It was with a phrase that we won at Verdun and rolled the Hun back from the Marne.
“Mourir sur place! Debout les morts! Ils ne passeront pas!” The whole war is there. And to me who heard it, the phrase which fell unconsciously from old Bompard’s lips,—“French blood never lies!” makes the rest comprehensible.
It is something to have the right to a phrase like that.
II
Yesterday, when I began these notes, it was more as a caprice than from any conviction that I would continue them. Yet to-day, I find myself to my surprise filled with a certain eagerness. During the night the thought came to me that it would be interesting to attempt an absolutely honest portrayal of myself, setting down everything, small and great, the good and the bad, as it occurred.
A classmate I met at Harvard (I cannot remember his name) once said to me, casually:
“The man who has the courage to write down day by day the true record of his life, concealing nothing, excusing nothing, without attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, putting down the sublime and the ridiculous, the mud that soils his feet as he contemplates the stars, the struggle, the inconsistencies, the little basenesses, the hypocrisies that make him virtuous—the man who will dare arraign himself before the pitiless bar of his own judgment—will leave an immortal book. But no one has ever confessed, and no one ever will.”
I never forgot this remark. It determined a whole course of mental speculation, fortunately or unfortunately, for it threw me into a period of introspection which at times verged perilously close to a melancholia, which might have been fatal had I not had in my sound body the corrective of an intense animal delight in life and an abounding curiosity for adventure. Since then, I have read copiously in the so-called confessions that line the shelves of intimate libraries, and I have recognized the essential truth of the dictum. Even Jacques Casanova who, in the effrontery of his brilliant record of a master-rogue, seems to have approached the stark verity of a confession, has moments of colossal vanity, in which he cannot resist the temptation to pose as an honest man. As for the famous confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, they confess nothing at all except perhaps the author’s desire to pass as a great man.
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It may be that a sentiment of vanity alone is the impulse which has determined me to this attempt; yet I do not think it is entirely that,—except as vanity is a natural and healthy quality and is allied to ambition. What is ambition? Is it not an instinctive rebellion against the little term of existence which is accorded to us, the soul’s struggling against mortality,—the longing to leave something behind us so that we shall not be utterly snuffed out?