TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES In the plain text version words in Italics are denoted by _underscores_. The book cover was modified by the Transcriber and has been added to the public domain. A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept. Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected. * * * * * THE HEART’S DOMAIN BY GEORGES DUHAMEL Author of “CIVILIZATION, 1914-1917,” etc. TRANSLATED BY ELEANOR STIMSON BROOKS [Illustration] NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1919 Copyright, 1919, by THE CENTURY CO. _Published, September, 1919_ TO MY SON BERNARD PREFACE I am beginning a book with what sounds like a very ambitious title. I wish to say at once that I have no qualifications to discuss political, historical or economic matters. I leave to the scholars who are versed in these redoubtable questions the task of explaining, skilfully and definitely, the great misery that has befallen our time. I thus at the same time renounce most of the opportunities and obligations of my title. But I wish, with all my heart, to pursue with a few people of good will a friendly discussion the object of which remains, in spite of all, the heart’s domain, or the possession of the world. The possession of the world is not decided by guns. It is the noble work of peace. It is not involved in the struggle which is now rending society. Even so, men will find themselves engaged in an undertaking that will threaten to overwhelm them with suffering and despair. Fate has assigned to me during the war a place and a task of such a character that misery has been the only thing I have seen; it has been my study and my enemy every moment. I must be forgiven for thinking of it with a persistence that is like an obsession. The whole intelligence of the world is absorbed by the enterprise and the necessities of the war; there is little chance of rousing it now from this in favor of the happiness of the race, in favor of that happiness which is compromised for the future and destroyed for the present. It is to the heart one must address oneself. It is to all the generous hearts that one must make one’s appeal. So, if I am spurred by an ambition, it is to beg the world to seek once more whatever can lighten the present and the future distress of mankind, to seek the springs of interest that exist for the soul in a life harassed with difficulties, perils and disillusionments, to honor more than ever the faithful and incorruptible resources of the inner life. * * * * * The inner life! It has never ceased to shine, a precious, quivering flame, devoting all its ardor in a struggle against the breath of these great events, resisting this tempest which has had no parallel. It has never ceased to shine, but its shy and faithful light trembles in a sort of crypt into which we fear to venture. What has happened has seized upon us as upon its prey. During the first months of the war, during the first years perhaps, all our physical and moral energies were overwhelmed in this maelstrom. How, indeed, could one refuse oneself to the appetite of the monster? We did not even try to snatch from him our hours of leisure, our dreams. We simply abandoned such things, as we abandoned our plans, our welfare, and the whole of our existence. You remember! It was a time when solitude found us more shaken, more disarmed, than peril. We reproached ourselves for distracting a single one of our thoughts from the universal distress. We gave ourselves day and night to this agonizing world; and when our work was suspended, when the wild beast unloosed its clutch, as if in play, and we returned for a few minutes to ourselves, we did not always dare to look the quivering inner flame in the face. What it lighted up in us seemed at times too foreign to our anxiety, or too filled with limpid serenity. And so we returned to our wretchedness, experiencing it to the point of intoxication, to the point of despair. When I think of the year 1915, it seems to me that I still hear all those noble comrades saying to me with a sort of dejection: “I can’t think of anything else! I can neither read, nor work, nor seek to distract myself to any purpose. When I’m off duty I think about these days, I think about them unceasingly, till I feel seasick, till I feel dizzy. I’ve just had two hours of liberty. Once upon a time I should have given them to Pascal or to Tolstoy. Today I have employed them in reading some documentary works on the manufacture of torpedoes and on European colonial methods. They are subjects that will always be outside my line, subjects I shall never be interested in. But how can I think of anything else?” Perhaps it is not a question of thinking of anything else. It is not a question of turning one’s back on the time, but rather of looking it in the face, calmly and collectedly. When the first great excitement had passed away, those who had the wisdom and the courage to return assiduously to themselves found their inner life ennobled, augmented, enriched. For it does not cease to labor on in the depths of us. It is at once ourselves and something other than ourselves, better than ourselves. Like certain of our organs which are endowed with a marvelous independence and pursue a vigilant activity in the midst of our agitations and our sleep, the inner life comes to its fruitage even though we are full of ingratitude and indifference towards it. It is the faithful spouse who keeps the home radiant, arranges every comfort and spins at the wheel, behind the door, awaiting our return. And behold we are returning! To be sure, the storm still roars