VII
The search for happiness cannot ignore the conditions of the material life. Undoubtedly, well-being, comfort, dispose us to a happy view of things; but will they ever replace what a poet has called “the contented heart”?
The Anglo-American peoples, susceptible as they are to all the moral and religious revolutions, have applied themselves to altering the original sense of simple well-being so as to identify it with luxurious comfort. That is a way of giving a moral aspect to pleasure, making an honest bargain with the corruptions of money.
The exigencies of this sort of life have largely contributed to involving these peoples in a frenzied whirlwind of business that wears a man out and bewilders him. The anonymous writer of the “Letters of an Elderly American to a Frenchman” says to my countrymen: “Your most beautiful country-houses and your best hotels are occupied most of the time by foreigners, while your own people have to content themselves with miserable little cheap holes. Isn’t it absurd!” Perhaps, O Elderly American, but that absurdity is dear to my heart. May the God of journeys always turn my path away from the tainted spots where rise those buildings in which the existence you think so enviable is passed. If we are to consecrate our friendship we ought to discuss the value of words: what you call happiness does not tempt me.
The love of nature, the taste for those simple, healthy joys that were so vaunted by the philosophers of our eighteenth century have been the laughing-stock of our contemporary writers. A laughable excess has led, by reaction, to a furious and ignoble excess.
The dramatists and novelists of our time who, by the quality of their opinions or by their political positions are ostensibly laboring for a moral or religious end, have betrayed, in most of their works, a servile and ill-concealed love of luxury. It is useless to give names; let us say only that none of the modern novels of certain of our authors lack those descriptions and professions of faith that reveal the quivering longing of the pauper for the delights and enjoyments on which all his eager desires are fixed.
It is partly to the influence of this literature that our old world owes the headlong rush of all classes of humanity toward those pleasures that are only the phantoms of happiness and will never be anything else.
If genius wishes to consecrate itself to a labor that is truly reconstructive, truly pacific, it must discover other subjects for its works.
VIII
If the future laws governing labor do not allow enough time for the cultivation and the flourishing of the soul, a sacred struggle will become inevitable.
The organizers of the modern world, who have shown themselves powerless to avert war and did not realize the vanity of our old civilization, do not yet seem to foresee the urgency of radical changes in the moral education of the peoples.
They continue to talk to us about the superhuman efforts we must make in order to redeem their faults.
No one shrinks before these efforts. Society is weary of crime but not of peaceful tasks. Everyone prepares with joyous energy to take up his former position and his tools again.
It rests with us all to mitigate the severity of economic conflicts by working to transform the current idea of happiness.
The possessors of material wealth have, in general, for centuries, given to those whom they employ and direct so scandalous and basely immoral an example that they themselves are the principal fomenters of the attacks which they will henceforth have to undergo.
In the machinery of modern industry, work has lost a great many of its attractive virtues: all the methods in force tend to diminish the part played by the soul and the heart, and the workman, imprisoned in an almost mechanical function, no longer expects from work the personal satisfaction he once obtained; as a poet has said: “His empty labor is the fate he fights against.”
Certain American methods have based their theory upon a clever sophism; they exaggerate the automatic under the pretext of thus cutting short the length of the work. That is not a happy solution, to cut short the hours of labor by emptying it of all joy, of all professional interest. It is better to undertake a long piece of work with relish than to hurry through a short task with repugnance.
The specialization that is rendered necessary by the very extent of scientific and industrial activity remains a dangerous thing, especially among an old race of encyclopedists like ourselves.
However that may be, the peoples consent to yield themselves to the discretion of the modern world. May the monster leave them some scraps of a liberty that is still honorable enough for them to think of cultivating their souls. There will not be lacking men of good will who will be glad to devote themselves to directing this liberty, to transforming the meaning and the demands of joy, propagating a culture which, unlike those old errors, will support education more readily than instruction,—men who will more often address themselves to the heart than to the disastrous reason.