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THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
EDITED BY FREDERIC CHAPMAN

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

\,

THE GARDEN
OF EPICURUS

A TRANSLATION BY
ALFRED ALLINSON

LONDON : JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK : JOHN LANE COMPANY : MCMVIII

WM. BBKKOON AND SOK, LTD., PSINTKKS, PLYMOUTH

CONTENTS

The Garden of Epicurus

On Nunneries ......

How I Discoursed One Night with an
Apparition on the First Origins of
the Alphabet .

,, Careers for Women

Miracle ....

Card Houses .

In the Elysian Fields

Aristos and Polyphilos on the
OF Metaphysics

The Priory

Language

rAGB

II

139

153

167

175

185

195

207

231

>,-.

Cecropius suaves exspirans hortultis auras
Florentis viridi Sophiag complectitur umbra,

CiRIS.

Qtie n'avons-nous connu vos caresses legeres,
O souses embautms de P antique jar din ^
O brises de Cecrops, divines messagereSy
Vous qui tentiezjadls le poete latin I

Oest de Ih que nos yeux^ dans un calme sourire,
Auraient pu voir au loin les erreurs des mortels,

UamUtiony V amour y egaux en leur delire.,
Et Pinutile encens brule sur les autels.

La Lamps d^ Argiky par Frederic Plessis.

Kai \(iKeTrwTeT(iiv Se Kaipiav KaracrxovToav rrjuiKavra
Trjv EXXa(5a, avToOi Kara/Siuivai Sig t] koi Tph eTTi tov$
irepi Ttjv Icoviav T6Trov(} SiaSpa/j-ovra Trpos tou? ^/Xoff, ol
Kai iravraxoQev irpo^ avTov acpucvovinro, nai avve/Siouv
avT(p v TO) KijTrtp, KaOa ^t]a-i koi. ATroWoSoopos' ov Kai
6ySo7]KOVTa ixvuiv irplaaOai'

Diogenes Laertius, De Iritis Pbihsophorumy lib. x. cap. i.

II acheta un beau jar din qUU cultivoit lui-^meme. Oest la ou
il etablit son ecole ; il menoit une vie douce et agreable ctvec ses
disciples qiiil enseignoit en se promenant et en travaillant. . . . II
etoit doux et affable a tout le monde. . . . II croyoit qu'il tiy a
rien de plus noble que de s'appliquer h la philosophie.

{Abrige de la vie des plus illustres philosophes de Pantiquite^ cuvrage
destine a P education de la jeunesse, par Fenelon).*

* A Cecropian garden-plot, breathing scented airs, enfolds me in
the verdant shade of flowering Sophia (Wisdom).

CiRis, vv. 3, 4.

Why have we not known your dainty caresses, oh ! scented airs
of the ancient garden, oh ! breezes of Cecrops, divine harbingers,
ye who tempted in olden days the Latin bard ! 'Tis thence our
eyes, in a tranquil smile, might have beheld afar off the errors of
mortal men, ambition and love, well matched in their frenzy, and
the unavailing incense burned on the altars.

La Lamfe d'ArgiU (The Lamp of Clay), by Frederic Plessis.

Moreover, very troublous times having come upon Greece in
those days, making it hard to live there, twice or thrice over he
took voyages in the regions of Ionia among his friends, who used
likewise to flock to him from all parts, and share his life in the
garden, as Apollodorus relates ; who tells us he purchased the plot
for eighty minae.

Diogenes Laertius, Li-ves of the PAilosofbers, Bk. x. ch. i.

He bought a fair garden, which he tilled himself. There it was
he set up his school, and there he lived a gentle and agreeable life
with his disciples, whom he taught as he walked and worked. . . .
He was gentle and affable to all men. . . . He held there was
nothing nobler than to apply oneself to philosophy.

(Summary of the Life of the most illustrious Philosophers of Antiquity,
Work destined for the Education of Youth, by Fenelon.)

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

E find it hard to picture to ourselves
the state of mind of a man of older
days who firmly believed that the
Earth was the centre of the Universe,
and that all the heavenly bodies
revolved round it. He could feel beneath his
feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames ;
very likely he had seen with his own eyes and
smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes
of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks.
Looking upwards, he beheld the twelve spheres,
first that of the elements, comprising air and fire,
then the sphere of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus,
which Dante visited on Good Friday of the year
1300, then those of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter,
and of Saturn, then the incorruptible firmament,
wherein the stars hung fixed like so many lamps.
Imagination carried his gaze further still, and his
mind's eye discerned in a remoter distance the Ninth
Heaven, whither the Saints were translated to

II

12 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

glory, the primum mobile or crystalline, and finally the
Empyrean, abode of the Blessed, to which, after
death, two angels robed in white (as he steadfastly
hoped) would bear his soul, as it were a little child,
washed by baptism and perfumed with the oil of
the last sacraments. In those times God had no
other children but mankind, and all His creation
was administered after a fashion at once puerile
and poetical, like the routine of a vast cathedral.
Thus conceived, the Universe was so simple that it
was fully and adequately represented, with its true
shape and proper motion, in sundry great clocks
compacted and painted by the craftsmen of the
Middle Ages.

We are done now with the twelve spheres and
the planets under which men were born happy or
unhappy, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault of the
firmament is cleft asunder. Our eyes and thoughts
plunge into the infinite abysses of the heavens.
Beyond the planets, we discover, instead of the
Empyrean of the elect and the angels, a hundred
millions of suns rolling through space, escorted
each by its own procession of dim satellites, invis-
ible to us. Amidst this infinitude of systems our
Sun is but a bubble of gas and the Earth a drop of
mud. The imagination is vexed and startled when
the astronomers tell us that the luminous ray
which reaches us from the pole-star has been

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 13

half a century on the road ; and yet that noble
star is our next neighbour, and with Sirius and
Arcturus, one of the least remote of the suns
that are sisters of our own. There are stars we
still see in the field of our telescopes which
ceased to shine, it may be, three thousand years
ago.

Worlds die, for are they not born ? Birth and
death are unceasingly at work. Creation is never
complete and perfect ; it goes on for ever under in-
cessant changes and modifications. The stars go
out, but we cannot say if these daughters of light,
when they die down into darkness, do not enter on
a new and fecund existence as planets, if the
planets themselves do not melt away and become
stars again. All we know is this ; there is no
more repose in the spaces of the sky than on earth,
and the same law of strife and struggle governs
the infinitude of the cosmic universe.

There are stars that have gone out under our
eyes, while others are even now flickering like the
dying flame of a taper. The heavens, which men
deemed incorruptible, know of no eternity but the
eternal flux of things.

That organic life is difilised through all parts of
the Universe can hardly be doubted, unless indeed
organic life is a mere accident, an unhappy chance,
a deplorable something that has inexplicably arisen

14 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

in the particular drop of mud inhabited by our-
selves.

But it is more natural to suppose that life has
developed in the planets of our solar system, the
Earth's sisters and like her, daughters of the Sun,
and that it arose there under conditions analogous
in the main to those in which it manifests itself
with us, under animal and vegetable forms. A
meteoric stone has actually reached us from the
heavens containing carbon. To convince us in
more gracious fashion, the Angels that brought St.
Dorothy garlands of flowers from Paradise would
have to come again with their celestial blossoms.
Mars to all appearance is habitable for living things
of kinds comparable to our terrestrial animals and
plants. It seems likely that, being habitable, it is
inhabited. Rest assured, there too species is
devouring species, and individual individual, at
this present moment.

The uniformity of composition of the stars is
now proved by spectrum analysis. Hence we are
bound to suppose that the same causes that have
produced life from the nebulous nucleus we call the
Earth engender it in all the others.

When we say life, we mean the activity of
organized 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

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 15

totally different environment, at extremely high or
extremely low temperatures, and under forms un-
thinkable 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.

Again, it is possible that these millions of suns,
along with thousands of millions more we cannot
see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or
lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute
insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we
can frame no conception, but which nevertheless
would itself, in proportion to some other world,
be no more than a speck of dust.

Nor is there anything absurd in supposing that
centuries of thought and intelligence may live and
die before us in the space of a minute of time, in
the confines of an atom of matter. In themselves
things are neither great nor small, and when we
say the Universe is vast we speak purely from
a human standpoint. If it were suddenly reduced
to the dimensions of a hazel-nut, all things keeping
their relative proportions, we should know nothing
of the change. The pole-star, included together
with ourselves in the nut, would still take fifty

i6 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

years to transmit its light to us as before. And
the Earth, though grown smaller than an atom,
would be watered with tears and blood just as
copiously as it is to-day. The wonder is, not that
the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has
measured it.

HRISTIANITY 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. It re-
peats with the Ecclesiast : "The arms of a woman are
like the nets of the hunters, laqueus venatorum." It
warns us not to put our hope in her : " Lean not
upon a reed shaken in the wind, and put not your
trust therein, for all flesh is grass, and the glory
thereof passeth away like the flower of the fields."
It dreads the wiles of this pest of the human race :
" All cunning is small beside the cunning of a
woman's heart. Brevis omnis malitia super malitiam
mulieris.'" But by the very terror it betrays of her,
it makes her strong and formidable.

To grasp the full significance of these maxims
you must have lived with the mystics. You must
have passed your childhood in a religious atmo-
sphere. You must have gone into " retreat " ;
followed the observances of the Church. You
must have read, at twelve years old, those little

B 17

1 8 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

books of edification that reveal the supernatural
world to simple souls. You must have known the
story of St. Francis de Borgia gazing into the open
coffin of Queen Isabella, or the apparition of the
Abbess of Vermont to her daughters in Christ.
The Abbess had died in the odour of sanctity, and
the nuns, who had shared in her works of angelic
piety, believing her in Heaven, were wont to invoke
her in their prayers. But one day she appeared to
them, with wan face and flames licking the border
of her robe. " Pray for me," she bade them ; " in
the days when I was alive, joining my hands in
prayer, I thought what pretty hands they were.
To-day I am expiating that sinful thought in the
torments of Purgatory. Know, my daughters, the
adorable goodness of God, and pray for me."
These little books of childish theology contain a
thousand tales of the kind tales that give purity
too exalted a price not to add an infinite zest to
carnal pleasures.

In consideration of their beauty, the Church
made Aspasia, La'fs, and Cleopatra into demons,
ladies of Hell. What glory for them ! Why, a
Saint would have appreciated the compliment !
The most modest and austere of womankind, who
has no faintest wish to destroy any man's peace of
mind, would fain have the power to destroy all
men's. Her pride is flattered by the precautions

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 19

the Church takes against her. When poor St.
Antony shouts at her : " Begone, foul beast ! "
his very alarm tickles her vanity deliciously. She
is ravished to find herself more dangerous than she
had ever suspected.

But never think too highly of yourselves, my
sisters ; you were not, at your first appearance in
the world, perfect and fully armed. Your grand-
mothers of the days of the mammoth and the giant
bear did not wield the same domination over the
prehistoric hunters and cavemen which you possess
over us. You were useful then, and necessary,
but you were not invincible. To tell the truth, in
those far-off ages, and for long afterwards, you
lacked charm. In those days you were like men, and
men were like brutes. To make of you the fearful
and wonderful thing you are to-day, to become the
indifferent and sovereign cause of countless sacrifices
and crimes, you still needed two things : Civiliza-
tion, which gave you veils, and Religion, which
gave you scruples. Since then your powers are
perfected ; you are now a mystery, and you are a
sin. Men dream of you and lose their souls for
you. You inspire longing and alarm ; love's
delirium has come into the world. Yes, it is an
infallible instinct inclines you to piety. You are
well advised to love Christianity. It has multi-
plied your puissance tenfold. Do you know St.

20 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Jerome ? At Rome and in Asia yoli inspired him
with such panic terror that he fled to escape you
into a frightful desert. There he fed on roots, and
the skin clung to his fleshless bones and was burnt
black by the sun, yet he found you there also.
His solitude was peopled with your phantoms, yet
more alluring even than yourselves.

For it is a truth, only too well proven by the
ascetics, that the dreams you excite are more seduc-
tive, if that is possible, than the realities you have
in your power to offer. Jerome rejected with
equal horror your presence and the remembrance
of your presence. But in vain he gave himself
up to fasts and prayers ; you filled his life, from
which he had expelled you, with hallucinations.
Such was the power of woman over a Saint. I
doubt if it is as great over an habitue of the
Moulin-Rouge. Take heed your empire be not
diminished along with men's belief in God ; beware
you do not lose a portion of your influence through
ceasing to be a sin.

Candidly I do not think rationalism is good for
you. In your place, I should not be overfond of
the physiologists who are so indiscreet, who are so
over ready to explain things to you, who say you
are sick when we think you are inspired, and who
attribute to the predominance of reflex actions
.your sublime potentialities for love and suffering.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 21

That is not the way they speak of you in the
Golden Legend ; * white dove,' Mily of purity,' * rose
of love,' are the names they give you there. Surely
this is more agreeable than to be dubbed hysterical,
cataleptic, subject to hallucinations, as you are
every day since science has ruled the roast.

Moreover, if I were one of you, I should cor-
dially detest all those emancipators of the sex who
are for making you into men's equals. They are
urging you to take a false step. Fine promotion,
to be sure, for you, to be as good as an attorney or
a druggist ! Take care, I say ; already you have
stripped off some particles of your mystery and
fascination. All is not lost. Men still fight, and
ruin and kill themselves for you ; but the young
fellows in tramcars leave you to stand on the plat-
form while they sit snug inside. Your cult is
declining along with other things once held sacro-
sanct.

"1AMBLERS play just as lovers make
love and drunkards drink, blindly
and of necessity, under domination
of an irresistible force. There are
beings vowed to play, as there are
others vowed to love. I wonder who invented
the story of the two sailors who were so
possessed by the lust of gambling ? They were
shipwrecked, and only escaped a watery grave,
after experiencing the most appalling vicissitudes,
by climbing on the back of a whale. The
instant they were installed there, they lugged
out of their pockets dice and dice-boxes and
settled themselves down to play. The story is
truer than truth. Every gambler is like those
sailors. And in very deed there is something in
play that does terribly stir the fibres of daring
hearts. Is it an insignificant delight to tempt
fortune ? Is it a pleasure devoid of intoxication
to taste in one second months, years, a whole life-
time of fears and hopes .? I was not ten years old
when M. Gr^pinet, my master in the junior class,

22

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 23

read us out the fable of the Man and the Genie.
Yet I remember the tale better than if I had read it
yesterday. A genie gives a boy a ball of thread,
and tells him : " This is the thread of your life.
Take it. When you find time heavy on your
hands, pull it out ; your days will pass quick or
slow according as you unwind the ball rapidly or
little by little. So long as you leave the thread
alone, you will remain stationary at the same hour
of your existence." The boy took the thread ;
first he pulled at it to become a man, then to
marry the girl he loved, then to see his children
grow up, to win offices and profit and honour,
to abridge anxieties, to escape griefs and the in-
firmities that came with the years, and finally, alas !
to cut short a peevish old age. He had lived
just four months and six days since the date of the
genie's visit.

