MARX, ENGELS, LENIN, TROTSKY - IN THEIR OWN WORDS

 Anatole France: In His Own words

                   (Your comments are most welcome)

from The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

HISTORICAL BOOKS

" It is a historical book ," he said to me, with a smile - "a book of real history."

 "In that case," I replied,  'it must be very tiresome; for all  all the historical books which contain no lies are extremely tedious. I write some authentic myself; and if you were unlucky enough to carry a copy of any of them from door to door  you would run the   keeping it all your life in that green baize of yours, without ever  finding even a cook foolish enough to buy it from you . 

( The crime of Sylvestre  Bonnard -p. 6) 

 

   "This old-book man" evidently thought Hamilcar" talks to no purpose at all", while our housekeeper never utters a word which is not full of good sense, full of significance containing either the announcement of a meal or the promise of a whipping.one knows what she says. but this old man puts together a lot of sounds signifying nothing (p.4/5. )

   I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than that of a catalogue. (p.5)

    As to jokes, I was satisfied with those which I unconsciously permitted myself to make in the course of my scientific labours.(p.7)

 

   Monsieur has thousands and thousands of books, which simply turn his head; and as for me, I have  just two which are quite enough for all my wants and purposes - my Catholic prayer-book and my  "Cuisinieri Bourgeoise ". (p.9)

 

                                             DESIRES

   The poor man who has no desires possesses the greatest of riches; he possesses himself. the rich man who desires something is only a wretched  slave I am a such a slave. The sweetest pleasures - those of converse with some  one of a delicate and well-balanced mind, or dining out with  a friend -  are  insufficient to enable me to forget the manuscript which I know that I want, and have been wanting from the moment I knew of its existence.(P.21) 

   Shakespeare, after having terminated the third act of the "Winters tale ,"  pauses in order to leave time for little Perdita to grow up in wisdom and in beauty;  and when he raises the curtain again  he evokes the ancient Scythe-bearer upon the stage to render account to the audience of those many long days which have weighed down upon the head of the jealous Leontes.

   Like Shakespeare in his play, I have left in this diary of mine a long interval to oblivion; and after the fashion of the poet, I make  Time himself intervene to explain the omission of ten whole years. Ten whole years indeed, have passed since I wrote one single line in this diary;  and now that I take up the pen again, I have not the pleasure, alas! To describe a Perdita "now grown in grace."

 Youth and beauty are the faithful companion of poets; but those charming phantoms scarcely  visit the rest of us, even for the space of a season. (p.33)

 

                                         PASSIONS

   "My poor dear comrade" I made the answer"I am the victim of a violent passion, which agitates and masters me. The passions are  enemies  of peace and quiet, I acknowledge; but without them there would be no arts or industries in the world everybody would sleep naked on a dung-heap; and you would not be able, Hamilcar, to repose all day on a silken  cushion, in the city of books." (P.37)

   "Friends, let us merrily eat and drink as long as oil remains in the lamp. Who knows if we shall meet again in the other world? Who knows if in the other world there be a tavern? (p. 42)

 ONE GOOD STORY WOULD HAVE SUFFICED, HAD I KNOWN HOW TO TELL IT TO THEM,TO MAKE THEM FORGET ALL THE WOES OF LIFE.(P. 52)

 The beautiful things I  have seen are still so vivid  in my mind that I feel the task of writing them would be a useless fatigue. Why spoil my  pleasure trip by collecting notes? Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness. (p.53)

 

   . .Up to that time, I used to think it was stupid to collect match boxes; but when I found that there were risks of losing liberty, and perhaps even life , by doing it , I began to to feel a taste for it. Now I  am an absolute fanatic on the subject. (p.58 )

 

                                              TIME     

   ...``for, contrary to the  opinion of the Thelemites, I hold that man is only master of time, which is life itself, when he has divided it into hours,, minutes and seconds - that is to say, into parts proportioned to the brevity  of human existence.

   And I thought to myself that life  really seems short to us only because we measure it irrational by our own mad hopes ( p.100)

 

                        VIGOUR OF NATURE

..Yet, as I looked at the young chestnut- tree in the salon, I could not but admire  the magnificent vigour of Nature, and that resistless power which forces every germ to develop into life. On the other hand I felt saddened to think that, whatever effort we scholars may make to preserve dead things from passing away, we are labouring painfully in vain. Whatever  has lived becomes the necessary food on new existences. And, the Arab who builds himself a hut out of the marble fragments of a Palmyra temple is  really more of a philosopher than all the guardians of museums at London, Munich , or Paris. (P.102)

 

    I am sure my nose must have expressed its disappointment, for it is a very expressive nose. Mora than once it has betrayed my secret thoughts.. (p.106)` 

   At this conjecture, I did what the dignity of science demanded of me - I remained silent.(p.111)

   Happily i remembered the maxim of my late grandfather, who was accustomed to say that everything was permissible on the part of ladies, and that whatever they do to us is to be regarded as a grace and a favour. (p.112)

 

                       KNOWING AND IMAGINING

   "I don't really know, " I answered, rubbing my eyes.

   This reply, indicating a deeply scientific scepticism , had the most deplorable effect upon my questioner.

   " Monsieur Sylvestre Bonnard" she said to me,  "you are nothing but an old pedant. I always suspected  as much. The smallest little ragamuffin  who goes long the road with his shirt-tail sticking out through a hole in his pantaloons knows more about me than all the old spectacled-folks in your  Institutes and your academies. To know is nothing at all, to imagine is everything. Nothing exists except that which is imagined. I am imaginary. that is what it is to exist, I should think! I am dreamed of, and I appear. Everything is only a dream;  and as nobody ever dreams about you, Sylvestre Bonnard, it is you who do not exist. I charm the world; I am everywhere... I am seen; I  am loved. There are sighs uttered, weird thrills of pleasure felt by those who follow the light print of my feet, as I make the little children smile; I give wit to the dullest-minded nurses. leaning  above the cradles, I play, I comfort, I lull to sleep- and you doubt whether I exist! Sylvestre Bonnard, your warm covers the hide of an ass!"  (pp.113/14)

   She is simple enough to believe that sense grows with age. I seem to her an exception to this rule. (p 115)

   In less than one second there thronged into my mind twenty different conjectures - the most rational of which was that I had suddenly become crazy.( P.118)

 

                                         DECEIVING

   He deceived himself before ever he deceived others. After ll, it is in the ability to deceive oneself that that the greatest talent is shown, is it not. (p. 123) 

    

                                               LIFE

   Everything passes away since thou hast passed away; but life is immortal; it is that life we must love in its forms eternally renewed. All the rest is child's play; and I myself, with all my books, am only like a child playing with marbles.. (P.125)

 

                                 POWER OF LOVE

   A Christian sarcophagus from the catacombs of Rome bears a formula of imprecation, the whole terrible meaning of which I only learned with time. It says: "Whatsoever impious man violates this sepulchre, may he die the last of his own people." In  my capacity of archeologist , I have opened tombs and disturbed ashes in order to collect the shreds of apparel, metal ornaments or gems that were mingled with those ashes. But I did it only through that scientific curiosity which does not exclude  the feelings of reverence and of piety.... I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love. 

   But the power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like  all the other energies of man. Examples proves it; and it is this which terrifies me.

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   The people who have no weaknesses  are terrible; there is no way of taking  advantage of them. (p.190)

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                                        BOOKS

   Mademoiselle made her appearance all in blue - advanced, retreated, skipped, tripped, cried out, cast her eyes down, rolled her eyes up, bewildered herself with excuses - said she dared  - said she would never dare again, and nevertheless dared again - made courtesies innumerable - made, in short, all the fuss she could. 

   What a lot of books!" she screamed. " and have you really read them all, Monsieur Bonnard?"

   "Alas, I have," I replied, "and that is just the reason that I do not know anything; for there is not a single one of those books which does not contradict some other book; so that by the time one has read them  all one does not know what to think about anything.( Pp.210/11)

 

.   ...  Should anyone ever read these pages written by an unimaginative old man, he will be sure to laugh at the way that bell keeps ringing through my narrative, without ever announcing the arrival of a new personage or introducing any unexpected   incident. On the stage things are managed on the reverse principle. Monsieur Scribe  never has the curtain raised without good reason, and for the greater enjoyment of ladies and young misses.That is art. I would rather hand myself than write a play, - not that I despise life, but because I should never be able ti invent anything amusing. Invent! In order to do that one must have received the gift of inspiration. (pp. 292/93)

 

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   To be the least wise in order to become the most wise - this is precisely what those Buddhists are aiming at without knowing it (.P.293)

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                    WHAT IS HISTORY:  ART OR SCIENCE?

   I say to him.

  " History which was formerly an art, and which afforded place for the fullest exercise of the imagination, has in our time become a science, the study of which demands absolute exactness of knowledge."

  Gelis leave to differ from me on this subject. He tells me he does not believe that history is a science, or that it could possibly ever become a science.

   " In the first place" he says to me, " what is history? The written  representation of past events. But what is an event?  Is it merely a commonplace fact.Is it any fact? No! you say yourself it is a noteworthy fact. Now, how is the historian to tell whether a fact is noteworthy or not? He judges arbitrarily , according to his tastes and his caprices and his ideas - in short, as an artist? For facts cannot by reason of their own intrinsic character be divided into historical facts and non historical facts. But  any fact is  something exceedingly complex. Will the historian represent facts in all their complexity. No, that is impossible. Then he will represent them stripped of the greater part of the peculiarities which constituted them, and consequently lopped, mutilated, different from what they really were. As for the inter-relation of facts, needles to speak of it. If a so-called historical fact be brought into notice - as is very possible - by one or more facts which are not historical at all, and are for that very reason unknown, how is the historian going to establish the relation of these facts one to another? And in saying this , Monsieur Bonnard, I am supposing that that the historian has positive evidence before him, whereas in reality he feels confidence only in such a witness for sympathetic reasons. History is not a science; it is an art, and one can succeed  in that art only through the exercise of his  faculty of imagination.   ...

   And, - will you  believe it? - this crazy boy actually tells me that no matter how  learned one may be, one cannot possibly know just how men used to live five or ten centuries ago, because it is only with a very greatest difficulty that one can picture  them to oneself even as they were  only ten or fifteen years ago. In his opinion, the historical poem, the historical novel, the historical painting, are all, according to their kind, abominably false as branches of art.

   " In all the arts," he adds, the artist can only reflect  his own soul. His work, no matter how it may be dressed up, is of  necessity contemporary with himself, being the reflection of his mind. What do we admire in the "Divine Comedy" unless it be the great soul of Dante? And the marbles of Michael Angelo, what do we represent to us that is at all extraordinary unless it be Michael Angelo himself? The artist either communicates his own life to his creation, or else merely whittles out puppets and dress up dolls." (pp.296/98)

 

                    " MY OLD BOOKS ARE ME"

   Then on my return home  I have to endure the outcries of my housekeeper, who accuses me of bursting all my pockets and filling the house with waste paper to attract the rats. Therese is wise about that, and it is because she is wise that I do not listen to her; for in spite of my tranquil mien, I have always preferred  the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference. But just  because my own passions are not of that sort which burst out with violence to devastate and kill, the common mind is not aware of their existence. Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by them at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my  sleep  for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schoeffer . And if these fierce enthusiasms are slowly been quenched in me, it is only because  I am being slowly quenched myself. Our passions are ourselves. My old books are Me.  I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are. ( pp.183/84)

 

                    THE SOURCE OF   KNOWLEDGE

  "People do not give away enough" I suddenly remark to  Fontanet.

   I expressed this thought in a tone of sincere conviction and as the outcome of mature reflection. I deemed that I was drawing forth this jewel of a truth from the depths of my consciousness and, as such , I imparted it to Fontanet. It is however, more probable that I was repeating a phrase that I had heard or read somewhere or other. I was prone, in those days, to adopt as my own the ideas of  other people. I have since corrected that proclivity, and I am now aware how much I am beholden to my fellows, to the ancients as well as the moderns, to my own countrymen and to men of other lands and particularly to the Greeks, to whom I owe so much and to whom I would fain owe more, for whatever of sound knowledge we posses concerning man and the universe is from them.(The Bloom of Life -p.2)

 

  from The Bloom of Life

                 COMMITTING FOLLIES BY PROXY

    Fontanet never committed any follies himself; but he was always eager to perpetrate them by proxy. My mother could never see through Fontanet. He always appeared to advantage in her company, and regularly displayed just that measure of hypocrisy requisite to secure the god opinion of the world. (p.12)

 

                                      PROPERTY

   In those days my idea on the subject of property were stricter than they are now. They were founded on tradition.. I deemed that my body linen did not belong to me, since I had had not paid for it. Today the question appears less simple. My notion of the origin and nature of property are quite opposed to those  held by the majority of my contemporaries. But in those long past days of which I am writing, no one was less of a Proudhonian than I, or better able to distinguish other folks' property and my own. (p.17)

 

                                             KING

   "... I am a royalist , and the principal reason for having a king, I might even say the sole reason, is that he should safeguard the freedom of the people. A royal oppressor is a contradiction in terms"

    To which my godfather would reply:

   "Unfortunately, the sovereign, as a rule, robs the people of freedom in the very things that are essential to guarantee them freedom in all other things." (p27)

 

                    PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

   ..if you would know why everything imagined in the human mind, virginal or withered, sad or gay, turns towards the past, wistful to enter there, the reason is surely that the past is our only pleasure, the only region wherein we may find sanctuary from  our daily trials, from our ills, from ourselves. The present is arid and full of unrest; the future is hidden from our sight. All the richness of the world, all its splendour, all the graces is in the past. (p.40)

                             NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

   He understood men, but he hated men of ability. He would have none but mediocrities about him; none but a pack of subalterns and clerks. And when, in his hour of trial, he had need of men, there were none at hand. No doubt he was intelligent. He was clear-sighted enough, so long as ambition did not becloud his mental vision; but he had a commonplace mind. He looked on men and things, not as a philosopher, but as an administrator. Indifferent to theories, a stranger to philosophy of any kind, he took no account of anything that did not further his schemes. Even in mechanics, where he was upon his own ground, he brushed aside everything that did not, in his view, appear to promise some immediate advantage, such as the  application of steam to land and water transport.. He never took interest in an idea for its own sake or in a piece of pure speculation... Thought and thinkers were anathema to him....

