TO A YOUNG MAN

I DEDICATE this book to you, my young countryman, with whom I am so well acquainted, although I may not know your place of birth, your name, your parents, your fortune or your ambitions—nothing but that you are over eighteen and under twenty-five years of age, and that you will search in our books for the answers to the questions which are troubling you. And the answers which you will find depend a little upon your moral life, a little upon your own soul, for your moral life is the moral life of France itself—your soul is her soul. In twenty years from now you and your brothers will hold in your hands the destiny of this ancient country, which is our common mother—you will be the nation itself. What will you have learned from our teachings? No man of letters, however insignificant he may be, but should tremble at the responsibility.

You will find in “The Disciple” the study of one of these responsibilities. May you find here a proof that the friend who writes these lines has the merit, if he possesses no other, of believing profoundly in the seriousness of his art. May you also find that he [Pg viii] thinks of you with great concern. Yes, he has thought of you ever since the days when you were learning to read, when we who are now approaching our fortieth year were scribbling our first verses to the noise of the cannon which roared over Paris. We, in our study chambers, were not gay at that period. The oldest of us had just gone to the war, and those of us who were obliged to remain at college already felt the duty of our country’s rehabilitation press heavily upon us. We often thought of you in that fatal year, 1871. O! young Frenchmen of to-day—all of us who were intending to devote ourselves to literature, my friends and I, repeated the beautiful verses of Theodore de Banville:

We wished this dawn of light to be as bright as ours had been gloomy and misty with a vapor of blood. We wished to be worthy of your love, in leaving to you that which we valued more than we valued ourselves. We said that our work was to make of you and for you, by our public and private acts, by our words, by our fervor, and by our example, a new France, a France redeemed from defeat, a France reconstructed in its external and in its internal life. Young as we were then we knew, because we had learned it from our masters, and this was their [Pg ix] best teaching—that triumphs and defeats from without interpreted the qualities and insufficiencies within; we knew that the resurrection of Germany at the beginning of the century had been above all a work of soul, and we recognized that the soul of France had been terribly hurt in 1870, and that it must be helped, healed and cured. We were not the only ones to comprehend in the generous ingenuousness of our youth that the moral crisis was then as it always is, the great crisis of this

country; for in 1873 the most valiant of our leaders, Alexandre Dumas, said in the preface to “La Femme de Claude,” addressing the Frenchmen of his age as I am addressing you, my younger brother: “Take care, you are passing through troublous times. You have just paid death and are not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit, a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have had enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage, love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up before you. All these must live or you will die”.

I cannot say of the generation to which I belong, and which kindled the noble hope of reconstructing France, that it has succeeded, or that it has even been sufficiently devoted to its work. But I do know that it has labored, and labored hard. We have plodded away without [Pg x] much method, alas! but with a continuous application which touches me when I think how little the men in power have done for us, how much we have been left to our own resources, of the indifference felt toward us by those who directed affairs, and who never once thought to encourage, support or direct us. Ah! the brave middle class, the solid and valiant bourgeoisie which France still possesses! What laborious officers, what skillful and tenacious diplomatic agents, what excellent professors, what honest artisans has this bourgeoisie furnished for the past twenty years! I sometimes hear: “What vitality there is in this country! It has survived where another would have perished.” Yes, it lives because this young bourgeoisie has made every sacrifice in order to serve the country. It has seen the

masters of a day proscribe its most cherished beliefs in the name of liberty, chance politicians play universal suffrage as an instrument by which to rule and install their lying mediocrity in the highest places. This universal suffrage has undergone the most monstrous and the most iniquitous of tyrannies; for the force of numbers is the most brutal of forces, possessing neither talent nor audacity. The young bourgeoisie has resigned itself to everything, has accepted everything in order to have the right to do the necessary work. If our soldiers come and go, if foreign powers hold us in respect, if our higher education is being developed, if our arts and our [Pg xi] literature continue to assert the national genius, we owe it to the bourgeoisie. It is true that this generation of young men of the war has no victory for its activity. It could not establish a definite form of government, or solve the formidable problems of foreign politics and of socialism. However, young man of to-day, do not despise it. Learn to render justice to your elders. It is through them that

France has lived!

How will she live through you is the question which at the present time troubles all those who have retained their faith in the restoration of France. You have not to see the Prussian cavalry galloping victoriously among the poplars of your native land to sustain you. And of the horrible civil war, you have only the picturesque ruins of the Cour des Comptes, or the trees putting forth luxuriant vegetation among the scorched stones which lend poetic attraction to the old palaces. We have never been able to conclude that the peace of ’71 has settled everything for all time. How I should like to know if you think as we do! How I should like to be sure that you are not ready to renounce the secret dream, the consolatory hope which each one of us had, even of those of us who never spoke of it! But I am sure that you feel sad whenever you pass the Arc de Triomphe where others have passed, even on those beautiful summer evenings in company with the one you love. You [Pg xii] would leave her cheerfully to-morrow to go to the front if it should