Well, what is play, I should like to know, but
the art of producing in a second the changes that
Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of
many hours or even many years, the art of collect-
ing into a single instant the emotions dispersed
throughout the slow-moving existence of ordinary
men, the secret of living a whole lifetime in a few
minutes, in a word the genie's ball of thread ?
Play is a hand-to-hand encounter with Fate. It is
the wrestling of Jacob with the Angel, the pact of

24 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Doctor Faustus with the Devil. The stake is
money, in other words immediate, infinite possi-
bilities of pleasure. Perhaps the next card turned,
the ball now rolling, will give the player parks and
gardens, fields and forests, castles and manors
lifting heavenward their pointed turrets and fretted
roofs. Yes, that little dancing ball holds within it
acres of good land and roofs of slate with sculptured
chimneys reflected in the broad bosom of the Loire ;
it contains treasures of art, marvels of taste, jewels
of price, the most exquisite bodies in all the world,
nay ! even souls, souls none ever dreamt were
venal, all the decorations, all the distinctions, all the
elegance, and all the puissance of the world. What
do I say ^ It contains better than that ; it embraces
the dream and vision of it all. And you would
have me give up play ? Nay ; if play only availed
to give endless hopes, if our only vision of it were
the smile of its green eyes, it would be loved less
fanatically. But it has nails of adamant, it is cruel
and terrible, at its caprice it gives poverty and
wretchedness and shame ; that is why its votaries
adore it.

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. And what
more terrifying than play ? It gives and takes away ;

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 25

its logic is not our logic. It is dumb and blind and
deaf. It is almighty. It is a God.

Yes, a God ; it has its votaries and its saints,
who love it for itself, not for what it promises, and
who fall down in adoration when its blow strikes
them. It strips them ruthlessly, and they lay the
blame on themselves, not on their deity.

" I played a bad game," they say.

They find fault with themselves ; they do not
blaspheme their God.

HE human race is not susceptible
of an indeterminate progress. To
allow of its development, the Earth
had to conform to certain condi-
tions, physical and chemical, which
are not stable. There was a time when our
planet was not suitable for mankind ; it was too
hot and moist. A time will come when it will
cease to be suitable ; it will be too cold and
dry. When the sun goes out, a catastrophe
that is bound to be, mankind will have long
ago disappeared. The last inhabitants of earth
will be as destitute and ignorant, as feeble and
dull-witted, as the first. They will have for-
gotten all the arts and all the sciences. They will
huddle wretchedly in caves alongside the glaciers
that will then roll their transparent masses over
the half-obliterated ruins of the cities where now
men think and love, suffer and hope. All the elms
and lindens will have been killed by the cold ; and
the firs will be left sole masters of the frozen
earth. The last desperate survivors of human-

26

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 27

kind, desperate without so much as realizing why
or wherefore, will know nothing of us, nothing of
our genius, nothing of our love ; yet will they be
our latest-born children and blood of our blood.
A feeble flicker of the regal intelligence of nobler
days, still lingering in their dulled brains, will for a
while yet enable them to hold their empire over the
bears that have multiplied about their subterranean
lurking-places. Peoples and races will have dis-
appeared beneath the snow and ice, with the towns,
the highways, the gardens of the old world. With
pain and difficulty a few isolated families will keep
alive. Women, children, old men, crowded pell-
mell in their noisome caves, will peep through
fissures in the rock and watch a sombre sun mount
the sky above their heads ; dull yellow gleams will
flit across his disk, like flames playing about a
dying brand, while a dazzling snow of stars will
shine on all the day long in the black heavens,
through the icy air. This is what they will see ;
but in their heavy witlessness they will not so
much as know that they see anything. One day
the last survivor, callous alike to hate and love,
will exhale to the unfriendly sky the last human
breath. And the globe will go rolling on, bearing
with it through the silent fields of space the ashes
of humanity, the poems of Homer and the august
remnants of the Greek marbles, frozen to its icy

28 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

surfaces. No thought will ever again rise towards
the infinite from the bosom of this dead world,
where the soul has dared so much, at least no
thought of man's. For who can tell if another
thought will not grow into consciousness of itself,
and this tomb where we all shall sleep become the
cradle of a new soul } What soul, I cannot tell.
The insect's, perhaps.

Side by side with mankind, and in spite of him,
the insects, bees for instance, and ants, have already
wrought marvels. True, the ants and bees are
like us in needing light and heat. But there are
invertebrates less sensitive to cold. Who can fore-
tell the future reserved for their activity and
patience ?

Who knows if the earth may not become good
for them, when it has ceased to be habitable by
us ? Who knows if they may not one day develop
consciousness of themselves and the world they
live in ^ Who knows if in their time and season
they too may not praise God .''

TO LUCIEN MUHLFELD

E cannot represent to ourselves with
precision what exists no longer.
What we call local colour is a dream.
When we see how a painter has all
the trouble in the world to repro-
duce anything like a true likeness of a scene, say,
of the time of Louis Philippe, we may well despair
of his ever giving us the faintest notion of an
event that befell under St. Louis or Augustus.
We waste endless pains in copying old armour and
old oak chests. 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. Can an artist do better } Each of
their personages was someone of their own circle,
and these figures, living pictures of their life and
thought, remain for ever touching. They bear wit-
ness to future times of sentiments and emotions
actually experienced. Paintings of archaeological cor-
rectness testify only to the wealth of our museums.

29

30 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

If you would taste true art and see a picture
that gives a broad and deep impression, examine
the frescoes of Ghirlandajo in Santa-Maria-Novella
at Florence, representing the Birth of the Virgin.
The old painter shows us the room where the
mother has been delivered. Anne, raised on the
bed, is neither young nor beautiful ; but we see
at once she is a good housewife. She has ranged
at the head of the bed a jar of sweetmeats and two
pomegranates. A serving-maid, standing between
the bed and the wall, offers her a ewer on a
platter. The child has just been washed, and the
copper basin still stands in the middle of the floor.
The babe Mary is taking the breast ; her wet-
nurse for the nonce is a young and beautiful
woman, a lady of the city, a mother herself, who
has graciously offered to lend her bosom, to the
end the child and her own, having imbibed life at
the same fount, may keep the savour of it in
common, and by force of their blood love each
other like brother and sister. Near her stands
another young woman, or we should rather say a
young girl, like her in feature, perhaps her sister,
richly dressed, wearing the hair drawn away from
her brow and plaited at the temples like -Emilia
Pia ; she stretches out her two arms towards the
infant with a charming gesture that betrays the
awakening of the maternal instinct. Two noble

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 31

ladies, clad in the fashion of Florence, are coming
in to offer their felicitations. They are attended
by a serving-maid, carrying on her head a basket
of water-melons and grapes. The figure is of a
large, simple beauty ; draped in flowing garments
confined by a girdle the ends of which float in the
wind, she seems to intervene in this pious, domestic
scene like a dream of pagan antiquity. Well, in
this warm room, in these gentle womanly faces,
I see expressed all the life of Florence and the fine
flower of the early Renaissance. This goldsmith's
son, this master of the Primitives, has revealed in
his painting, which has the clearness and brilliancy
of a summer dawn, all the secret of that courteous
epoch in which he had the good fortune to live,
and which possessed so great a charm of its own
that his contemporaries themselves were wont to
cry : " The Gods are good indeed ! Oh, thrice-
blessed age ! "

It is the artist's part to love life and show us it
is beautiful. Without him, we might well doubt
the fact I

GNORANCE is the necessary con-
dition, I do not say of happiness,
but of life itself. If we knew every-
thing, 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 judgment, would
reduce it to powder.

32

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 him-
self, 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 hold-
ing all the perfume 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 I
c 33

34 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Woman has none of these wild fancies. More
often than not, what we take for jealousy in her is
only rivalry. But as for this torment of the senses,
this demoniacal possession by odious imaginings,
this insane and piteous frenzy, this physical rage,
she knows nothing of all this, or next to nothing.
Her feelings, in such a case, are less definite and
downright than our own. One kind of imagina-
tion is not highly developed in her, even in matters
of love and the senses, viz. the plastic imagina-
tion, the precise appreciation of definite outlines.
A large vagueness clings about her impressions,
and all her energies are equally agog for the
struggle. Once her jealousy is roused, she fights
with a fell obstinacy, at once violent and artful, of
which a man is incapable. The same spur that tears
our very vitals pricks her on to the contest. Her
dethronement only makes her strive the more reso-
lutely to win empire and domination. Her chagrin
is more than counterbalanced by the access of in-
solent self-confidence she draws from her dis-
appointment.

Look at Racine's Hermione. Her jealousy does
not exhaust itself in black fumes of impotent
passion ; she displays little imagination ; she does
not weave her torments into a lurid epic of heart-
breaking imaginings. She does not brood over her
wrongs, and what is jealousy without brooding ?

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 35

What is jealousy without the demoniacal possession,
the mad, monomaniacal obsession ? Hermione is
not jealous. Her mind is set on hindering a
marriage. She is resolved to prevent it at any
cost and win back a lover, that is all.

And when Neoptolemus is killed for her sake, by
her instrumentality, she is startled certainly ; but
her predominant feeling is chagrin, disappointment.
Her marriage project has miscarried. A man in
her place would have exclaimed : " So much the
better ; this woman I loved will never wed another
now 1 "

jOCIETY is vain and frivolous.
Granted. Nevertheless, it is no bad
school for politicians. Indeed we
may well regret it is so little fre-
quented by our present-day states-
men. What constitutes society .? Woman ; she is
its sovereign arbitress ; it exists by her and for her
exclusively. But Woman forms the great educating
influence for men ; she it is trains him in the gifts
that charm, courtesy, discretion, and the pride
that shudders to be self-assertive. She it is teaches
a few the art of pleasing, and all the useful
art of not displeasing. From her we learn the
lesson that human society is more complex and
more delicately adjusted than is generally suspected
by the politicians of the cafes. Last but not least,
it is she brings home to us the great truth that the
ideals of sentiment and the visions of faith are
invincible forces, and that it is by no means reason
that governs humankind.

36

HE comic soon becomes painful when
it contains a human element. Does
not Don Quixote sometimes make
you weep ? For my part, I greatly
enjoy certain books that breathe a
calm and contented disconsolateness, such as Cer-
vantes' incomparable romance, or Candide^ works
which are, if rightly regarded, manuals of toler-
ance and indulgent pity, holy bibles of benignity.

37

RUTH is not the objective of Art.
It is the Sciences 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.
The Chloe of Greek romance was never a real
shepherdess, nor Daphnis a real goat-herd ; yet
they please us still. The subtle-minded Greek
who narrated their story cared not a fig for sheep-
folds or goats. All he thought of was poetry and
love. So, being fain to unfold, for the gratification
of his fellow cits, a tale of sensuous and graceful
love, he took for setting the rustic country, where
his readers never went. For who were they .'' Old
Byzantine fellows, grown white in their palace
chambers, amidst strange, barbarous mosaics, or
behind the receipt of custom, whereat they had
amassed endless wealth. To enliven these peevish
greybeards the writer showed them a pair of
beautiful children. Then, for fear they might
confound his Daphnis and Chloe with the vicious
little brats of boys and girls that swarm in the

38

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 39

streets of great cities, he took care to add ; " The
two I am telling you about lived once upon a time
in Lesbos, and their history was depicted in a wood
sacred to the Nymphs." In fact, he took the same
excellent precaution which goodwives never fail to
adopt before beginning a fairy-tale, when they say :
" In the days when Berthe span," or " When the
animals used to talk."

If we are to have a really pretty story, the bounds
of everyday experience and usage must needs be
a little overstepped.

3C-

4

m

^

m

*l

,J^-^

I ^

E count love among things infinite.
It is not the women's fault.

40

CANNOT think that twelve hun-
dred 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 theatre a
simpleness of heart and sincerity of mind that
give a certain value to the feelings it experi-
ences. 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 dispenses with any help from the imagina-
tion. This is why it satisfies the great majority,
and likewise why it does not appeal very strongly
to pensive, meditative minds. Such persons appre-

41

42 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

date 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 theatre ; 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 senti-
ments to which these signs correspond. It will
depend on him whether the book be dull or bril-
liant, 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 vibrat-
ing like a harp-string, and so evokes a note from
the sounding-board of our soul. No matter how
skilful, 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 re-
placed 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.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 43

So too we see in all theatrical representations
(when literary or political quarrels do not com-
plicate 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.

OES death put an end to us utterly
and entirely ? I am not prepared
to deny it. It is highly possible.
In that case there is no need to
fear death :

Je suis, elle n'est pas ; elle est, je ne suis plus.^

But supposing that, while striking us down, it
leaves us still in existence, be sure we shall find
ourselves beyond the grave exactly the same as we
were on earth. Doubtless we shall feel not a little
abashed ; the thought is of a sort to spoil heaven
and hell for us beforehand. It robs us of all
hope, for the thing of all others we most earnestly
desire is to become something quite different from
what we are. But this is plainly forbidden us.

^ I am, it is not ; it is, I cease to be.

44

HERE is a little German book entitled,
Notes to Illustrate the Book of Life^ the
author's name Gerhard d'Amyntor,
containing much that is true, and
consequently much that is sad. In
it we see depicted the ordinary conditions of women's
life. " It is in these daily cares that the mother of a
family loses her buoyancy and strength, and is worn
to the very marrow of her bones. The everlasting
question, * What must we have for dinner to-day } '
the constantly recurring necessity of sweeping floors,
beating and brushing clothes, dusting furniture, all
this is the never-ceasing drip-drip of the water-drop
that slowly but surely breaks down mind as well as
body in the long run. It is in front of the kitchen
range that, by a cruel, commonplace magic, the
pretty pink-and-white fairy, with her crystal laugh,
is transformed into a smoke-dried and dismal-
looking black mummy. On the sooty altar where
the pot-au-feu simmers are sacrificed youth, free-
dom, beauty, joy ! " Such, as near as may be, are
Gerhard Amyntor's words.

45

46 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

This is indeed the lot of the vast majority ot
.^l^omen. Life is hard for them, as it is for men.
If we ask why existence in these days is so painful
and laborious, the answer is, it cannot well be
otherwise on a planet where the indispensable
necessities of living are so scarce, and involve such
toils and difficulties to produce and procure.
Causes so deep-seated, and which depend on the
very configuration of the earth, on its constitution,
its flora and fauna, are, alas ! permanent and
necessary. Work, with whatever fairness it may
be repartitioned, will always weigh heavy on the
major part of men and women ; few of either sex
can have leisure to develop their beauty and
intellect under aesthetic conditions. Only Nature
is to blame.