   ... Look at his head, it's the head of a child; a Titan's child if you will, but still a child. In matters intellectual he retains a child's power of make believe, illusion; a child's taste for the colossal, the excessive, the marvellous; a child's inability to resist his desires, and an irresponsibility of mind which accompanied him in the gravest situations, and that faculty of forgetting which most men lose, on emerging from childhood but which endured in his case all through his riper years.

   ..." A man would never do anything" he said on one occasion, "if he waited for all the chances to be in his favour." In that utterance the gambler stands revealed. Gamblers must have strong excitements. Their whole pleasure depends on the hazard of the event. The attraction would cease to exist if the issue were foreseen.(pp.60/61)

 

   She did not think people ought to go up to heaven when they were still alive, and she looked with disfavour on voyages to the moon because Cain was prisoner there. she had seen him one clear night carrying a faggot of thorns on his back.(p.72)

 

                                        EDUCATION

   ...It has been said that the Education Minister of 1852 did everything in his power to vilify university teaching, which was looked upon in high quarters as a public danger. He cut away its noblest branches, and made so bold as to say, " Historical and philosophical discussions are ill adapted for children, and these ill-timed studies are  merely productive of vanity and doubt." Of a surety that is not the language  of an educationist eager to awaken the intelligence of the young. Fortoul fondly imagined he was laying the foundation of an era of peace, and proposed to give the sons of the middle classes, who had grown up under a liberal monarchy, an education suited to the business careers which they were destined to follow. At this time a bourgeois-minded  professor,who had remained faithful to the July monarchy, expressed these intentions with sufficient clearness in the following words: "Our sons are are not destined to be professors. We don't want to make poets and literary  men of them.. Poetry and literature are too precarious as a livelihood. We don't want them to be barristers; there are enough of them already. We want them to be good business men. good farmers. Now for people in these walks of life, and they make up bulk of society, what is good of  the Latin and Greek which you teach them and which they quickly forget? We can't all be writing books, pleading causes, or teaching others. The vast majority of people are outside the ambit of learned professions. What do your colleges do for them. Nothing at all, or nothing that's any good"

    Anyone with the slightest measure of dignity  in his composition must feel his gorge rise at these coarse and ignoble words. I recall them because the state of mind which inspired them still exists.(pp.73/74)

 

    ...Education in common, as it is imparted nowadays, not only fails to prepare a boy for the life he has to follow, but actually unfits him for it , if he possesses any instincts of obedience  and docility at all. The discipline imposed on little first-form brats becomes irksome and humiliating when applied to young men of seventeen or eighteen. The very uniformity of the exercises makes them insipid. The mind is stultified by them, as it is warped by the system of rewards and punishments which have no counterpart  in ral life, where our actions bear in themselves their good or evil consequences.so when a boy leaves school, he is at a loss to know how to act and afraid to use his freedom. (pp.147/48)

 

   I blindly embraced this opinion because it contradicted that of my professor..That, for me , was quite decisive. (p.95)

 

   .. His thoughts were difficult to understand; their obscurity rendered them beautiful in my eyes. We seldom admire the things that are clear to us. There is no admiration without the element of surprise.(p.98)

 TWO DIFFERENT WAYS OF LOVING ONE'S OWN COUNTRY

   ...I loved the country as much as he could have loved it, but not in the same way. His love for it was the love of the industrious hard-bitten peasant. For him the country meant hard work and profit. And I, what I sought from Nature was to drink in upon her breast the delight which she mingles with death. I besought her to yield me all her passionate beauty. How little we change! As I write these lines I feel once more the thrill of my childhood days. (p.116)

 

                   LIFE AND DEATH: TWIN SISTERS

   .. I fell to weeping, and was fain to die, not from lassitude and weariness of living, but because Life seemed too full of beauty and charm not to make me also in love with Death, her twin sister and her friend, with whom she dwells eternally entwined; and because I cherished Nature so fondly that I longed to seek annihilation and oblivion within her  folding arms. Never had life been so dear to me. I filled my lungs with the warm, scented air, the evening breezes wafted caresses sweeter than any I had  ever before known , and I was thrilled to the deeps of my soul. (p.128)

 

                     REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS

   ... Moreover , everything  at school made study hateful and life unbearable. I could never accustom myself to the the degrading system of rewards and punishments which debases the character  and distorts the judgement. ...

    When I was just in my sixteenth year I somehow or other managed to get through a horrible little examination called the "Matriculation", which was well adapted to debase both candidates nd examiners.There was at that time a scientific section and a literary section. The one I went in for was of the second variety. It was worse of the two, because, although  one can understand that a poor boy might be called upon to define a pneumatic machine, or to say what he knew about the square of the hypotenuse, to cross-question him concerning his commerce with  the Muses of Helicon would be an odious profanation. (p.132/33)

   

                                 EXAMINATIONS

   To all appearance, he conducted the examination not so much  with the object of testing the candidate's knowledge, as of delivering himself of sarcastic references to his big colleague , to whom he referred by innuendoes, and with whom he decorously exchanged glances charged with animosity. the three judges hated each other with a poisonous hatred, but there their hatred ended. Content with having made the candidate shake in his shoes, they allowed him to pass, and all was accomplished without weeping or gnashing of teeth. (p.152) 

    I subsequently learnt that I had done very wisely in refraining  to present myself for an examination whose sole purpose it was was to eliminate those candidates who were not sufficiently recommended. ( p.161 )

 

                                  GRAMMAR

   Monsieur Dubois was a grammarian of awe-inspiring powers. In all questions connected with the true meaning  of words  and phrases  he was a severe and uncompromising authority. With regarded to spelling , however, he displayed a certain measure of indifference. He said he could not understand why people wasted their valuable time over such trifles. he used to say that Noel  and Chapsal's grammar was a drill sergeant's grammar imposed on the people by the insatiable tyranny of Napoleon, which exercising itself not only on deeds but o ideas , aimed at stamping out all independence of mind. (p.168)

 

                                         RHYME

   Rhyme rendered modern poetry intolerable to him. He considered it a barbarous  device which fulfilled no purpose but to rivet the unstable attention of the coarse and ignorant, and to serve as a clumsy means of marking the cadence for untutored ears.   He had a theory that this regular iteration of the same sounds had originally been nothing more than a kind of memoria technica to help people who, for want of practice, had a difficulty in committing things to memory. Nevertheless, his dislike of rhyme did not prevent him from deriving great enjoyment from the poetry of La Fontaine, Voltaire and Parny. (p. 169?70) 

                  WAR, FINANCIERS AND THE PEOPLE

   ... I am  much afraid lest the financiers and the great manufacturers, who are gradually becoming the masters of Europe, may exhibit just as belligerent a spirit as did the kings and Napoleon. It is in their interests to provoke war, not merely because of the profit they derive from furnishing supplies, but from the increased business that victory would bring them. And people always believe that they are going to win. It would be a crime against patriotism to entertain a doubt of it. The issue of peace or war is generally decided by a very small number of men. It is surprising how easily they drag the masses along with them. The time-honoured tactics which they employ are always successful. In the forefront they put the outrages inflicted on the country by the foreigner , outrages that can only be washed out with blood; whereas, considered in the light of true morality, the cruelties and deceptions inseparable from war, far from doing honour to the people who commit them, cover them with undying infamy. They urge that it is the nation's interest to take up arms, whereas the country as a whole always emerges bankrupt from war. War only brings wealth to a handful of individuals. But there is no need for the warmongers to do any speechifying at all; one only needs to beat a drum and wave a flag, and the masses will fly with enthusiasm  to slaughter and death. The truth is that is that in every country the great mass  of people make war willingly - nay eagerly- because it relieves them from the horrible monotony of domestic life, assures them unstinted liquor and plenty of adventures. To get his pay, to see the world and to cover himself with glory , these are the things that make a man put his life in peril. Nay, the real truth of the matter is that mankind adores war. It procures them the greatest satisfaction they are able to find in this world, the satisfaction of killing. Doubtless they run the risk of being killed themselves, but men seldom think about dying when they  are young, and the intoxication of murder makes them forget the risk.... The task of peace are long, monotonous, often irksome and unfraught with glory for the majority of those who fulfill them. But the deeds one is called on to perform in war are short and sharp, and to be grasped by the dullest intelligence. Even in the leaders no great qualities of intellect are called for; in the case of the common soldier, none at all...(pp.194/95)

 

                  WOMEN: BEAUTIFUL AND UGLY

   I was tremendously in love with the beautiful ones, that is to say the really feminine women, but their proximity threw me into such perturbation  that all my faculties forsook me. The result was that  I could only get on with the ugly ones, and them I could not endure. (p.198)

 

                                       PERSECUTION

    ... He did not know that a man can only rise to fame on mountain of opprobrium, and that it augurs  ill for the thinker and the man of action  if he be not vilified , insulted and threatened  on every side. He had not sufficiently  observed that in every age the man who shed lustre on their country by their genius or their virtues are the victims of outrage, persecution, captivity, exile and, occasionally, death.(pp.210/11)

 

                                        POWER OF LIE

   ... He had a simple soul and believed in the invincibility of truth, whereas only the lie is mighty and by its charm and diversity, by the distractions it offers, by its power to flatter and console,impose its dominion over the minds of men. (p.211) 

                               MAN AND ANIMAL

   ... Last of the animals came Man, akin to them all and very closely akin to some of them. The term by which we designate him today are the index of his origin; we call him human and mortal. What names could be better suited to the wild things which, like him, inhabit the earth and are the destined prey of  death? Man is incomparably more intelligent than his brother animals; but his intelligence  does not differ from theirs in kind. He is superior to them all, but without having within him aught that they also do not posses. All what brings him down to the level of all of them is that, if he would live, he must eat of that which has had life. The law of murder weighs upon him as it weighs upon all the rest and has made him a ferocious being. He is a devourer of flesh , and in order that he may not be ashamed to slay his brothers he repudiates them. He boasts that he comes of a loftier origin; yet everything shows his kingship with animals he is born, like them; like them he nourishes himself; he reproduces his kind like them , and, finally like them he dies. Even as they, he is subjected to the law of murder imposed upon all who inhabit the earth.Of his incomparable intelligence  he makes use in order to subjugate the beasts necessary welfare, and although his stalls and byres are well stocked, yet the chase is his favourite occupation. It was ever the chief pastimes of kings, and so it is it today. He abandons himself to the work of killing with a mad joy which the other animals do not share with him.Like the wild beasts, which do not eat each other, he abstains  from devouring the flesh of men; but he does what other animals scarcely ever do, he kills his fellows, if not to eat them, at all events to wrest from them some coveted possession, to prevent them from  enjoying their own, or merely for the pleasure of slaying.This is what is known as war, and men wage it with delight..."kill to live" is its immutable law. (pp.217/19)

 

                           HOLLOW LEARNING

   I read omnivorously and without method, and I soon perceived with ludicrous amazement that I knew nothing, the I had not even learned how to learn, and that my brilliant acquirements were but a thin veneer spread over the profundity of my ignorance.... I came to observe, rather late in the day, that the exact sciences are the only that which enable us to form and equip our understanding and that our professors of literature made us into so many empty sound boxes, vain creatures, incapable of any serious undertaking. (p.229)

 

   My mother and father gave me little help in the difficult task of selecting a profession, my mother because she thought me capable of success  in all, my father because he thought me incapable of success in any. ( 230)

 

               ADMIRATION AND UNDERSTANDING

      Madame Airiau one day lent me  the Vita Nuova which she much admired, and which, though I  did not understand very much of it, filled me with delight. But people will never realize, where literature is concerned, how little admiration depends  on understanding.(p.234)

 

 THE PATRIOTIC WAY OF ACHIEVING UNIVERSAL PEACE

   Impressed, as he used to put it, by the movement which was bearing the nations towards unity, he considered industrialism and banking to be the great beneficent forces which, by bringing the various peoples of the world into association with one another, would one day establish universal peace. But he was a Frenchman and a patriot. His idea of peace was of the Napoleonic order. What he meant and intended was that the union of the nations should be the exclusive achievement of France, and that France should preside in sovereign splendour over the united states of the world.(p.235) 

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      she said so sensibly: "The children must marry to please themselves, and not their parents.(p.241)

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   .. I was born on the 20th January under the unlucky sign of Aquarius." Then,  mimicking the tone and manner of a fortune teller, she went on" " People born under this star always go out without their umbrella when it is going to rain. Whenever they go out in a new hat and someone  is watering flowers on a window-sill  they, and not the flowers, get the water. And it happens to be windy, they get the flower-pot as well." 

