In order to appreciate the importance of such words, let us remember that they do not emanate from a theorist, but from an observer of innumerable facts. Such, then, is the physical danger of the fear of living, such is the psychic treatment of it.
II
There is yet another form of the fear of living. Here, it is true, there is no shrinking from effort, from trouble, or from battle. Next to passive selfishness it is necessary to drag into the light, as Apollo dragged Marsyas, that active egotism which is capable of displaying the utmost vigor, but only to satisfy an individual aim, that of one’s own pleasure. This puts to a wrong use our best weapon, which is energy. It claims to subordinate life to its will, to accept it only for what it is actually worth, and therefore it fears life.
Doubtless this curious form of cowardice has more to recommend it than the other, and attracts by a pretence of merit as the Sirens attracted by a pretence of love. Its motto might be the celebrated definition of Mérimée: “Life is a green table, which amuses us only when the stakes are high.” Its defiance of life sometimes becomes a defiance of death, and we cannot quite restrain ourselves from admiration when we see Don Juan—the most brilliant incarnation of this bold selfishness—the breaker of all oaths, the miserable corruptor of all the virtues, alone in the banqueting hall (where, though lights and flowers still suggest triumphant joy, the terrified guests have all fled), to see him rise and go forth, torch in hand and sarcasm on his lips, to meet the statue of the Commander, whose embrace is to crush him.
This energy which demands violent pleasure is the energy of the bandit. It is quite possible to find praise for it. I find it, to the life, in one of those strange, suffocating novels wherein Madame Grazia Deledda truthfully depicts the manners of Sardinia. An old widow in the mountains, to dazzle the young Oli, sings the praises of her dead husband, the best and most devoted of men. “What did he do?” asks Oli. “Ah, he was a brigand.” And when the young girl is surprised at this answer, the widow tells that her husband became a brigand to show his bravery and to occupy the time which is so badly spent when one is idle. Was it not better than frequenting the inn? And in a lyrical strain she celebrates this life of enterprise. “They were,” she says, “brave and skilful, ready for everything, especially for death. You think, perhaps, that all these robbers are bad men? You are wrong, dear sister. They are the men who want to prove their bravery—nothing else. My husband used to say, ‘Once men went to the wars, but to-day there are no more wars and men still feel the need of fighting.’ That is why they go in for brigandage, plunder, and violent deeds, not to do harm, but to show their strength and courage in some way.”[1]
This is the case in business, in politics, in society, to some extent everywhere, with men, and even women, who in one way or another display their strength and courage. They are not necessarily bandits, but they all desire to get only joys, or at least violent sensations, out of life, and aim at throwing it away afterwards like a squeezed orange. These are the mad individualists who will not observe any measure in enjoyment, and see in the world only a personal inheritance to be wasted by them. I know them well, through having often myself looked in their direction with the fever of desire. Never has the possibility of a future life been so insolently rejected, and never have we, as some of us now do, exposed ourselves with such foolhardiness to all dangers of destruction, as though it were necessary to make a blaze of this, our only life, in order to discover in it some divine fire. We plunge it in the whirl-wind of death to increase its intensity for a few precarious moments.
Romanticism, by proclaiming the right to passion, the right to happiness, the right to freedom, encouraged the development of individual force. A new romanticism extols it to-day, and it is chiefly women who preach the gospel. Their invasion of contemporary literature is only one symptom of a more general feminism. Less apt than man to grasp the complexity of social and moral life, the new woman exhausts all her demands in one cry and with a single leap lands at the road’s end to which she is led by confidence in her own powers and by her narrow view of the universe which centres wholly in self. At last individualism has found its philosopher in a poet, Nietzsche,—much misunderstood, by the way,—who grants to the Superman all rights. And why should one not believe in a Superman, especially if one is a modern woman?
But is it not rather curious to call that doctrine the fear of living which glorifies life and doubles its intensity?
I am reminded of a little story which used to be told to me when I was a child. It is the story of a ball of string that a fairy—good or bad—gave to a little boy with these mysterious words:
“This ball represents the length of your life. Each moment will shorten it. I have not the power to increase the time nor even to suspend it, but I have the power of shortening it, and that I give to you. Whenever in your life you come upon hours that are useless, sorrowful, or unpleasant, and wish to shorten them, pull the string and the hours will pass. Farewell and be wise.”