Part 1

Chapter 14,037 wordsPublic domain

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_.

The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

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THE HEART’S DOMAIN

BY GEORGES DUHAMEL

Author of “CIVILIZATION, 1914-1917,” etc.

TRANSLATED BY ELEANOR STIMSON BROOKS

NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1919

_Published, September, 1919_

TO MY SON BERNARD

PREFACE

I am beginning a book with what sounds like a very ambitious title.

I wish to say at once that I have no qualifications to discuss political, historical or economic matters. I leave to the scholars who are versed in these redoubtable questions the task of explaining, skilfully and definitely, the great misery that has befallen our time.

I thus at the same time renounce most of the opportunities and obligations of my title.

But I wish, with all my heart, to pursue with a few people of good will a friendly discussion the object of which remains, in spite of all, the heart’s domain, or the possession of the world.

The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace. It is not involved in the struggle which is now rending society.

Even so, men will find themselves engaged in an undertaking that will threaten to overwhelm them with suffering and despair.

Fate has assigned to me during the war a place and a task of such a character that misery has been the only thing I have seen; it has been my study and my enemy every moment. I must be forgiven for thinking of it with a persistence that is like an obsession.

The whole intelligence of the world is absorbed by the enterprise and the necessities of the war; there is little chance of rousing it now from this in favor of the happiness of the race, in favor of that happiness which is compromised for the future and destroyed for the present. It is to the heart one must address oneself. It is to all the generous hearts that one must make one’s appeal.

So, if I am spurred by an ambition, it is to beg the world to seek once more whatever can lighten the present and the future distress of mankind, to seek the springs of interest that exist for the soul in a life harassed with difficulties, perils and disillusionments, to honor more than ever the faithful and incorruptible resources of the inner life.

* * * * *

The inner life!

It has never ceased to shine, a precious, quivering flame, devoting all its ardor in a struggle against the breath of these great events, resisting this tempest which has had no parallel.

It has never ceased to shine, but its shy and faithful light trembles in a sort of crypt into which we fear to venture.

What has happened has seized upon us as upon its prey. During the first months of the war, during the first years perhaps, all our physical and moral energies were overwhelmed in this maelstrom. How, indeed, could one refuse oneself to the appetite of the monster? We did not even try to snatch from him our hours of leisure, our dreams. We simply abandoned such things, as we abandoned our plans, our welfare, and the whole of our existence.

You remember! It was a time when solitude found us more shaken, more disarmed, than peril. We reproached ourselves for distracting a single one of our thoughts from the universal distress. We gave ourselves day and night to this agonizing world; and when our work was suspended, when the wild beast unloosed its clutch, as if in play, and we returned for a few minutes to ourselves, we did not always dare to look the quivering inner flame in the face. What it lighted up in us seemed at times too foreign to our anxiety, or too filled with limpid serenity. And so we returned to our wretchedness, experiencing it to the point of intoxication, to the point of despair.

When I think of the year 1915, it seems to me that I still hear all those noble comrades saying to me with a sort of dejection: “I can’t think of anything else! I can neither read, nor work, nor seek to distract myself to any purpose. When I’m off duty I think about these days, I think about them unceasingly, till I feel seasick, till I feel dizzy. I’ve just had two hours of liberty. Once upon a time I should have given them to Pascal or to Tolstoy. Today I have employed them in reading some documentary works on the manufacture of torpedoes and on European colonial methods. They are subjects that will always be outside my line, subjects I shall never be interested in. But how can I think of anything else?”

Perhaps it is not a question of thinking of anything else. It is not a question of turning one’s back on the time, but rather of looking it in the face, calmly and collectedly.

When the first great excitement had passed away, those who had the wisdom and the courage to return assiduously to themselves found their inner life ennobled, augmented, enriched. For it does not cease to labor on in the depths of us. It is at once ourselves and something other than ourselves, better than ourselves. Like certain of our organs which are endowed with a marvelous independence and pursue a vigilant activity in the midst of our agitations and our sleep, the inner life comes to its fruitage even though we are full of ingratitude and indifference towards it. It is the faithful spouse who keeps the home radiant, arranges every comfort and spins at the wheel, behind the door, awaiting our return.