be necessary, I am sure of it. But it is not enough to know how to die. Have you resolved to know how to live? When you look at this Arc de Triomphe and recall the epoch of the Grande Armée, do you regret that you did not feel the heroic breath of the conscripts of that time? When you recall 1830, and the glorious struggles of Romanticism, do you experience nostalgia at not having, like those of Hernani, a great literary standard to defend? Do you feel, when you meet one of the masters of to-day—a Dumas, a Taine, a Leconte de Lisle—that you are in the presence of one of the depositaries of the genius of your race? When you read such books as must be written when it is necessary to depict the criminal passions and their martyrdom, do you wish to love more wisely than the authors of these books have loved? Have you, my brother, more of the Ideal than we have—have you more faith than we have—more hope than we? If you have, give me your hand and let me thank you.

But suppose you have not? There are two types of young men that I see before me, and before you also, like two forms of temptation, equally formidable and fatal. One is cynical and usually jovial. He is about twenty years of age, he appraises life at a discount, and his religion consists in enjoying himself—which may be translated by success. [Pg xiii] Let him be occupied with politics or business, with literature or art, engaged in sport or in industry, let him be officer, diplomat or advocate—his only God is himself; he is his only principle, his only object. He has borrowed from the natural philosophy of the times the great law of vital concurrence, and he applies it to the advancement of his fortune with an ardor of positivism which makes him a civilized barbarian; the most dangerous kind. Alphonse Daudet, who understands so well how to describe him, has christened him the “struggle-for-lifer.” He respects nothing but success, and in success nothing but money. He is convinced when he reads this—for he reads what I write as he reads

everything else, if only to be in the current—that I am laughing at the public in tracing this portrait, but that I myself am like him. For he is so profoundly nihilistic in his manner that the Ideal appears to him like a comedy, for example, when he judges it proper to lie to the people to secure their votes. Is not this young man a monster? For one is a monster who is only twenty-five years old and has for a soul a calculating machine in the service of a machine of pleasure.

I fear him less, however, on your account than I do the other one who possesses all the aristocracies of nerves and mind, and who is an intellectual and refined epicurean as the former is a brutal and [Pg xiv] scientific one. How dreadful to encounter this dainty nihilist, and yet how he abounds! At twenty-five he has run the gamut of all ideas. His critical mind, precociously awake, has comprehended the final results of the most subtle philosophies of the age. Do not speak to him of impiety or of materialism. He knows that the word “matter” has no precise meaning, and beside he is too intelligent not to admit that all religions have been legitimate in their time. Only, he has never believed, and he never will believe in them, any more than he will ever believe in anything whatever, except in the amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into a tool of elegant perversity. The good and the bad, beauty and deformity, vices and virtues are to him simply objects of curiosity. The human soul so far as he is concerned is a

skillful piece of mechanism in the dissection of which he is interested as a matter of experience. To him nothing is true, nothing is false, nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is a subtle and refined egotist whose whole ambition, as that remarkable analyst, Maurice Barrès, has said in his beautiful romance of “L’Homme Libre”—that chef-d’œuvre of irony which lacks only conclusion—consists “in adoring himself,” and to acquire new sensations. The religious life of humanity is to him only a pretext for these sensations, as are also the intellectual and the sentimental life. His corruption is otherwise [Pg xv] as profound as that of the voluptuous barbarian; it is differently complicated, and the fine name of dilettantism with which he adorns it, conceals its cold ferocity, its frightful barrenness. Ah! we know this young man too well; we have all wished to be in his place, for we have been so charmed by the paradoxes of too eloquent teachers; we all have been like him at some time. And so I have written this book to show

you, who are not yet like him, you child of twenty years, whose soul is in process of formation, what villainy this egoism may conceal.

Be neither of these young men, my young friend! Be neither the brutal positivist who abuses the world of sense, nor the disdainful and precocious sophist who abuses the world of thought and feeling. Let neither the pride of life nor that of intellect make of you a cynic and a juggler of ideas! In such times of troubled conscience and conflicting doctrines cling as you would to a safe support to Christ’s words: “The tree is known by its fruit.” There is one reality which you cannot doubt, for you possess it, you feel it, you see it every moment, it is your own soul. Among the thoughts which assail you, are those which render your soul less capable of loving, less capable of desire. Be sure that these ideas are false to a degree, however subtle they seem, adorned as they are with the finest names and sustained by the magic of the most splendid talents. Exalt and cultivate these [Pg xvi] two great virtues, these two energies, without which only blight and final agony ensue—Love and Will. The sincere and modest Science of