on. It grows greater, more furious, more unending. Never has it seemed more complex, more grave, more difficult. Peril has taken up its abode with us. Every sort of opinion holds up its head and vehemently solicits our belief. But we have found once more the key and the path to the secret refuge. Nothing could turn us aside now. Nothing could prevent us at certain hours from plunging into solitude, there to find again the equilibrium, the harmony and those moral riches which we know, after the ruin of so many things, are alone efficacious, alone durable. For long months now I have realized, watching the men with whom I live, that they are waiting for words of quietude, words of rest and love. They are like parched soil at the end of a blazing summer: they long to slake their thirst and grow green again. In vain have destruction, disorder and death tried to break up the sublime and familiar colloquy that every being pursues with the better part of himself. That colloquy revives, it begins again, in the very midst of the battle, among the odors and the groans of the hospital. Nevertheless, the daily work is done, well done; duty is properly weighed and accomplished; the soul simply is unwilling any longer to renounce its meditation upon all that is profound, imperishable, and immaterial in the present. Tell me that we are going to labor in concert once more at the exploitation of our inner fortune. Tell me that we are going to labor to save from shipwreck that part of us which, in spite of all our errors, uncertainties, crimes and disillusionments, remains truly noble and worthy of eternity. * * * * * I am able to undertake this essay thanks to the leisure moments the war has been willing to grant me. It is not purely the fruit of solitary meditations. I do not live alone: my chosen comrades surround me; they share with me the confused space of our dwelling; we share together all the thoughts that fill this space. Friendship has accomplished the miracle of transforming into a communion what, without it, would have remained a promiscuity. I have a feeling that I am expressing the desires and the thoughts of many men. Very soon, those who are here will be going to sleep; I shall continue my writing, but with the secret certitude of not being alone in the task, of carrying with me their tacit assent. I feel that I have been entrusted with a sort of mandate. I have no library, no documents. But do we need books in order to converse together of the things that form the very substance of our existence? Does it not suffice to consult our souls? Do we need any other guarantee than our devout desire in order to lift an open hand and make, for all those who await it in their solitude, the sign of concord and of hope? CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS 3 II POVERTY AND RICHES 21 III THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS 33 IV ON DISCOVERING THE WORLD 69 V THE LYRICS OF LIFE 94 VI SORROW AND RENUNCIATION 110 VII THE SHELTER OF LIFE 126 VIII THE CHOICE OF THE GRACES 146 IX APOSTLESHIP 160 X ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART 178 THE HEART’S DOMAIN THE HEART’S DOMAIN I THE HOPE OF HAPPINESS I It was necessary for me to pass middle age in order to become convinced that happiness was the object of my life, as it is the object of all humanity, as it is the object of the whole world of living things. At first sight, that statement seems self-evident. And yet many a time have I questioned my friends, my relatives, my chance companions on this subject and I have received the most contradictory replies. Many seemed taken unawares and, overwhelmed with their various burdens, would not trouble to seek an object: they were in pursuit of happiness without naming it. Others, excited by the play of argument, acknowledged as the object of life all sorts of states or manners of being which are nothing but steps toward happiness, means good or bad of seeking it, such as movement, stoical indifference, or prayer. Others confused the end with the object and named death. Still others, maddened by their misery, gave it as their bitter conclusion that unhappiness is the actual destiny of man, and these confused the obstacle with the aim. Finally, there were some who gave to happiness names dictated by their aspirations, their culture, their accustomed manner of using words, and called it God, or eternal life, or the salvation of the soul. As for me, in spite of all, I am sure that happiness is the object of life. This certitude has come to me altogether from within, not from outside events, and not from the spectacle of other men. Like all the certitudes of the inner life, it is obstinate and even aggressive. All objections seem simply made to fortify it. It dominates them all. I have not been able even to imagine a new certitude that could invalidate or replace this one. Upon reflection, the path and the end are identical. Happiness is not only the aim, the reason of life, it is its means, its expression, its essence. It is life itself. II One might well doubt this. The whole of humanity at this moment utters one despairing, heart-rending cry. It bellows like a wounded beast of burden, it simply does not understand its wound. All convictions and all certitudes are at one another’s throats. How can we recognize them, with that lost look they have, that blood that soils and disfigures them? In the hurricane, opinions, uprooted, have lost their soil and their sap. They drift like autumn thistles, dry thistles that yet have power to tear the skin. Men no longer know anything but their insurmountable suffering, a suffering