   "great stupid", said Madame Gobelin with a sigh. (p.243)

   In those days of the Third Empire Paris was the hostelry of the world. Visitors from every quarter of the world were treated with the most cordial magnificence there. There was no indication of that xenophobia , that mistrust and dislike of foreigners which darkened the latter days of the Third Republic, no sign of those hatreds and suspicions which, fifty years later, were increased and multiplied by victory, an which now will never die away.(p.248)

 

 NOTWITHSTANDING SCIENCE  BIGOTRY PREVAILS

   ... But what, in my view, is the most disheartening thing of all is that when a science has at length  succeeded in establishing some new and certain piece of knowledge, when astronomy, for example, reveals to us the structure of the universe, educated men are unable  to bring themselves to reject as unworthy of belief whatever conflicts with this new idea of the universe thus authoritatively imposed upon them. No, they persist in their ancient outworn creeds, though they have been demonstrated to be false, and thus exhibit a crass, heartbreaking stupidity. Boast  of your Progress, Gentlemen, puff yourselves up with your ever growing aptitude for perfection, laud yourselves to the skies, prance along blowing your own trumpets, until you are involved in the final and irremediable crash."(pp.264/65)

 

                     SURVIVAL WITH ILLUSIONS!

   All I can claim is that  I have acted in good faith. Again I say it: I love truth. I believe that man has need of it; but assuredly he has still greater need of the illusions that encourage and console and set no limit to his hopes and aspirations. Rob of him of his illusions, and man would perish of very weariness and despair. (p.291) 

 

 

   Then I looked again upon the face of the dead. It was so beautiful that I grew afraid. Intellectually he was the greatest man I had ever known, the greatest I  was ever destined to know throughout the course of my long life, and yet I have been friendly with people whose writings have made them famous. But the example of M.Dubois and of a few others who, like him, left  no works behind them,  has made me suspect that the highest human worth has often perished without leaving a trace. And need one be very surprised that the man who despises glory is greater than  he who wins it by insincere speeches? (p.271) 

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   His life was divided between phantoms of the past and dreams of the future; the actual present was utterly foreign to his notions. ( The Well of Saint Claire- p.6)

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 from     On life & letters - first series

                                         CRITICISM

   As I understand it, and as you allow me to practice it, criticism is , like philosophy and history, a sort of romance designed for those who have sagacious and curious minds, and every romance is, rightly taken, an autobiography. The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his own soul among masterpieces. 

   Objective criticism has no more existence than has objective art, and all those who deceive themselves into the belief that they put anything but their own  personalities into their work are dupes of the most fallacious of illusions. The truth is that we can never get outside ourselves. That is one of our greatest misfortunes....We cannot , like Tiresias, be a man and have recollections of having been a woman. We are shut up in our own personality as if in a perpetual prison. The best thing for us, it seems to me, is to admit this frightful condition  with a good grace, and to confess that we speak of ourselves every time we have not strength enough to remain silent.  (On life and  Letters - Vol.1 - p. vii/viii )

                            BOOKISH KNOWLEDGE

   There are bookish souls for whom the universe is but a paper and ink. The man whose body is animated by such a soul spends his life before his desk, without any care for the realities whose graphic representation he studies so obstinately. Of the beauty of women he knows only what has been written about it. He knows of the labours, sufferings, and hopes of men only what can be sewn on to tapes and bound in morocco. He is monstrous and ignorant. He has never looked out of the window.Such was the worthy Peignot, who collected other people's opinions to make books out of them. Nothing had ever disturbed him. He conceived  of passions as subjects for monographs, and knew that nations perish in a certain number of  octavo pages. Up to the day of his death he toiled with an equal ardour and without ever understanding anything. That is why work was not bitter to him. He is to be envied, if peace of heart can be won only at such a cost.  (pp.ix/x)

 

   ...I know many other people of a very different temperament. These search in books for all sorts of  fine secrets  about men and things.

    They seek continually, and their minds give them no rest. If book bring peace to the peaceful-minded, they trouble these restless souls. I myself know many restless souls. They are wrong to plunge into too much reading. look, for instance, at what happened to Don Quixote because he devoured the four volumes of " Amadis de Gaule' and a dozen other excellent romances. After he had read enchanting stories he believed in enchantments. He believed that life was as beautiful as the stories , and he did a thousand mad things which he would never have done had he not been bitten by the itch of reading.

   A book, according to Littre's dictionary, is a collection of several sections of manuscript or of printed pages. That definition does not satisfy me. I would define a book as  a work of witchcraft from which there escape all sorts of images which disturb people's minds and change their hearts.I will put it better still - a book is a small magical apparatus which transports us into  the midst of images of the past or among supernatural shades.. Those who read much are like hasheesh-eaters. They live in a dream. The subtle poison which penetrates their brains renders them insensible to the real world and throws them as a prey to terrible or to delightful phantoms. Books are the opium of the west. They devour us. A day will come when we shall all be librarians, and that will end it all.

   Let us love books in the way that the lover described by the poet loved her pain. Let us love them, for they cost us dear enough. Let us love them, for we are dying because of them. Yes, books are killing us. Believe me when i tell you this, for I adore them, I long since gave myself unreservedly to them. Books are killing us. We have too many of them and too many kinds. Men lived for long ages without reading anything, and that was the very time when they did the greatest and most useful things, for it is the time when they passed from barbarism to civilization....

   .. We publish now, in Paris alone, fifty volumes a day, not to mention the newspapers. this is a monstrous orgy. It will end by driving us mad. Man's destiny is to fall into contrary excesses in succession...

    Let us be bibliophiles and let us read our books. But let us not take them in armfuls. Let us be delicate, let us choose, and, like that lord in one of Shakespeare's comedies, let us say to our bookseller, "I would have them to be well bounded, and I would have them speak of love." (pp.xi/xiii)

 

 

   When you find it difficult to come to a decision, said he, take a sheet of white paper and divide it into two columns. Write in one of these columns all the reasons you have for acting and in  the other all the reasons you have for abstaining. As in algebra we cancel similar quantities, strike out the reasons that balance one another and decide according to the reasons that remain. 

   This method is not suited to Serenus, and he never employs it. Serenus would exhaust all the papyrus and all the waxen tablets in the world, he would use up all the reeds of the Nile and his steel stylus as well, before he would have exhausted the reasons that his subtle intellect would suggest to him, and finally, he would not decide  that anyone of them was better or worse than the others. 

.   ...Men can live without thinking. Indeed, it is generally thus that men do live, and no great harm to the community results. On the other hand, the state has need of the diverse and harmonious action of all its citizens. It is by acts and by ideas that people live. (p.12| 

                "SIGN OF TIMES!": FACT OR FICTION

   We often say:" This or that is a sign of the times. And, nine times out of ten, the thing that we believe new is in reality as old as the world itself. It is even noticeable  that in all epochs people are alarmed by the same signs.In all epochs there are to be found candid and generous spirits who lament the universal decay of men and things and foretell the end of the world. Homer,anticipating M. Henry Cochin, has said:" The men of the past were better than than the men of the present." Others, through a contrary illusion, proclaim the the hour in which they were born to be fortunate. They honestly think that the past was dark and wretched, and that the future will be splendid, since it issues from themselves. It occurs to nobody to think that, before our time, human affairs were mixture of good and bad, and that, after us, the world will pursue its ordinary way and remain mediocre- though this view,is, however,the most probable one (p.31)

                      LITERARY TRUTH AND POETRY

   To say everything is to say nothing. To show everything is to make us see nothing. The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gave herself without preference. There is a literary truth as well as scientific truth, and do you know the name of that literary truth? It is called poetry. In art everything is false which is not beautiful.( P.67)

 

                          INDEPENDENCE IN ART

   ...People desire independence in art. I desire it too; I am jealous  for it.. The writer must be able to say everything, but he cannot be permitted to say it in every fashion, in all circumstances, and about all sorts of persons. He does not move in the absolute. He is in relation with men. That implies duties.. In his mission of enlightening  and of beautifying life,  he  is independent; he is not when he wishes to disturb and to injure it. He is bound to touch sacred things with respect. And if there is, by the consent of all, a sacred thing in human society, it is the army.  (p.68)

 

 

      I know that there is no certainty outside science. But I know also that the worth of scientific truth lies in the methods of its discovery, and that these methods are not to be arrived at by the common run of mankind. It is hardly scientific to hold that science may one day replace religion. So long as man sucks milk of woman, so long as he be consecrated in the temple, and initiated in some sort in divine mystery. He will dream. And what matter if the dream be false, so it be beautiful? Is it man's destiny to be steeped in perpetual illusion? Indeed, is not such illusion the very condition of life? (The Bride of Corinth- Preface - p.xi) 

 

from    The Garden of Epicurus

        POSSIBLE METHODS OD DEVELOPING LIFE

   When we say life, we mean the activity of organizes matter under the conditions in which we see it manifested in our own world. But it is equally possible that life may be developed in a totally different environment , at extremely high or extremely low temperatures, and under forms unthinkable by us. It may even be developed under an ethereal form, close beside us , in our atmosphere; and it is possible that in this way we are surrounded by angels,- beings we shall never know, because  to know them implies a point of common contact, a mutual relation, such as there can never  be between them and us. ( The Garden of Epicurus -pp. 14/15)

 

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The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has measured it. (p.16)

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                            WOMEN AND CHURCH

   Christianity has done much for love by making a sin of it. The church excludes woman from the priesthood; it fears her, and thereby shows how dangerous she is...But by the very terror it betrays her, it makes her strong and formidable. (p17)

 

        FASCINATION OF DANGER AND THE THEATER

   The fascination of danger is at the bottom of all great passions. There is no fullness of pleasure unless the precipice is near. It is the mingling of terror with delight that intoxicates.What more terrifies than play? It gives and takes away; Its logic is not our logic. It is dumb and deaf. It is almighty. It is a God.(p.24/25)

   The artists of olden days never troubled their heads with such-like pedantry. They gave the heroes of legend or history the costume and appearance of their own contemporaries. Thus they depicted for us in natural colours their soul and their century.(p.29)

                             IGNORANCE AND LIFE

   Ignorance is the necessary condition, I do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions

   If, like God,  a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe  melt away instantly like a shadow. Divine truth, like a last judgement, would reduce it to powder. (p.32)

                                 A JEALOUS MAN

     A jealous man is  jealous indeed; there is nothing  he does not find food for umbrage in, nothing that is not a subject for self-torment. He knows a woman false from the first, from the mere fact that she lives and breathes.He fears those workings of the inward life, those varied impulses of the flesh and spirit which make the woman a creature apart and distinct from himself, a creature independent, instinctive, ambiguous, and at times inconceivable. He suffers  because she blossoms forth, of her own sweet nature, like a beautiful flower, without the possibility of any love, no matter how masterful, capturing and holding all the perfumes she sheds in that stirring moment that is youth and life. At heart, the one reproach  he has against her is that, - she is. She is,  she is alive, she is beautiful, she dreams dreams.What mortal disquietude in the thought! He wants her, wants her whole body, wants it in more consummate fullness and perfection than Nature has permitted; he wants her, body and soul! (p.33)

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     Truth is not the objective of Art. It is the science we must appeal to for that, as it is what they aim at; not to literature, which has, and can have, no objective but beauty.... 

   If we are to have really pretty story, the bounds of everyday experience and usage must needs be a little overstepped.  (pp.38/39)

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                              THEATER AND BOOKS

   I cannot think that twelve hundred individuals met together to hear a play constitute an assembly necessarily  inspired with infallible wisdom; still the public, it seems to me, does bring with it to the theater a simpleness of heart and sincerity of mind that give a certain value to the feelings it experiences. Many people who find it impossible to frame an idea of anything they have read are capable of giving a very fairly exact account of what they have seen represented on the stage. When you read a book you read it how you please, you read in it, or rather into it, what you choose. a book leaves everything to the imagination. This is why uncultivated, common minds as a rule take only a feeble, ineffectual pleasure in reading. The stage is different; it puts everything before the eyes and dispense with any help from the imagination. This is why it satisfies the great majority, and likewise why it does not appeal very strongly to pensive, meditative minds. Such persona appreciate a situation, a thought, only for the sake of the amplifications it suggests to them, the melodious echo it wakes in their own minds. Their fancies are unexercised in a theater; the play gives them only a passive pleasure, to which they prefer the active one of reading.

      What is a book? A series of little printed signs,- essentially only that.It is for the reader to supply himself the forms and colours and sentiments to which these signs correspond. It will depend on him whether the book be dull or brilliant, hot with passion or cold as ice. Or, if you prefer it put otherwise, each word in a book is a magic finger that sets a fibre of our brain vibrating like a harp-string, and so evokes a note from the sounding-board of our soul. No matter  how skillful, how inspired, the artist's hand; the sound it awakes depends on the quality of the strings within ourselves. It is not quite the same with the stage. The little black marks are there replaced by living images. For the tiny printed characters, which leave so much to be guessed, are substituted men and women, who have nothing vague or mysterious about them. Everything is precisely fixed and determined. Hence the several impressions received by different spectators vary within the narrowest possible limits compatible with the fatal diversity of human points of view. So too we see  in all theatrical representations( when literary or political quarrels do not complicate matters)  how true and genuine a sympathy is established among all present in the house. If, further, we remember that of all arts, the dramatic is the closest to life, we must see that it is the easiest to understand and appreciate, and conclude it to be the one of all others as to which the public is most in accord and most sure of its opinion.( pp.41/43)

   I cannot say whether this world of ours is the worst of all possible worlds. I hold it is  gross flattery to grant it any preeminence , were it only the preeminence of evil.... All we know is that Venus and Mars bear a considerable resemblance to the Earth. This resemblance is enough warrant by itself for our believing that evil is in the ascendant there as it is here, and that our world is only one of the provinces of its vast empire. (p.70)

    Men of action, who have the knack and taste for affairs, even in their best-concerted plans, reckon with the part fortune will play, well knowing that all great enterprises are uncertain. Soldiers and gamblers are experts in this calculation of probabilities , and learn to seize such chances as come their way without wearing out their patience waiting for the concurrence of them all. (p.74)

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   When we say life is good, life is evil, we are stating a meaningless proposition. We ought to say it is good and bad at one and the same time, for it is through it, and it alone, we have the idea of good and bad at all .. (p.75)

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                                             EVIL

   Evil is necessary. If it did not exist neither would good. Evil is the sole potential cause of good. What would courage be without danger, and pity without pain?