to-day recognizes that the realm of the Unknowable extends beyond the limit of its analysis. The venerable Littré, who was a saint, has magnificently spoken of this ocean of mystery which beats against our shore, which we see stretching before us, and for which we have neither bark nor sail. Have the courage to respond to those who will tell you that beyond this ocean is emptiness, an abyss of darkness and death; “You do not know that.” And since you know, since you feel that there is a soul within you, labor to keep it alive lest it die before you. I assure you, my boy, France has need that you should think thus, and may this book help you so to think. Do not look here for allusions to recent events, for you will not find them. The plan was marked out and a part of the book written before two tragedies, the one French, the other European, occurred, to attest that the same trouble of ideas and of sentiments agitates both high and humble destinies at the present time. Do me the honor to believe that I have not speculated on the

dramas in which too many persons have suffered, and still suffer. The moralist, whose business it is to seek for causes, sometimes encounters analogies of situation which attest that they have seen correctly. They would rather have been deceived. I, myself, for example, would wish [Pg xvii] that there never had been in real life a person like the unfortunate Disciple who gives name to this romance! But if there had not been, if none existed, I should not have said what I am going to say to you, my young countryman, you to whom I wish to be a benefactor, you by whom I so earnestly wish to be loved—and to be worthy of your love.

PAUL BOURGET.

Paris, June 5, 1889.

[Pg 13]

I. A MODERN PHILOSOPHER.

THERE is a story that has never been denied to the effect that the bourgeois of the city of Königsberg supposed that some prodigious event was disturbing the civilized world simply because the philosopher Emanuel Kant changed the direction of his daily walk. The celebrated author of the “Critique of Pure Reason” had that day learned of the breaking out of the French Revolution. Although Paris, may not be very favorable to such naïve wonders, a number of the inhabitants of the Rue Guy de la Brosse experienced an astonishment almost as great one afternoon in January, 1887, when they saw go out, toward one o’clock, a philosopher, who if less illustrious than the venerable Kant, was as regular and as peculiar in his habits, not to mention that he was even more destructive in his analysis. It was M. Adrien Sixte, whom the English call the French Spencer.

[Pg 14]

This Rue Guy de la Brosse, which leads from the Rue de Jussieu to the Rue Linné, forms part of a veritable little province bounded by the Jardin des Plantes, the Hopital de la Pitié, the wine warehouse and the first rise of Sainte-Geneviève. That is to say, that it permits those familiar inquisitions of glance impossible in the larger districts where the come-and-go of existence ceaselessly renews the tide of carriages and of people. Only persons of small incomes live here, modest professors, employees of the museum, students who wish to study, all young literary people who dread the temptations of the Latin Quarter. The shops are patronized by this clientele, which is as regular as that of a suburb. The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the washerwoman, the apothecary, are all spoken of in the singular by the domestics who make the purchases.

There is little room for competition in this square, which is ornamented by a fountain capriciously encumbered with figures of animals in honor of the Jardin des Plantes. Visitors to the garden seldom enter by the gate, which is opposite the hospital; so that even on fine spring days when crowds of people gather under the trees of the park, which is a favorite resort of the military and of nursemaids, the Rue Linné is as quiet as usual, and so also are the adjacent streets. If occasionally there is an unusual flow of people into this [Pg 15] corner of Paris, it is when the doors of the hospital are opened to visitors, and then a line of sad and humble figures stretches along the sidewalks. These pilgrims of poverty come furnished with dainties for their friends who are suffering behind the gray old walls of the hospital, and the inhabitants of ground-floors, lodges, and shops are not interested in them. They hardly notice these sporadic promenaders, and their entire attention is reserved for the persons who go by every day at the same hour. There are for shopkeepers and concierges,

as for sportsmen in the country, unfailing indications of the time and of the weather, that there will be in this quarter, where resound the savage calls of some beast in the neighboring menagerie; of an ara that cries, and elephant that trumpets, an eagle that screams, or a tiger that mews. When they see the free professor jogging along with his old green leather case under his arm, nibbling at a penny bun which he has bought on his way, these spies know that it is about to strike eight. When the restaurant boy passes with his covered dishes they know that it is eleven o’clock, that the retired captain of battalion is soon to have his breakfast, and thus in succession for every hour of the day. A change in the toilette of the women who here display their finery, is noted and critically interpreted by twenty babbling and not overindulgent tongues. In fine, to use a very [Pg 16] picturesque expression common in central France, the most trifling movements of the frequenters of these four or five streets are at the end of the tongues, and those of M. Adrien Sixte even more than those

of many others. This will be readily understood by a simple sketch of the person. And beside, the details of the life led by this man will furnish to students of human nature an authentic document upon a rare species—that of philosopher by profession. Some examples have been given to us by the ancients, and more recently by Colerus, in reference to Spinoza, and by Darwin and John Stuart Mill in reference to themselves. But Spinoza was a Hollander of the eighteenth century, Darwin and Mill grew up among the wealthy and active English middle class, whereas M. Sixte lived in the heart of Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. In my youth, when studies of this kind interested me, I knew several individuals just as entirely given up to abstract speculations. I have, however, never met one who has made me comprehend so well the existence of a Descartes—in his little room in the depth of the Netherlands, or that of the thinker of the Ethics, who, as we know, had no other distraction from his reveries than smoking a pipe and fighting spiders.