"For a hundred years after the destruction of the religious and political dogmas of the past, France had lived as best she could on some few fragile dogmas, which had in their turn been consecrated by a naïve superstition; these dogmas were the principles of 1789—the almightiness of reason, the efficacy of absolute liberty, the sovereignty of the people—in a word, the whole credo of the revolution.... In order to shake that faith [in these principles] ... it was necessary that human reason, proclaimed infallible, should turn its arms against itself. And that is what happened. Scientific criticism, after having ruined old dogmatism, ... made as short work of the revolutionary legend as of the monarchical one, and showed itself as pitiless for the rights of man as it had been for the rights of God. All these causes combined, sufficiently explain the nihilism and pessimism which invaded the souls of the young during the past ten years.... Clear-sighted boys analyzed life with a vigor and a precision unknown to their predecessors; having analyzed it, they found it bad; they turned away from life with fear and horror. There was heard from the peaks of intelligence a great cry of discouragement:—'Beware of deceitful nature; fear life, emancipate yourselves from life!' This cry was first uttered by the masters of contemporary thought,—a Schopenhauer, a Taine, a Tolstoy; below them, thousands of humbler voices repeat it in chorus. According to each one's turn of mind, the new philosophy assumed shades different in appearance—Buddhist nirvana, atheistic nihilism, mystic asceticism; but all these theories proceeded from the same sentiment, and all these doctrines may be reduced to the same formula:—'Let us depreciate life, let us escape from its snares.'"
Paul Desjardins, by name and family, belongs to the old bourgeoisie of France, that reserve force of Gallic virtue to which the French people always look for help in political and moral crises. Like most of the young men of distinction in the French world of letters, he combines professional and literary work; he is professor of rhetoric at the Lycée Veuves in Paris, and a member of the brilliant editorial staff of the Journal des Débats. Paris offered to his grasp her same old choice of subjects, to his eye the same aspects of life, which form her one freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his guild—his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of 'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,' 'Companions of the New Life'; and in the treatment of these subjects, and especially in his sketches of character and critical essays upon the literature of his day, Desjardins's originality resolves itself more and more clearly into spirituality of thought, expressed in an incorruptible simplicity of style. To quote from Madame de Bury again:—"One of the chief characteristics of Paul Desjardins's utterances is their total disinterestedness, their absolute detachment from self. Nowhere else have you the same indescribable purity, the same boundless generosity of joy in others' good, the same pervading altruism."
These writings were the expression of a mind on a journey, a quest,—not of any one definite mind, for so completely has the personality of the author been subdued to his mission, that his mind seems typical of the general mind of young France in quest of spirituality, his individuality a common one to all participants in the new movement, as it is called.
In 1892 the boldest effort of Desjardins's,—a small pamphlet, 'The Present Duty,'—appeared. It created a sensation in the thinking world of Paris. It marked a definite stage accomplished in the new movement, and an arrival at one stopping-place at least. While the critics were still diagnosing over the pamphlet as a theory, a small band of men, avowing the same convictions as Desjardins, proceeded to test it as a practical truth. They enrolled themselves into a "Union for Moral Action," which had for its object to associate together, without regard to religious or political beliefs, all serious-minded men who cared to work for the formation of a healthy public opinion, for a moral awakening, and for the education and strengthening of the modern decadent or enervated will power. In general, it is common interests, doctrines, needs, that bring men together in associations. The Union for Moral Action sought, on the contrary, to associate men of diverse interests and opinions—adversaries even,—into collaboration for the common morality. In response to the interpellations, questions, and doubts evoked by 'The Present Duty,' Desjardins published in the Débats a series of articles on 'The Conversion of the Church.' They contributed still more to differentiate him from the other leaders of the new movement; in fact, few caring to share the responsibility of such radical utterances, he has been left in literary isolation in his advanced position: a position which, although it can but command the admiration and respect of the press and the educational and religious contingent of Paris, none the less attracts sarcasm and irony in the world's centre of wit, sensual tolerance, and moral skepticism. As the reproach of his literary confrères expresses it, the author has given way before the apostle. The "life to be lived" commanded the sacrifice. Desjardins makes now but rare appearances in his old journalistic places, and in literature he has determinately severed connections through which fame and fortune might confidently be expected. He now gives his writings anonymously to the small weekly publication, the official organ of the Union for Moral Action, depending for his living upon his professorial position in the Collège St. Stanislas.
'Une Critique,' one of Desjardins's earliest essays, strikes the note of his life and writings at a time when he himself was unconscious of its portentous meaning to his world and his literature:—
"Whatever deserves to be, deserves the best attention of our intellect. Everything calls for interest, only it must be an interest divested of self-interest, and sincere. But above all we must labor—labor hard—to understand, respect, and tenderly love in others whatever contains one single grain of simple intrinsic Goodness. Believe me, this is everywhere, and it is everywhere to be found, if you will only look for it....
"The supremacy of the truly Good!—here lies the root of the whole teaching—the whole new way of looking at things and judging men....
"New views of the universality of our world, of poetry, of religion, of kindness (human kindness), of virtue, of worth!... Think it over; these are the objects on which our new generation is fixing its thoughts, and trying to awaken yours. This it is which is so new!"
Translation of Madame Blaze de Bury.