   What would become of self-devotion and self-sacrifice in a world of universal happiness? Can we conceive of virtue without vice, love without hate, beauty without ugliness? It is thanks to evil and sorrow that the earth is habitable and life worth living. We should not therefore be too hard on the Devil. He is a great artist and a great savant; he has created at least one-half of the world. And his half is so cunningly  embedded in the other that it is impossible to interfere with the first without at the same time doing  a like injury to the second Each vice you destroy had a corresponding virtue, which perishes along with it. (p.76)

                                  INTOLERANCE

    Intolerance is of all periods. There is no religion but has had its Fanatics. We are all prone to unreasoning admiration. Everything seems excellent to us in what we love, and it angers us when we are shown the clay feet of our idols. Men find it very hard to apply a little criticism to the sources of their beliefs and origin of their faith. It is just as well; if we looked too close into first principles, we should never believe at all (p.96)

             "THE END OF ALL THE CIVILIZATIONS"

   Many people in these days are convinced that we have reached the last word of all the civilizations, and that after us the world will come to an end. ... It is perhaps a consolation of a sort to tell ourselves that the universe will not survive us.

   For my own part, I see no sign of decay in mankind. I have heard talk about decadence, but I do not believe a word of it. I do not even think we have yet come to the highest point of civilization. I consider that the evolution of humanity is extremely slow, and that the differences in manners and morals that come about from one century to the next are, measured by a true scale, much less than is generally supposed. Only they strike us; while the innumerable points of resemblance we share with our fathers pass unnoticed The world moves very slowly. Man has a natural genius for imitation. He hardly invents. (pp.97/98)

   What I complain of is not that the Positivists choose to forbid us all investigation into the essence, origin and end of things. I have always regarded the books I read on metaphysics in the light of romances, more diverting than most novels, but not a whit more authoritative. But what does make Positivism so bitter and disheartening is the severity with which it bars the useless sciences, - which are the most fascinating! To live without them, would that be to go on living  (104)

                            CROWDS AND PROOFS

   The man will always have the crowd with him who is sure of himself as he is of the crowd at large. That is what the crowd likes; it demands categorical statements and not proofs. Proofs disturbed puzzle it. It is simple-minded and only understands simplicity. You must not tell it how or in what way, but simply yes or no. (p.107)

                                        BIBLIOPHILES

    The love of books is really a commendable taste. Bibliophiles are often made fun of, and perhaps, after all, they do lend themselves to raillery. But we should rather envy them, I think, for having successfully filled their lives with an enduring  and harmless pleasure. Detractors think to confound them by declaring  they never read their books. But one of them had his answer pat; " And you, do you eat off your old china?" What more innocent hobby can a man pursue than sorting away books in a press? True, it is very like the game the children play at when they build sand castles on the seashore. They are mighty busy, but nothing comes of it; whatever they build will be thrown down in a very short time. No doubt it is the same with collection of books and pictures. But it is only the vicissitudes of existence and the shortness of human life that must be blamed. The tide sweeps away the sand castles, the auctioneer disperses the hoarded treasures. And yet, what better can we do than build castles at ten years old, and form collections at sixty? Nothing will remain in any case of all our work, and the love of old books is not more foolish than any other love. (pp.109/10)

 

                           " IMPARTIAL HISTORY" ?

   Is there such a thing as an impartial history? And what is history?  The written representation of past vents. But what is an event?  Is it a fact of any sort? Ni! It is a notable fact. Now, how is the historian to discriminate whether a fact is notable or no? He decides this arbitrarily, according to his character and idiosyncrasy, at his own taste and fancy, - in a word, as an artist. For facts are not divided by any hard and fast line of nature into historical facts and non-historical. A fact is a something of infinite complexity. Is the historian to present the facts i all their complexity? That is an impossibility. He will represent them stripped of almost all the individual peculiarities that constitute them facts, - maimed, therefore, and mutilated, other than what they really and truly were. As to the mutual connections of the facts one with another, what can we say? If a historical fact, so called, is brought about, as is possible, as is probable indeed , by one or more non-historical facts, and because non- historical therefore unknown, how can the historian mark the relation of these facts to each other and their interconnection?  Then I am assuming in all this I am saying that the historian has under his eyes trustworthy  evidence, whereas  in reality he is constantly deceived, and he gives credence to such ans such a witness only for sentimental reasons of his own. History is not a science, it is an art. A successful history can only be written by dint of imagination. (pp.123/24)

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 ... old Cadmus believes neither in generosity nor virtue. He knows that men are bad, and that the gods, being more powerful than men, are worse. He fears them; he strives to appease them by bloody sacrifices. He does not love them; he loves only himself. I paint myself as I am. (p160)

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                                   WOMEN"S RIGHTS

   I have no sympathy with the gibes levelled by our farce writers at lady doctors. If a woman has a vocation for science, what right  have we to upbraid her for following her bent? Can we blame the noble-hearted and wise and gentle Sophie Germain, who, in preference to the cares of household and family, chose to devote herself to the studious speculations of algebra and metaphysics? May not science, like religion, have her virgins and deaconesses. It is hardly reasonable to wish to make all women learned. Is it any more so to want to warn them off the domains of high thinking? And again, from a purely practical point of view, are there not cases where science is a precious stand-by for a woman? Because there are more governesses  nowadays than are needed, are we to find fault with the young women who take up teaching as a career, in spite of the cruel futility of the prescribed studies and the monstrous unfairness of the examinations? Women have always been credited with  an exquisite tact in the management of the sick; they have been known in all ages as sweet consolers and " ministering angels"; they supply the world with hospital nurses and midwives. Then why refuse our approval to those who, not satisfied with the bare, indispensable apprenticeship, pursue their studies further and qualify for a medical degree, thus gaining increased dignity and authority. (p.167/68) 

     Knowledge is the bond of union between man and nature. Like ourselves, women require their share of learning; but by the methods chosen for their instruction, far from multiplying their points of contact with the Universe, we have separated and as it were fenced them off from Nature. We have taught them words and not things, and stuff their heads with lists of names in History, Geography, and Zoology that by themselves possess no meaning whatever. The innocent creatures have born their burden and more than their burden of those vicious schemes of study which democratic self-complacency and bourgeois patriotism  erected like so many Bables of priggishness and pedantry.

   These wiseacres started originally with the ridiculous fallacy that a people is learned when everybody has learned the same things, as if the variety of human pursuits did not involve a corresponding variety of accomplishments, and as if a trader could advantageously know just what a doctor does! This misconception was fertile in mistakes; in particular, it gave birth to another yet more mischievous than itself..... Surely as foolish a superstition as ever the old Scandinavians cherished, who used to write their runes and imagine there are words of power so tremendous that, if once pronounced, they will quench the sun and reduce the earth to dust.

   A smile of pity rises to the lips as one thinks of generations of schoolmasters teaching children the words of a language their pupils will never hear or speak. They profess, these pedagogues, that this is the way to teach the elements of all the sciences, and diffuse a broad light over girls' minds.But it is only darkness they are disseminating, as any one can see for himself; to put ideas in these young heads, so malleable and volatile, a totally different method must be followed. show in a in a few well-chosen words the main aims of a science,draw attention to its achievements by some striking examples. Deal in broad generalities, be philosophical, but hide your philosophy so skillfully that you appear as artless as the minds you address. avoid technical jargon, expound in the vulgar tongue all share alike a small number of great facts that strike the imagination and satisfy the intelligence. Let your language be simple, noble, magnanimous. Never pride yourselves on teaching a great number of things.Rest content to rouse curiosity. Be satisfied with opening your scholars' minds, do not overload them. Without any interference of yours, they will catch fire at the point where they are inflammable. 

   And if the spark dies out, if some intellects remain unillumined , at any rate you will not have burnt them. There will always be dunces amongst us.. (pp.170/71) 

 

                                   Metaphysicians 

...The Metaphysicians have all along shown a marked preference for negative terms, such as non-existence,in-tangible, unconscious. They are never so happy as when they are discoursing about the in-finite and the in-definite , or dealing with the un-knowable. In three pages of Hegel taken at random, in his Phenomenology, out of six and twenty words, the subjects of important sentences. I found nineteen negative terms as against seven affirmatives, - I mean seven terms the meaning of which was not annulled  in advance by some prefix reversing the essential signification. I cannot say if the same ratio holds good in the rest of the book; that  I do not know; but the example will serve to illustrate a remark the accuracy of which can be readily verified. (p.210)

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  " I am happy to offer you an omelette, wine, and tobacco. But I tell you frankly it is still more agreeable to me to give my dog, my rabbits and pigeons their daily bread, which renews their vigour. They will not turn it to bad use in writing novels that disturb men's minds or textbooks of philosophy that poison existence." (p.235) 

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 from      On Life & Letters - fourth series

                              LITERARY CRITICISM

   I am not in the very least a critic. I am quite incapable of working the thrashing-machines into which skillful persons through the literary harvest in order to divide the grain from the chaff. There are such things as fairy tales. If there are also such things as literary tales, these are such rather than criticisms...

. In aesthetics , that is, in the clouds, one can argue more and better than in any other subject. It is in this connection that we must be distrustful. In this connection we must fear everything: indifference as much as partiality, coldness as much as passion, knowledge as much as ignorance, art, intellect, subtlety, and innocence more dangerous than cunning.In matters of aesthetics you will be chary of sophisms, above all when that are pretty ones, and some of them are admirable. You will not even believe in the mathematical spirit;  for mathematics, so complete, so sublime, is yet so delicate a machine that it can work only in a vacuum , and a grain of sand in the wheels will suffice to throw it out of gear.One shudders on reflecting whither this grain of sand may lead a mathematical brain. Think of Pascal.

    Aesthetics is based upon nothing solid. It is a castle in the air. Some have sought to base it upon ethics.But there is no such thing as ethics....

     In order to give a basis to criticism we speak of tradition and universal consent. There are no such things. It is true that an almost genera opinion favours certain works. But this is by virtue of a prepossession;not in the least as a matter of choice or as the result of a spontaneous preference. The works that everybody admires are those that no one examines. We receive them as a precious burden which we pass on to others without glancing at them.... It is because of this tendency that a work of art which has, to begin with, for whatever reason, obtained the acceptance of a few persons is is thereupon accepted by a large number. The first alone were free; all the rest do no more than obey. Their opinions have neither spontaneity  nor value, nor are they founded on judgement or capacity of any sort. And by their number they establish fame. All depends on a very small beginning. Thus we see that works of art which are undervalued at their birth have little chance of pleasing later; while, on the other hand, works that have been celebrated from the first retain their reputation for a long time and are valued even after they have become unintelligible  (On Life and Letters- Fourth Series Preface)

 

                     CLEOPATRA'S NOSE  AND HISTORY

   There are medals of Cleopatra; the numismatists admit fifteen various types. They are for the most part poorly engraved. All represent Cleopatra with hard, heavy features and a very long nose. Pascal's profound remark will be remembered: If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different." This nose was disproportionately  long if we believe the medals; but we do not believe them.It is useless to set before us all the show-cases of the British Museum and Vienna;we say that this is one of those  fairy tales, in which all the noses of all the portraits are lengthened  simultaneously; and we care nothing foe numismatics , which cares nothing for us. The face which made Caesar forget the empire of the world was not spoiled by a ridiculous nose.. (p.114)

 

from     Monsieur Bergeret in Paris

 

                            GENEROSITY OF PARIS

   .... Paris is famous and generous city. To be honest, however, I must point out that this generosity is not vouchsafed alike to all its inhabitants. On the contrary, it is confined to a very small number of its citizens. but a whole city, a whole nation resides in the few who think more forcefully and more justly than the rest. The others do not count. what we call the spirit of a race attains consciousness only in imperceptible minorities.minds which are sufficiently free to rid themselves the of vulgar terrors and discover for themselves the veiled truths are rare in any place1 (Monsieur Bergeret in Paris-p.20) 

                       REASON AND SENTIMENT

     ... It is always right and fitting, however, that reason should prevail over sentiment. We must not dally with vain regrets for the past, nor commiserate with ourselves over the changes that thrust upon us, since change is the very condition of life.Perhaps these upheavals are necessary; it is needful that this city should lose some of her traditional beauty, so that the lives of the greater number of her inhabitants may become less painful and less hard.( p. 23)

 

                    ***********************

      .. The profound and innumerable forces which chain man to the past cause him to cherish its errors, superstitions, prejudices and cruelties as precious symbols of the security. Salutary innovation terrifies him. Prudence makes him imitative , and he dare not quit the tumble-down shelter that protected his fathers and which is about to fall in upon him...(pp.48/49)

                    ************************

 

                 PAST AND FUTURE_ILLUSIONS!