that has no limit and seems to be without reason. They groan and desire nothing but to be alleviated. Will a century of pious tenderness suffice to bathe, drain, close the vast wound? Without delay, O streaming wound, your living flesh must be stanched and bathed. From now on, no matter how long you bleed, you must be anointed and protected, and if you are opened up again ten times, ten times must you be anointed anew and covered once more. Yet, do not doubt it, humanity even in this terrible hour seeks for nothing but its own happiness. It rushes forward, by instinct, like a herd that smells the salt-lick and the spring. But it will suffocate rather than not enjoy everything together and at once. Happiness? God! who has given it this painful and ridiculous idea? What were they about, the priests, the scientists, and the people who write the books? What has been taught the children of men that they could have been made to believe that war brings happiness to anyone? Let them declare themselves, those who have assured the poor in spirit that their happiness depends upon the possession of a province, an iron-mine, or a foaming arm of the sea between two distant continents! It is thus that they have all set out for the conquest of happiness, since that is destiny, and there has been placed in their hands precisely what was certain to destroy happiness forever. And yet, if you will bear with me, we need not lose all hope. So long as there is a single wall-flower to tremble in the coming Aprils over the ruins of the world, let us repeat from the depths of our hearts: “Happiness, you are truly my end and the reason for my being, I know it through my own tears.” III I went, lately, to a laboratory, in the heart of a wilderness of glass and porcelain, haunted with inhuman odors. A friend dwelt there. I saw a great crystal cask full of distilled water; the sunlight quivered through it freely and majestically. There, I thought, is the desert. That water contained nothing, it was unfitted for life, it was as empty as a dead world. But then we scratched the bottom of the cask and looked at it with the microscope. Little round, green algæ were growing in that desert. A current of air had carried the germs, and they had increased and multiplied. There where there was nothing to seize upon, they had yet found something. The taste of barren glass, a few stray grains of dust, that soulless water, that sunlight, they had asked for nothing more in order to subsist and work out their humble joy. I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest. Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself. If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy. Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned. I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics, whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and modestly fulfil their destiny. One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too, that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it. Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world. IV You must understand that this concerns happiness and not pleasure, or well-being, or enjoyment, or the delight of the senses. All cultivated people have created different words to designate these different things. All have committed their moralists to the task of preserving simple souls from a confusion which our instincts favor. Delight of the senses, you who are the eternally unsatisfactory, is it true, intangible one, that you will always deceive us and that we shall always seek for happiness through you? What seductiveness is not yours, O you who smile with the lips of love, O mysterious phantom of joy? How you lure us and enchain us! Well you know how to array yourself, at times, in the appearance of a sacred mission, a religious duty! No, you are not happiness, divine though you are! To live without you is a bitter misfortune, but you are not happiness! Why does happiness command us to sacrifice you often, to mistrust you always? There is no happiness without harmony; you know this very well, you who are delicious disorder itself, death, laughter, strife. Happiness is our homeland. You are only the burning country we long for, the tropical isle where our dreams exile themselves, never to return. Happiness is our true kingdom. Delight of the senses, let your slaves hymn your praise. V During the summer of 1916 I found among the meadows of the Marne a flower that had three odors. It is a very common flower in France: it adorns a low and spiny plant which the peasants call “_arrête-bœuf_.” Toward midday, at the hour when the sun exasperates all its creatures, this flower exhales three different odors: the first is soft, fresh and resembles the perfume of the sweet pea; the second is sharp and makes one think of phosphor irritant, of a flame; the third is the secret breath of love. This miraculous flower really has all three of these odors at once, but we perceive them more easily one at a time because we are not worthy of all this wealth. This little discovery descended upon my weary head like a benediction. At that time we were leaving the miseries of Verdun behind and were just on the point of plunging into those of the Somme. The intermediate rest depressed us and enervated us by turns. In the walks across the fields which we took with our comrades, I grew accustomed every day to gather a root of _arrête-bœuf_ and offer it, as a gift, to those who accompanied me, so that they might share my discovery. Some of them, anxious about the world and their own fortune, took pleasure in this modest marvel. They