Every life demands effort, no one is exempt from sorrow, very few are unacquainted with failure. Effort, sorrow, failure, are so many obstacles which bring out the extent of our merit. “In this life”—to quote President Roosevelt again—“we arrive at nothing without an effort. A healthy State can exist only if the men and women who compose it lead healthy, strong, clean lives; if the children be brought up in the right way, if they try to overcome difficulties, not to avoid them, if they do not seek comfort but know how to snatch triumph from pain and risk. Man must be happy to do man’s work, to dare and be adventurous and work to keep himself and those who depend on him. The wife must be the housekeeper, a companion to the founder of the home, a wise mother, who is not afraid of having many healthy children. In one of his powerful and melancholy books Daudet speaks of the ‘fear of maternity—the terror which haunts the young wife of the present day.’ When such words can be truly said about a nation, that nation is rotten to the core. When men fear work, or rightful war, when women fear maternity, they are trembling on the brink of damnation, and it would be a good thing if they vanished from the earth, where they are the just objects of scorn to all men and women who themselves are brave and high-souled.”[2]
This is the condemnation of idle wealth and inertia. And if the head of the young American nation thinks it necessary to utter such words to stir up the wills of so vigorous a people, how much the more bitter must their application be to our weary France? Over there they scarcely strike at any but the frantic egoists, whose energies it is more easy to direct into the right channels than it is to galvanise into action our fear and cowardice.
President Roosevelt has always made the distinction between material treasures and those moral treasures which give nations and individuals their vitality. In a letter to our Mistral, who had sent him a copy of “Mireille,” he explained this again with his usual clearness. “Industries and railways,” he wrote, “have their use up to a certain point, but courage and power of endurance, the love of our wives and children, the love of home and country, the love of the betrothed for one another, the love and imitation of heroism and sublime endeavors, the simple every-day virtues and the heroic ones,—these are the greatest virtues and if they are lacking, no accumulated wealth, no amount of ‘industrialism,’ however noisy and impressive, no feverish activity, under whatever form it may be shown, will be profitable either to the individual or to the nation. I am not despising the value of these things of the ‘body of the nation’; I merely desire that they should not make us forget that as well as a body there is also a soul.”
IV
If endeavor should stimulate us, pain ought not to crush us. But do we not resist it less well nowadays? Physical pain, more especially, has become unbearable to us. We need sedatives for the smallest ailments, and we are sure that our candor will be applauded if we declare that violent toothache is more painful than any moral pain.
Moral pain is the indispensable complement of human life. Before suffering comes, life does not appear in its true colors, and the weak are not always distinguishable from the strong.
“The woods, cut down, more fair and green shall grow,” said old Ronsard. After all, life has its revenges. Even if it had not, we still ought not to be discouraged. Many faces turn away from failure and resent defeat, even in the case of others. That again is fear. One day a professor of literature, not devoid of irony, having finished a course of lectures on the “Iliad” to a class of young girls, asked his pupils which hero they preferred, Achilles or Hector. Achilles had an overwhelming majority. He was the conqueror. But Homer, more clear-sighted in his psychology, gave the conquered hero the nobler and more generous character, for he knew the share that the gods have in the success or failure of mankind. Our finest French epic, the “Chanson de Roland,” exalts courage under defeat.
Energy fits us to bear failure, pain, and effort. This fine quality needs discipline. Its character depends on the use that is made of it. To cultivate it for itself would be to imitate those people who make sport the aim of their existence. Sport maintains or increases our strength and our health, of which we have need in order to realise our life; but to take them for the actual realisation of life would only be grotesque. Nature develops itself blindly and lavishly. Everything pertaining to the human sphere is subject to order. And, just as no work of art can be produced without submission to the laws of harmony, so there is no fine life without the acceptance of an order conditioned by our dependence and our limitations. But to regulate our energy is not to diminish it. On the contrary, it is to possess and manage it as a horseman his well-trained horse. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence,” says the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, “and the violent take it by force.” Life itself suffers violence. The lukewarm and moderate natures have never created anything; the creative are the passionate ones who have tamed their passions.
In order to live all our life, it is important to accept it in the past, the present, and the future as well. In the past, this means to recognise a tradition. Neither nations nor individuals appear suddenly in the light of day. We must therefore recognise the ties which bind us to the country where we were born, to the race from which we have sprung. Thus we shall extend ourselves backwards and take to ourselves whatever there is, in the past, that still has life.
But to get inspiration from the past does not mean to identify oneself with it. “The life which tries to expand itself,” says Monseigneur Spalding, “eliminates dead things from it, and if you are a vivifying force, do not adopt the profession of grave-digger.” Nothing begins over again and everything evolves. Everything evolves slowly and under the impulse of what has gone before. Every age has its own new needs, which must be understood. Ours makes great demands. More complex and more troublous, it requires clearer sight, plainer sense of responsibility, and more enlightened intelligence. The segregation of poverty helps to conceal its miseries; industrial and mechanical developments make work less personal, and specialisation destroys part of the joy in work. New conditions of life have sprung up, which need a new spirit of enterprise.