Ask actors what audience is happiest at the play; they will tell you the popular one. The reason is not hard to grasp. To these people the play is an exception, they are not bored by it from over-indulgence. And, too, to them it is a rest from rude toil. The pleasure they enjoy they have honestly earned, and they know its cost as they know that of each sou earned by the sweat of their labor. More, they have not frequented the wings, they have no intrigues with the actresses, they do not see the wires pulled. To them it is all real. And so they feel pleasure unalloyed. I think I see the sated sceptic, whose monocle glistens in that box, cast a disdainful glance over the smiling crowd.
"Poor stupid creatures, ignorant and gross!"
And yet they are the true livers, while he is an artificial product, a mannikin, incapable of experiencing this fine and salutary intoxication of an hour of frank pleasure.
Unhappily, ingenuousness is disappearing, even in the rural districts. We see the people of our cities, and those of the country in their turn, breaking with the good traditions. The mind, warped by alcohol, by the passion for gambling, and by unhealthy literature, contracts little by little perverted tastes. Artificial life makes irruption into communities once simple in their pleasures, and it is like phylloxera to the vine. The robust tree of rustic joy finds its sap drained, its leaves turning yellow.
Compare a fête champêtre of the good old style with the village festivals, so-called, of to-day. In the one case, in the honored setting of antique costumes, genuine countrymen sing the folk songs, dance rustic dances, regale themselves with native drinks, and seem entirely in their element. They take their pleasure as the blacksmith forges, as the cascade tumbles over the rocks, as the colts frisk in the meadows. It is contagious: it stirs your heart. In spite of yourself you are ready to cry: "Bravo, my children. That is fine!" You want to join in. In the other case, you see villagers disguised as city folk, countrywomen made hideous by the modiste, and, as the chief ornament of the festival, a lot of degenerates who bawl the songs of music halls; and sometimes in the place of honor, a group of tenth-rate barnstormers, imported for the occasion, to civilize these rustics and give them a taste of refined pleasures. For drinks, liquors mixed with brandy or absinthe: in the whole thing neither originality nor picturesqueness. License, indeed, and clownishness, but not that abandon which ingenuous joy brings in its train.
THIS question of pleasure is capital. Staid people generally neglect it as a frivolity; utilitarians, as a costly superfluity. Those whom we designate as pleasure-seekers forage in this delicate domain like wild boars in a garden. No one seems to doubt the immense human interest attached to joy. It is a sacred flame that must be fed, and that throws a splendid radiance over life. He who takes pains to foster it accomplishes a work as profitable for humanity as he who builds bridges, pierces tunnels, or cultivates the ground. So to order one's life as to keep, amid toils and suffering, the faculty of happiness, and be able to propagate it in a sort of salutary contagion among one's fellow-men, is to do a work of fraternity in the noblest sense. To give a trifling pleasure, smooth an anxious brow, bring a little light into dark paths—what a truly divine office in the midst of this poor humanity! But it is only in great simplicity of heart that one succeeds in filling it.
We are not simple enough to be happy and to render others so. We lack the singleness of heart and the self-forgetfulness. We spread joy, as we do consolation, by such methods as to obtain negative results. To console a person, what do we do? We set to work to dispute his suffering, persuade him that he is mistaken in thinking himself unhappy. In reality, our language translated into truthful speech would amount to this: "You suffer, my friend? That is strange; you must be mistaken, for I feel nothing." As the only human means of soothing grief is to share it in the heart, how must a sufferer feel, consoled in this fashion?
To divert our neighbor, make him pass an agreeable hour, we set out in the same way. We invite him to admire our versatility, to laugh at our wit, to frequent our house, to sit at our table; through it all, our desire to shine breaks forth. Sometimes, also, with a patron's prodigality, we offer him the beneficence of a public entertainment of our own choosing, unless we ask him to find amusement at our home, as we sometimes do to make up a party at cards, with the arrière-pensée of exploiting him to our own profit. Do you think it the height of pleasure for others to admire us, to admit our superiority, and to act as our tools? Is there anything in the world so disgusting as to feel one's self patronized, made capital of, enrolled in a claque? To give pleasure to others and take it ourselves, we have to begin by removing the ego, which is hateful, and then keep it in chains as long as the diversions last. There is no worse kill-joy than the ego. We must be good children, sweet and kind, button our coats over our medals and titles, and with our whole heart put ourselves at the disposal of others.
Let us sometimes live—be it only for an hour, and though we must lay all else aside—to make others smile. The sacrifice is only in appearance; no one finds more pleasure for himself than he who knows how, without ostentation, to give himself that he may procure for those around him a moment of forgetfulness and happiness.