Meantime, what becomes of love ? It fares as
it may. Hunger is its great enemy. And it is an
incontrovertible fact that women are hungry. It
seems likely that in the Twentieth, as in the Nine-
teenth Century, they will do the cooking, unless,
indeed. Socialism brings back the period when the
hunters devoured their quarry while the flesh was
still warm, and Venus coupled forest lovers in the
wilds. Then woman was free. I am going to
make a confession : If I had created man and
woman, I should have framed them on a type
widely different from that which has actually

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 47

prevailed, that of the higher mammifers. I should
have made men and women, not to resemble the
great apes as they do, but on the model of the
insects which, after a lifetime as caterpillars, change
into butterflies and for the brief final term of their
existence havp no other thought but to love and
be lovely. I should have set youth at the end
of the human span. Some insects, in their last
metamorphosis, have wings and no stomach. They
are reborn in this purified form only to love an
hour and die.

If I were a god, or rather a demiurge, for the
Alexandrine philosophers teach that these minor
works of creation are rather the business of the
demiurge y or simply of some journeyman demon,
well, if I were demiurge or demon, it is these insects
I should have chosen as models whereon to fashion
mankind. I should have preferred man to accom-
plish, like them, in the preliminary larva stage the
disgusting functions necessary to nutrition. In
this phase, the sexes would not have been dis-
tinguished, and hunger would not have degraded
love. Then I should have so arranged that, in
a final metamorphosis, man and woman, unfurling
glittering wings, lived awhile on dew and desire
and died in a rapturous kiss. Thus I should have
added love as crown and recompense of their
mortal existence. Yes, it would have been better

48 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

so. However, I did not make the world, and the
demiurge who undertook the task did not take
advice from me. 1 have my doubts, between you
and me, if he ever consulted the philosophers and
men of parts at all.

T is a great mistake to suppose that
scientific truths differ essentially from
those of every day. The only dis-
tinction is their superior degree of
extension and precision. From the
point of view of practice, the difference is highly
important. At the same time we must not forget
that the savant's powers of observation are limited
to appearances and phenomena, and can never
penetrate the substance or know anything of the
true nature of things. An eye armed with a
microscope is only a human eye after all. It sees
more than the naked eye does, but not in any
different way. The man of science multiplies the
points of contact between man and nature, but it
is impossible for him to modify in any particular
the essential character of the mutual relations
between the two. He sees the manner of pro-
duction of certain phenomena which escape us,
but he is prohibited, just as much as we are, from
inquiring why they are so produced.

To demand a system of morals from Science is to
D 49

50 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

invite cruel disappointments. Men believed, three
hundred years ago, that the earth was the centre of
creation. Nowadays we know it is only a coagulated
drop of the sun. We know what gases burn at
the surface of the most distant stars. We know
that the universe, in which we are a wandering speck
of dust, is for ever in labour, bringing to birth and
devouring its offspring ; we know that heavenly
bodies are ceaselessly dying and being born. But
wherein has our moral nature been altered by these
prodigious discoveries ? Have mothers come to love
their little ones better or less ardently } Do we ap-
preciate the beauty of women any more or any less
in consequence ? Does a hero's heart beat any differ-
ently within his bosom } No, no I Be the earth great
or small, what matter is that to mankind ? It is always
great enough, provided it gives us a stage for
suffering and for love. To suffer and to love, these
are the twin sources of its inexhaustible beauty.
Suffering, pain, how divine it is, how misunder-
stood ! To it we owe all that is good in us, all that
makes life worth living ; to it we owe pity, and
courage, and all the virtues. The earth is but a
grain of sand in the barren infinity of worlds. Yet,
if it is only on the earth creatures suffer, it is greater
than all the rest of the universe put together.
Nay ! it is everything, and the rest is nothing.
For otherwise, without it, there is neither virtue

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 51

nor genius. What is genius, if not the art of charm-
ing away pain ? Very great minds have, I know,
cherished other hopes. Renan surrendered him-
self with smiling alacrity to the dream of a scientific
morality. He reposed an almost unlimited confidence
in Science. He believed it would change the world,
because it can tunnel mountains. I do not think
with him that it can make us gods. To say the
truth, I do not very much want it to. I do not feel
I have within me the stuff of a divinity, no matter
how petty a one. My feebleness is dear to me. I
cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of
my being.

LIBRARY

ONIVERSmr Of (LUMMV

HERE is a small canvas of Jean
Beraud's that possesses a strange
interest for me. It is called the Salle
Graffardf representing a public
meeting where we seem to see the
superheated brains fuming alongside the smoking
pipes and lamps. No doubt the scene has its comic
side ; but how deep and true is the comedy ! And
how sad ! This amazing picture contains one figure
that goes farther to make me understand the socialist
workman than twenty books of history and eco-
nomics. It is a little bald man, all head, no
shoulders to speak of, who is seated at the com-
mittee-table in his woollen comforter, an art work-
man, no doubt, and a man of ideas, sickly and
physically impotent, an ascetic of the proletariat, a
Sir Galahad of the workshop, as chaste, and as
fanatical, as the Saints of the Church in the Ages
of Faith. Verily the man is an Apostle, and as
we look at him we feel a new Religion is come to
birth among the masses.

52

"IN English Geologist, a man of the
finest and most unprejudiced intel-
lect, Sir Charles Lyell, established,
forty years or so ago, what is known
as the theory of subsisting causes,
or "causes now in operation."^ He proved that
the changes which have occurred in the course of
ages on the earth's surface were not due, as was
supposed, to sudden cataclysms, but were the
result of slow, almost imperceptible causes that
are equally in action at the present time. Ac-
cording to his argument, we see that these mighty
changes, the traces of which surround us, appear
so tremendous only because of the foreshortening
effect of vast periods of time, whereas in reality
they came about very gently and gradually. By
slow degrees and without any violent disturbance
the ocean changed its bed, and the glaciers crept

^ The first volume of the " Principles " was published in
1830; its title is a summary of Lyell's work: "Principles of
Geology : being an Attempt to explain the former changes of the
Earth's surface, by reference to Causes now in Operation." A. A.

53

54 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

down over the plains, hitherto covered with forests
of tree-fern. Similar transformations are being
wrought under our eyes, without our so much as
being able to observe them. In a word, where
Cuvier beheld a series of sudden and appalling
catastrophes, Charles Lyell makes us see only the
slow, beneficent action of natural forces. It strikes
one what benefits this theory of subsisting causes
would bring in its train, if it could be transferred
from the physical to the moral sphere, and made
the basis of a system of conduct. The spirit of
conservatism and the spirit of revolution would
there find a common ground of reconciliation.

Convinced that alterations are not felt or noticed
when they operate continuously, the opponent of
change would cease to block necessary reforms, for
fear of accumulating a reserve of destructive forces
at the very spot where he had set up an obstacle.
The revolutionary, on the other hand, would re-
frain from an imprudent and inopportune appeal
to energies he knew to be always in operation.
The more I think of it, the more I am persuaded,
if only the moral theory of subsisting causes won a
lodgment in the conscience of humanity, it would
metamorphose all the peoples of the earth into a
commonwealth of sages. The only difficulty is to
effect that lodgment, and it must be allowed it is a
formidable one.

\] HAVE been reading a book lately,
in which a poet and philosopher
shows us a race of men exempt
from joy, grief, and curiosity. On
quitting this new Utopia and com-
ing back to earth, when we look round and see
our fellows striving, loving, suffering, how one's
heart goes out to them, and how content one is
to suffer in sympathy ! How surely we realize
that here, and here only, is true joy to be found.
It springs from suffering, as the healing balm
flows from the wounded bark of the kindly tree.
They have killed passion, and at one and the same
blow slain joy and grief, suffering and pleasure,
good, evil, beauty, everything in short, and virtue
first and foremost. They are wise, yet they are
worthless. For what of worth is attained with-
out effort } What use that their life is long if
they leave it empty, if they do not live ?

The book goes far to make me, on reflection, well
content with man's lot, hard as it is, to reconcile
me with his painful existence, in a word to renew

55

56 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

my esteem for my fellow-creatures and my wide
human sympathies. It has another excellence : it
fosters our love of reality and enters a caveat
against the spirit of vain imaginings and self-
deception. By showing us a set of beings exempt
from the ills of life, it lets us see for ourselves that
these unfortunate favourites of fortune are actually
our inferiors, and that it would be the height of
folly to exchange (granting such a thing were
possible) our own condition for theirs.

Truly a pitiful sort of happiness ! Having
no passions, they have no art, no poetry. How
should they breed poets ? They can savour how
should they .? neither the Epic muse, that is in-
spired by the wild frenzies of love and hate, nor
yet the Comic, that laughs in merry concert with
the vices and foibles of mankind. They have lost
the power of imagining a Dido or a Phaedra, poor
emasculated minds 1 They cannot glimpse the
divine shades, the immortal spectres, that wander
by, shuddering, under the undying myrtles.

They are blind and deaf to the miracles of that
art of poetry which makes the common earth
divine. They have not Virgil ; and we call them
happy, because they have lifts and electric light.
Yet, be sure, a single beautiful line has wrought
the world more good than all the masterpieces of
mechanism !

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 57

Inexorable progress ! it has given us a people of
engineers that has neither passions, nor poetry, nor
love ! Alas ! how should they know love, seeing
they are happy ? Love blossoms only in pain.
What are lovers' plaints if not cries of suffering ?
"A god would be unhappy, how unhappy, in my
place ! " exclaims an English poet, with intense
feeling ; " a god, my beloved, could not suffer,
could not die, for you ! "

We had best forgive pain, and frankly admit it
is impossible to imagine a happiness greater than
what we enjoy in this human life of ours, so sweet
and so bitter, so bad and so good, at once ideal and
real, a life that embraces all things and reconciles
all opposites. Yes, that is our garden-plot, which
we must dig zealously.

ELIGIONS are strong and beneficent
because they teach man his raison
d'etre, the final causes of his exist-
ence. Those who have rejected the
dogmas of theological morality, as
almost all of us have done in this age of science
and intellectual freedom, have no means left of
knowing why they are in the world and what
they are come there to do.

Fate envelops us entirely in the mysterious pro-
cesses of her mighty alchemy, and really our one
and only resource is to give up thinking altogether,
if we are not to feel too cruelly the tragic absurdity
of living. It is here, in our absolute ignorance of
the why and wherefore of our existence, lies the
root of our melancholy and sick disgust of life.
Physical evil, moral evil, the miseries of the soul
and the senses, the prosperity of the wicked, the
humiliation of the just man, all this would still be
endurable, if we could grasp the system and economy
of it all, if we could divine a providence directing
the chaos. The believer finds a perverse pleasure

58

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 59

in his sores ; his enemies supply him with the
agreeable spectacle of their acts of violence and
injustice ; even his misdeeds and crimes do not rob
him of hope. But in a society where all faith is
blotted out in darkness, sin and sorrow lose all
their meaning, and only strike us as odious jests,
ill-omened farcical impertinences.

HERE is always a moment when
curiosity becomes a sin ; the Devil
has always ranged himself on the
side of the savants.

60

^HEN staying at Saint-L6, ten or a
dozen years ago, I met at the house
of a friend, who resides in that hilly
little town, a priest, a cultivated
and eloquent man, in whose conver-
sation I found no little pleasure.

Little by little, I won his confidence, and we
enjoyed many talks on serious subjects, in which
he revealed the acuteness and subtlety of his mind
no less than the fine spiritual candour of his soul.
He was a wise man and a saint. A finished casuist
and a great theologian, he expressed himself with
so much force and fascination that I found no plea-
sure so enthralling in the little place as listening to
him.

Yet it was several days before I dared look at
him. In stature, shape, and features he was a
monster. Picture a dwarf, bandy-legged and de-
formed, the whole man twitching and jumping
with a sort of St. Vitus's dance inside his soutane,
as in a bag. Close curls of fair hair surmounted
the brow, and by their revelation of youthfulness

6i

62 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

made the general aspect of the man more horrify-
ing still. At last, however, having plucked up
courage to look him in the face, I found a sort
of overmastering interest in contemplating his
hideousness. I looked and pondered. While the
lips, opening in a seraphic smile, displayed the
blackened remains of three teeth, and the eyes,
lifted to heaven, rolled horribly between blood-red
lids, I looked at him in admiring wonder. Far
from compassionating him, I envied a being so
miraculously preserved, by the utter deformity of
his person, from the trials of the flesh, the lapses
of the senses, and the temptations night brings on
its dusky wings. I deemed him happy among men.

Well, one day as we were walking together in
the sun down the slope of the hills on which the
town is built, discussing heavenly grace, suddenly
the priest stopped dead, and laying a heavy hand
on my arm, said in a ringing voice I can hear at
this moment

" I tell you this, I know it : chastity is a virtue
that cannot be preserved without a special interven-
tion of God's good help."

The speech showed me in a flash the unfathom-
able abyss of the sins of the flesh. What righteous
soul is not sore tempted, if this man, who had no
body, one would think, save as the vehicle of pain
and nausea, if he too felt the pricks of desire ?

ERSONS of great piety or high ar-
tistic sensibility infuse into Religion
or Art a refined sensuality. But
then sensuality always implies some
degree of fetish-worship. The poet
makes fetishes of words and tones. He lends
miraculous virtues to certain combinations of
syllables and, like the devotee, is fain to believe
in the potency of consecrated formulas.

There is more of ritual in verse-making than
most people think. Indeed, to a poet grown grey
in his art, writing verses is the fulfilment of a
sacrosanct ceremony. Such a mind is instinctively
opposed to novelty, and we need not wonder at the
intolerance that is its natural outcome.

We are hardly entitled even to smile when we
see the very men who, rightly or wrongly, lay
claim to have been the boldest innovators the first
to repudiate new ideas with the utmost indignation
and disgust. This is one of the commonest incon-
sistencies of the human mind, and the history of
religious reformation has some tragic instances to

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64 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

show. We have seen a Henry Estienne forced
to fly his country to escape the flames, and from
the land of exile denouncing to the stake his own
friends who did not see eye to eye with him ;
we have seen Calvin hounding Servetus to death ;
and all the world knows the extremity of intolerance
displayed by Revolutionaries.

At one time I knew personally an old Senator or
the Republic, who as a young man had been a
member of all the Secret Societies that conspired
against Charles X, had fomented fifty risings under
the Government of July, then in later life had
concocted plots to overturn the Empire and taken
a hand in three successive Revolutions. He was a
quiet, peaceable old man, whose face never lost its
look of smiling geniality in the debates in the
house. It seemed as though nothing could ever
again disturb the equanimity he had purchased
with so many years of weary turmoil. His whole
personality breathed only complacency and con-
tented acquiescence. Yet one day I saw him
roused to furious indignation. A fire that seemed
quenched long ago flamed up in his eyes. He was
looking out of a window in the Luxembourg and
saw a caucus of students filing in disorderly pro-
cession through the Gardens. The sight of this
innocent revolt against authority stirred him. to
a veritable frenzy.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 65

" Shameful, shameful, such a breach of order in
a public place ! " he cried out, his voice choking
with anger and alarm, and he sent for the police.
He was a fine old fellow. But after being a leader
of dmeutes himself, he dreaded the merest shadow of
rebellion. Men who have engineered revolutions
cannot endure that others should take upon them
to rise in revolt.