breathed in with these perfumes the inexhaustible variety of the lavish universe. They distinguished and recognized, smilingly, the three odors of this one being. They honored these three ambassadors whom a people of unknown virtues had assigned to them. They interpreted as a revelation the little signs of the latent opulence which challenges and disdains the majority of bewildered men. But others remained insensible to this delicate prayer, and these I thought of with chagrin as of men who had no care for the welfare of their own souls. I know quite well you will say, “There is no relation between this flower and the welfare of the soul.” But this relation does exist, emphatically and definitely. Truth shines out of every merest trifle that goes to make up the world. We must fasten our eyes ardently upon it, as if it were a light shining through the branches, and march forward. I am sure, we are all sure, that happiness is the very reason for our existence. Let it be added at once that happiness is founded upon possession, that is to say, upon the perfect and profound understanding of something. For this reason men who have a high conception of happiness aspire to the complete and definite knowledge of an absolute, a perfection which they name God. The desire for eternal life is a boundless need of possession. Equally noble is the passionate desire of certain men to understand, to possess themselves, to have such an exact and merciless conception of their moral and physical nature as will give them some sort of mastery over it. It is indeed a beautiful destiny to pursue the understanding of the external world with the weapons and the arguments of a science that is not the slave of conquest. Men who achieve this may indeed be called just. Others wish to possess a house, a field, a pair of earrings, an automobile. For them possession is not understanding, it is above all else an exclusive and almost solitary enjoyment. They deceive themselves about happiness and about possession. They deceive themselves to the actual point of war, massacre and destruction. If we wish it, we may possess the whole universe, and it is in this possession that we shall find the salvation of our souls. We may possess, for example, that unknown something which walks by the road-side, the color of the forest of pointed firs that rises sharply against the southern horizon, the thoughts of Beethoven, our dreams by night, the conception of space, our memories, our future, the odor and the weight of objects, our grief at this moment and thousands and thousands of other things besides. Is my soul immortal? Alas! how can I still linger in this ancient, ingenuous hope? There are millions who, like me, can no longer give reasonable credence to such an impossible happiness. But does my soul exist? Every thought bears witness that it does, and this life of ours too, and the inexplicable life that is all about us. When Christians speak of the salvation of the soul, they are thinking of all sorts of assurances and precautions in regard to that future life which remains the greatest charm of religion and at the same time its most wonderful weapon. We can give a humbler but more immediate meaning to this expression. First of all, not to be ignorant of our own souls! To think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation. To think with perseverance and respect of the soul, to enrich it unceasingly, that will be our sanctity. VI We have all known those men who, at the first break of day, while they are still half awake and barely rested, fling themselves into the stress of business. They pass all day from one man to another in a sort of blind, buzzing frenzy. They are ceaselessly reaching out to take, to appropriate for themselves. If a moment of solitude offers itself, they pull note-books out of their pockets and begin figuring. Between whiles they eat, drink and seek a sort of sleep that is more arid than death. Looking at these unfortunates, who are often men of great importance, one would imagine their souls were like decrepit poor relations, relegated to some corner of their personality, with which they never concern themselves. I was once returning from the country on a train with a young surgeon on whom that cruel fortune which we call success was beginning to smile. I can still see him, breathless and almost stupefied, on the seat facing me. He had been talking to me of his work, of how he spent his time, with a restless excitement which the noise of the train hammered and disjointed and gave a sort of rhythm to. Evening was falling. It gave me pleasure to look at the young poplars in the valley beside the track, their foliage and slender trunks transfigured by the sunset. My friend looked at them also, and suddenly he murmured: “It’s true! I’m no longer interested in those things, I no longer pay attention to anything.” Through the fatigue and anxiety of his affairs, through the jingling calculation of his profits, he suddenly caught a glimpse of his error, of his real poverty. His repudiated soul stirred in the depths of his being as the infant stirs in its mother’s womb. It is constantly awakening in this way and timidly reclaiming its rights. Often, an unexpected word strikes us, a word that comes from it and reveals it. I have as a work-fellow a quiet, studious young man who takes life “seriously,” that is to say, in such a fashion that he gets himself into a fine state of mind and will die, perhaps, without having known, without having saved, the soul with which he is charged. At the beginning of the month of June of this year 1918, I found myself hard