There will be so many voices to praise these desperate resolutions, so many books will be written to persuade men to persevere in their old hatreds that a timid voice may well raise itself to protest against the consummation of the error.
A man whom I love and esteem above all others once said to me:
“When peace is signed and I return home, I shall have to give up all the distractions I used to have if I wish to work as much as will be necessary to recover a situation as good as the one I had before.”
Believe me, O my friend who said these words to me, I love work too well to blame your decision; but I was thinking only of your happiness, and it was of your situation that you spoke to me. Are you sure that they are rightly related, those two words, those two ideas? What do you hope from the future if you are not going to allow a large place in it to the soul?
What compensation will be left for our passion of today if we take up all our prejudices again, if we return to our own vomit?
The old civilization seems condemned. To break with it, we must first of all seek our individual satisfaction outside money, our happiness outside the whirlpool of pleasure. We must flee deliberately from the tyranny of luxury. In this way even the events of the present oblige us to seek our true path. Must we keep blindly and obstinately to the ways of slavery? We have slighted the best sources of interest, joy and wealth; shall we misprize them now that they remain the only fresh and faithful things in the aridity of our time? Shall we neglect our souls again to seek a false fortune that can only betray us? Shall we contend with exasperated brutes over possessions we know to be unstable and deceptive?
No! No! Here should lie the lesson and the one benefit of this war: that we should undeceive ourselves about ourselves and about our ends! Let us not devote our courage to choosing a ferocious discipline devoid of the ideal. Let us once for all reject our calculating and demoralizing intelligence. Let us organize, in the peace that returns, the reign of the heart.
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.