And behold we are returning!

To be sure, the storm still roars on. It grows greater, more furious, more unending. Never has it seemed more complex, more grave, more difficult. Peril has taken up its abode with us. Every sort of opinion holds up its head and vehemently solicits our belief.

But we have found once more the key and the path to the secret refuge. Nothing could turn us aside now. Nothing could prevent us at certain hours from plunging into solitude, there to find again the equilibrium, the harmony and those moral riches which we know, after the ruin of so many things, are alone efficacious, alone durable.

For long months now I have realized, watching the men with whom I live, that they are waiting for words of quietude, words of rest and love. They are like parched soil at the end of a blazing summer: they long to slake their thirst and grow green again.

In vain have destruction, disorder and death tried to break up the sublime and familiar colloquy that every being pursues with the better part of himself. That colloquy revives, it begins again, in the very midst of the battle, among the odors and the groans of the hospital.

Nevertheless, the daily work is done, well done; duty is properly weighed and accomplished; the soul simply is unwilling any longer to renounce its meditation upon all that is profound, imperishable, and immaterial in the present.

Tell me that we are going to labor in concert once more at the exploitation of our inner fortune. Tell me that we are going to labor to save from shipwreck that part of us which, in spite of all our errors, uncertainties, crimes and disillusionments, remains truly noble and worthy of eternity.

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I am able to undertake this essay thanks to the leisure moments the war has been willing to grant me. It is not purely the fruit of solitary meditations. I do not live alone: my chosen comrades surround me; they share with me the confused space of our dwelling; we share together all the thoughts that fill this space.

Friendship has accomplished the miracle of transforming into a communion what, without it, would have remained a promiscuity.

I have a feeling that I am expressing the desires and the thoughts of many men. Very soon, those who are here will be going to sleep; I shall continue my writing, but with the secret certitude of not being alone in the task, of carrying with me their tacit assent. I feel that I have been entrusted with a sort of mandate.

I have no library, no documents. But do we need books in order to converse together of the things that form the very substance of our existence? Does it not suffice to consult our souls? Do we need any other guarantee than our devout desire in order to lift an open hand and make, for all those who await it in their solitude, the sign of concord and of hope?

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS 3

II POVERTY AND RICHES 21

III THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS 33

IV ON DISCOVERING THE WORLD 69

V THE LYRICS OF LIFE 94

VI SORROW AND RENUNCIATION 110

VII THE SHELTER OF LIFE 126

VIII THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES 146

IX APOSTLESHIP 160

X ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART 178

THE HEART’S DOMAIN

I THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS

It was necessary for me to pass middle age in order to become convinced that happiness was the object of my life, as it is the object of all humanity, as it is the object of the whole world of living things.

At first sight, that statement seems self-evident. And yet many a time have I questioned my friends, my relatives, my chance companions on this subject and I have received the most contradictory replies.

Many seemed taken unawares and, overwhelmed with their various burdens, would not trouble to seek an object: they were in pursuit of happiness without naming it. Others, excited by the play of argument, acknowledged as the object of life all sorts of states or manners of being which are nothing but steps toward happiness, means good or bad of seeking it, such as movement, stoical indifference, or prayer. Others confused the end with the object and named death. Still others, maddened by their misery, gave it as their bitter conclusion that unhappiness is the actual destiny of man, and these confused the obstacle with the aim. Finally, there were some who gave to happiness names dictated by their aspirations, their culture, their accustomed manner of using words, and called it God, or eternal life, or the salvation of the soul.

As for me, in spite of all, I am sure that happiness is the object of life. This certitude has come to me altogether from within, not from outside events, and not from the spectacle of other men. Like all the certitudes of the inner life, it is obstinate and even aggressive. All objections seem simply made to fortify it. It dominates them all. I have not been able even to imagine a new certitude that could invalidate or replace this one.

Upon reflection, the path and the end are identical. Happiness is not only the aim, the reason of life, it is its means, its expression, its essence. It is life itself.

