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.