleasure than of repentance, extremely ingenious, and discovering peculiar motives behind my most simple actions. The Abbé Martel was not a psychologist sufficiently acute to discern this shadow and to comprehend that to cut the soul to pieces in this way would lead me to prefer the fleeting complexities of sin to the simplicity of virtue. He recognized only the zeal of a very fervent child. For example, on the morning of my first communion I went in tears to confess to him once more.
In turning over and over again the soil and the subsoil of my memory, I had discovered a singular sin, the fear of man. Six weeks before, I had heard two boys, my comrades, at the door of the Lyceum, mocking an old lady who was entering the church Des Carmes, just opposite. I had laughed at their words instead of reproving them.
The old lady was going to mass; to ridicule her was to ridicule a pious action. I had laughed, why? from false shame. Then I had participated in it. Was it not my duty to find the two mockers and to show them their impiety, and make them promise repent? I had not done so. Why? From false shame; from respect for man, according to the definition of the catechism. I passed the whole night preceding the great day of the first communion in wondering if I could see the Abbé Martel early enough the next day to confess this sin. I recall the smile with which he tapped my cheek after having given me absolution in order to quiet me. I hear the tone of his voice which had grown very sweet as he said to me:
“May you always be what you are now.”
He did not suspect that this puerile scruple was the sign of an exaggeratedly unhealthy reflection, nor that this reflection would poison the delights of the Eucharist for which I had so ardently wished. I had not been satisfied, in the course of the preceding weeks, to analyze the conscience to its most delicate fibres, I had abandoned myself to the imagination of sentiment which is the forced consequence of this spirit of analysis. I had anticipated with extreme precision the sentiments which I should experience in receiving the host upon my lips. In my imagination I advanced toward the rail of the altar which was draped in a white cloth, with a tension of my whole being which I have never since experienced, and I felt, in communing, a kind of chilling deception, an ecstatic exhaustion of which I cannot describe the discomfort. I have since spoken of this impression to a friend who was still a Christian and he said: “You were not simple enough.” His piety had given to him the insight of a professional observer. It was too true. But what could I do?
The great event of my youth, which was the loss of my faith, did not, however, date from this deception. The causes which determined this loss were very numerous, and I have never clearly comprehended them until now. They were slow and progressive at first, and acted upon my mind as the worm upon the fruit, devouring the interior without any other sign of this ravage than a small speck, almost invisible, on the beautiful purple rind. The first was, it seems to me, the application to my confessor of this terrible critical spirit, a faculty destructive of all confidence, which, from my infancy, had so separated me from my mother.
I pushed my examinations of conscience to the most subtle delicacy and still the Abbé Martel did not perceive this work of secret torture which completely anatomatized my soul. My scruples appeared to him, as they were, childish; but they were the childishness of a very complex boy, and one who could not be directed unless he might feel that he was understood.
In my conversations with this rude and primitive priest I soon experienced the contrary feeling. This was enough to deprive this director of my youth of all authority over my mind. At the same time, and this is the second of the causes which detached me from the church, I found among men whom I then considered superior the same indifference to religious observances that I had observed in my father. I knew that the young professors, those who had come from Paris with the prestige of having gone through the Normal School, were all atheists and skeptics. I heard the abbé pronounce these words with concentrated indignation, in the visits which he made to my mother. When I accompanied her to the offices of Des Minimes as I had formerly to those of the Capuchins, I reflected on the poverty of intellect of the devotees who crowd to mass on Sunday mornings and mutter their prayers in the silence of the ceremony, broken only by the noise of displaced chairs. The flame of a clear and living thought had never been lighted in the heads that bowed with so submissive a fervor at the elevation of the host.
I did not at that time formulate this contrast with this distinctness, but I recalled the picture of those young masters as they emerged from the Lyceum, talking with each other in conversations which I imagined were like those of my father, where the smallest sentence was charged with science; and a spirit of doubt arose in my mind as to the intellectual value of Catholic beliefs.
This distrust was fed by a kind of naïve ambition which made me desire with an incredible ardor to be as intelligent as the most intelligent and not to vegetate among those of second rank. I confess that a good deal of pride was mingled with this desire, but I do not blush at this avowal. It was a purely intellectual pride, completely foreign to any desire for outward success. And, if I hold myself erect at this moment, and in this fearful drama, I owe it first of all to this pride--it is this which permits me to describe my past with this cold lucidity, instead of running away like an ordinary suspect, from the noisy events of this drama. I can see so clearly that the first scenes of this tragedy began with the college youth in whom was acting the young man of to-day.
The third of the causes which concurred in this slow disintegration of my Christian faith was the discovery of contemporaneous literature, which dates from my fourteenth year. I have told you that my mother, shortly after my father’s death, suppressed certain books. This severity had not relaxed with time, and the key of the paternal bookcase continued to click on the steel ring between that of the pantry and of the cellar. The most evident result of this prohibition was, to heighten the charm of the remembrance which these books had left of the half-comprehended pieces from Shakespeare, and the half-forgotten romances of George Sand.
Chance willed that, at the commencement of my thirteenth year, I should come across some examples of modern poetry in the book of French authors which served for the year’s recitations. There were fragments of Lamartine, a dozen of Hugo’s pieces, the “Stances à la Malibran” of Alfred de Musset, some bits of Sainte-Beuve, and of Leconte de Lisle.