at work during one of those overwhelming afternoons that seem, on our barren Champagne, like a white furnace, a glistening desert. There were many wounded and the greater part had been uncared for for several days; the barrack that served us as an operating-hall was overcrowded; our task was a tragic one; the demon of war had imprisoned us under his knee. We felt crushed, exasperated, swamped in these immediate realities. Between two wounded men, as I was soaping my gloves, I saw my young comrade looking far away through a little window and his gaze was suddenly bathed with calm and peace. “What are you looking at?” I said to him. “Oh! nothing,” he replied; “only I’m resting myself on that little tuft of verdure down there: it refreshes me so much.” VII It seems childish and paradoxical to oppose to all the concrete and formidable realities that are considered as the hereditary wealth of mankind an almost purely ideal world of joys that have no price, that remain outside all our bargainings, that are unstable, often fugitive, and always relative in appearance, whenever we put them to the test. Yet they alone are absolute, they alone are true. Where they are lacking there may be a place for amusement, there is no place for true happiness. They alone are capable of assuring the salvation of the soul. We ought to labor passionately to find them, to amass them as the veritable treasures of humanity. The future we are permitted to glimpse seems the very negation of happiness and the ruin of the soul. If this is true, we must examine it with open minds and then, with all our strength, refuse it. Just this moment, when the struggle for mastery goes on, to the great peril of the soul, among the peoples, just this moment I choose for saying: “Let us think of the salvation of our souls.” And this salvation is not a matter of the future but of the present hour. Let us recognize the existence of the soul; it is thus that we shall save it. Let us give it the freedom of the city in a world where everything conspires to silence or destroy it. If it is true that this withdraws us from that struggle for existence, the clamor of which assails our ears, well, even so, I believe it is better to die than to remain in a universe from which the soul is banished. But we shall have occasion to speak more than once of this. Let us not forget that happiness is our one aim. Happiness is, above all, a thing of the spirit, and we shall only deserve it at the price of the honors we render to the noblest part of our being. VIII There are people who have said to me, “My happiness lies in this very hurly-burly, this brutish labor, this frantic agitation which you spurn. Outside this turmoil of business and society, I am bored. I need it. I need it in order to divert my thoughts.” No doubt! No doubt! But what have you done with your life that it has become necessary to divert your thoughts? What have you made of your past, what do you hope from your future when this alcohol, this opium, has become necessary to you? You must understand me, there is no question, if you are built as an athlete, of letting your muscles deteriorate. There is no question, if you have a great thirst for controversy, a natural aptitude for struggle, of letting that thirst go unsatisfied, that aptitude uncultivated. The question is simply one of harmoniously employing all these fine gifts, of enriching yourself with those real treasures the universe bestows on those who wish to take them, and not of wearing out your radiant strength in the labors of a street-porter, a galley-slave or an executioner. Here is a man who says to me: “My happiness! My happiness! But it consists in never thinking of my soul.” What a sad thing! And how gravely one must have offended others and one’s own self to have reached that point! For where shall he who loves torment, passionate restlessness, uncertainty, and remorse discover these terrible blessings if it is not in the depths of his own hateful ego? IX If anyone tells you something strange about the world, something you have never heard before, do not laugh but listen attentively; make him repeat it, make him explain it: no doubt there is something there worth taking hold of. The cult of the soul is a perpetual discovery of itself and the universe which it reflects. The purest happiness is not a stable and final frame of mind, it is an equilibrium produced by an incessant compromise which has to be adroitly reëstablished; it is the reward of a constant activity; it increases in proportion to the daily corrections one brings to it. One must not cling obstinately to one’s own interpretations of the world but unceasingly renew the flowers on the altar. In quite another order of ideas I think of those old-fashioned manufacturers who are immovably set against trying any of the new machines and perish in their stubbornness. That is nothing but a comparison: to justify the machine folly is quite the opposite of my desire. I simply wish to show that routine affects equally the things of the mind and of the heart, that it is a very formidable thing. Kipling, I believe, tells the story of a Hindu colony that was decimated by famine. The poor folk let themselves die of hunger without touching the wheat that had been brought for them, because they had been used to eating millet. If the sacred lamp of happiness some day comes to lack the ritual oil, we shall not let it go out; we shall surely find something with which to feed it, something that will serve for light and heat. X The will to happiness attains its perfection in the mature man. With adolescence it passes through a