   " It is certain" rejoined Monsieur Bergeret, "that  humanity, in is youth, did not conceive  of the future and the past as we do. Now these ideas that devour us have no reality outside ourselves. We know nothing of life, and the theory of its development through time is pure illusion. It is by some infirmity of our senses that we do not see tomorrow realized as we see yesterday. we can very well conceive of being so organized as to be capable of the simultaneous  perception of phenomena which to us appear to be separated from one another by an appreciable interval of time. We ourselves do not perceive light and sound in the order of time. We ourselves take in at a single glance, when we raise our eyes to the sky, aspects which are by no means contemporaneous. The beams of light from the stars seem indistinguishable  to our eyes, yet they mingle in them, in a fraction of a second, centuries and thousands of centuries. With instruments other than those we now possess we might see ourselves lying dead in the very midst of our own life. For, as time does not in reality exist, and as the succession of facts is only an appearance, all facts are realized simultaneously and there is no such thing as future. The future has already been; we merely discover it... Time is pure idea, and space is no more real than time (pp.55/57)

     "The savages" he said " make no distinction  between past, present and future. Languages, which are undoubtedly the oldest monuments of the human race, permit us to go back to the days when our ancestors had yet accomplished this metaphysical operation. Monsieur Michel Breal. who has just published an admirable essay on the subject, shows that the verb, so rich today in its resources for marking the priority of an action, had originally no means of expressing the past, and in order to perform this function forms were employed which implied a double affirmation of the present." (p.57)

 

 

   We must not be surprised that the general public has held out so long against the obvious truth. Nothing should surprise us. There are reasons for everything, and it is our place to discover these reasons.In the present instance little reflection is needed in order to perceive that the public has been utterly and absolutely deceived, and its touching credulity abused. The Press has largely helped the lie to succeed . Most of the newspapers have hurried to the assistance of the forgers, and have published forged or falsified documents, insults and lies. But we must admit that in most cases this was done to please their public and respond to the private opinions of their readers. It is certain that the battle against truth was in the first place based on the popular instinct. (p.133) 

   You see Lucien, you are slandered because of your position. You can summon your slanderers before a jury. But I don't advise you to do so. They would be acquitted."

   "That is  most probable," said Monsieur Bergeret. " Unless I walk into court in a plumed hat, a sword at my side, spurs on my boots, and an army of twenty thousand paid hooligans at my heels.Then my plea would be head by judge and jury.... 

   "You cannot , however, remain indifferent to insults. What do you intend to do?"

   " nothing. I am satisfied. I would just as soon be subjected to the insults of the press as to its praise.Truth has been served in the newspapers by her enemies as well as by her friends. When a mere handful of men, mindful of the honour of France, denounced the fraudulent  condemnation of an innocent man, the government and public opinion treated them as enemies. (p.146)

                        ************************

    The secret of happiness is to live without illusions.  As far as I am concerned , if my services are forgotten or despised, I shall not complain. Politics is not a matter of sentiment; i realize only too well what His Majesty will be forced to do when we have set him upon the throne of his fathers. Before rewarding gratuitous  devotion, a good king pays for the services which have been sold to him.(p153)

                        *************************

   I believe that the reign of violence will last a long time yet, that for many years to come the nations will rend one another asunder for trivial reasons; that for many years to come the people of the same country will desperately snatch from one another the common necessaries  of life, instead of equitably dividing them. But I also believe  that men are least ferocious when they are least wretched, that is in the long run the progress of industry will produce a certain softening of manners... (p173

   " Yes," he said, " it would be fine to lay the foundations for the new society, where each man would receive  the just price of his labour."

   "It will happen, won't iy? But when?" asked Pauline innocently.

   " Don't ask me to prophesy, my child" answered Monsieur Bergeret sadly and gently. " It is not without reason that the ancients considered the power of piercing the future as the most fatal gift that could be bestowed upon man. If it were possible for us to see what is to come, there would be nothing left for us but to die; or perhaps we should fall stricken to death by grief and terror. We must work at the future like weavers who work at their tapestries without seeing what they accomplish. (p.174)

                                   EVIL AND GOOD

   ..Evil is necessary; like good, it has its  root deep in human nature, and the one cannot perish without the other. Suffering is the twin sister of joy, and as they breathe upon the chords of our being they cause them to vibrate harmoniously . The breath of happiness alone would produce but a dull and tedious sound, like silence. But the artificial ill arising out of social conditions will no longer be added to those that are inevitable, commonplace and august, which arise out of our human state. Men will no longer be deformed by iniquitous labours by which they die rather than live. The slave will  come out of his cell and the factory will no longer devour the bodies of millions.(p.176)

 

                                         COLLECTIVISM

   "Papa, that's collectivism," said Pauline quietly.

   " The most precious gifts, " replied  Bergeret, " are common to all men and have always been so. Air and light are the common property of all that breathes and sees the light of day. After the secular labours of egoism and avarice, in spite of the violent efforts of individuals  to seize and keep wealth, the individual possessions enjoyed by the wealthiest among us are little when compared with those that belong without distinction to mankind in general. And even in our society do you not notice that the most beautiful and splendid possessions such as roads, rivers, forests, which are once royal, libraries and museums, belong to all? Not a single rich man has a greater claim than i do to an  old oak-tree at Fontainebleau  or a picture in the Louvre.`They are not mine than the rich man's, if I can appreciate them better.Collective property, dreaded like some remote monster, is already among us in a thousand familiar forms. (pp.178/79)

 

    ..If you take up people's interests you displease the king, and out you go. If you devote yourself to the king's interests the people complain, and the king dismisses you. He makes mistakes, and you make them, but you are punished for both; popular or unpopular, you are done for inevitability. But as long as the king is in exile you can do no wrong.You can do nothing; you have no responsibility! It is an excellent state of affairs. You need fear neither popularity nor unpopularity, you are above the one and the other. you cannot blunder;no blunder is possible to the defender of a lost cause. the advocate of misfortune is always eloquent. When hope has become impossible, you can be a Royalist with impunity in a Republic. You offer a calm opposition to those in power; you are liberal' you have the sympathy of all enemies of the existing system, and the respect of the government which you harmlessly oppose(PP.212/13) 

   .. Joseph Lacrisse had an inimitable genius for expressing the Nationalist ideal. He had hit upon one special sentence he frequently employed, and which always seemed new and beautiful. it was this: " Citizens, let us all rise to defend our admirable Army against a handful of cosmopolitans who have sworn to destroy it."This was just the thing to say to the electors of the Grandee-Ecuries. Repeated  nightly, the sentence aroused the whole meeting to august and formidable enthusiasm. Anselm Raimondin did not hit upon anything nearly so good; if patriotic phrases occurred to him he did not deliver them in the right tone, and they produced no effect.(p.227)

     The ex-attorney Goby could never speak of military justice without shedding tears. The oldest of them, a Republican who had taken part in the great conflicts of the heroic days, spoke of the army in such loving and impassioned terms that, at any other period, his hearers  would have judged his expressions more applicable to some poor orphan girl than to an institution so strong in men and in millions. p.185)

                     DREAMS OF PHILOSOPHERS

    "Even were my Republic never to exist I should be glad that I had played with this idea of it. It is permissible to build in Utopia....

   The dreams of philosophers have in all ages raised up men of action who have set to work to realize those dreams. Out thought creates the future. Statesmen work on the plans which we leave behind us. No child, I am not building in Utopia. My dreams, which in no way belongs to me, but is, at this very moment, the dreams of thousands upon thousands of souls, is true and prophetic. All societies whose organs no longer correspond to the functions for which they were created, and whose members are not nourished by virtue of the useful work which they accomplish, die. Deep-rooted disturbances and inward disorder precede and proclaim their end.... Who can maintain that in modern society  the organs correspond with their functions and that all the members are nourished in proportion to the useful work which they perform? Who can maintain that there is a fair distribution of wealth? Who, I say, can believe in the permanence of unrighteousness?"   " And how can we put an end to it, papa/ How can we change the world?"

   "By the force of speech, my child. Nothing is more powerful than speech. The linking of powerful argument and noble thoughts forms a chain that nothing can break. Speech, like the sling of David, lays low the violent and causes the mighty to fall. It is an invisible weapon, without which the world would belong to armed brutes. What keeps them in abeyance? Merely thought, naked and weaponless

   " I shall not see the new state. All changes in the social order, as in the natural order, are slow and almost imperceptible. A geologist of profound understanding, Charles Lyell by name, demonstrated that those fearful traces of the glacial period, those monstrous rocks carried into the valleys, the flora and the furry beasts of cold countries succeeding to the flora and fauna of hot countries, those apparent tokens of cataclysmic  upheaval, were in reality only the effect of prolonged and multiple action, and that those great changes, proceed with the merciful deliberation of natural forces, were not even suspected by the innumerable generations of living creatures that existed during their accomplishment. Social transformations operate in the same way, insensibly and incessantly. The timid man fears, as he would a future cataclysm, a change which began before he was born, which is going on before his unconscious eyes, and which will become noticeable only in a century's time." (pp.181/83)

 

from        Bride of Corinth

        SO LONG AS  MAN SUCKS MILK OF WOMAN....

  I know that there is no certainty outside science. But I know also that the worth of scientific truth lies in the methods of  its discovery, and that these methods are not to be arrived at by the common run of mankind. It is hardly scientific to hold that science may one day replace religion. So long as man sucks milk of woman, so long will he be consecrated in the temple, and initiated in some sort in divine mystery, he will dream. And what matter if the dream be false, so it be beautiful? Is it not man's destiny to be steeped in perpetual illusion? Indeed,is it not such illusion the very condition of life? (Preface-The Bride of Corinth-p. xi)

 

from     Little Pierre

                                  WORDS OF PRAISE

   Though at that time I had not as much intelligence as a dog or cat, I was, like them, a domestic animal and, like them I loved those words of praise which creatures in their wild state despise....

   My mother gazed at me in sorrow and marveled how she could have brought so unnatural a child into the world, now blaming heaven for visiting her with unmerited misfortune, now finding fault with herself  having incurred it by her own shortcoming (Little Pierre - pp.26/27)

        MYSTERIOUS ATTRACTION OF NEWSPAPERS

   So long as I was unable to read, newspapers had a mysterious attraction for me. When I used to see my father spreading out their big sheets covered all over with little black signs, when passages were read aloud and connected ideas were produced from those same signs, it seemed to meas though  I were a party to some work of magic. From this sheet so thin and covered with lines so tiny, lines that had no signification in my eyes, there issued tidings of crimes, disasters adventures, festivals - of Napoleon Bonaparte escaping from the fort of Ham; of Tom Thumb dressed up like a general; of the stalled Ox Dagobert being led through Paris: of the murder of the Duchesse de Praslin. All theses things were contained in a single sheet of paper, all these things and numberless others besides, things not so solemn but more homely, whereby my curiosity was aroused. There were "Misters" who gave blows or received them, who got run over by vehicles, who fell off roofs or picked up  purses and took them to the police. How came it that there were all these "Misters" about when I never set eyes on a single one? I tried, but in vain, to imagine what a "Mister" was like. I asked people about it, but never got any satisfactory answer. (pp.29/30)

    The history of science abounds in examples of similar faulty deductions, and the worlds greatest geniuses  have often been misled in the same manner as Little Pierre Noziere. That little person ascribed to one substance a certain property that belonged to another In Physics and Chemistry there are laws reposing on foundations just as false, laws that are respected and will go on being  respected till time at last brings about their abrogation. (p.35)

                                   UNCERTAINTY

   It was before the Revolution of' 1848; I was not yet four, that is certain, but was I three and half? That is what I cannot be sure of, and now, for this many a year there has been no one left on earth who could throw any light on the point. One must make the best of this uncertainty, and console oneself with the reflection that more important and more exasperating lacunae present themselves in the history of nations. Chronology and geography, it has been said, are the two eyes of history. If that be so, everything leads one to conclude that, despite the Benedictines of Saint- Maur, who invented the art of verifying dates, History is, to say the least of it, blind of one eye. (p.49)

                                        MONEY

   ... No, mother dear, I have never known the value of money. Even now I know it not, or perhaps I had better say  that I know it too well.I know that money is the cause of all those ills that afflict our social order, which is so cruel and whereof  we are so proud."p.61)

                        LAWYERS AND USURERS

   Thus it came about that, in my very earliest  childhood, I learned to know what manner of men are lawyers,and usurers. The y are an immortal race. All things about them suffer change. They alone hold true to type. Even as Rabelais portrayed them so  they remain today. They are the same to their beak and claws, and even to their unintelligible  jargon.....

   But how wholesome and pleasant is that cave of harpies, which Virgil describes for us as all befouled with dung and dropping flesh, compared  with the office and green cardboard files of a man of law.

   It is because I loathed and detested those murderous paper holders that I never could endure to have any files or filing cases about me. And so I have always mislaid my papers, my poor harmless papers. (p.162)

   At the name of Rabelais, which I  then heard for the first time, I burst into fits of laughter, I don't know why- stupidity, silliness, tomfoolery, I suppose , for it certainly was not from any presentiment, intuition, or revelation of the sublime buffoonery, the merry whimsicality , the folly wiser than wisdom, that lies concealed beneath that name.Nevertheless, it cannot be gainsaid that it was a becoming manner in which to salute the creator of Gargantua(p.164)

 

 

                     INSTINCT AND UNDERSTANDING

    If Descartes maintained, in complete defiance of probability, that animals are machines, we must excuse him, for he was compelled to do so by his philosophy, and a philosopher always think more of his theories, which are part of himself, than he does of Nature, which is external to him.There are no Cartesians nowadays, but there may still be people who will tell you that animals possess instinct and men understanding. When I was a child that was the generally professed belief. It was an absurdity. Animals have understanding just as we have. It only differs from ours because their organs are different, and, like ours, it contains the world. Like animals we possess that secret genius, that unconscious wisdom called instinct, which is far more precious than understanding. Without it neither  flesh, worm, nor Man could survive an instant.(pp.216/17)

 

                                        HAPPINESS

    When I was but eight years old I made proof that he is the happy man who, having abandoned mental effort and the attempt to arrive at an intellectual understanding of things, loses himself in the contemplation of the beautiful; and it was revealed to me that unbounded desire, desire that knows neither fear  nor hope , desire that is unconscious of its own existence, brings to the mind and to the senses the very consummation of happiness, for it is unto itself entire contentment and its own complete satisfaction. But that is  a truth that I had quite forgotten by the time I was eighteen, and I have never been able  thoroughly to recapture it since.( pp.244/45)

 

                    TEACHING TO LOVE BEAUTY

   I wrote and spelt pretty well for my age, so they said, except for participles. My mother as a child had conceived  a mortal dread of participles. She had never got over it, and she took good care not to lead me into a grammatical mazes in which she was apprehensive that she herself might lose her way. ....