In the same way old poets, who have made their
mark by some poetical innovation, are bitterly
opposed to any further changes whatever. They
are only human after all. It is a painful thing, to
any but a great and wise philosopher, to see life
going on the same after one has ceased to influence
it, to feel oneself drowned in the flowing tide of
events. Poet, Senator, or Cobbler, a man finds it
hard to resign his claim to be the final cause of
things, the supreme motive of the created universe.

PEAKING generally, we may say
poets are not aware of the scientific
laws which they obey when they
make good verses. In matters of
prosody they cling, very rightly, to
the most artless " rule of thumb," and it would be
far from wise to blame them for it. In art as
in love, instinct is an adequate guide, and any light
science may throw on the subject only baffles the
eyes. Beauty is based ultimately on geometry,
but yet it is only by the Ecsthetic sense we can
grasp its delicate shades and shapes.

Yes, poets are lucky men ; a part of their
strength resides in the very fact of their ignorance.
Only they must not be too keen to argue about the
laws of their art ; when they lose their innocence
their charm goes with it, and like fish out of water
they flounder helplessly in the arid regions of
theory.

66

X

HAT a foolish phrase, the " know
thyself" of the Greek philosopher !
Why, we can never know either
ourselves or others. A fine task,
indeed ! To create a new world
would be less impossible than to comprehend the
old. Irlegel had an inkling of this. Perhaps the
human intellect may one day avail to frame a
universe ;' it is for ever incompetent to conceive
things as they are. So it is an iniquitous abuse
of intelligence, nothing less, to employ it in search-
ing after trutih. Still less can it help us to set up
a standard of justice, and weigh men and their
works thereby . It is properly enough employed
over those g?*mes, more complicated than shovel-
board or chfjss, which we call Metaphysics, Ethics,
Esthetics. But the way it serves us best and
gives most gratification is by seizing here and
there some salient angle, some bright spot of
thirigs existent, and making play with it, yet never
spoiling the innocent frolic by a spirit of system
and moral sententiousness.

67 -^

/

^OU say that our habit of philosophiz-
ing is at the root of all our ills.
But to hold it so disastrous as z\\
this is surely a monstrous exagger-
ation of its importance and power.
As a matter of fact, the reason trespasses far
less than people think on the domains of the in-
stincts and natural feelings, even in persons whose
reasoning faculties are most highly developed, but
who are every whit as selfish and greedy and.
sensual as the generality of mankind. We shall
never find a Physiologist submitting his heart-beats
and the rhythm of his respiration ^o the dictates
of pure reason. No matter how advanced, how
scientific the civilization, the operations that men
undertake according to reasoned metliod are few in
number and unimportant compared with such as in-
stinct and common impulse perform of tlremselves.
So little does our conscious will react against our
reflex activities that I am afraid to say that human
societies exhibit anything approaching an intellect ual
constitution as distinguished from a natural.

68

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 69

After all is said and done, a metaphysician is not
so widely different from the rest of mankind as
people think and as he wishes them to think.

And, then, what is thinking ? and how do we
think ? We think with words ; that by itself con-
stitutes a sensible basis and brings us back to
iiatural preconditions. Reflect a little ; a Meta-
physician possesses, to build up his system of the
Universe with, only the perfected cries of apes and
dogs. What he styles profound speculation and
transcendental method is only setting in a row,
arbitrarily arranged, the onomatopoetic noises where-
with the brutes expressed hunger and fear and
desire in the primeval forests, and to which have
gradually become attached meanings that are as-
sumed to be abstract only because they are less
definite.

Never fear ; this series of petty noises, deadened
and enfeebled in the course of ages, that goes to
make up a book of philosophy will never teach us
too much of the Universe to permit us to inhabit
it any longer. We are all in the dark together ;
the only diflTerence is, the savant keeps knocking at
the wall, while the ignoramus stays quietly in the
middle of the room.

TO GABRIEL SEAILLES

CANNOT say whether this world

of ours is the worst of all possibh

worlds. I hold it is gross flattery

to grant it any pre-eminence, were

it only the pre-eminence of evil.

What we can imagine of other worlds is very

little, and physical astronomy affords us no very

precise information as to the conditions of life

on the surface even of those planets which are

nearest to our own. 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. We have

no reason to suppose that life is any better on

the surface of those giant globes, Jupiter, Saturn,

Uranus, and Neptune, whi^ci' glide silently through

the infinite spaces of tfle sky where the sun is

already beginning to -Use some portion of his heat

and light. Who can tell what kind of beings

inhabit these worlds shrouded in dense, swiftly

70

N

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 71

shifting vapours ? Judging by analogy, we can-
not help thinking that our whole solar system is
one vast gehenna, where animal life is born only to
suffer and to die. Nor can we comfort ourselves
with the fancy that perhaps the fixed stars give
light to planets of happier conditions. No, the
stars are too much like our own sun for that.
Science has decomposed the feeble ray they take
years, centuries, to transmit to us ; and the analysis
of their light proves that the substances which burn
on their surface are the very same that surge and
eddy round the orb which, ever since men have
been in existence, has lighted and warmed their life
of misery and folly and pain. This analogy alone is
enough to fill me with a sick disgust of the Universe.
The homogeneity of its chemical composition
makes me expect with only too great assurance a
rigorous monotony in the conditions of spirit and
flesh that prevail throughout its inconceivably vast
extent, and I have every reason to fear that all
thinking beings are as wretchedly unhappy in the
world of Sirius or the star-system of Altalr as they
are, within our own knowledge, on the Earth. But,
you say, all this does not constitute the universe.
Yes, I have a shrewd suspicion you are right ; I
feel these immensities are nothing, in fact I am
convinced that, if there is anything, that anything
is not what we see.

72 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Yes, I feel we live surrounded by a mere phantas-
magoria, that our glimpse of the universe is purely
the effect of the nightmare that breaks the restless
sleep that is our life. And this is the worst blow
of all. For it is plain we can know nothing, that
all things combine to deceive us, and that Nature is
only making cruel sport of our ignorance and
helplessness.

TO PAUL HERVIEU

AM convinced in my own mind that
humanity has always identically the
same total of folly and dullness to
spend. It is a capital that is bound
to bear interest in one way or
another. The great thing to know is whether,
after all, the imbecilities that time has conse-
crated do not form the best investment a man
can make of his stupidity. Far from feeling glad
when I see some time-honoured fallacy exploded,
I think of the new one that will come and take
its place, and 1 ask myself the anxious question,
will it not perhaps be more inconvenient and
dangerous than the other ? On full and sufficient
consideration, the old prejudices are less baneful
than the new ; time, by long usage, has given them
a polish and made them almost innocent.

73

EN 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 expert
in this calculation of probabilities, and learn to
seize such chances as come their way without
wearing out their patience waiting for the concur-
rence of them all.

74

HEN we say life is good, life is evil,
we are stating a meaningless propo-
sition. 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. The truth is, that
life is delightful, odious, charming, repulsive, sweet,
bitter, in fact that it is everything. It is like the
harlequin of our friend Florian ; one man sees it
red, another blue, and both see it as it is, inasmuch
as it is red and blue and all other colours. Here
is a way to bring us all into agreement and recon-
cile the philosophers who are all tearing each
other's eyes out. But there, we are so constituted
that we will force others to feel and think as we do,
and we cannot suffer our neighbour to be merry
when we are sad ourselves.

75

I]VIL 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 em-
bedded in the other that it is impossible to inter-
fere 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.

I enjoyed the pleasure of seeing, one day at a
country fair, the life of St. Antony the Great
represented by marionettes. As a lesson in philo-

76

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS t]

sophy, such a show beats Shakespeare's tragedies
hollow, to say nothing of M. d'Ennery ! Oh,
how vividly it brings before us the two things
working together to one end, God's grace and the
Devil's !

The stage represents a horrid desert, to be
peopled presently with angels and demons. The
action, as it proceeds, impresses the mind with a
grim presentiment of fatality, an impression partly
resulting from the symmetrical alternation of
demons and angels as participators, partly from the
gait and bearing of the characters, who are moved
by strings manipulated by an invisible hand.
Nevertheless, when, after his orisons, St. Antony,
still on his knees, lifts his brow, which has grown
as hard and humpy as a camel's knees by dint of
so many, many prostrations on the stones, and
raising his tear-worn eyes, sees the Queen of Sheba
standing there before him in her golden robe,
opening her arms invitingly and smiling at him,
we shake and shiver with apprehension lest the
Saint yield to temptation, and we follow with
anguished anxiety the harrowing spectacle of his
trials and tribulations.

The fact is, we all see ourselves in him, and
when he has finally won the day, we feel ourselves
personally interested in his victory. It is the
triumph of humanity as a whole in its everlasting

78 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

strife and struggle. St. Antony is a great Saint only
because he has successfully resisted the Queen of
Sheba. Well, is it not obvious then, that in send-
ing this beauteous lady, who hides her cloven hoof
under a trailing skirt embroidered with pearls, to
visit the Hermit, the Devil performed an act which
was indispensably necessary to constitute his Saint-
ship.

Thus the marionettes confirmed me in my belief
that evil is an indispensable pre-condition of good,
and the Devil a necessity to the moral beauty of
the universe.

HAVE known savants as simple
and unassuming as children, and
every day we meet ignoramuses
who deem themselves the axis of
the world. Alas ! each one of us
regards himself as the hub of the universe. It
is a delusion common to all mankind. The
crossing-sweeper is not exempt. His eyes tell him
so ; as he looks around him, he sees the vault
of heaven rounding him about on every side,
making him the very centre of heaven and earth.
It may be the presumption is a little shaken in the
mind of the man who has thought deeply. Hu-
mility, a rare thing among the learned, is rarer still
with the ignorant.

79

PHILOSOPHICAL theory of the
universe is as much like its proto-
type as a sphere, in which merely
the lines of latitude and longitude
are traced, would be like the actual
earth. Metaphysics has one admirable peculiarity;
it takes away from the universe whatever it has
and gives it what it had not, a wondrous work
no doubt, and a finer game, an incomparably
nobler one, than draughts or chess, but, when
all is said, of a like sort. The universe as plotted
by the metaphysicians is resolved into geometrical
lines, the arrangement of which is a diverting
amusement. A system like that of Kant or Hegel
does not differ essentially from those combinations
of cards with which women foretell fortunes, and
so cheat the monotony of their lives.

80

O think it is possible, I tell myself,
as I read this book, to charm us
thus, not with forms and colours, as
Nature does in her happy moments,
which are few and far between,
but just with little conventional signs borrowed
from language 1 These signs awake in us divine
images. That is the miracle. A beautiful verse
is like a violin-bow drawn across the resonant
fibres of our soul. It is not his own thoughts,
but ours, that the Poet sets singing within us.
When he tells us of a woman he loves, it is our
loves and griefs he awakes entrancingly in our
souls. He is an evoker of spirits. When we
understand him, we are as much poets as he. We
have in us, every one of us, a copy of each of our
poets which no man knows of and which will perish
utterly and for ever with all its variants when we
shall cease to feel and know. And do you suppose
we should love our lyric bards so fondly, if they
spoke to us of aught else but our own selves ^ It
is all a happy misapprehension 1 The best of them

82 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

are sheer egoists. They are thinking of themselves
all the time. It is only themselves they have put
into their verses and it is only ourselves we find
there. The poets help us to love ; that is all they
are for. And surely it is a good and sufficient use
to put their delightful vanity to. Their stanzas are
in like case with women, nothing more unprofit-
able than to praise them ; the best loved will always
be the loveliest. As to compelling the public to
confess the object of our special choice to be in-
comparable, that is a task better befits a knight-
errant than a man of sober sense.

IFE is an ordeal, a test, so say the
Theologians. I am sure I do not
know ; at any rate it is not one we
submit to voluntarily. The con-
ditions are not laid down with
sufficient clearness. In fact, it is not fair and
equal for all. How can life be a test, for chil-
dren who die directly after birth, and idiots, and
madmen } Ah ! these are objections that have
been answered long ago. Yes, they are always
being answered, and I am bound to say the answer
cannot be very convincing, if it has to be repeated
so often. Life does not bear the look, somehow,
of an examination-room. It is much more like a
vast pottery-works, where they manufacture all
sorts of vessels for unknown purposes, a good
many of which get broken in the making and are
tossed on one side as worthless potsherds, without
ever having been used. Others again are only
employed for ridiculous or degrading ends. That
is the way with us too.

83

TO PIERRE VEBER

"[HE fate of Judas Iscariot fills us
with endless amazement. For, after
all, the man of Kerioth came into
the world to fulfil the prophecies ;
he was bound to sell the Son of
God for thirty pieces of silver. And the traitor's
kiss is, just as much as the spear and the nails
all Christians venerate, one of the necessary in-
struments of the Passion. Without Judas, the
mystery were not accomplished nor the human
race saved. And nevertheless it is an estab-
lished dogma with Theologians that Judas is
damned. They base it on the words of the
Christ : " Good were it for that man if he had
never been born." This thought, that Judas lost
his soul while working for the salvation of the
world, has tormented not a few Christian mystics,
and amongst the number the Abb6 CEgger, Senior
Vicaire of the Cathedral Church of Paris. The
good priest, whose soul was full of tender pity,
could not endure the idea that Judas was in Hell,
suffering everlasting torments. He thought and

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 85

thought, and the more deeply he pondered, the
more baffling grew his doubts and difficulties.

He came to the conclusion that the redemption
of this unhappy soul was under consideration of
the Divine clemency, and that, despite the dark
saying of the Gospel and the tradition of the
Church, he of Kerioth was finally to be saved.
His doubts were beyond bearing, and he longed
fervently for enlightenment. One night, as he
could not sleep, he got up and, passing through
the sacristy, entered the great empty church, where
the lamps of perpetual adoration were burning in
the thick darkness. Falling on his face before the
high altar, he began to pray :

"O God ! Thou God of love and pity, if it is
true Thou hast received into Thy glory the most
unhappy of Thy disciples ; if it is true, as I hope
and would fain believe it is, that Judas Iscariot
is seated at Thy right hand, command him to come
down to me and proclaim to me himself the chiefest
masterpiece of Thy clemency.

*^* And thou, whose name all men have cursed for
eighteen hundred years, and whom I revere because,
methinks, thou hast chosen Hell for thyself alone
in order to leave Heaven free to us, scape-goat of
all traitors and cowards and deceivers, O Judas,
come and lay thy hands on me for consecration to
the priesthood of pity and loving-kindness 1 "

86 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Then, as he lay there after his prayer was ended,
the priest felt two hands laid upon his head, like
the Bishop's at the ceremony of ordination. Next
day he went to the Archbishop and announced his
vocation. " I am," he told him, " consecrated
Priest of Pity, after the Order of Judas, secundum
ordinem Judas."