redoubtable crisis. Nietzsche says: “There is less melancholy in the mature man than in the young man.” It is true. Very young people cultivate sadness as something noble. They do not readily forgive themselves for not being always sad. They have discovered the mysterious isle of melancholy and do not wish to escape from it again. They love everything about that black magician and his attitudes and his tears and his nostalgia and his romantic beauty. They have a fierce disdain for vulgar pleasures and take refuge in sadness because they do not yet know the splendor and majesty of joy. But in their own fashion, which is full of disdain, reserve and ingenuous complexity, they do not any the less seek for happiness. With age happiness appears as truly the sole, serene study of man. As he rests upon the moral possession of the world, he believes that with time and experience he can remain insensible to the wearing out of his bodily organs. He who knows how to be happy and to win forgiveness for his happiness, how enviable he is!--the only true model among those that are wise. It is now, just now, that these things ought to be said, in the hour when our old continent bleeds in every member, in the hour when our future seems blotted out by the menace of every sort of servitude and of a hopeless labor that will know neither measure nor redemption. II POVERTY AND RICHES I The Christian doctrine, which has all the beauties, has all the audacities too. It has endeavored to make the sublime and daring notion prevail among the mass of men that salvation is reserved for the poor. What a magnificent thing! And if this religion of poverty has degenerated in the course of the centuries, with what consolation has it not bathed those thrice-happy souls whom an unbroken faith guides through misery and humiliation! But there has never been a religion which has been able to found itself upon renunciation without compensation. Is he poor, this man who consents to go unclad, roofless, unfed, up to the day when there will be showered upon him all the riches of the kingdom of God? Has he no thought of a supreme gift, of a magnificent possession, the man to whom his master, in person, has given the command: “Lay up your treasures in heaven, where they will not be lost”? He does not exist, the hopeless being who does not hunger for some treasure, even if it is an imaginary one, even an unreal one, even one that is lost in a bewildering future. In what an abyss of poverty should we groan if our kingdom were not of this world and were nowhere outside the world, either? And now a generation of men has come that no longer believes in the supernatural felicities of the future life and seems no longer to have anything to hope from a world consumed by hatred and given over inevitably, for long years, to confusion, destitution, egotistical passions. In truth, the programmes of the social factions have no consolation for us, there is nothing in them that speaks of love and the true blessings; all these monuments of eloquence bring us back to hatred and anguish. The most generous of them only give us glimpses of new struggles, new sheddings of blood, when our age is drunk with crime and fatigue. To whichever side the individual turns he finds himself crushed, scoffed at, sacrificed to insatiable, hostile gods. A few years ago Maeterlinck wrote: “Up to the present men have left one religion to enter another; but when we abandon ours, it is not to go anywhere. That is a new phenomenon, with unknown consequences, in the midst of which we live.” Having quoted these words, I hasten to add that the war is no particular consequence of this moral state of the world. The question of religion is not involved at all. The priests are quite ready to abuse these easy oppositions in order to obtain arguments in favor of their cause. But they know well enough, alas! that if the teaching of Christ stigmatizes wars, the religions have only contributed to multiply and aggravate them. They know very well that, in the conflict that now divides the earth, the religions have shown themselves enslaved to the states. No one has wished to take up the wallet and staff of the dead Tolstoy. Humanity seems poorer and more truly disinherited than ever. Its kingdom is in itself and in everything that surrounds it; but it has sold it for a morsel of bread. And how can one reproach it for this? It is very hungry and its heart is not open to beauty. II We shall seek together the materials of our happiness. Together we shall pile up all those marvelous little things that must constitute our patrimony, our wealth. We shall have great misfortunes and we shall often be bitterly deceived. It is because the war has succeeded in depriving the simplest and the most sacred things of the light of eternity. That is not the least consequence of the catastrophe. We must make a painful effort to recover that light and clear it of its blemishes. Silence, solitude, the sky, the vestiture of the earth, all the riches of the poor have been sullied as if forever. The works of art have been mutilated. They have taken refuge under the earth where they seem to veil their faces. We ought to seek and gather together the debris so that we can take up and love in secret every day the fragments of our liberties. We ought to think unceasingly of that “mean landscape” of which Charles Vildrac has spoken in one of his most beautiful poems. It is an unfruitful landscape, despoiled, denatured by the sad labor of men, and apparently worn out;-- But even so you found, if you sought there, One happy spot where the grass grew rich, Even so you