One might well doubt this. The whole of humanity at this moment utters one despairing, heart-rending cry. It bellows like a wounded beast of burden, it simply does not understand its wound.

All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe, drain, close the vast wound?

Without delay, O streaming wound, your living flesh must be stanched and bathed. From now on, no matter how long you bleed, you must be anointed and protected, and if you are opened up again ten times, ten times must you be anointed anew and covered once more.

Yet, do not doubt it, humanity even in this terrible hour seeks for nothing but its own happiness. It rushes forward, by instinct, like a herd that smells the salt-lick and the spring. But it will suffocate rather than not enjoy everything together and at once.

Happiness?

God! who has given it this painful and ridiculous idea? What were they about, the priests, the scientists, and the people who write the books? What has been taught the children of men that they could have been made to believe that war brings happiness to anyone? Let them declare themselves, those who have assured the poor in spirit that their happiness depends upon the possession of a province, an iron-mine, or a foaming arm of the sea between two distant continents!

It is thus that they have all set out for the conquest of happiness, since that is destiny, and there has been placed in their hands precisely what was certain to destroy happiness forever.

And yet, if you will bear with me, we need not lose all hope. So long as there is a single wall-flower to tremble in the coming Aprils over the ruins of the world, let us repeat from the depths of our hearts: “Happiness, you are truly my end and the reason for my being, I know it through my own tears.”

III

I went, lately, to a laboratory, in the heart of a wilderness of glass and porcelain, haunted with inhuman odors. A friend dwelt there. I saw a great crystal cask full of distilled water; the sunlight quivered through it freely and majestically. There, I thought, is the desert. That water contained nothing, it was unfitted for life, it was as empty as a dead world.

But then we scratched the bottom of the cask and looked at it with the microscope. Little round, green algæ were growing in that desert. A current of air had carried the germs, and they had increased and multiplied. There where there was nothing to seize upon, they had yet found something. The taste of barren glass, a few stray grains of dust, that soulless water, that sunlight, they had asked for nothing more in order to subsist and work out their humble joy.

I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.

Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.

If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.

Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.

I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics, whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and modestly fulfil their destiny.

One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too, that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.

Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world.

You must understand that this concerns happiness and not pleasure, or well-being, or enjoyment, or the delight of the senses.

All cultivated people have created different words to designate these different things. All have committed their moralists to the task of preserving simple souls from a confusion which our instincts favor.

Delight of the senses, you who are the eternally unsatisfactory, is it true, intangible one, that you will always deceive us and that we shall always seek for happiness through you?

What seductiveness is not yours, O you who smile with the lips of love, O mysterious phantom of joy? How you lure us and enchain us! Well you know how to array yourself, at times, in the appearance of a sacred mission, a religious duty!

No, you are not happiness, divine though you are! To live without you is a bitter misfortune, but you are not happiness!

Why does happiness command us to sacrifice you often, to mistrust you always?

There is no happiness without harmony; you know this very well, you who are delicious disorder itself, death, laughter, strife.

Happiness is our homeland. You are only the burning country we long for, the tropical isle where our dreams exile themselves, never to return.

Happiness is our true kingdom. Delight of the senses, let your slaves hymn your praise.

During the summer of 1916 I found among the meadows of the Marne a flower that had three odors. It is a very common flower in France: it adorns a low and spiny plant which the peasants call “_arrête-bœuf_.” Toward midday, at the hour when the sun exasperates all its creatures, this flower exhales three different odors: the first is soft, fresh and resembles the perfume of the sweet pea; the second is sharp and makes one think of phosphor irritant, of a flame; the third is the secret breath of love. This miraculous flower really has all three of these odors at once, but we perceive them more easily one at a time because we are not worthy of all this wealth.

This little discovery descended upon my weary head like a benediction. At that time we were leaving the miseries of Verdun behind and were just on the point of plunging into those of the Somme. The intermediate rest depressed us and enervated us by turns. In the walks across the fields which we took with our comrades, I grew accustomed every day to gather a root of _arrête-bœuf_ and offer it, as a gift, to those who accompanied me, so that they might share my discovery.