And, that very day, M. CEgger set forth to
preach through the world the Gospel of the In-
finite Pity, in the name of Judas redeemed. His
mission ended in mere misery and madness. M.
CEgger turned Swedenborgian and died at Munich.
He was the last and most gentle-hearted of the
Cainites.

MONSIEUR ARISTIDE, who is a

great sportsman, a fine shot and a
keen rider to hounds, saved a brood
of young goldfinches just hatched in a
rosebush below his window. A cat
was clawing up into the bush. It is a good thing,
when it comes to action, to believe in final causes, and
hold that cats are made for killing mice or else for
receiving a charge of lead in the ribs. M. Aristide
picked up his revolver and fired at the cat. At
first blush, one is pleased to see the nestlings saved
and their enemy punished. But this revolver-shot
is like all other human acts, you somehow cease to
see the justice of it when you look too close. Be-
cause, if you think of it, the cat, which had its
sporting instincts like M. Aristide, might very well
believe with him in final causes, and in that case
feel quite sure goldfinches were hatched for him.
It was a very natural mistake. The revolver-charge
taught him rather late in the day that he was in
error as to the final cause of the little nestlings
twittering in the rose-bushes. What living being

7

88 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

but deems himself the end and aim of the universe,
and acts as if he were so ? It is the very corner-
stone of life. Each one of us thinks the world has
himself for its object. When 1 say us, I am not
forgetting the brutes. There is not an animal that
does not feel itself the supreme end for which
things were created. Our neighbours, like M.
Aristide's revolver, never fail to undeceive us
sooner or later, our neighbours, or just a dog, a
horse, a microbe, a grain of sand.

HATEVER wins its vogue only by-
some trick of novelty and whim of
aesthetic taste ages fast. Fashions
change in Art as in everything else.
There are catch -words that come
up and profess to be new, just like the frocks
from the great dressmakers' in the Rue de la
Paix ; like them, they only last a season. At
Rome, in the decadent periods of Art, the statues
of the Empresses showed the hair dressed in the
latest mode. Soon these coiffures looked ridicu-
lous ; so they had to be changed, and the figures
were given marble wigs. It were only fitting that
a style as rococo as these statues should be re-
periwigged every year. The fact is, in these days
when we live so fast, literary schools last but a
few years, sometimes but a few months. I know
young writers whose style is already two or three
generations out of date, and seems quite archaic.
This is the result, doubtless, of the marvellous
progress in industry and machinery that carries
modern communities along in its dizzy sweep. In

89

90 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

the days of MM. de Goncourt and railways, we
could still spend a fairly long time over an artistic
piece of writing. But since the telephone, Litera-
ture, which depends on contemporary manners,
renews its formulas with an altogether disconcert-
ing rapidity. So we will merely agree with M.
Ludovic Hal6vy that the simple form is the only
one adapted to travel peacefully, we will not say
down the centuries, that is assuming too much,
but at any rate down the years.

The only difficulty is to define what the simple
form is, and it must be allowed to be a great one.

Nature, at any rate as we can know her, and in
an environment adapted for organic life, offers us
nothing simple, and Art cannot aspire to more
simplicity than Nature. Yet we understand well
enough what we all mean, when we say such and
such a style is simple, and such and such another
is not.

I will say this much then, that if properly speak-
ing there is no simple style, there are styles which
appear simple, and it is just these that carry youth
and power of duration with them. It is only
left now to inquire whence they get this lucky
appearance. Doubtless we shall conclude they owe
it, not to the fact of their being less rich than
others in divers elements, but rather because they
form a whole in which all the parts are so thoroughly

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 91

blended that they cannot be distinguished separately.
A good style, in fact, is like yonder beam of light
that shines in at my window as I write, and which
owes its pure brilliancy to the intimate combination
of the seven colours of which it is made up. A
simple style is like white light. It is complex, but
does not seem so. This is only a simile after all,
and we know what such parallels are worth when
it is not a poet that draws them. What I wanted
to make plain is this : in language, true simplicity,
the simplicity that is good and desirable, is only
apparent, and results solely from the fine co-ordina-
tion and sovereign economy of the several parts of
the whole.

S I cannot conceive beauty independ-
ent of time and space, I only begin
to take pleasure in works of the
imagination when I discover their
connexion with life ; it is the point
of junction between the two that fascinates me.
The coarse pottery- ware of Hissarlik has made
me love the Iliad more, and I can better ap-
preciate the Divine Comedy for what I know of
Florentine life in the Thirteenth Century. It is
the man, and the man only, I look for in the
artist. The finest poem, what is it but a replica }
Goethe has an illuminative phrase : " The only
durable works are works of circumstance." But
it is not too much to say that all works are
works of circumstance, because all depend on the
place and particular time when they were created.
We cannot understand them nor love them with
an intelligent love, unless we know the place, time,
and circumstances of their origin.

A man is ipso facto convicted as a vain-glorious
fool who supposes he has produced a work that can

92

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 93

stand alone and self-sufficing. The highest has
value only in virtue of its relations with life. The
better I grasp these relations, the more interest I
feel in the work.

T Is possible, and it is right, to tell
everything, when you know how to
do it. It would be so profoundly
interesting to listen to a confession
that was absolutely sincere ! Yet
since the world began, nothing of the kind has
ever been heard. No man has told everything,
not even the fiery Augustine, more concerned to
confound the Manichaeans than to lay bare his
soul, not even poor Rousseau, a great man, whom
his own disordered brain led to vilify himself.

94

HE secret influences of daylight
and atmosphere, the thousand pangs
emanating from all Nature, are the
ransom of sensuous beings, prone to
find their delight in the shapes and

colours of things.

95

_

NTOLERANCE is of aU 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 the origin of their faith. It is just as
well ; if we looked too close into first principles,
we should never believe at all.

96

ANY people in these days are con-
vinced that we have reached the
last word of all the civilizations,
and that after us the world will
come to an end. They are mille-
narians like the Saints of the early Christian ages,
but reasonable, reflecting millenarians, in the
taste of the period. 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 resem-
blance we share with our fathers pass unnoticed.
The world moves very slowly. Man has a natural
G 97

98 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

genius for imitation. He hardly ever invents.
There is, in psycholc^ no less than in physics, a
law gravitation that binds us down, as ever, to
the groand. Th^phile Gautier, who was a philo-
sopher in his way, widi something of the Grand
Turk in his attitude of mind, would remark, with
a look of melancholy, that men had not so much as
managed to invent an eighth mortal sin. This
morning, as I walked the streets, I saw some masons
who were building a house, and they raised the
stones czactfy as the slaves of Thebes and Nineveh
did. I saw a newly-married pair leave the church
on dieir way to the tavern, followed by their
frioids and relations ; they were accomplishing
cheerfully enough rites tiiat are centuries and
centuries old. I met a lyric poet who stopped me
and recited some of his verses, which he deems
immcntal ; and as we stood there, horsemen were
passing by along the road, wearing a helmet, the
helmet of the Roman legionaries and the Greek
hoj^tes, the helmet of shining bronze of the
Homeric warriors, from which still hung, to terrify
the foe, the waving mane that frightened the child
Astyanax in die arms of his ** wdl-girdled nurse."
They were a detachment of the Gardes RepubBcMKS.
Seeing these things and remembering how the
Paris bilkers stiH bake bread in ovens, as in the
dxf% of Abraham, I rqpeated to myself the words

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 99

of the Book : " There is no new thing under the
sun." And I ceased to think it strange to sub-
mit to civil laws that were already ancient when
the Emperor Justinian embodied them in a vener-
able code.

HERE is one thing in especial that
gives a charm to men's reflexions,
and that is a sense of disquietude.
A mind that is not anxious I find
either irritating or tiresome.

E call men aangerous whose minds
are made differently from our own,
and immoral those who profess
another standard of ethics. We
condemn as sceptics all who do not
share our own illusions, without ever troubling
our heads to inquire if they have others of their
own.

lOI

UGUSTE COMTE has by this time
taken his proper place beside Des-
cartes and Leibnitz. That part of
his philosophy which deals with the
mutual relations of the sciences and
their several subordinations to each other, and
that too in which he disentangles from the mass
of historical facts a positive system of sociology,
constitute from henceforth one of the most pre-
cious and fruitful possessions of the human mind.
On the contrary, the scheme formulated by that
great thinker, towards the end of his life, with a
view to a new organization of society, has found
no favour outside the bounds of the Positivist
Church ; it forms the religious part of the work.
Auguste Comte conceived it under the influence of
a pure and mystical love. The woman who inspired
him, Clotilde de Vaux, died within a year of her
first meeting the philosopher, who vowed to her
memory a cult to be observed for ever by his faith-
ful disciples. The religion of Auguste Comte was
inspired by love. Yet it is gloomy and tyrannical.

1 02

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 103

In It every act of life and thought is strictly regu-
lated. It confines existence within a geometrical
figure. All curiosity of mind is sternly reprobated.
It tolerates only the useful branches of knowledge,
and entirely subordinates intellect to sentiment. It
is noteworthy, this ! From the very fact of the
doctrine being based on science, it assumes science
to be definitely constituted, and far from en-
couraging the further prosecution of researches, it
actually disapproves and censures any that have not
for their object the direct advantage of mankind.
This alone would be enough to prevent my donning
the neophyte's white robe and going to knock at the
door of the temple in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince.
To banish caprice and curiosity, what ruthless
cruelty !

What I complain of is not that the Positivists
choose to forbid us all investigation into the
essence, origin and end of things. I am quite
content to remain for ever ignorant of the cause
of causes and the end of ends. 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 dis-
heartening 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

I04 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

living ? It will not suffer us to play at our own
free will with phenomena and intoxicate ourselves
with the vain shows of things. It condemns the
agreeable mania for exploring the remote regions of
the heavens. Auguste Comte, who taught astron-
omy for twenty years, was for confining the study
of the science to the visible planets of our own
system, the only heavenly bodies, he declared,
that could exercise an appreciable influence on the
Great Fetish. That was the name he gave to the
Earth. But, let me tell him, the Great Fetish would
not be habitable to certain minds, if life on it were
regulated hour by hour, and if no one was allowed
to do useless things, as for instance to ponder on
the double stars.

MUST act because I live," says
the homonculus that issued from
Doctor Wagner's alembic. And, in
very truth, to live is to act. Un-
fortunately, the speculative turn of
mind unfits men for acting. The empire of this
world is not for such as long to understand every-
thing. It is a disabling weakness to see beyond
the immediate object in view. It is not horses
and mules only that need blinkers to keep them
from shying. Philosophers will stop in the road
and loiter out of the path, on an errand. The
story of Little Red Ridinghood is a great lesson
to Statesmen who carry the little pot of butter and
are so much better for not knowing if there are
nuts along the woodland ways.

105

HE more I think over human life
the more I am persuaded we ought
to choose Irony and Pity for its
assessors and judges, as the Egyp-
tians called upon the goddess Isis
and the goddess Nephtys on behalf of their dead.
Irony and Pity are both of good counsel ; the first
with her smiles makes life agreeable ; the other
sanctifies it to us with her tears. The Irony I
invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love
nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed.
Her mirth disarms anger, and it is she teaches
us to laugh at rogues and fools, whom but for
her we might be so weak as to hate.

io6

HE man will always have the crowd
with him who is sure of himself as
he is of the world at large. That
is what the crowd likes ; it demands
categorical statements and not proofs.
Proofs disturb and 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.

107

HE dead are very readily open to
reconciliations. It is a good instinct
to join indiscriminately in glory and
affection the workers who, albeit
enemies, yet worked in common at
some great moral or social task. Legend brings
about these posthumous reunions, which gratify a
whole people's wishes. Legend possesses marvel-
lous resources for bringing Peter and Paul and
everybody into unison.

But the Legend of the Revolution has a hard
task to get itself into shape.

io8

HE love of books is really a com-
mendable 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
collections 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

109

no THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

do than build sand 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.

VERY brief acquaintance with the
savants is enough to show us that
they are the least curious of man-
kind. Chancing some years ago to
be in one of the great towns of
Europe, 1 visited the Natural History Galleries
under the escort of one of the Conservators,
who described the collection of fossils to me with
great pride and pleasure. He gave me much
valuable information up to and including the
pleiocene beds. But directly we found ourselves
in face of the first traces of man, he looked
another way, and, in reply to my questions,
told me that was outside his show-case. I saw I
had been indiscreet. One should never ask a
savant the secrets of the universe which are not in
his particular show-case. He takes no interest in
them.

Ill

"IME, as it flies, wounds or kills our
most ardent and tendercst senti-
ments. It tones down admiration,
robbing it of its two staple aliments
surprise and wonder ; it destroys
love and love's pretty follies, it shakes the foun-
dations of faith and hope, it strips bare of blossom
and leaf every growth of simple innocence. At
any rate, may it leave us pity, that we be not
imprisoned in old age as in a charnel-house.

It is through pity we remain truly men. Let us
not change into stone like the defiers of the gods
in the old myths. Let us commiserate the weak
because they suffer persecution, and the fortunate-
of this world, because it is written : " Woe unto
you that laugh." Let us choose the good part,
which is to suffer with them that suffer, and let us
say with lips and heart to the victims of calamity,
like the good Christian to Mary, " Fac me tecum
plangere," Make me to lament with thee.

112

|0 not be over chary in attributing
to the artists of older days an ideal
they never really had. No one ever
admires a woi-k of art without some
self-delusion ;', in a word, to under-
stand a masterpiece is to recreate it in oneself over
again. The same works are reflected diversely
in the souls of those who ccintemplate them. Each
generation of men seeks a fresh emotion in face
of the productions of the cild masters. The best-
endowed spectator is the on.e who finds, at the cost
of some fortunate misunderstanding, the purest
and strongest emotion. H ence it is that humanity
is hardly ever passionately attracted by works
of art or poetry which are not in some part or
degree obscure and capable of various interpre-
tations.

"3

/

/

/

/

AST social rfhanges are imminent, we
are told ; the prophets confidently
expect thiem, see them already come.
This is a mistake the prophetic
spirit ^s always prone to. Insta-
bility no doubt is the first condition of life ; all
living matter undergioes ceaseless modification,
but imperceptibly, almcK^t without our knowing it.
All progress, the best ^as well as the worst, is slow
and regular. There wi/ll be no vast changes, and
there never have been,-, I mean rapid and sudden
changes. All economic transformations have the
kindly gradual operation characteristic of all
natural forces.

Our social condition is^the effect of those which
have preceded it, as it is the cause of those that will
succeed it. It depends or.i the former, as those that
follow will depend on it. And this interconnexion
determines for long periods- the persistency of the
same type ; this orderly succession guarantees the
tranquillity of existence. True, it fails to satisfy
minds that are set eagerly on n ovelties and hearts

114

/

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 115

that are athirst with love of humanity. But it
is the order of the universe, and we must make
the best of it. Let us keep a zealous heart and
cultivate the needful illusions ; let us work at
whatever we deem useful and good, but not in the
hope of any sudden and marvellous success, not
buoyed up by any dreams of a social apocalypse ;
all visions of the sort serve only to dazzle and
deceive. We must look for no miracle ; but resign
ourselves to do our own infinitesimal part in
making the future better or worse, the future we
shall never sec.

