In the realm of art, the fear of living is mingled with the fear of feeling. It moves those dilettantes who wish neither to make a choice nor to give themselves up, who only yield themselves temporarily to all their intellectual or plastic impulses without ever surrendering to enthusiasm, and who consider themselves superior because they float on the top of things; for, deep as the subject be, love alone can penetrate beneath the surface. This fear also actuates those artists who, in the name of pure art, reject from their work all humanity and poetry; who substitute for those familiar conflicts of the soul, which are the life-food of ancient tragedy, the pretty but unsubstantial painting of pleasure, and are content to elaborate their style like the sides of a costly but empty vase—without the slightest suspicion that in art, as in everything else, there is a definite order of merit, and that they are seated on the lowest step.
It is everywhere, this fear of living; it provides inspiration for the effeminate novelists and the incapable dramatists, who can create none but inconsistent characters, incapable of analysis. In the trivial adventures of their puppets they show us that everything is a matter of arrangement and nothing is worth being taken seriously, instead of inviting us to take our lives in our own hands. The great human cries, in art, are cries of strength and courage, and are often forced into utterance by unhappiness; suggesting that perhaps the happy spirit lacks the depth that is to be found in the abysses of life.
Lastly, timidity, reserve, and a prudence that is sometimes legitimate but often excessive, find their expression even in our public institutions, which multiply our guardians, put us all into leading strings, and relegate to the State the duty of looking after and helping us on all occasions. They have even undertaken to replace the old-fashioned Providence—and by what? By insurance companies! We insure ourselves against accidents, against risks, against death—indeed a far-sighted wisdom! Why should we not be insured also against fear?
Fear stamps the faces of the young men of the new generation, who appear to be anxious only about their health, and who, unable to digest except by the help of mineral waters and camomile, open their mouths only to criticise and to disparage; who praise nothing, like nothing, want nothing, as if they had fishes’ blood in their veins. Why all this trouble to preserve and keep themselves, for all the good that they get out of or contribute to life?
Could youth set less value than it does upon life? The recent suicide of a schoolboy at Lyons added a fresh paragraph—the most terrible of all—to the indictment of the Déracinés, the Uprooted ones, against an education which ignores the facts of family, race, locality, and country. Before going to his death the poor lad wrote on the blackboard, “I am young, I am pure, and I am going to die.” The teaching of his professor of philosophy had disgusted him with life.
What had they taught him? The beauty of pure reason, of science, of humanitarianism. Instead of being told to take his proper place in the order of things, he was called upon to destroy all in order to rebuild all again, to make a clean slate of the past, of tradition, of the destiny which had caused him to be born in a particular country at a particular date, in order to create a new personality for himself, a new universe, a new God. Besides preparing for his material future they expected of him, as of all Frenchmen, that he should create for himself a metaphysics, a politics, and a morality. He succumbed to all these burdens. Life did not appear to him in a shape with exact outlines, with beautiful lights and dark shadows, with the concomitants of effort, joy, and sorrow, with a splendour of created things, with privileges of working, of feeling behind one a past that one may carry forward, and of being able to count even on the future. It was for him a dense fog, which his reason vainly tried to pierce, in which he heard the call neither of God, of race, nor of country. He did not see his own importance, which was not merely individual but collective, he did not understand that everyone’s duty is to recognise one’s own place, that everyone’s strength and profit are to be sought in the realities of existence on which he depends and which in their turn depend on him. And so he learned a new fear of living.
These modern young men have sisters. I will not venture to describe them. A Persian proverb warns us “not to strike a woman, even with a flower.” But the poets, who have every license, even against love, have taken on themselves the task of painting the portrait. Who does not recall the “Lines to a Dead Woman”?
“Yes, good she was—if ’twere enough
That as she passed her hand would give,
Without God seeing, saying aught,