   My dear mother was labouring under a delusion. No. Mademoiselle Merelle did not teach me the participles, but she revealed to me truths still more precious, secrets still more valuable. she initiated me into the cult of all things gracious and comely; by her indifference she taught me to love beauty even when it was unresponsive and remote, to love it with it with detachment, an art that is sometimes necessary in this life.(pp. 238 & 248) 

                     HOW TO DEFINE A MAN

   .. Of all the ways of defining man, I think the worst is the one which makes him out to be a reasoning animal. It is no great boast on my part to set myself up as a being endowed with a larger share of reason than most of those whom  I have met or heard about. Reason rarely dwells in common minds but still more rarely in great ones. I say '' reason'' and if you inquire in what sense I employ the term, I reply in the everyday sense. If I attached a metaphysical signification to it, I should not know what I meant myself. I apply the same meaning to it as old Melanie, who did not know her letters. I call a reasonable man a man who makes his own particular mind so to square with the mind universal that he is never unduly surprised at anything that happens, and manages to accommodate himself to circumstances more or less successfully. I call the man reasonable who, observing the lack of order that exists in the natural world and the folly of mankind, does not persist in talking of the order of  the one, and the wisdom of the other. In a word, I call him reasonable who does not make too self-conscious an effort to appear so.(p.278)

      TO BE INTELLIGENT IN A DIFFERENT MANNER

   I was indeed looked upon as just a little simple. That was an injustice. I was as intelligent  as the majority of my comrades, but I was as intelligent  in a different manner. their intelligence served them in the ordinary circumstances of life; mine only came to my aid in the rarer and more unlooked-for conjunctures. It manifested itself unexpectedly in wanderings far afield or in a liking for reading things out of the ordinary run. I had given up the idea of distinguishing myself in class, and from the day I entered the college I set about getting what distraction i could out of my new surroundings. Such was my nature  and my bent, and I have never changed. I have always known how to amuse myself. For me,  that comprised the whole art of living. Little and big, young and old, I have always lived as far as possible away from myself and away from the tristful reality of things. (281/82)

 

from         Penguin Island

                   QUEER WAY OF FINDING EVIDENCE

   Pyrot was tried secretly and condemned.

   General Panther immediately went to the Minister of War to tell him the result.

   "Luckily," said he, " the judges were certain, for they had no proofs."

   "proofs, " muttered Greatauk, " proofs, what do the prove? There is only one certain, irrefragable  proof - the confession of the guilty person. Has Pyrot confessed?"

   " No , General."

    " He will confess, he ought to. Panther, we must induce him; tell him it is to his interest. Promise  him that, if he confesses, he will obtain favours, a reduction of his sentence, full pardon; promise him that if he confesses his innocence will be admitted, that he will be decorated. Appeal to his good feelings. Let him confess from patriotism, for the  flag, for the sake of order, from respect for the hierarchy, at the special command of the Minister of War militarily... But tell me, Panther, has he not confessed already? There are tacit  confessions; silence is a confession."

    "but, General, he is not silent; he keeps on squealing like a pig that he is innocent." 

   " Panther, the confessions of a guilty man sometimes result from the vehemence of his denials. To deny desperately is to confess. Pyrot has confessed; we must have witnesses of his confessions, justice requires them.' 

             (Penguin Island - pp.174/75)

                                     DOUBT

   That Pyrot had stolen the eighty thousand trusses of hay nobody hesitated for a moment to believe. No one doubted because the general ignorance  in which everybody was the affair did not allow of doubt, for doubt is a thing that demands motives .People do do not doubt without reasons in the same way that people believe without reasons. The thing was not doubted because it was repeated everywhere and, with the public, to repeat is to prove. It was not doubted because people wished to believe Pyrot guilty and one believe what one wishes to believe. Finally, it was not doubted because the faculty of doubt is rare amongst men; very few minds carry in them its germs and these are not developed without cultivation. Doubt is singular,exquisite, philosophic, immoral, transcendent, monstrous, full of malignity, injurious to persons and to property, contrary to the good order of governments, and to the prosperity  of empires, fatal to humanity, destructive of the gods, held in horror by heaven and earth. The mass of the Penguins were ignorant of doubt; it believed  in Pyrot's guilt and this conviction immediately became one of its chief national beliefs and an essential truth in its patriotic creed.  (p174)

   " The pious Agaric asked eagerly: " You do not doubt Pyrot's guilt?' 

   " I cannot doubt it, dear Agaric, ' answered the monk of Conils. " That would be contrary to the laws of my country. which we ought to respect as long as they are not opposed to Divine laws. Pyrot is guilty, for he has been convicted. As to saying more for or against his guilt, that would be to erect my own authority against that of the  judges, a thing which I will take good care not to do. Besides, it is useless, for Pyrot has been convicted. If he has not been convicted because he is guilty, he is guilty because  he has been convicted; it comes to the same thing. I believe in his guilt as every good citizen ought to believe in it; I will believe in it as long as the established jurisdiction will order me to believe in it, for it is not for a private person but for a judge to proclaim the innocence of a convicted person. Human justice is venerable even in the errors inherent in its fallible and limited nature.These errors are never irreparable; if the  judges do not repair them on earth, God will repair them in  Heaven (pp.187/88)

 

                                  THE FINEST ARMY

    The Penguins had the finest army in the world. So had the Porpoises. And it was the same with the other nations of Europe. The smallest amount of thought will prevent any surprise at this. For all the armies are the finest in the world. The second finest army, if one could exist would be in a notoriously inferior position; it would be certain to be beaten It ought to be disbanded at once.Therefore all the armies are the finest in the world.... And it should be noticed that even after suffering the most terrible reverses an army does not fall from its position of being the finest  in the world. For if nations ascribe their victories to the ability of their generals and the courage of their soldiers, they always attribute their defeats to an inexplicable fatality. On the other hand, navies are classed according to the number of their ships. There is a first, a second, a third , and so on. so that there exists no doubt as to the result of naval wars. (p. 145) 

                            HYPOCRITICAL MORALITY

   All morality relative to the relations of the sexes is founded on this principle: that a woman once obtained belongs to the man, that she is his property like the horses or his weapons.  And this having ceased to be true, absurdities result from it, such as the marriage or contract of sale of a woman to a man with clauses restricting the right of ownership introduced as a consequence of the gradual diminution of the claims of the possessor.

    The obligation imposed on a girl that she should bring her virginity to her husband comes from the times when girls were married immediately they were of a marriageable  age. It is ridiculous that a girl who marries at a twenty-five or thirty should be subjected to that obligation. You will, perhaps, say that it is a present with which her husband, if she gets one at last, will be gratified; but every moment we see men wooing married women and showing themselves perfectly satisfied to take them as they find them.(p.224)

SOCIALISTS ENTERING A CAPITALIST GOVERNMENT

    The office of public works was given to a socialist. Fortune Lapersonne. It was then apolitical custom and one of the most solemn, most severe, most rigorous, and if I may dare say so, the most terrible and cruel of all political customs, to include a member of the Socialist Party in each ministry intended to oppose Socialism, so that the enemies of wealth and property should suffer the shame of being attacked by one of their own party, and so that they could not unite against these forces without turning to someone who might  possibly attack themselves in the future. Nothing but a profound ignorance of the human heart would permit the belief that it was difficult to find a Socialist to occupy these functions. Citizen Fortune Lapersonne entered the Visire cabinet of his own free will and without any constraint; and he found those who approved of his action even among his former friends, so great was the fascination that power exercised over Penguins.(p.246)

   In the meantime Penguinia gloried in its wealth. Those who produced the things necessary for life, wanted them; those who did not produce them had more than enough. "But these, " as a member of the institute said, " are necessary economic fatalities." The great Penguin people had no longer either traditions, intellectual culture, or arts. The progress of civilisation  manifested itself among them by murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury. Its capital assumed, as did all the great cities of of the time, a cosmopolitan and financial character. An immense and regular ugliness reigned within it. The country enjoyed perfect tranquility. It has reached its zenith (p. 274)

 

         RESPECT FOR RICH & CONTEMPT FOR POOR

   ...Those who possessed some small capital ( and they were necessarily the greater number), affected the idea and habits of the multi millionaires, in order that they might be classed among them. All passions which injured the increase  or the preservation of wealth, were regarded as dishonourable; neither indolence, nor idleness , nor the taste for disinterested study, nor love of the arts, nor, above all, extravagance , was ever forgiven; pity was condemned as a dangerous weakness. Whilst every inclination to licentiousness excited public reprobation , the violent and brutal satisfaction of an appetite was, on the contrary, excused; violence, in truth, was regarded as less injurious to morality, since it manifested a form of social energy. The state was firmly based on two great public virtues: respect for the rich and contempt for the poor. Feeble spirits who were still moved by human suffering had no other resource than to take refuge in a hypocrisy  which it was impossible to blame, since it contributed to the maintenance of order and the solidity of institutions....

   ... Upon the whole, this social order seemed the most firmly established that had yet been seen, at least among mankind, for that of bees and ants is incomparably more stable. nothing could foreshadow the ruin of a system founded on what is strongest in human nature, pride and cupidity.... A more obvious peril resulted from the physiological state of almost the entire population. " the health of the poor is what it must be, " said the experts in hygiene, But that of the rich leaves much to be desired.." It was not difficult to find the causes of this. The supply of oxygen necessary for life was insufficient in the city, and men breathed in an artificial air. The food trusts, by means of the most daring chemical syntheses , produced artificial wines, meat, milk, fruit, and vegetables, and the diet imposed gave rise to stomach and brain troubles... (pp.280/81) 

          DEMOCRACY AND FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY

   The Penguin democracy did not itself  govern. It obeyed a financial oligarchy which formed opinion by means of the newspapers, and held in its hands the representatives, the ministers, and the president.  It controlled the finances of the republic, and directed the foreign affairs of the country as if it were possessed of sovereign power.

   Empires and kingdoms in those days kept up enormous fleets. Penguinia, compelled to do as they did, sank under the pressure of her armaments. Everybody deplored or pretended to deplore so grievous a necessity. However, the rich, and those engaged in business or affairs, submitted to it with a good heart through a spirit of patriotism, and because they counted on the soldiers and sailors to defend their goods at home and to acquire markets and territories abroad.The great manufacturers encouraged the making of cannons and ships through a zeal for the national defence and in order to obtain orders. Among the citizens of middle rank and of the liberal professions some resigned themselves to this state of affairs without complaining, believing that it would last for ever; others waited impatiently for its end and thought they might be able to lead the powers to a simultaneous disarmament.(pp.124/25)

                     DOLLARS, MEN AND WAR

   "What?" said Obnubile to the interpreter: "you have voted a war with that rapidity and that indifference!"

    " Oh! it is an unimportant war which will hardly cost eight million dollars."

   " And men..."

   "the men are included in the eight million dollars." (p.128)

 

               DIRECT AND  INDIRECT TAXES

    Morio... one of the richest of the Penguins, rose up and said:

 "... I think it right that each should contribute to the public expenses and to the support of the Church. For my part I am ready to give up all that I posses in the interest of my brother Penguins, and if it were necessary I would even cheerfully part with my shirt. All the elders of the people are ready, like me, to sacrifice their goods, and no one can doubt their absolute devotion to their country and their creed. We have, then, only to consider the public interest and to do what it requires. Now , Father,, what it require, what it demands, is not to ask much from those who posses much, for then the rich would be less rich and the poor still poorer. The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it; to do so would be an uncalled-for evil. You will get no profit by taking from the rich, for they are few in number; on the contrary you will strip yourself of all your resources and plunge the country into misery. Whereas if you ask a little from each inhabitant without regard to his wealth, you will collect enough for the public necessities and you will have no need to enquire into each citizen's resources, a thing that would be regarded by all as a most vexatious measure. By taxing all equally you will spare the poor, for you will leave them the wealth of the rich. And how could you possibly proportion taxes to wealth? Yesterday  I had two hundred oxen, today I have sixty, tomorrow I shall have a hundred. Clunic has three cows, but they are thin; Nicclu has only two, but they are fat. Which is the richer, Clunic or Nicclu? The signs of opulence are  deceitful What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and It would be justice."

   Thus spoke Morio amid the applause of the Elders.

   " I ask this speech be graven on bronze" cried the monk, Bulloch. "It is spoken for the future; in fifteen hundred  years the best of Penguins will not speak otherwise." (pp.49/50)

from         Revolt of the Angels

                           BELIEVING IN GOD

    '' What? You no longer believe in God?"

 ... I believe in Him, since my existence depends on His, and if he should fail to exist, I myself should fall into nothingness. I believe in Him, even as Satyrs  and Maenads believed in Dionysus and for the same reason. I believe in the God of the Jews and the Christians. But I deny that he created the world; at the most He organized but an inferior part of it, and all that he touched bears the mark of His rough and unforeseen  touch. I do not think He is either eternal or infinite, for it is absurd to conceive of a being who is not bounded by space or time. I think Him limited, even  very limited. I no longer believe Him  to be the only God. For a long time He did not believe in Himself; in the beginning He was a polytheist; later, His pride and flattery of His worshipers made Him a monotheist. His ideas have little connection; He is less powerful than He thought to be. And to speak candidly, He is not  so much a god as a vain and ignorant demiurge. Those who, like myself , know His true nature call Him Ialdaboth." ( Revolt of  the Angels -pp69/70)

                   LACK OF PERSONS WHO THINK

   " That is what is most lacking in our people" she said, " they do not think."