N life we must make all due allow-
ance for chance. Chance, in the
last resort, is God.

ii6

HILOSOPHICAL systems are in-
teresting only as psychical docu-
ments well adapted to enlighten the
savant on the different conditions
which the human mind has passed
through. Valuable for the study of man, they
can afford us no information about anything that
is not man.

They are like those thin threads of platinum
that are inserted in astronomical telescopes to
divide the field into equal parts. These filaments
are useful for the accurate observation of the
heavenly bodies, but they are not part of the
heavens. It is good to have threads of platinum
in telescopes ; but we must not forget it was the
instrument-maker put them there.

117

WAS seventeen when I saw Alfred

de Vigny one day in a public read-
^ ing-room in the Rue de I'Arcade.

I shall never forget the incident.

He wore a voluminous cravat of
black satin fastened with a cameo, and over it
a turned-down collar with rounded corners. He
carried in one hand a thin Malacca cane with
a gold knob. I was very young, and still he
did not strike me as old. His face was calm
and kindly. His hair, turning grey but still
fine and silky, fell in ringlets about his round
cheeks. He held himself very upright, walked
with short steps, and spoke in a low voice. After
he was gone, I handled the book he had returned
with feelings of respectful admiration. It was a
volume of the Collection Petitot, the Memoires
de La ISloue, I think. I found a book-mark left
behind in it, a narrow slip of paper on which the
poet, in his large handwriting, tall and pointed
and reminding one of Madame de Sevigne's, had
traced a single word in pencil, a name, " Bellero-

ii8

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 119

phon." Hero of mythology or historic ship,
which did the name point to ? Was de Vigny,
when he wrote the word, thinking of Napoleon
confronted with the limits of human ambition, or
was he telling himself : " The ill-starred rider who
bestrode Pegasus, has not, for all the Greeks have
fabled, slain the terrible and alluring monster which,
with sweating brow and burning throat and bleed-
ing feet, we pursue so frenzicdly, the Chimaera " ?

^

HILOSOPHIC melancholy has more
than once found expression in
words of gloomy magnificence. As
believers who have attained a high
degree of moral perfection taste
the joys of renunciation, so the savant, persuaded
that all about us is but vain show and pre-
tence, drinks deep of this philosophic sadness,
and forgets himself in the delights of a calm
despair a profound and noble mournfulness,
which those who have once tasted it would not
exchange for all the frivolous gaieties and
empty hopes of the vulgar herd. Even ob-
jectors who, despite the aesthetic beauty of these
thoughts, might be tempted to pronounce them
a poison to men and nations, will perhaps
suspend their anathema, when we show them
how the doctrine of universal illusion and the
flux of things arose in the golden age of
Greek philosophy with Xenophanes, and was
perpetuated through the ages of most refined
civilization by the highest, the most serene and

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 121

sensitive minds, by a Democritus, an Epicurus,
a Gassendi.^

^ Pierre Gassendi, French philosopher, 1 592-1655, opponent
of the Aristotelian philosophy.

"HERE is a little girl of nine who I
am sure is wiser than all the sages.
She said to me just now :

"One sees in books what one
cannot see in reality, because it is
too far off or because it is past. But what one
sees in books one sees badly or sadly. I think
children ought not to read books. There are so
many things in the world which are good to see,
and which they have not seen, lakes, mountains,
rivers, towns and fields, the sea and ships, the sky
and the stars ! "

I am quite of her opinion. We have an hour to
live ; why trouble our heads about so many
things ? Why learn everything, seeing we know
we shall never know anything ? We live too
much in books and not enough in nature, and we
are very like that simpleton of a Pliny the
Younger who went on studying a Greek author
while before his very eyes Vesuvius was over-
whelming five cities beneath the ashes.

122

S there such a thing as an impartial
history ? And what is History ?
The written representation of past
events. But what is an event ?
Is it a fact of any sort ? No ! 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 in all their complexity ^ That is an im-
possibility. He will represent them stripped of
almost all the individual peculiarities that con-
stitute them facts, maimed, therefore, and muti-
lated, other than what they really and truly were.
As to the mutual connexions 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

123

124 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

facts, and because non- historical therefore un-
known, how can the historian mark the relation
of these facts to each other and their intercon-
nexion ? Then I am assuming in all this I am
saying that the historian has under his eyes trust-
worthy evidence, whereas in reality he is con-
stantly deceived, and he gives credence to such
and 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.

\

T is superb, a superb crime ! " So
wrote J. J. Weiss one day in the
pages of a famous journal. The
exclamation raised a storm of
] scandalized protest among the
regular readers of the paper. I know of one
worthy fellow, a magistrate and a well-meaning,
kind-hearted old man, who next day refused to
take in his copy of the offending sheet. He
had been a subscriber for over thirty years, and
he had reached an age when a man is not fond
of changing old habits. Yet he did not hesitate
to make the sacrifice to professional morality. It
was, I think, the affaire Fualdhs that had roused
the writer to this burst of generous admiration
I am for scandalizing no man ; I could not do it.
It calls for a fascinating recklessness I do not
possess. But I confess the master was right, and
that it was superb, a superb crime.

Celebrated crimes have an irresistible attraction
for all of us. It is not too much to say that blood-
shed plays a great part, the major part, in the epic

125

126 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

of humanity. Macbeth and Chopart, surnamed
the Amiable^ are the heroes of the scene. The love
of legends of crime and horror is innate in human-
kind. Ask the children ; they will tell you if
Blue Beard had not killed his wives his story
would not be half so entrancing. In presence of a
dark and baffling murder case the mind feels a
thrill of surprised curiosity.

It is surprised, because crime is of its very
nature abnormal, mysterious, and monstrous ; it is
curious and interested, because in every crime it
finds the same world-old motives of hunger and
love, which are at the bottom of all our actions, good
or bad. The criminal strikes us as a survival from
a remote past, suggesting a horrid image of our
savage ancestors of the woods and caves. The
genius of prehistoric races lives again in him.
He preserves wild instincts we thought abolished ;
he has wiles our milder manners know nothing of.
He is stirred by primitive appetites that are asleep
in us moderns. He is still a brute beast, yet
already a man. Hence the feeling of indignant
admiration he inspires in us. The spectacle of
crime is at once dramatic and philosophical. It is
picturesque, moreover, and fascinating by virtue of
a hundred things, odd, fantastic groupings, weird
shadows thrown momentarily on walls, when all
the world is sleeping, tragic rage, inscrutable looks

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 127

the mystery of which baffles and irritates. In
country places, crawling on the bosom of mother
earth, which it has fed with blood for so many
centuries, crime is associated with the black magic
of dark nights, the favouring silence of the moon-
light, the vague terrors of wild nature, the gloomy ex-
panses of field and flood. In town and lurking amid
crowds it assails the nerves with a reek of poisoned
air and alcohol, a nausea of putrid filth, and accents
of unspeakable foulness. In society, I mean re-
spectable middle-class society, where it is rarely
seen, it dresses like us, speaks like us ; and it is
perhaps under this equivocal and commonplace
aspect it takes the strongest hold on men's minds.
Crime in a black coat is what most strongly appeals
to the popular imagination.

F all charms that touch our souls
the most moving is that of the
mysterious. Beauty undraped is no
beauty, and what we love the best
is always the unknown. Existence
would be intolerable, were we forbidden all dreams
Life's best gift is the feeling it affords us of an
ineffable something that is no part of it. The
real helps us, more or less imperfectly, to frame
some scrap of ideal. It may be this is its chiefest
use.

128

ES, it is a sign of the times," we
are for ever saying. But it is a
very difficult matter to distinguish
the true signs of the times. It
requires a knowledge of the pre-
sent as well as of the past and a wide philo-
sophical outlook that none of us possess. It has
often happened to me to note certain trivial events
passing before my eyes as showing a quite original
aspect, in which I fondly hoped to discern the
spirit of the period. "This," I would tell my-
self, " was bound to happen to-day and could not
have been other than it is. It is a sign of the
times." Well, nine times out of ten, I have
come across the very same event with analogous
circumstances in old Memoirs or old History
books. There is a basis of human nature in us
all which alters less than we are apt to think. We
diffisr, in fact, very little from our grandfathers.
For our tastes and sentiments to change appreci-
ably, the organs which produce them must be
changed too, and that is the work of ages.
I 129

I30 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Hundreds and thousands of years are needed to
modify some of our characteristics to any sensible
degree.

E have ceased to confine our belief
within the old dogmas. For us,
the Word has not been revealed
only on the holy Mount the Scrip-
tures speak of. The heaven of the
theologians seems to us moderns peopled with vain
phantoms. We know that life is short, and to
prolong it, we add the remembrance of the times
that are no more.

We have abandoned hope in the immortality of
the human individual ; to console us for this dead
faith, we have only the dream of another immor-
tality, intangible and diffuse, only to be enjoyed by
anticipation, and which moreover is promised only
to a very few of us, the immortality that consists
in the memory mankind cherishes of us.

131

HERE is nothing else for us to do
in this world but resign ourselves
to circumstances. But the nobler
natures know how to give resigna-
tion the fine name of content. High
souls resign themselves with a holy joy. In the
bitterness of doubt, amidst the general woe, under
the empty sky, they still contrive to keep intact
the antique virtues of the Faithful. They believe,
they are determined to believe. Love of the
human race warms their hearts. Nay ! more than
this ; they cherish with pious care that virtue
which Christian Theology in its wisdom set above
all the rest, because it presupposes and replaces
them, to wit, hope. Let us hope then, not in
humanity, which for all its august efforts, has
not abolished the evil that is in the world ; rather
let us set our hopes on the creatures our minds
cannot conceive, that shall one day be developed
out of mankind, as man has been evolved from
the brute. Let us greet reverently these super-
human beings of a future era. Let us found our

132

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 133

hopes on the universal pain and travail whose
material law is transformation. Yes, we can feel
this life-giving anguish working within us ; it is
the impulse that urges us on our forward march
to an inevitable, a divine consummation.

LD men hold far too obstinately to
their own ideas. That is why the
natives of the Fiji Islands kill their
parents when they grow old. In
this way they facilitate evolution,
while we retard its advance by founding Academies.

134

^HE poets' world -weariness has its
golden alleviations ; no need to waste
too much pity on them. These
singers know a spell to charm away
their despair ; there is no art magic
so compelling as the magic of words. The poets
find consolation, as children do, in pictures.

135

N love, men demand forms and
colours ; they will have visible im-
ages. Women only crave sensa-
tions. They love better than we ;
they are blind. And if you say :
but think of Psyche's lamp and the spilt drop
of oil, I reply. Psyche does not represent woman.
Psyche is the soul. It is not the same thing ;
indeed it is just the opposite. Psyche was curi-
ous to see, and women are only curious to feel.
Psyche was searching after the unknown ; when
women search, it is never the unknown they are in
quest of. They long to recover something lost,
that is all, to recall something dreamt or some-
thing recollected, to renew some past sensation,
nothing more. If they had eyes, how should we
ever explain their loves }

136

ON NUNNERIES

TO EDOUARD ROD

ON NUNNERIES

T is painful to see a young girl
die voluntarily to the world. The
Nunnery is terrifying to all who
do not enter its doors. In the
middle of the Fourth Century of
the Christian era, a young Roman lady, Blassilla
by name, undertook such a severe course of
fasting in a Convent that she died of the effects.
The populace followed her coffin to the grave,
shouting furiously : " Drive out, drive out this
odious tribe of Monks from the city ! Why do
we not stone them ? Why do we not throw them
into the Tiber ? " And when, fourteen hundred
years afterwards, Chateaubriand, by the mouth of the
Pere Aubry, extolled the women who have "sancti-
fied their beauty to the masterpieces of repentance
and mortified the rebellious flesh whose pleasures
are only pains," the Abbe Morellet, an old man
and a philosopher, listened with impatience to this
panegyric of the cloistered life, and exclaimed : " If
this is not fanaticism, I ask the author to give me his
definition of what fanaticism is ! " What do we

139

140 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

learn from these interminable disputes, if not that
the religious life alarms the natural man, but that
nevertheless it has reasons for its existence and con-
tinuance ? Neither populace nor philosophers always
appreciate these reasons. They are deep-seated and
touch the greatest mysteries of human nature. The
Cloister has been taken by storm and its walls thrown
down. Its deserted ruins have been repeopled
afresh. There are certain souls that gravitate thither
by a natural bias ; claustral souls they are. Because
they are innately unhuman and pacific, they quit
the world and go down rejoicing into silence and
peace. Many souls are born weary ; they have no
curiosity ; they drag out a sluggish existence with-
out a wish for one thing more than another. Not
knowing either how to live or die, they embrace the
religious life as a lesser life and a lesser death.
Others are led to the Cloister by indirect motives ;
they never foresaw whither they were going.
Wounded innocents, an early disappointment, or
secret grief, has spoilt the scheme of things for
them. Their life will never bear fruit ; the cold
has blighted the blossom. They have realized too
soon how evil the world is. They hide away in
corners to weep. They would fain forget. . . .
Or rather, they cherish their grief and set it in a
place of shelter away from men and men's activities.
Yet again there are others attracted to the Convent

ON NUNNERIES 141

by the zeal of sacrifice, souls that are eager to give
themselves wholly to heaven, in a self-abandonment
more ardent than love itself knows. These last,
the smallest class of all, are the true brides of Christ.
The grateful Church bestows on them the sweet
names of lily and rose^ dove and lamh^ promising
them, by the mouth of the Queen of Virgins, the
crown of stars and the throne of purity. But we
should beware of going further than the theologians
warrant. In the Ages of Faith, there was no great
enthusiasm about the mystic virtues of Nuns. I
am not speaking of the people, who always looked
upon the denizens of Convents with a certain sus-
picion and told facetious tales about them. I speak
of the Secular Clergy, whose opinions were very
mixed. We must not forget that the poetry of the
Cloistered life only dates from Chateaubriand and
Montalembert.

Another point to be considered, religious com-
munities differ altogether according to the varying
conditions of period and country ; they cannot all
be massed together in one and the same judgment.
The Religious House was for centuries, in the
West of Europe, farm, school, hospital, and library
combined. There were Houses for the preserva-
tion of knowledge, others for the encouragement
of ignorance. Some were designed for work, as
others were for a life of idleness.