heard, if you listened, The whisper of leaves And the birds pursuing one another. And if you had enough love, You could even ask of the wind Perfumes and music ... We shall have enough love! That shall be the principle and source of our wealth. And so we shall not have a whole life of poverty. When love, that is to say, grace, abandons us, we shall perhaps know hours of poverty. That will help us all the better to understand our hours of opulence, and all the better cherish them. III If you wish, we can divide our task, enumerate the coffers in which we are to pile our treasures. First of all, let us stop over a word. We have said: to possess is to know. The definition may seem to you arbitrary. On the chance of this I open my little pocket dictionary, which is the whole library I have as a soldier, and read: “To possess: to have for oneself, in one’s power, to know to the bottom.” Let us accept that. We shall see, page by page, if it is possible for us to satisfy these naïve, direct definitions. What is most certain to attract our glance, when we look about us, is the world of men, our fellow-creatures. Their figures are certainly the most affecting spectacle that can be offered us. Their acts undoubtedly constitute, owing to a natural inclination and an indestructible solidarity, the chief object of our curiosity. Good! We shall possess them first of all. We shall possess this inexhaustible fund of other people. We shall feel no shame then in contemplating, with a noble desire, whatever strikes our senses, the animals, that is to say, the plants, the material universe of stones and waters, the sky and even the populous stars. These, too, ought to be well worth possessing! Already our wealth seems immense. Our ambition is still greater: we must possess our dreams. But have not illustrious men made more beautiful dreams than ours? Yes, and these men are called Shakespeare, Dante, Rembrandt, Goethe, Hugo, Rodin; there are a hundred of them, even more; their works form the royal crown of humanity. We shall possess that crown. It is for us it was forged, for us it was bejewelled with immortal joys. It would be vain to extend our possession only into space. It overruns time: we possess the past, that is to say, our memories, and the future in our hopes. And then we also possess, and in the strictest sense of all, our sorrows, our griefs, our despair, if that supreme and terrible treasure is reserved for us. Finally, there will be times when we possess nothing but an idea, but this may perhaps be the idea of the absolute or the infinite. If it is given us to possess God, then, no doubt, nothing else will be necessary to us. Every time that we possess the world purely we shall find that we have touched an almost unhoped for happiness, for it is always being offered to us and we do not think of it: we shall possess ourselves. We shall share all our riches with our companions: that shall be our apostolate. And we shall manage in some way to resist the seductions or the commands of a society that is going to ruin, a society that is even more unhappy and abused than corrupt. If, in consequence, we are permitted to glimpse, even if only for the space of a minute, a little more happiness about us, a little more happiness than there is at present, we shall at last be so happy as to accept death with joy. IV The greatest of all joys is to give happiness, and those who do not know it have everything to learn about life. The annals of humanity abound with illustrious deeds aptly proving that generosity enriches first of all those who practise it. Not to mention any celebrated instance, I shall tell you one simple little tale. It is of the truth I live on, my daily bread. Just now, not far from me, there is a young English soldier from the neighborhood of York who is so severely wounded in the lower part of the stomach that the natural functions of the body have been completely upset and he has been reduced to a state of terrible suffering. And yet, when I went to see him this morning, this boy gave me an extraordinary smile, his very first, a smile full of delicacy and hope, a smile of resurrection. Presently I learned the cause of this great joy. The dying man pulled from under his pillow a cigarette he had hidden there, which he had secretly saved for me and now gave me. V There are many who preach an unpretentious life and the sweetness of possessing a little garden. The most magnificent of gardens is insignificant compared with this world in which nothing is refused us. Accepting the little garden we should have the air of those dispossessed kings who lose an empire to be ironically dowered with a small island. If we find it pleasant to employ our muscles in digging the earth, there are a thousand spots where we can easily practise this wholesome and fruitful exercise. But we shall never really possess a single clod of earth because a legal deed has declared that it belongs exclusively to us. The world itself! Our love demands the whole world; the rocks, the clouds, the great trees along the highway, the darting flight of birds, receding into the evening, the rustling verdure high above that wall that vainly strives to shut in the private property of someone else, the shining glory of those flowers we glimpse through the iron railings of a park, and even that very wall and railing themselves. According to the stretch of our wings, the scope of our desires, we shall possess whatever our hands touch with ardor and respect, whatever delights our eyes from the summits of mountains, whatever our thoughts bring back from their travels through legendary lands. To