    And she added almost immediately: " But on what can intelligence sharpen its wits, in a country where the climate is soft and existence made easy? Even here, where necessity calls for intellectual activity, nothing is rarer than a person who thinks."

   Nevertheless, Replied Maurice's guardian angel, " man has created science. The important thing is to introduce it into Heaven. When the angels possess some notions of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and physiology; when  the study of matter  shows them the worlds in an atom, and an atom in the myriads of planets; when they see themselves lost between these two infinities; when they weigh and measure the stars, analyze their composition, and calculate their orbits, they will recognize that these monsters work in obedience to forces which no intelligence can define, or that each star has its particular divinity, or indigenous god; and they will realize  that the gods of Aldebarn, Betelgeuse, and Sirius are greater than Ialdaboth. When at length they come to scrutinize  with care the little world in which their lot is cast, and piercing the crust of the earth, note the gradual evolution of its flora and fauna and the rude origin of man, who, under the shelter of rocks and in cave dwellings, had no God  but himself; when they discover that, united by the bonds of universal kinship to plants, beasts, and men, they have successively  indued all forms of organic life, from the simplest  and the most primitive, until they became at length the most beautiful of the children of light, they will perceive that their God, the obscure demon of an insignificant world lost in space, is imposing on their credulity when he pretends that they issued from nothingness at his bidding; they will perceive that  he lies in calling himself the infinite, the Eternal, the Almighty , and that, so far from having created worlds, he knows neither their number nor their laws. They will perceive that he is like unto one of them; they will despise him, and, shaking off his tyranny, will fling him into the Gehenna where has has hurled those more worthy than himself." (p89/90)

                                 POWER OF MONEY

   Baron Everdingen exclaimed that  they were crazy, that he would not give a sou, that it was both criminal and mad to attck the most admirable thing in the world, the thing which renders earth more beautiful than Heaven - finance. .. His heart thrilled with holy enthusiasm ; he drew attention to the French Savings Bank, the virtuous Savings Bank, that chaste and pure Savings Bank like unto the Virgin of the Canticle who ,issuing from the depths of the country in  in rustic petticoat, bears to the robust and splendid Bank - her bridegroom, who awaits her - the treasures of her love; and drew a picture of the Bank, enriched with the gifts of its spouse; pouring on all the nations of the world torrents of gold, which, of themselves, by a thousand invisible channels return in still greater abundance to the blessed land from which they sprang.

   " By deposit and Loan, " he went on, "France has become the New Jeruselem, shedding her glory over all the nations of Europe, and the Kings of the Earth come to kiss her rosary feet. And  that is what you would fain destroy? you are both impious and sacrilegious." (p.130)

                       MORALS AND DIVINE LAW

   ..."I freely acknowledge that it is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil."

   "you see then," replied Maurice, " that religion is necessary."

   "Moral Law, " replied the angel, " which is supposed to be revealed to us, is drawn in reality from the grossest  empiricism. Custom alone regulates morals. What  Heaven prescribes is merely the consecration of ancient customs. The divine law, promulgated amid fireworks on some Mount Sinai, is never anything but the codification of human prejudice. And from this fact - namely, that morals change- religions which endure for a long time, such as Judaeo- Christianity, vary their moral law."  (pp.212/13)

 

 from        On life & letters

                       CRIME OF EXPLAINING  FACTS

   The hagiographers alone are hostile. They reproach me, not for my manner of explaining the facts, but  for having explained them at all. And more my explanations are clear, natural, rational and derived from the most authoritative sources, the more these explanations displease them. They would wish the history of Joan of Arc to remain mysterious and entirely supernatural. I have restored the Maid to life and to humanity. That is my crime. And these zealous inquisitors, so intent on condemning  my work, have failed to discover therein any grave fault, any flagrant inexactness. Their severity has had gone to content itself with a  few inadvertences  and with few printer's errors. What flatterers  could better have gratified " the proud weakness of my heart."  ( Preface)

                                     PATRIOTISM

   ...Twenty-three years of warfare, with the inevitable alternations of victories and defeats, built up our fathers in their love of la patrie  and their hatred of the foreigner. 

   Since then, as the result of industrial progress, there have arisen in one country and another, rivalries which are every day growing more bitter. The present methods of production by multiplying antagonism among nations, have given rise to imperialism, to colonial expansion and to armed peace.

   But how many contrary forces are at work in this formidable creation of a new order of things! In all countries the great development of trade and manufactures has given birth to a new class. This class, possessing nothing, having no hope of ever possessing anything, enjoying none of the good things of life, not even the light of day, does not share the fear which haunted the peasant and burgher of the Revolution, of being despoiled by an enemy coming from abroad; The members of this new class, having no health to defend, regard foreign nations with neither terror nor hatred. At the same time over all the markets of the world there have arisen financial powers, which, although they often affect respect  for old traditions, are by their very functions essentially destructive of the national and patriotic spirit. The universal capitalist system has created in France, as everywhere else, the internationalism of workers and the cosmopolitanism of the financiers.

   Today, just as two thousand  years ago, in order to discern the future, we must regard not the enterprises of the great but the confused movements of the working classes. The nations will not indefinitely endure this armed peace which weighs so heavily upon them. Everyday we behold the organizing of an universal community of workers.

   I believe in the future union of nations,  and I long for it with that ardent charity for the human race, which,  formed in the Latin conscience  in the days of Epictetus and Seneca, and through so many centuries extinguished by European  barbarism, has been revived in the noblest breasts of modern times. And in vain will it be argued against me that these are the mere dream-illusions of desire: it is desire that creates life and the future is careful to realise the dreams of philosophers. Nevertheless, that we today are assured of a peace that nothing will disturb, none but a madman would maintain. On the contrary, the terrible industrial and commercial rivalries growing up around us indicate future conflicts, and there is nothing to assure us that France will not one day find herself involved in a great European or world conflagration. Her obligation to provide for her defence increases not a little those difficulties which arise from a social order profoundly agitated by competition in production and antagonism between classes......

   On these important subjects I have not been able to forbear expressing the truth as it appears to me; there is a great satisfaction in saying what one believes useful and just. (Introduction)

                    FATE OF RELIGIOUS  EDUCATION

   When she was a little older a god priest took great pains to explain the Christian doctrine to her; and she followed his instruction with extreme attention. When it was finished she has ceased to believe, absolutely and for ever. (Madame Ackermann- On Life and letters - Fourth  Series -p.4)

                          FASHIONABLE LOVE

    Reading these novels of fashionable love, ...we end by reflecting that love, the barbarous passion, has acquired, with civilization , the uniformity of a game whose rules the men and women of the social world are careful to observe. It is a game full of difficulties and complications; an extremely  graceful game. But it ia always  obscure, pitiless Nature that keeps the goal. And this why no game is  crueller or more immoral. (pp. 27/28)

 

       TWO CAPITAL OFFENCES OF  LITERATURE

   Contemporary literature is not without its wealth and its charm. But its natural splendour is impaired by two capital offences, avarice and pride. Let us confess it. We are dying of pride. We are intelligent, adroit,  inquisitive, restless, audacious. We still know how to write, and if we do not reason too well as our predecessors, we perhaps feel more keenly. But pride is killing us. We want to astonish, and that is all we do want. Only one sort of praise touches us; that which declares our originality; as though originality were something desirable in itself and as though there were not bad as well as good kinds of originality. We crazily credit ourselves with virtues that the greatest geniuses never possessed; for what they themselves have added to the common treasury, though it be infinitely precious, is little compared with what they have received from mankind. Individualism developed to the point which it has now attained is a dangerous malady. We reflect, despite ourselves, upon those days when art was not personal, when the anonymous  artist was anxious only to do good work, when each worked upon the vast cathedral with no other desire than that of raising  harmoniously toward the heavens the unanimous thought of the age. (On Life & Letters- fourth series -p.156)

 

                                   PLAGIARISM

    ...Our contemporary men of letters have got it into their heads that an idea may be a man's personal property. Of old no such idea was entertained, and plagiarism was not formerly what it is today. In the seventeenth century the subject was discussed by the professors of philosophy, dialectics and rhetoric.Master Jacobus Thomasius, professor at the College of St. Nicholas of  Leipzig, wrote about the year 1684 a treatise entitled  De Plagio  litterario , from which one perceives" says Furestiere, " that one is free to appropriate the  property of others in the case of works of the intellect.".... I read these words, written in a faded ink: J'aime bien Marie, le 26me de juin de l'an 1695. And this confirms my idea that there is an old stock of human emotions upon which the poets  work their delicate, airy embroideries, and that one must not cry " Stop thief!" the moment one hears some one say:  J'aime bien Marie, after having said it one's self.I have already said that of old, plagiarism was not regarded  quite  as it is today. And I believe that old ideas, in this respect, are worth more than new, being more disinterested , nobler and more in conformity with the republic of letters...

   ...Pierre Bayle, in his dictionary, gives a definition which is rather fantastic, but which helps us nevertheless to understand the term: "To plagiarize," he says "  is to carry off the furniture of a house, and the very sweepings; to steal grain, straw, chaff and dust all at once." you understand; for Pierre Bayle and the scholars of his day the plagiarist is the man who pillage the house of the imagination without taste or discernment.Such a rogue is unworthy to live and write. But the writer who takes from others only what is convenient and profitable to him, and who knows how to select, is an honest man.

    ..This great man ( Moliere) took what he needed from everybody....He was never blamed for it; and rightly so. What if our fashionable authors do a little pillaging here and there? I hope they do. They will never amass as much  plunder as La Fontaine and Moliere....

   Coincidences are frequent and inevitable. Can it be otherwise when the human passions are  in question. There are not so many of them. It is hunger and love that rule the world, and do what we will there are only two sexes. The greater the art, the more sincere, lofty and truthful., the simpler are the situations of which it will admit.(pp.150/53) 

                         `MYSTICISM AND SCIENCE

   Our modern youth is seeking for something other than this. And since the science which we adduced as the supreme revelation is rejected it is important that we should know why it is rejected.

   It is reproached in the first place with its insufficiency. Science, we are told, is not established; you have constructed sciences, which is a very different thing. And what, if you please, are these sciences, as you call them? Spectacles, neither more nor less. Spectacles!  They give you a more penetrating sight and enable you to examine certain phenomena more accurately. Agreed! But does this signify very greatly? When you have observed a  a few more mirages in the gulf of appearances  which is the perceptible universe, do you know any better what is the reason of things, what are the laws of the world which it is of importance to understand?  And do you think that your discoveries in physiology and chemistry have put you on the track of a single moral truth?

    Your science cannot aspire to govern us because it is in itself without morality and the principle of action which we might derive from it would be immoral.

    It is inhuman; its cruelty wound us; it annihilates us in Nature; it compares us with the animals and plants by showing us what they have common with us, that is to say,  everything: their organs, their joy, their suffering and even their thought. It shows us lost with them upon a grain of sand, and it insolently proclaims that the destinies of the whole of humanity are, in the universe, nothing appreciable.

   In vain we cry that we discover the infinite within ourselves. Science teaches us that the earth is not even a corpuscle  in that vein of Uranus which we call the Milky Way; it makes us blush with shame and confusion at the memory of the time  when we thought ourselves the centre of the  world and the fairest work of God, we who in reality spin awkwardly round a second-rate star  a million  times smaller than Sirius.

   Our imperceptible corner of the universe  seems poor enough as far as we can judge it. It has only one sun , whereas  plenty of systems have two or three. Its central star can have little brilliance seen from the nearest systems. I t is reddish, which is a sign that it is no longer burning with the energy of the young, perfectly white stars.; presently, in a few million of centuries only, it will show merely a smoky disk, spotted with great  black scoriae;  and that will be the end, and the speck of dust which we call the Earth and which will then bear no name will roll on with it into the eternal night.

   Humanity, no doubt, will have perished long before that epoch. In the meantime they tell us that we are travelling  towards the constellation of Herculus; our dust will arrive there one day in darkness and silence: an this is all that science can reveal to us of the destiny of humanity.

   We are making the journey in company with a few planets of which some are lost for us in the light of the sun - like Venus and Mercury.- and the rest in the night  of space, like Uranus and Neptune. The astronomers believe that it has been observed that Venus presents always one face to the sun. But they are not yet quite sure. The only planet whose surface we have been able to observe is Mars, ou neighbour; continents have been distinguished upon it, seas, clouds, an snow at the pole; and M. Flammarion  has drawn a map of it. Signor Schaparelli saw canals  upon it last year. These canals are dug as though by magic, and if they are the work of Martian industry we must admit that the engineers of this planets are infinitely superior to ours. But it it is not known that these are canals, and it seems that this world must be shifting and more disturbed than the face of the earth. Its countenance changes hourly. It is infinitely probable that it is inhabited; but we shall never know what forms of life assumes there. It is also probable that life is as painful there as on earth; we are free to believe it, and this at least is a consolation of which science will not deprive us. And as for man himself, what has science made of him? It has deprived him of all the virtues that constituted his pride and his beauty. It has taught him that all within him as all around him is determined bu inevitable laws; that the will is an illusion and that he is only a machine ignorant of his own mechanism. t has suppressed  even the sense of his identity, on which he founded such proud hopes. It has shown him two distinct existences, two souls in the same individual.

   Thus the new generation draws up the indictment of science and declares it deprived of the right of ruling humanity.. 