142 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

I visited some years ago the hill on which St.
Odile, daughter of a Duke of Alsace, raised in the
middle of the twelfth century a Convent, the
memory of which has lingered ever since in the
soul of the Alsatian people. She was a brave and
good woman, who sought and found means to
soften for those about her the curse of living, which
then weighed sore on poor folks. Aided by clever
fellow-workers of her own sex and served by
numerous serfs, she cleared the ground, tilled the
fields, reared stock, secured the harvests against
pillagers. She was a special providence to the im-
provident. She taught the mead-drinkers sobriety,
the violent gentleness, all men carefulness and good
management. What resemblance can we discern
between these robust, pure-hearted virgins living
in a barbarous age, these daughters of kings and
tillers of the soil, and the dainty Lady Abbesses
who, under Louis XV, went to Mass in paint
and patches, and left a scent of poudre h la mari-
chale on the lips of the Abbes who kissed their
fingers }

And even then, even in those scandalous days,
when the Abbeys served as refuge and prison for the
younger daughters of noble houses who had proved
recalcitrant, there were good, pious souls to be
found behind the bars of Convents. It so happens
I have surprised the secrets of one of them. It

ON NUNNERIES 143

was last year at Legoubin's, the bookseller on the
Quai Malaquais, amongst whose treasures I lighted
on an old Manual of Confession for the use of
nuns. An inscription on the title-page written in
a formal hand informed me that in 1779 the book
was the property of the Soeur Anne, a Nun of the
Order of the Feuillantines. It was in French, and
had this special peculiarity, that each sin was
printed on a little square slip attached to the leaf
by the edge merely. While examining her con-
science in the Convent Chapel, the penitent needed
neither pen nor pencil to dot down her faults,
whether grave or venial. All she had to do was
to turn down the little strip mentioning any par-
ticular sin she had committed. Then in the Con-
fessional, by help of her book, which she went
through systematically from one turned-down slip
to another, Soeur Anne ran no risk of forgetting
any breach of God's commandments or the Church's
ordinances.

Now, at the time when I discovered the little
book on my friend Legoubin's shelves, I noticed
that a number of offences showed only a single
crease where they had been turned down. These
were Sceur Anne's extraordinary sins. Others had
been folded in again and again, so that the corners
of the paper were all worn and dog's-eared. Here
we had Soeur Anne's pet peccadilloes.

144 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

There was no doubt about it. The book had
never been used since the dispersion of the Nuns
in 1790. It was still stuffed with religious pictures
and illuminated prayers, which the good Nun had
slipt in between the pages.

In this way I came to know Soeur Anne's soul.
I found it held only the most innocent of sins, and I
have great hopes that Soeur Anne is seated to-day at
the right hand of the Father. No purer heart ever
beat beneath the white robe of the Feuillantine
Sisters. I can picture to myself the pious sister
with her clear eyes and stoutish figure, as she walks
slowly up and down between the cabbage beds of the
Convent garden. She is quite calm and self-possessed
as her white hand marks down in her book her
sins, which are as regular and as orderly as her
life, vain words, wandering thoughts in Chapter
and in Church, trivial acts of disobedience, and
greediness at meals. This last touch moved me to
tears ; Soeur Anne was greedy at her repast of roots
boiled in plain water 1 She was not unhappy. She
had no doubts. She never tempted God. Sins
such as these have left no mark in the little book.
She was a Nun, and her heart was in the Convent.
Her destiny was in accord with her nature. That
is the secret of Soeur Anne's good life.

I do not know, but I quite think there are many
Soeur Annes at the present day in Nunneries. I

ON NUNNERIES 145

could find not a few things to say against the
Monks ; I think it best to own frankly I am not
very fond of them. As to the Nuns, I believe
they have most of them, like the Soeur Anne, a con-
ventual spirit, in which the graces of their estate
flourish and abound.

Why otherwise should they have taken the veil ?
In these days they are not driven into the Cloister
by the pride and avarice of relations. They take
the vows because they like to. They could repudiate
them, if they chose ; yet you see they do not.
The free-thinking dragoons we see in farces of
the Revolutionary period breaking down Convent
doors soon had enough of invoking nature and
marrying the Nuns. Nature is of vaster scope than
free-thinking dragoons quite realize ; she unites the
sensuous and the ascetic both in her comprehensive
bosom. For the Cloister, the monster must needs
be lovable, seeing it is loved, and no longer devours
any but voluntary victims. The Convent has
charms of its own. There is the Chapel, with its
gilded vessels and paper roses, a Blessed Virgin
painted in the colours of life and bathed in a pale,
mysterious radiance as of moonlight, the chants
and the incense and the Priest's voice ; these are
some of the most obvious fascinations of the
Cloister, and they often carry the day against the
attractions of the world.

146 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

After all, there is a soul in these things, and
they contain the sum total of poetry certain
natures are capable of. Sedentary by nature and
disposed to a discreet, unassuming, retiring life,
women are from the first in their element in a
Convent. The atmosphere is cosy and comfort-
ing, a trifle stifling ; it affords the pious dames
who breathe it all the delights of a long-drawn
asphyxiation. They fall into a half-sleep, and soon
lose the habit of thinking. This is a fine thing
to get rid of. In exchange, they gain certainty.
An excellent transaction, surely, from the practical
point of view 1

I do not lay much stress on titles such as the
bride of Jesus, vessel Oj election, immaculate dove.
Enthusiasm, mysticism, plays no great part in re-
ligious communities. The virtues jog quiedy
along a humdrum path. Everything, even includ-
ing the sentiment of the divine, keeps a judicious
course near the ground, attempts no heavenward
flights. Spirituality is worldly-wise and takes a
material form so far as it can, and the possibilities
in this direction are far greater than is commonly
supposed. The great business of life is so minutely
divided up into a series of little trivial transactions
that punctuality satisfies all needs. Nothing ever
breaks the even thread of existence. Duty is re-
duced to its simplest terms ; the rule of the House

ON NUNNERIES 147

defines it. There Is much in this to satisfy timid
souls, gentle, tractable natures. Such a life kills
imagination, but not gaiety of heart. It is a rare
thing to see an expression of deep-seated melan-
choly on a Nun's face.

At the present day, we should search in vain in
the Convents of France for a Virginie de Leyva or
a Giulia Carraclolo, unwilling victims of a hated
system, craving frantically for a breath through
the Cloister gratings of the free air of nature and
the world of men. Nor yet should we find, I
think, a St. Theresa or a St. Catherine of Siena.
The heroic age of the Cloister is gone for ever.
The mystic ardour of an earlier time waxes faint.
The motives that impelled so many men and women
to adopt the monastic life have ceased to exist. In
those times of violence, when a man was never sure
of reaping the fruits of hi^ labour, when he was
liable to be awakened at any moment by the screams
of the dying and the flames of burning home-
steads, when life was a nightmare, souls of softer
temper were fain to retire to dream of heaven in
the Religious Houses that rose like great arks above
the waves of hate and malice. But these days are
past. The world has grown almost bearable, and
people are more willing to stay in it. At the same
time, such as find it still too rough and too in-
secure are at liberty, after all, to leave it. The

148 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Constituent Assembly was wrong to dispute the
right, and we have done well to allow it in
principle.

I have the privilege to know the Lady Superior
of a Community the Mother House of which
is in Paris. She is a woman of excellent prin-
ciples who inspires me with sincere respect. She
was telling me, a little while since, about the
last moments of one of her Nuns, whom I had
known as a merry-hearted and pretty girl in
society, and who had entered the Convent to die
a lingering death from consumption.

" She made an edifying end," the Lady Superior
told me. " She used to get up every day all
through her long illness, and two lay sisters would
carry her to the Chapel. She was praying there on
the very morning of her release. A taper burning
before the image of St. Joseph was guttering on to
the pavement. She directed one of the lay sisters
to set the candle straight. Then she threw herself
back, heaved a deep sigh, and the death agony
began. She received the last consolations of
religion. She could only testify by the movement
of her eyes to the pious satisfaction the sacraments
of the dying afforded her."

The little narrative was given with an admirable
simplicity. Death is the most important transaction
of the religious life. But so good a preparation

ON NUNNERIES 149

for it is the existence of the Cloister that nothing
more momentous is left to do at that hour than at
any other. The dying Nun sets a taper straight
and expires. It was the one act lacking tO' round
off the blessedness of a minute and meticulous
piety.

HOW I DISCOURSED ONE NIGHT WITH AN

APPARITION ON THE FIRST ORIGINS OF THE

ALPHABET

/

HOW I DISCOURSED ONE NIGHT WITH AN

APPARITION ON THE FIRST ORIGINS OF THE

ALPHABET

N the silence ot midnight I sat
writing at my desk, where I had
been so employed for hours. I
pushed back my lamp, the shade
of which left in semi-darkness the
books that rise in tiers on all four walls of my
study. The dying fire showed a few sparks still
glowing like rubies amid the cinders. The air
was heavy with the pungent fumes of tobacco ;
in a bowl in front of me, on top of a little
heap of ash, lay a last cigarette, from which its
tiny column of blue vapour rose straight up-
wards. The shadows of the room were full of
mystery, as one felt vaguely conscious of the
/SOul of all the slumbering books around. My
pen hung suspended in my fingers, and I was
dreaming of very far-off days, when rising from
the smoke of my cigarette, as from the fumes
of a witches' cauldron, emerged a strange, weird
figure. His ringleted hair, his long, flashing eyes,

153

154 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

his beaked nose, his thick lips, his black beard,
close-curled in the Assyrian fashion, his clear
bronze complexion, the look of guile and cruel
sensuality that marked his countenance, the thick-
set contours of his limbs, the richness of his
flowing robes, all proclaimed one of those natives
of Asia whom the Hellenes called Barbarians. He
wore a blue cap shaped like a fish's head and dotted
with stars. He was wrapped in a purple robe, and
carried in one hand an oar, in the other writing-
tablets. I was not disconcerted at sight of my
visitor. What place more likely than a library
to be haunted by apparitions ? Where should
the spirits of the dead appear, if not amid the
signs that preserve our memory of them .'' I
invited the stranger to be seated ; but he took
no notice.

" Let be," he addressed me presently, " and act
just as if I were not here, I beg. I have come
to look at what you were writing on that bad
paper yonder. I like to watch you at work ; not
that I care one jot for the ideas you may be able to
express, but the characters you trace interest me
beyond measure. In spite of the alterations they
have suffered in eight-and-twenty centuries of use,
the letters that flow from your pen are not un-
familiar to me. I recognize that B, which in my
day was called heth^ that is to say house. Here is

FIRST ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET 155

the L, which we knew as lamedy because it was
shaped like a goad. That G comes from our gimel^
with the camel's neck, and that A springs from our
aleph, in shape of an ox's head. As for the D
I see there, it once represented as faithfully as the
daleth which was its original, the three-cornered
opening of the tent pitched on the desert sands, if
you had not, with a cursive stroke, rounded the
angular outlines of that emblem of an old-world,
nomad existence. You have modified the daleth^ as
you have all the other letters of my alphabet. But I
do not blame you. It was to go faster. Yes, time
is precious. Time is gold dust, and elephants'
tusks, and ostrich feathers. Life is short. With-
out losing one moment, we must be ever bargain-
ing and sailing the seas, to win riches, that we may
enjoy a happy and respected old age."

"Sir," I told him, "by your looks as well as
your words, I know you for an old Phoenician."

He answered me simply :

" I am Cadmus, the shade of Cadmus."

" In that case," I replied, " you do not exist,
properly speaking. You are mythical and allegori-
cal. For it is impossible to give credence to all
the tales the Greeks have told of you. They say
you slew, beside the fountain of Ares, a dragon
whose jaws vomited flames of fire, and that having
plucked out the monster's teeth, you sowed them in

156 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

the ground, where they changed into men. These
are fairy-tales, and you yourself, sir, are fabulous."
" I may indeed have become so in the course of
ages, that is very possible, and those big children
you call the Greeks may have mingled fables with
history, I can quite believe it ; but I care not a jot.
I have never troubled my head about what folk
would think of me after my death ; my hopes and
fears never went beyond this life which we enjoy
on earth, and which is the only one I know aught
of even now. For I do not call it living to float
like an empty shade in the dust of libraries
and appear vaguely to M. Ernest Renan or M.
Philippe Berger. And this phantom existence
seems all the more mournful to me, seeing how my
days, when I was alive, were the most stirring and
busy any man could enjoy. I had no time to go
sowing serpent's teeth in the plains of Boeotia,
unless mayhap those teeth were the hate and jeal-
ousy roused in the bosoms of the shepherds of
Cythaeron by my wealth and power. I sailed the
seas all my life. In my black ship, which carried
at the prow a red dwarf of monstrous ugliness, the
guardian of my treasures, observing the Cabiri who
navigate the sky in their glittering barque, steering
my course by that fixed star the Greeks named,
after me, " the Phoenician," I ploughed every sea
and touched at every shore ; I went to find the

FIRST ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET 157

gold of Colchis, the steel of the Chalybes, the
pearls of Ophir, the silver of Tartessus ; in Baetica
I shipped iron, lead, cinnabar, honey, wax, and
pitch, and pushing beyond the confines of the
world, I ran on under the fogs of the Ocean till
1 came to the dim isle of the Britons. Thence I
returned an old man with white hair, with a rich
cargo of tin that the Egyptians, the Hellenes, and
the Italiotes bought of me at its weight in gold.
The Mediterranean in those days was my lake. I
founded on its still savage shores hundreds of trad-
ing factories, and the famed Thebes was only a
stronghold where I kept a store of gold. I found
Greece inhabited by savages armed with stags'
horns and split flints. I gave them bronze, and it
was through me they learnt all the arts."

Both looks and words were imbued with an offen-
sive hardness, and I answered him coldly :

" Oh 1 you were a keen trader and a clever.
But you had no scruples, and you behaved, on
occasion, like a regular pirate. When you landed on
a sea-beach of the Greek mainland or islands, you
took care to spread a tempting array on the sands
of gewgaws and precious stuffs, and if the girls of
the countryside, drawn by an irresistible attraction,
came down alone, without their kinsmen's privity, to
gaze at the fascinating display, your mariners would
carry off the maidens despite their frantic cries and

158 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

tears, and throw them, bound and shuddering, into
the hold of your ships, under guard of the red
dwarf. Did you not in this fashion, you and your
men, kidnap young lo, daughter of King Inachos,
to sell her in Egypt ?"

" 'Tis very likely. This King Inachos was chief-
tain of a petty clan of savages. His daughter was
white-skinned, with pure, delicately cut features.
The relations between savages and civilized men
have been the same in all ages."

" That is true ; but your Phoenicians committed
thefts unparalleled in the world for odiousness.
They did not fear to rob the tombs of the dead
and strip the Egyptian burial vaults to enrich their
necropolis of Mount Gebal."

