Ariel (3 page)

That is the question which troubles me
as I look upon you. Your first pages as I read them, your confessions in them of your private life so far, speak often of indecision, of astonishment, but never of enervation or of definite loss of will. I am sure that enthusiasm is still a living force with you. I know well that those notes of discouragement and pain which the absolute sincerity of your thought—a virtue even greater than hope itself—has caused to spring from the tortures of your meditation in your sad but inevitable meetings with Doubt, were not an indication of a permanent soul-condition; and did not
signify
in any case your want of confidence in the eternal virtue-force of life. But when the cry of anguish rose to your lips from the depths of your hearts, you did not suffocate it before utterance, like the austere and proudly silent Stoic in his punishment, but ended your cry with an invocation to that ideal which
“shall come
”—as with the note of a Messianic inspiration.

On the other hand, though I speak to you of hope and enthusiasm as high and fertile virtues, I would by no means cross that inviolable line which divides scepticism from belief, illusion from happiness. Nothing is farther from my thought than to confound with the natural gifts of youth, with its beautiful spontaneity of spirit, that indolent frivolity of thinking, which, as it is incapable of seeing more than a gambler’s motive in any human action, buys love, or tries to, buys life's pleasures at the cost of ignorance of all those things that may give one pause before the mysterious front, the solemn face of all realities. That is not the noble meaning of youth individual, or of the youth of peoples. I have always thought vain the policy of those statesmen, who shape America’s policies and guard her fate, to suppress, before they ever reach our shores, any sound or echo of human suffering from the older world or its literature—fearing lest,
mor
bid or unhealthy, it put in peril our fragile optimism. No firm training of the intelligence can be based on simple-minded isolation or on voluntary ignorance. Every problem proposed to human thought by the spirit of Doubt, every sincere reproach which is fulminated against Nature or against God himself from the breast of disheartenment or sorrow, has a right to reach our consciousness and there be considered and faced. The strength of our heart must show itself in accepting the riddle of the Sphinx; not in evading its awesome question.

Nor should you forget that even in bitterness of thought, as in joy, there may ever be a starting-point for action, often a fertile suggestion. When grief unmans, when it seems so irresistible as to prompt the abdication of the power to will, the philosophy which breeds such thoughts is unworthy of youthful souls. Then may the poet denounce “ the slack soldier who
fights beneath the flag of Death.” But when there rises from the heart of sorrow the manly wish for battle, for conquest or reconquest of that boon which is denied us, then it becomes a double spur to action, most potent impulse to life. So Helvetius thought the very loathing of one’s own lot a high prerogative of man, if, instead of dulling our sensibility in a slothful submission, it awaken it and become a spur to action. In that sense it has been well said that there are pessimisms which
aré
like inverted optimism: far from supposing the renouncement and condemnation of all being, they teach, with their discontent of the actual, the necessity of its renewal. That which humanity needs, to be saved from all pessimistic negation, is not so much a belief that all is well at present, as the faith that it is possible through life’s growth to arrive at a better state, hastened and discovered by the actions of men. Such faith in the future, belief in the efficacy of human energy, are the necessary condition of all strong action and all fecund thought. That is why I have wanted to begin with praising the eternal value of that faith which, being in youth a very instinct, needs the teaching of no dogma. For you all feel it stirring at the depths of your being, and know it for the divine suggestion of Nature itself.

Animated by this sentiment, enter you on life, its deep horizons before you, with the noble ambition of making your presence felt therein from the moment when you confront it with the glance of a conquistador. Join to the spirit of youth the initiative of the bold, the innovation of the genius. Perhaps everywhere to-day the action and the influence of youth is less effective in the march of human society than it ought to be, and less intense. Gaston Deschamps has noted it, in France, commenting on the tardy initiative of the younger generation in public life or cul-
ture,
and the scanty original thought which they contribute to the beaten track of the prevailing ideas. My impressions of the present America, so far as I can form a general opinion, despite the sad isolation in which live its peoples, would perhaps justify a like remark. And yet I seem to see everywhere expressed a need for some active revelation of new forces; and I hold that America stands much in need of her youth. Here is the reason for which I speak to you. This is why I am so extraordinarily concerned with the moral development of your minds. The force of your word and your example may come to embody the living energies of the past in the work of the future. I hold with Michelet that the right idea of education does not include only the teaching to the minds of the sons the experience of the fathers, but as well, and often more, the informing of the fathers’ experience with the innovating inspiration of the sons.

Let us then discuss how you shall consider the life that is awaiting you.

The divergence of individual vocations will impress divers directions upon your activities and cause to predominate in each one of you a disposition of mind predetermined by a definite aptitude. Some will be men of science, others of art, others still, of action. But over all the inclinations which may bind you severally to different tasks and ways of life, you should guard in your inner soul the consciousness of the fundamental unity of our nature, which demands that every human being be, above and before all, the unspoiled pattern of a man in whom no noble faculty of the mind be obliterated, and no lofty interest for all men have lost its communicative virtue. Before all modifications of profession and training stands the fulfilment of the destiny common to all rational beings. “There is one universal profession:—to be a man,” says
Guyau. And Renan, remembering
à
propos
of unbalanced and imperfect civilizations, that the end of the human creature cannot be only either to know or to feel or to imagine, but to be entirely and really human, defines the ideal of perfection to which he should bend his energies, as the possibility of offering in the individual type an abbreviated picture of the whole race.