possess the world is purely a question of the intensity of our understanding of it. One does not possess things on their surfaces but in their depths; but the spirit alone can penetrate into the depths, and for the spirit there is no barrier. Many men to whom the law allows the gross, official possession of a statue, a gem, a beautiful horse or a province wear themselves out fulfilling a rôle to which no human being has received a call. Every moment they perceive with bitterness that men who have no legal title whatever to these material goods draw from them a delight that is superior to the enjoyment they themselves get from them as absolute owners. They often find, in this way, that a friend appreciates their beautiful pictures better than they do, that a groom is a better judge of their own stables, that a passer-by draws out of “their landscape” a purer joy than theirs and more original ideas. They take their revenge by obstinately confusing the usage of a thing with its possession. Jesus said that the rich man renounced the kingdom of God. He renounces many other things as well. For if he shuts himself up within his proud walls, he abandons the marvelous universe for a small fragment of it; and if he is actually curious about the universe, if he appreciates its significance, how can he consent without guilt to hide a portion of it away from the contemplation of others? In order to express the gross and exclusive possession of things society has invented various words and phrases that betray the weak efforts of men to appropriate for themselves, in spite of everything, in spite of the laws of love, the riches that remain the prerogative of all. They speak, for example, of “disposing of a piece of property,” which means having it subject to our pleasure, being able to do as we choose with it. The sacrilegious vanity of this view of the world gives the possessor, as his supreme right, the power to destroy his own treasure. He could not, indeed, have a greater right than that. But what sort of desperate possession is it, I ask, that considers the destruction of the object possessed as the supreme manifestation of power? The world has long known and still knows slavery. Lords and masters claimed the extravagant right of disposing of other human beings. They all insisted, as a mark of authority, on their right of dealing death to their slaves. But truly, what was the power of these despots compared with the deep, sensitive, voluntary bond that united Plato to Socrates, or John to Christ? Epictetus suffered at the hands of Epaphroditus. For all that, Epaphroditus was not able to prevent his slave from reigning, through his thought, over the centuries. Epaphroditus’ right of possession seems to us ridiculous and shameful. Who can fairly envy him when so many centuries have passed judgement on him? VI Every philosophy has given magnificent expression to these immortal truths. What can we add to the words of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius, of Christ in regard to the vanity of those riches which alone society admits to be of value? But the poets have said to us, “Do not abandon the world, for it abounds in pure and truly divine joys that will be lost if you do not harvest them!” The road that ought to be sweet for us to follow crosses now that of the Christians, now that of the Stoics. We may stop now at the Garden of Olives, now at the threshold of that small house without a door, without furnishings, where the master of Arrien used to live. Our road will lead us even more often through wild, solitary places, or to the pillow of some man who sleeps in the earth, or to the smiling dwelling of some humble friend, or again into the melodious shadow where the souls of Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach forever dwell. We shall not struggle with the mass of deluded man to possess the known, so long as the unknown remains without a master. We shall give up crude material possession in order to dream all the better of spiritual possession. No, we cannot any longer renounce our kingdom when it calls to us, when for us it sings, hosanna! And those of us who already have their place in the kingdom of heaven must not hesitate to demand their share of this world also; for the world has been given to all men so that each man, with the help of all the rest, may possess the whole of it. III THE POSSESSION OF OTHERS I In the exile of the war I have fifteen comrades, and we live side by side like seamen on the deck of a ship. Everything brings us together: work, sleep, play, food and danger. Even our quarrels reunite us, for, in order to quarrel well, you have to know your man: between strangers disputes have little savor. I never chose these men for my companions, as I once thought I had a right to do. They have been given to me like a handful of fruit of which some is juicy and some green. They have been taken at random, as if by a drag of that net which respects nothing, from the swarming species of man. Thanks, therefore, to the blind and divine world which has thrown the net into the flood! They are my treasure, my study, and my daily task. They are my purpose, my horizon, my torment, and my recompense. Although far from my own people, far from those with whom I have carried on my life, I could not feel myself destitute, abandoned; the world is not empty for me since I have these fifteen men to manage, this cherished problem to ponder, this soil to work over, this vintage for the winepress. I accept the
{'title': "The Heart's Domain by Georges Duhamel", 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}