3
Once again, we are here confounding that which belongs to destiny with that which belongs to ourselves. The misfortune was perhaps not to be avoided; but a great part of the sorrows that attend it remain in our power. It is for us to be careful of them, to direct them, to subdue them, disarm them, delay them, turn them aside and sometimes even to stop them altogether.
In effect, we hardly yet know the psychology of sorrow, which is as deep, as complex and as worthy of study as the passions to which we devote so much of our time. In everyday life, it is true, great sorrows, though not so rare as we could have wished, were nevertheless too widely scattered for us to study them easily, step by step. To-day, alas, they are the ground of all our thoughts; and we are learning at last that, even as love or happiness or vanity, they have their secrets, their habits, their illusions, their sophistries, their dark corners, their baffling mazes and their unforeseen abysses; for man, whether he love or rejoice or weep, remains ever constant to himself!
It is not true, as we too willingly agree, that, since unhappiness must be known sooner or later, our only duty is to reveal it at the earliest moment, for the sorrow that is yet green is very different from the sorrow that is already fading. It is not true, as we admit without question, that anything is better than ignorance or uncertainty and that there is a sort of cowardice in not forthwith announcing the bad news which we know to those whom it must prostrate in the dust. On the contrary, cowardice lies in ridding ourselves of the bad news as quickly as we may and in not bearing its whole burden, secretly and alone, as long as we are able. When the bad news arrives, our first duty is to set it apart, to prevent it from spreading, to master it as we would a malefactor or a stalking pestilence, to close all means of escape, to mount guard over it, so that it cannot break forth and do harm. Our duty is not merely, as the best of us and the most prudent seem to believe, to usher in the bad news with a thousand precautions, with short and muffled, sidelong and measured steps, by the back-door, into the dwelling which it is to devastate; rather is it our duty definitely to forbid its entrance and to have the courage to chain it in our own dwelling, which it will fill with unjust and insupportable reproaches and upbraidings. Instead of making ourselves the easy echo of its cries, we should think only of stifling its voice. Each hour that we thus pass in restless and painful intimacy with the hateful prisoner is an hour of suffering which we accept for ourselves and which we spare the victim of fate. It is almost certain that the malignant recluse will end by escaping our vigilance; but here the very minutes have their value and there is no gain, however small, that we are entitled to neglect. The hour-glass that measures the phases of sorrow is much finer and truer than that which marks the stages of pleasure. The time that passes between the death of one whom we love and the moment when we hear of his death is as full of pain as it is of days. Most to be feared of all is the first blow of misfortune; it is then that the heart is smitten and torn with a wound that will never heal. But this blow has not its shattering and sometimes mortal force unless it strike its victim at once and, so to speak, fresh from the event. Every hour that is interposed deadens the sting and lessens its virulence. A death already some weeks old no longer wears the same face as that which is made known on the very day when it occurs; and, if a few months have covered it, it is no longer a death, it has become a memory. The days that divide us from it have almost the same value whether they pass before we hear of it or afterwards. They remove beforehand from the eyes and heart the blinding horror of the loss; they step forward and draw it out of the clutch of madness into a past like that which softens regret. They weave a sort of retrospective memory which stretches into the past and grants straightway all that true memory would have given little by little, hour by hour, during the long months that part the first despair from the sorrow which grows wise and reconciled and ready to hope anew.
THE SOUL OF NATIONS
IV
THE SOUL OF NATIONS
1
IN the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau bequeaths his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses his surprise at finding how in the supreme moments of its life the collective soul of the French nation differs from the soul of each of the individuals of which it is composed.
He had devoted the best part of his work to examining, dissecting, presenting in a blinding and sometimes unbearable light and stigmatizing with unequalled eloquence and bitterness the weaknesses and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the shameful stains on the life of his fellow-countrymen. And behold, in the hour of insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy scene, out of the quagmire which he had so long stirred with rough and generous disgust, the purest, noblest, most patient, fraternal and whole-hearted spirit of heroism and sacrifice that the world has ever known, not only in the most glorious days of its history, but even in the time of its most romantic legends, which were but glorious dreams which it never hoped to realize.
I could say as much of another nation, which I know well, since it lives in the land where I was born. The Belgians, in the guise in which we saw them daily, appeared to give us no promise of a noble soul. They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little commonplace, honest in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous aspirations, wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more menacing and formidable than those of the other nations, because it preceded all of them in a terrible mystery; while there was everything to gain and nothing to lose, save honour, if they proved faithless to a plighted word; at the first call of their conscience aroused as by a thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at what they had to meet or undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse, they astonished mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken and saved the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are able to achieve upon this earth of ours.