Try, then, to develop so far as possible not any single aspect, but the plenitude of your being. Shrug not your shoulders before any noble and fecund manifestation of human nature, under the pretext that your own individuality ties you of preference to a different one. Be attentive spectators where you may not be actors. When that false and vulgarized idea of education, which thinks it subordinate wholly to utilitarian ends, takes upon itself to mutilate by such materialism the natural fulness of our minds, and by a premature specialization to proscribe the teaching of
anything that is disinterested or ideal, it fails to avoid the danger of training for the future minds that have become narrow, incapable of seeing more than the one aspect of a thing which immediately touches them, separated as by a frozen desert from other minds that in the same society have chosen other aspects of our life. The necessity of devoting ourselves each one to some determined activity, some special form of learning, surely need not exclude the inclination to realize, for the intimate harmony of our spirit, that destiny which is common to all rational beings. That special activity must be but the basic note of that harmony. The famous line in which the slave of the old play affirmed that nothing human was strange to him, being human himself, forms part of that cry of the heart which is eternal in the human consciousness because its meaning is inexhaustible. Our capacity to understand must only be lim
ited
by the impossibility of understanding souls that are narrow. To be unable to see more than one phase of nature, more than one human interest or idea, is like living in the shadow of a dream pierced by a single ray of sunlight. That intolerance, that exclusiveness, which when bom of tyrannous absorption in some high enthusiasm or flowing from some disinterested ideal may merit justification or even sympathy, becomes converted to the most abominable of inferiorities when in the circle of vulgar life it betrays the narrowness of a mind incapacitated to reflect on more than the partial appearances of things.

Unfortunately, in the very times when civilization reaches its highest level of culture is the danger of this limitation of minds most serious and its results most to be feared. For the law of evolution requires, as it appears in societies as well as individuals, an ever-increasing tendency to heterogeneity, which as the general cul-
ture
of society increases limits individual activities more and more and restricts the field of action of each one to an ever' narrower specialty. And though it be a necessary condition of progress, this development of the notion of specialization brings with it visible evils which not only lower the horizon of the eye of thought, thus distorting its image of the universe, but come to injure also the spirit of human solidarity by the particularization of individual habits and affections. Auguste Comte well noted this peril of advanced civilizations. A high state of social perfection had for him serious inconvenience in that it facilitated the appearance of narrow and bounded minds; of brains “very efficient under one aspect and monstrously inept under all others." The belittling of the human brain by continual exercise of one mode of activity is compared by Comte to the miserable lot of a labourer who by the division of labour is condemned in a
factory to devote all the energies of his being to the invariable repetition of a single mechanical detail. In each case the moral result is to inspire him with a disastrous indifference to the general interests of humanity. And although this sort of human automatism does not, says the positivist, occur save under the extreme dispersive influence of the principle of specialization, its actual existence, already frequent, requires that we should give serious consideration to its importance.

This dispersive influence injures the beauty of our institutions no less than their strength. The incomparable beauty of Athens, the imperishable pattern left to humanity of all that is admirable and enchanting by her divine hand, lies in that that city of prodigies founded its idea of life on the concert of all human faculties, in the free and chartered liberty of all energies capable of contributing to the glory or the power of mankind! For Athens
alone
could exalt at once the feeling for ideal with the real, reason with instinct, the forces of the body with those of the spirit. It chiselled clear the four sides to the soul. Every free Athenian draws, as it were, a circle about him to contain his activities, a perfect circle in which no unordered impulse shatters the graceful proportion of the line. He is athlete and living sculpture in the gymnasium, citizen on the Pnyx, polemic and thinker in the porticoes. He exerts his will in every virile action and his thought in any fertile task. Therefore averred Macaulay that a day in the public life of Athens comprised a more brilliant programme of instruction than any we now plan in our modem centres of education. And from that one free blooming of the fulness of our nature rose the miracle of Greece—an inimitable, enchanting mingling of animation and serenity, a springtime of the human spirit, a smile of history.

In our times the growing complexity of our civilization would make unserious the thought of restoring this harmony, which is only possible with elements of a gracious simplicity. But within that very complexity of our culture, that progressive differentiation of our characters, our aptitudes, our merits, which is the unavoidable consequence of a progress in social evolution, it behooves us to preserve a reasonable share for all in certain basic ideas or feelings which alone keep up the unity and concert of human life—in certain
interests of the soul
for which the dignity of the rational being suffers no indifference in any of us. When the sense of material utility and comfort dominates societies with the energy now shown, the results of narrow minds and one-sided culture are especially fatal to the growth of purely ideal occupations. From being an object of love to those who nobly and perseveringly cherish them, they change to an unknown land,
an unexplored region, whose very existence is unsuspected by an immense multitude of the others. Any sort of disinterested thought, of ideal contemplation, of inward truce, to which the daily newspaper yields for a moment its dominion, for one glance that is noble and calm direct from the heights of reason to things as they are, will thus remain, in the actual state of our society, unknown to millions of minds, minds “educated” and “civilized,” who are by our education and customs reduced to the automatism of an activity that is definitively material. And more: that kind of servitude should be held by us the very saddest and lowest of all the moral conditions we condemn. And I demand of you that in the battle of life you defend your souls against that mutilation of them by the tyranny of a single and self-interested object. Never give, to either passion or self
interest, but a small part of what i
s you.
For even in material
servitude there is a way to keep free one’s inner self, the self of reason and of feeling. So never do you try to justify, by your absorption in labour, in conflict, the enslaving of your soul.