The will to live (Les Roquevillard)

(Les Roquevillard)
A Novel
HENRY BORDEAUX
Author of “The Parting of the Ways,” “The Woollen Dress,” “The Fear of Living,” “The House,” etc.
Translated by Pitts Duffield
NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915 By DUFFIELD & COMPANY
TO MONSIEUR FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
My dear Master :
As an answer to those who regard tradition as a dead and heavy weight, not worth cultivating, you once defined the matter thus:
“Tradition is not something which is dead: it is, on the contrary, that which lives, that which survives in the present from the past; something that goes beyond the actual moment; and for those who come after us, the tradition of any one of us, whatever he is, is only that which lives beyond himself.”
If we know what we came from we can the better understand our destiny; we can be happy and do good only by developing ourselves along the line of our natural sensibilities, by consenting to take our proper place in the chain of generations by which the future and the past are linked. Far from constricting our powers of accomplishment, the family and our native soil give direction to them. I remember to have felt sorry, in reading Le Play, for that family of Mélougas, who defended their old home so desperately because they confused its history with the land’s. In Savoy I have come across so many similar adventures. But the soil, and the dead who sow the seed of our sensibilities, are carried with us in our hearts if we have extracted the essential quality of tradition, that is to say, a sense of honour, and that will to live which the sentiment of duration incarnate in the family communicates to us.