   What does it seek to put in the place of positive knowledge? It is the that we have to discover.(pp.43/46)

   They desired everything, and in that they were men; they were able to everything, and it was this that made them such frightful criminals.It would be dangerous to blind ourselves to the fact; human societies contain a great any Borgias; I mean, a great many people possessed by a furious lust to accumulate and enjoy.

   Our society still contains a very large number of them. They are  commonplace temperament and fear the police. It is the effect of civilization  gradually sap the natural energies. But the human foundation does not change, and this foundation is harsh, egoistical, jealous, sensual, ferocious.

   There is not in our government departments  a single poor office that does not witness, within its four green paper-covered walls, all the lusts and hatreds that were kindled  in the Vatican  under the  Spanish papacy. But there the human beast is less vigorous, less eager, less proud; the royal tiger has become the domestic cat. At bottom it is the same affair: we have got to live, and that alone is a ferocious business. (p.48)

 

            AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND WORKS OF ART

   Yes. we love all confessions and all memoirs. No, writers do not bore us when they speak of their own lives and of their hates, their joys, and their griefs. There are several reasons fot this. Here are two of them. The first is that a journal, a memorial, a volume of reminiscences , escapes all the fashions, all the conventions that are imposed  on the works of mind.

   A poem or a novel, however beautiful it may be, becomes old-fashioned when the literary form in which it was conceived grows old. Works of art cannot please for a long , since novelty forms a great part of the pleasure they give. Now, memoirs are not works of art. An autobiography owes nothing to fashion. We look in these simply for human truth. this remark  will become clearer if I  extend it to the chronicles.  Gregory of Tours has painted his soul and his world in a crude and affected narratives. Yet that narrative still lives and still moves us. The verses of his contemporary, Fortunatus, exist no longer as far as we are concerned. they have perished with the Latin barbarism of which they were  the ornament. 

   In the second place, we ought to consider that there is in each of us a desire  for truth, which causes us at certain moments to reject the most beautiful fictions. This is a deep-rooted instinct....  

   There is much to admire in an ordinary person even if we do not reckon the fact that what we admire in him is also to be found in ourselves - and that is pleasant to us. I  should certainly discourage some of my friends from writing a drama or a epic poem, but  I would  discourage nobody from dictating his memoirs, nobody, not even my Breton cook , who can only read the printed letter of her  Mass-book, and who firmly believes that my house is haunted by the soul of a shoemaker who comes every night to ask for her prayers. That would be an interesting book in which one of these poor, obscure souls would explain itself and would explain the world with a foolishness whose depth would almost become poetry....

   We cannot read too many memoirs and diaries, because we can never study men too much. I do not at all agree with those  who think that too many intimate and personal works of this type have been published in  our time.

   I do not believe that a person must be extraordinary in order to have the right of saying what he is. On the contrary, I believe that the confidences of ordinary people are good to hear. (pp.75/77) 

   CONFESSIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND ROUSSEAU

   I do not speak of St. Augustine' s "Confessions"; the great doctor does not confess enough in them. His is a  spiritual book, which satisfies divine love better than the human curiosity. Augustine confesses to God and not to man; he hates his sins, and it is only those who still love their faults who make delightful confessions. He repents, and nothing spoils a confession like  repentance....

 He confesses his love affairs, because he does it with shame. He speaks only of " pestilences"" and of " infernal vapours which arose out of corrupt depth of his concupiscence." Nothing could be more moral but, at the same time, nothing less graceful. He does not write for for the  curious; he writes against the Maanicheans. That annoys me doubly , for I am curious, and a little Manichiean.

   ...As for Rousseau, whose soul held so many miseries and grandeurs, one cannot charge him with having made a half-hearted confession. He Confesses his own faults and those of others with marvelous readiness. To tell the truth cost him nothing. He knows that, however ignoble and vile it be, he can render it touching and beautiful.(pp.72/75)

 

from              On Life And  Letters  - first Series

                        NEWSPAPER EDITOR

   ...I had  hardly any thought of writing critical articles for a newspaper at the time when you invited me to the  "Temps." Your choice astonished me and I am still surprised  at it. How was it possible for a mind so keen, so practical, and so versatile as yours, in constant communion  with everybody  and everything, a mind in such full possession of life and always steeped in affairs, to have conceived a liking for thoughts so grave, sober, and detached as mine?...

 I believe you have a talisman. you do whatever you like. You have  made me into a regular and periodical writer. You have overcome my laziness. You have utilized my  day-dreams and coined my wits into money. That is why I look on you as an incomparable political economist. For I assure you that to render me productive was a marvelous feat. My excellent friend Calmann Levy himself had not been able to make me write a single book for the last six years.(pp.v/vi) 

                                    SCEPTIC

    There is no one like a sceptic for always being moral and a good citiZen. A sceptic never revolts against the laws, for he has no  hope that better ones can be made. He knows that the State must be forgiven for great deal. (p.vi)

 

                          NATURE OF CRITICISM 

   As I understand it , and as you allow me to practise it, criticisma is, like philosophy and history, a sort of romance designed for those who have sagacious and curipus minds, and every  romance is, rightly taken, an autobiography. The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his own soul among masterpieces.

   Objective criticism has no more existence than has objective art, and all those who deceive themselves into the belief that they put put anything but their own personalities into their work are dupes of the most fallacious of illusions. The truth is that we can never get outside ourselves. That is one of our greatest misfortunes... We cannot.. be a man and have recollections of having been a woman. We are shut up in our own personality as if in a perpetual prison. The best thing for us, it seems to ma, is to admit this frightful condition with a good grace, and to confess that we speak of ourselves every time we have not stregth enough to remain silent.

 

from            Under the Rose

                                 WAR AND GOD

  I should like to write a dialogue concerning God, in which I should develop the following idea. : "If God exists, He must be the the most abominable of creatures, since he has permitted this war to be." (p. 6)

  

                                      WORDS

   Themine: Let us leave off talking about beginings, please. Let us rather reason about the verities that are within our reach. And in order to reduce to a minimum the errors to which our senses and our reason are prone, we will aim at a rigid accuracy of language and be carefuul to define the precise connotation of our terms, as and when we bring them into our discussion.

   Floris:  And how, pray, are we to define them? By words; words which we must needs define by other words, themselves subject to definition in the same manner. And what is a word? Just a sound, a murmur, a cry, a grunt. The philosophers have been at great pains to differentiate the speech of man from the inarticulate language of ani mls. No doubt there is a great difference between the two, but it is not complete and fundamental, it is not a difference in kind.In either case it is just murmuring, grunting.. And if there is a wide difference between the harmonius lamentations of Antigone  mourning for the blessed light of day, and the howling of a beaten dog, it is, in either case, but a stream of sounds outpoured by the suffering of flesh. Let us agree that we are endowed with speech as animals are. Do you aspire to reveal the secrets of the universe by means of those little words which enable both men and animals to express joy and pain, desire and fear, to cry aloud their hunger, to threaten a foe, to entreat a loved one and to thrill all the airs of heaven with the tumult of their emotions? What a fantastic notion!.....

   .... Themine, I will impart to you a weighty truth. Man is in no better case than the poor animals, his brothers, when it comes to learning anything about things and their causes. However wide the range of his researches, however ingenious the contrivances he may invent to supplement the infirmity of his senses, he will never do more than multiply the fields of his ignorance. Imprisoned within his own being, everything which he may believe to be external to himself will mislead him, and by whatsoever means he thinks to grasp them, he will, in the long run, only find -himself! Now, devote yourself, if you have a mind, to researches in experimental philosophy, or fling yourself into the abysmal depths of metaphysics, you will never discover therein aught  save yourself.  (pp.16/20)

 

                               ALMIGHTY GOD

   Floris: The philosophers call Him (GOD) the Infinite One. In so doing  they do not define Him; they "undefine" Him. Everything predicated of Him is contradictory. He is described as being  unbounded in space and time. and then He is contracted to the measure of mortal man. He is invested with omnipotence, and then displayed as baulked at every turn by a maleficent, unreasoning adversary, drunk with hatred and rage. The notion of God  as the Creator of the World, a notion formed in the childhood of the race, no longer corresponds with our views constitution of matter, the plurality of worlds, the mechanism of the heavens and the results of knowledge in general.His universal creation has shrunk to an infini tesimal  point in the universe, and the Earth is but a speck of dust amid the multitude of worlds which, it was alleged, were created to be subservient to it. They invest Him with the physique of a child and the moral code of a savage. I say nothing  of what the theologians have made of Him. (pp. 24/25)

             IMMANUEL KANT AND THE GOD

   ..The worthy Kant, who was given to meditation, discovered the principles of human knowledge and the reconciliation of the various conflicting philosophi systems, in the smoke that curled up from his prcelain pipe; but he did not find God there. Having, with great assiduity, searched for Him in vain, he had made up his mind to do without Him, when, taking a walk one day through the streets of Konisberg,that rich and populace city, he observed many scenes of disorder and sedition. Amid this tumult, at which the mind of the sage revolted in disgust, God suddenly appeared  to him, and the good philosopher immediately  entrusted  Him with the task of policing the  world. that, in popular parlance, is what we mean when we say, in philosophical terminology, that Kant's belief in God does not result from theoretic, but from practical, reasoning.

   Thus, mighty intellect as he was, the Sage of Konisberg fell back on the common belief of mankind who, in their thirst for happiness and life, cling to an Omni potent Being at once just and merciful, to whom they look for cemtral happiness and the punishment of their enemies. Such, then, is the fundamental basis of the belief in God. It rest upon self-interest, like morality and all the rest of mankind's most sacred beliefs Man does not believe in things as they are, but in things as he wishes them to be 

   Themine: A belief that, in the long run, may prove not unproductive. Who knows whether, as our Master, RENAN, used to say , we may not bring a just God into being, merely by believing in Him. (pp.25/27)

 

              GOD"S BADLY EXECUTED  CREATION

   His ( GOD"S) creation involved Him in serious deprivations and inextricable difficulties. He lost His independence. His relations with an imperfect world and creatures of limited intelligence exposed Him to endless mortifications. The creation of man occasioned Him the most distressing disappointments. His peaceful days were over. He grew irritable, he growled and thundered. He repented. and repentence never mends anything.

   to govern mankind, He took it into  His head to become moral, without any preliminary training. For having lived a whole eternity by Himself and enjoyed His pleasures alone, He had no morals and could not have any. In his dealings with man, He adopted the marality of a savage, as one might have expected. He would. His cruel and outrageous deeds have been set down in a portentous book.

   He handled the situation badly. It was as if a showman were to take it into his head to reward or punish his puppets for the features he had given and the deeds he made them perform. If a showman were so ill-advised as that, his puppets  would say, " "We didn't ask to play this comedy, and we have played it as you made us play it. You pulled the strings. You have no call either to praise or blame us." (58/59)

 

                         MAN-MADE GODS

   ... Don't be disturbed. Christianity was man-made and can no more change men than a coat can change the body of its wearer. 

   It can deform man, just as a coat can deform the body. The corset is not a heaven-sent device, but it can ruin a woman's figure. Men make religions and religions make men, or at all events shape them Humanity is in the position of that poor devil of a fellow who, being lonely and love-sick, created for himself, by a supreme effort of imagination, a companion who came dowan from heaven. He followed her over hill and dale, till he fell into a pond and was drowned.

   Men are led on by their own imaginings. They create gods and obey them. Their is no harder taskmaster than the master you make for yourself, no crueller tyrant than the tyrant within you. (pp65/66)

 

                             WARS AND HEROES

   Some deeds which we ourselves take a pride in, become infamous when they are wrought  by the enemy.

   Thus the same actions are called by different names according to whether they are accomplished by us or by our foes.

   To love war because it makes heroes, is like loving the croup because doctors and nurses have died in trying to save  the life  of a child.(p.170)

 

                 WOMEN  RISE UP AGAINST WAR!

    Mesdames,"  he said to them  American women who came to France  To take part  in the resoration of the war-striken provinces in 1923), I am given to understand that you will not reject the greeting of an old man who, after having espoused all the political errors of his time, has come, at the close of his days, to see that the truth resides in government by the people for the people.

   You come from a country that is both industrious and rich to a land oppressed by a tragic glory, a country which suffers from the burden more cruelly than its pride will permit it to avow.

  You are indeed, welcome. But repairing the ravages of war is not the only task. You are women, and women are more courageous than men. 

   Be the saviours of humanity. 

   Be it your task to attack the monster that devours our race; yours to make war on war, a war to the death.

   From this time forward, hate war with quenches hatred.... ..   

   .. Let your hatred of it be a mortal hatred, Slay it! (192)

   There are bookish souls for whom the universe is but a paper and ink. The man whose body is animated by such a sol spends his life before his desk, without any care for the realities whose graphic representation he studies so obstinately. Of the beauty of women he knows only what has been written about it. He knows of the labours, sufferings and hopes of men only that can be sewn on to tapes and bound  in Morocco. He is monstrous and ignorant. He has never looked out of the window.. such was the worthy who collected other people's opinions to make books out of them. Nothing had ever disturbed him. He conceived of passions as subjects for monographs, and knew that nations perish in a certain number of octavo pages. Up to the day of his death he toiled with an equal ardour and without ever understanding anything. That is why work was not bitter to him. He is to be envied, if peace of heart can be won only at such a cost.

   (On Lifeand Letters -First Series - Preface p.X)

PLAGIARISM

   ...But our contemporaries are very touchy in this respect, and it is a matter of sheer good luck if, in our days, a well-known writer is not accused at least once a year of stealing ideas.

 (An Apology for plagiarism -Fourth Series- p.149.

 

 (TO BE CONTINUED- CORRECTED AND COMPLETED)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

 

 

 

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