The little boy paid no heed to this prudent advice. He took the ball laughingly, and as he was merry he thought he would let the string shorten itself. Then he began to have wishes. At school he wished for holidays. He was ambitious; he desired to realise his ambitions. And to obtain the objects which he coveted, he pulled and pulled at the string. When he had finished the term of his life he perceived with consternation that he had scarcely lived a few days. Just so our desires would consume our days, if our days depended on our desires.
Thus our individualists whose energy seems to i be of a worthy sort have, on the contrary, a fear of living. They are afraid to live, since they do not wish to live their lives entirely and since, perverted by the abuse of violent sensations, they no longer understand, they fear ordinary life, which seems wearisome and dull to them.
Now this ordinary life plays an important part in the succession of our days. It is almost all the ball of string. To limit life to youth is not to understand it, is indeed to despise it. For it is all worth living, if only we know how to fill it.
Beyond the appetite for those passions which, through their very violence, their risks, their mischances, have a certain grandeur, I see among the symptoms of disease the search for, the need of, distraction. One meets to-day, especially in Paris among the wealthier classes—for poverty suppresses this ardor—men and women who seem to flee from themselves, so agitated are they. They confuse the meaning of agitation and action. It is a terrible confusion, which arose in society principally since the Eighteenth Century. That century began to disturb the springs of our inward life. The Duchess of Maine, as early as that, said that she had contracted “the love of a crowd.” We pass our time outside our homes, or we come back with a crowd, so as to avoid solitude for a single instant. We make out a programme every morning, so harassing that we should refuse to go through it if we were forced to do so. We must amuse ourselves, distract ourselves, forget ourselves. To withdraw within ourselves is to be bored when we have neither love nor faith nor definite aim. And we think we are living a great deal; which is the reason why so many Parisians, men and women, to whom a variety of spectacles and a feast of art are supposed to bring great intellectual development, have seen so much and have retained so little. Life for them is like a cinematograph picture which dazzles the eye and goes back into darkness. They have never worked for their impressions, and these are the only impressions which count.
Now that is not living, to be always “out”—like Madame Benoîton—“out” even to oneself, especially to oneself; any more than it is travelling, when one rushes over the high roads at full speed in a motor without once stopping. Life is not perpetual distraction, and here we have another form of the fear of living.
III
The first form confused cowardly passivity, reserve, and parsimony with courageous resignation, while this militant egotism confuses strength with its display. The only true energy is that which is ordered and disciplined.
We are born in a state of dependence. We depend on all kinds of particular conditions; conditions of country, race, family, environment, education, health, brains, fortune; for there are no men that are free, and herein lies our great equality. Besides, in the course of our life, we shall depend on circumstances which we shall be able neither to foresee nor to avoid. We must resolutely accept this dependence.
It is the chief of all heroisms. Not the heroism with the plumes and the flourish of trumpets, which individualism is willing to extol so as to raise the song of life to the major key; but an obscure heroism—the most difficult, for publicity is a great comfort—which must be sustained and manifested in the smallest things. That haughty individual, capable of heroic acts, shows himself, on coming down from his pedestal, perfectly unbearable and cowardly in the life which (let us not forget) is our daily life; while of another, apparently insignificant, we learn one day, often too late, that he has always been doing wonders. No life is devoid of opportunities to display merit; the thing is to seize these opportunities.
But if we are, in one part of our life, dependent, another part of our life, on the contrary, depends on us. There, our will and our energy can and must come into play. It is their task to increase in wealth, importance, and value the inheritance of our life, as cultivation increases the natural fruitfulness of the land.