Some of them, anxious about the world and their own fortune, took pleasure in this modest marvel. They breathed in with these perfumes the inexhaustible variety of the lavish universe. They distinguished and recognized, smilingly, the three odors of this one being. They honored these three ambassadors whom a people of unknown virtues had assigned to them. They interpreted as a revelation the little signs of the latent opulence which challenges and disdains the majority of bewildered men.

But others remained insensible to this delicate prayer, and these I thought of with chagrin as of men who had no care for the welfare of their own souls.

I know quite well you will say, “There is no relation between this flower and the welfare of the soul.” But this relation does exist, emphatically and definitely. Truth shines out of every merest trifle that goes to make up the world. We must fasten our eyes ardently upon it, as if it were a light shining through the branches, and march forward.

I am sure, we are all sure, that happiness is the very reason for our existence. Let it be added at once that happiness is founded upon possession, that is to say, upon the perfect and profound understanding of something.

For this reason men who have a high conception of happiness aspire to the complete and definite knowledge of an absolute, a perfection which they name God. The desire for eternal life is a boundless need of possession.

Equally noble is the passionate desire of certain men to understand, to possess themselves, to have such an exact and merciless conception of their moral and physical nature as will give them some sort of mastery over it.

It is indeed a beautiful destiny to pursue the understanding of the external world with the weapons and the arguments of a science that is not the slave of conquest. Men who achieve this may indeed be called just.

Others wish to possess a house, a field, a pair of earrings, an automobile. For them possession is not understanding, it is above all else an exclusive and almost solitary enjoyment. They deceive themselves about happiness and about possession. They deceive themselves to the actual point of war, massacre and destruction.

If we wish it, we may possess the whole universe, and it is in this possession that we shall find the salvation of our souls. We may possess, for example, that unknown something which walks by the road-side, the color of the forest of pointed firs that rises sharply against the southern horizon, the thoughts of Beethoven, our dreams by night, the conception of space, our memories, our future, the odor and the weight of objects, our grief at this moment and thousands and thousands of other things besides.

Is my soul immortal? Alas! how can I still linger in this ancient, ingenuous hope? There are millions who, like me, can no longer give reasonable credence to such an impossible happiness.

But does my soul exist? Every thought bears witness that it does, and this life of ours too, and the inexplicable life that is all about us.

When Christians speak of the salvation of the soul, they are thinking of all sorts of assurances and precautions in regard to that future life which remains the greatest charm of religion and at the same time its most wonderful weapon.

We can give a humbler but more immediate meaning to this expression.

First of all, not to be ignorant of our own souls!

To think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation.

To think with perseverance and respect of the soul, to enrich it unceasingly, that will be our sanctity.

We have all known those men who, at the first break of day, while they are still half awake and barely rested, fling themselves into the stress of business. They pass all day from one man to another in a sort of blind, buzzing frenzy. They are ceaselessly reaching out to take, to appropriate for themselves. If a moment of solitude offers itself, they pull note-books out of their pockets and begin figuring. Between whiles they eat, drink and seek a sort of sleep that is more arid than death. Looking at these unfortunates, who are often men of great importance, one would imagine their souls were like decrepit poor relations, relegated to some corner of their personality, with which they never concern themselves.

I was once returning from the country on a train with a young surgeon on whom that cruel fortune which we call success was beginning to smile. I can still see him, breathless and almost stupefied, on the seat facing me. He had been talking to me of his work, of how he spent his time, with a restless excitement which the noise of the train hammered and disjointed and gave a sort of rhythm to. Evening was falling. It gave me pleasure to look at the young poplars in the valley beside the track, their foliage and slender trunks transfigured by the sunset. My friend looked at them also, and suddenly he murmured: “It’s true! I’m no longer interested in those things, I no longer pay attention to anything.” Through the fatigue and anxiety of his affairs, through the jingling calculation of his profits, he suddenly caught a glimpse of his error, of his real poverty. His repudiated soul stirred in the depths of his being as the infant stirs in its mother’s womb.