" Upon my faith, sir, are these fitting reproaches
to throw at a man of ancientry like mine, one
whom Sophocles, even in his day, called the Ancient
Cadmus ? It is barely five minutes we have been
talking together in your chamber, and you forget
altogether I am your elder by eight-and-twenty
centuries. See in me, dear sir, an aged Canaanite
whom you should not cavil at over a few mummy
cases and a few savage wenches stolen in Egypt
or Greece. Rather admire the vigour of my in-
telligence and the beauty of my industry. I have
spoken to you of my ships. I could show you my
caravans wending to fetch incense and myrrh from

FIRST ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET 159

the Yemen, precious stones and spices from the
Harran, ivory and ebony from Ethiopia. But my
activity was not limited to trade and barter. I was
a cunning handicraftsman in an age when the
peoples round me all lay fast asleep in barbarism.
Metal-worker, dyer, glass-blower, jeweller, I exer-
cised my genius in those arts of the fire and
furnace that are so marvellous they seem magic.
Look at the bowls I have chiselled, and admire the
dainty cunning of the old Canaanitish artificer ! Nor
was I less excellent in the works of the field.
Out of that narrow strip of land confined betwixt
the Libanus and the sea I made a very garden of
delight. The cisterns I dug are to be seen there
to this day. One of your masters has said : * Only
the man of Canaan could build wine-presses for
eternity.' Nay ! sir, think better of old Cadmus.
It was I carried all the Mediterranean peoples on-
ward from the Stone Age to the Bronze. It was I
taught your Greeks the rudiments of all the arts.
In barter for corn and wine and hides which they
brought me, I gave them goblets whereon were
wrought doves billing and little earthenware figures,
which they copied themselves afterwards, arranging
them to suit their own taste. Above all, I gave
them an alphabet, without which they could neither
have fixed nor set down correctly their thoughts
which you admire. Such the achievements of old

i6o THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Cadmus. All this he did, not for afFection of the
human race nor any desire of empty fame, but for
the love of lucre and in expectation of tangible
and certain gain. He did it to win wealth withal,
that in his old age he might drink wine out of
cups of gold on a silver table amid fair, white
women dancing voluptuous dances and playing on
the harp. For 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. But remember this, had I not craved
after fierce pleasures of the senses, I should not
have toiled to grow rich, I should never have in-
vented the arts you reap the joy of to this very
day. And, a last word to you, my good sir,
seeing you had not wit enough to become a trader,
and are therefore a scribe, and indite writings
after the fashion of the Greeks, you should surely
revere me as a god almost, seeing it is to me you
owe the alphabet. It was my invention. Be
assured I created it only for the convenience of
my traffic and without the smallest inkling of the
use the literary nations would some day put it to.
What I wanted was a system of ready and rapid
notation. Gladly would I have borrowed it from

FIRST ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET i6i

my neighbours, being well used to take whatever
of theirs suited my purpose. I make no boast of
originality ; my language is the Semites', my sculp-
ture is part Egyptian, part Babylonian. If I could
have laid my hand on a good method of writing, I
should never have been at the pains of inventing
at all. But neither the hieroglyphics of the peoples
you nowadays, without knowing anything of their
true history, name Hittites or Hetaeans, nor the
sacred script of the Egyptians fulfilled my needs.
These were slow and complicated modes, better
fitted for tedious inscriptions on the walls of
temples and tombs than for marking the tablets of
a busy trader. Even when abbreviated and cursive,
the writing of the Egyptian scribes still retained
traces of the ponderousness, confusion, and vague-
ness of the primitive type. The whole system was
bad. The hieroglyph, albeit simplified, was still a
hieroglyph, that is to say, something dreadfully
confused. You know how the Egyptians mixed
up in their hieroglyphs, whether complete or
abbreviated, the signs that stood for ideas with
those representing sounds. By a stroke of genius,
I chose twenty-two of these numberless signs, and
made of them the twenty-two letters of my alpha-
bet. Yes, letters, that means signs correspond-
ing each to one single sound, and providing by
their quick and easy combination means of depict-

1 62 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

ing faithfully all sounds ! Was it not truly in-
genious ? "

" Yes, no doubt it was ingenious, and even more
so than you think. We owe to you a gift of in-
calculable price. For without an alphabet, no
accurate record of speech is possible ; there can be
no style, and therefore no thinking of any preci-
sion and refinement, no abstractions, no subtle
speculation. It would be as absurd to imagine
Pascal writing the Lettres Provinciales in cuneiform
characters as to believe the Olympian Zeus to have
been carved by a seal. Originally invented for
keeping a trader's books, the PhcEnician alphabet
has become throughout the whole world the neces-
sary and perfect instrument of thought, and the
history of its transformations is intimately bound
up with that of the development of the human
mind. Your invention was infinitely fine and pre-
cious, although still incomplete. For you never
thought of the vowels, and it was those ingenious
fellows, the Greeks, who hit upon them. Their
part in the world was always to bring things to
perfection."

** The vowels ; yes, I will allow I have always
had a bad habit of jumbling and confusing them
together. You may very likely have noticed as
much to-night ; the old Cadmus has something
of a throaty way of speaking."

FIRST ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET 163

" I can excuse it ; I could almost forgive him the
rape of the virgin lo, for after all her father Inachos
was but a savage princeling, whose sceptre was a
stag's horn rudely carved with a pointed flint. I
could even forgive his teaching the Boeotians, a
poor and virtuous folk, the frenzied dances of the
Bacchantes. I could forgive him everything, for
having given Greece and the world the most precious
of talismans, the twenty-two letters of the Phoeni-
cian alphabet. From these twenty-two characters
have come all the alphabets of all countries. There
is never a thought on this earth they do not fix and
preserve. From your alphabet, divine Cadmus,
arose the Greek and Italiote scripts, which in turn
have given birth to all the European types of writ-
ing. From your alphabet arose all the Semitic
scripts, from the Aramaic and Hebrew to the
Syriac and Arabic. Nay, this same Phoenician
alphabet is the father of the Hymiaritic and
Ethiopian and all those of Central Asia, Zend and
Pehlevi, and even of the Indian alphabet, which has
given birth to the Devanag^ri and all the alphabets of
Southern Asia. What a triumph ! What a world-
wide success. There is not, at this present hour,
on all the surface of the globe, one single form of
writing that does not descend from the Cadmean.
Whosoever in our world writes a word is indebted
to the old Canaanitish merchants. The thought

i64 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

makes me fain to render you the most signal
honours, Sir Cadmus, and I cannot pay enough
thanks for the favour you have done me by spend-
ing a brief hour in the dead of night in my study,
you, Baal Cadmus, inventor of the Alphabet ! "

" Nay, dear sir, moderate your enthusiasm.
I am far from dissatisfied with my little invention.
But my visit means nothing especially complimen-
tary to you personally. The fact is I am bored to
death since I have become a fleeting shade, and
there is no more buying and selling for me either
of tin, gold dust, or ivory ; nay, even on the
subject of that Continent where Mr. Stanley fol-
lowed my example in his paltry way, I am reduced
to an occasional conversation with some savant or
traveller who is pleased to take an interest in me.
Hark ! I hear the cock crow ; farewell, and try,
try to win wealth ; the only good things of this
world are riches and power."

He spoke, and vanished. My fire was gone out,
the chilliness of the night was getting into my
bones, and I had a racking headache.

CAREERS FOR WOMEN

CAREERS FOR WOMEN

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 follow-
ing 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 specu-
lations 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 ?

167

i68 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Women have always been credited with an ex-
quisite 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 ?

We must not let ourselves be carried away by
our hatred of female preciosity and pedantry.
Granted there is nothing so odious as a blue-
stocking ; still we must draw a distinction in favour
of the precieuse. Airs and graces are not always
unbecoming, and a certain predilection for speaking
well and correctly need not spoil a woman. If
Madame de Lafayette was a precieuse (and in her
day she passed for such) I for one cannot utterly
abominate the class. All affectation is detestable,
that of the dish-clout no less than that of the pen ;
and there would be small enjoyment to be got out
of life in a society such as Proudhon imagined,
where all the women would be cooks and darners
of stockings. I am ready to admit women are less
in their element, and therefore less charming, com-
posing a book than acting a play. Nevertheless, a
woman who can write would not be justified in
refusing to use her pen if its exercise does not

CAREERS FOR WOMEN 169

interfere with her life, not to mention that her
inkstand may prove a good friend to her when she
comes to take the difficult step that inaugurates the
epoch of retrospection. There is no doubt of this :
if women do not write better than men, they do
write differently, and contrive to leave on the paper
something of their own divine grace. For my
part, I am deeply grateful to Madame de Caylus
and Madame de Stael-Delaunay for having left
behind them sundry immortal pen scrawls.

Nothing could well be more unphilosophical than
to regard knowledge as entering into the moral
system of a woman or girl like a foreign body,
a disturbing element, an incalculable force. But,
granting it is a natural and legitimate aspiration to
educate young girls, it is very certain we have
adopted a bad way of doing so. Fortunately we
are beginning to recognize as much. 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 stuffed their heads with
lists of names in History, Geography, and Zoology
that by themselves possess no meaning whatever.
The innocent creatures have borne their burden

I70 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

and more than their burden of those vicious
schemes of study which democratic self-complacency
and bourgeois patriotism erected like so many
Babels of priggishness and pedantry.

These wiseacres started originally with the ridicu-
lous 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 par-
ticular, it gave birth to another yet more mis-
chievous than itself. It was supposed that the
elements of the special sciences were useful to
persons never intended to follow these up either in
their applications or their theory. It was supposed
that the terminology of Anatomy, for instance, or
Chemistry had a value of its own, and that it
was a desirable thing to learn it quite indepen-
dently of any use surgeons and chemists make of
it. 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

CAREERS FOR WOMEN 171

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 few well-
chosen words the main aims of a science, draw
attention to its achievements by some striking ex-
amples. Deal in broad generalities, be philo-
sophical, but hide your philosophy so skilfully
that you appear as artless as the minds you ad-
dress. Avoiding 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, and do not overload them. With-
out any interference of yours, they will catch fire
at the point where they are inflammable.

And if the spark dies out, if some intellects re-
main unillumined, at any rate you will not have
burnt them. There will always be dunces amongst
us. We must respect all natures, and leave in their
native simplicity such as are made that way. This
is especially necessary for girls, who for the most

172 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

part spend their time in the world in employments
where the last thing called for is general ideas and
technical accomplishments. I would have the
education we give girls consist essentially in a
gentle and discreet stimulation of the faculties.

MIRACLE

MIRACLE

E should not say : There are no
miracles, because none has ever
been proved. This always leaves
it open to the Orthodox to appeal
to a more complete state of know-
ledge. The truth is, no miracle can, from the
nature of things, be stated as an established fact ;
to do so will always involve drawing a premature
conclusion. A deeply rooted instinct tells us
that whatever Nature embraces in her bosom is
conformable to her laws, either known or occult.
But, even supposing he could silence this pre-
sentiment of his, a man will never be in a
position to say : " Such and such a fact is
outside the limits of Nature." Our researches
will never carry us as far as that. Moreover, if
it is of the essence of miracle to elude scientific
investigation, every dogma attesting it invokes an
intangible witness that is bound to evade our
grasp to the end of time.

This notion of miracles belongs to the infancy
of the mind, and cannot continue when once the

175

176 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

human intellect has begun to frame a systematic
picture of the universe. The wise Greeks could
not tolerate the idea. Hippocrates said, speaking
of epilepsy : " This malady is called divine ; but
all diseases are divine, and all alike come from the
gods." There he spoke as a natural philosopher.
Human reason is less assured of itself nowadays.
What annoys me above all is when people say :
** We do not believe in miracles, because no miracle
is proved."

Happening to be at Lourdes, in August, I paid
a visit to the grotto where innumerable crutches
were hung up in token of a cure. My companion
pointed to these trophies of the sick-room and
hospital ward, and whispered in my ear :

** One wooden leg would be more to the point."
It was the word of a man of sense ; but speaking
philosophically, the wooden leg would be no whit
more convincing than a crutch. If an observer of
a genuinely scientific spirit were called upon to
verify that a man's leg, after amputation, had
suddenly grown again as before, whether in a
miraculous pool or anywhere else, he would not
cry : " Lo ! a miracle." He would say this : " An
observation, so far unique, points us to a presump-
tion that under conditions still undetermined,
the tissues of a human leg have the property of
reorganizing themselves like a crab*s or lobster's

MIRACLE 177

claws and a lizard's tall, but much more rapidly.
Here we have a fact of nature in apparent contra-
diction with several other facts of the like sort.
The contradiction arises from our ignorance, and
clearly shows that the science of animal physiology
must be reconstituted, or to speak more accurately,
that it has never yet been properly constituted.
It is little more than two hundred years since we
first had any true conception of the circulation of
the blood. It is barely a century since we learned
what is implied in the act of breathing." I admit
it would need some boldness to speak in this
strain. But the man of science should be above
surprise. At the same time, let us hasten to add,
none of them have ever been put to such a proof,
and nothing leads us to apprehend any such
prodigy. Such miraculous cures as the doctors
have been able to verify to their satisfaction are
all quite in accordance with physiology. So far
the tombs of the Saints, the magic springs and
sacred grottoes, have never proved efficient except
in the case of patients suffering from complaints
either curable or susceptible of instantaneous relief.
But were a dead man revived before our eyes, no
miracle would be proved, unless we knew what life
is and death is, and that we shall never know.

What is the definition of a miracle ^ We are
told : a breach of the laws of nature. But we do

M

178 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

not know the laws of nature ; how, then, are we to
know whether a particular fact is a breach of these
laws or no ?

" But surely we know some ot these laws ? "

"True, we have arrived at some idea of the
correlation of things. But failing as we do to
grasp all the natural laws, we can be sure of none,
seeing they are mutually interdependent."

"Still, we might verify our miracle in those
series of correlations we have arrived at."

"No, not with anything like philosophical cer-
tainty. Besides, it is precisely those series we
regard as the most stable and best determined
which suffer least interruption from the miraculous.
Miracles never, for instance, try to interfere with
the mechanism of the heavens. They never dis-
turb the course of the celestial bodies, and never
advance or retard the calculated date of an eclipse.
On the contrary, their favourite field is the obscure
domain of pathology as concerned with the internal
organs, and above all nervous diseases. However,
we must not confound a question of fact with one
of principle. In principle the man of science is
ill-qualified to verify a supernatural occurrence.
Such verification presupposes a complete and final
knowledge of nature, which he does not possess,
and will never possess, and which no one ever did
possess in this world. It is just because I would not

MIRACLE 179

believe our most skilful oculists as to the miracu-
lous healing of a blind man that h fortiori I do not
believe Matthew or Mark either, who were not
oculists. A miracle is by definition unidentifiable
and unknowable.

The savants cannot in any case certify that a fact
is in contradiction with the universal order, that is
with the unknown ordinance of the Divinity.
Even God could do this only by formulating a
pettifogging distinction between the general mani-
festations and the particular manifestations of
His activity, acknowledging that from time to
time He gives little timid finishing touches to
His work and condescending to the humiliating
admission that the cumbersome machine He has
set agoing needs every hour or so, to get it to
jog along indifferently well, a push from its con-
triver's hand.

Science is well fitted, on the other hand, to bring
back under the data of positive knowledge facts
which seemed to be outside its limits. It often
succeeds very happily in accounting by physical
causes for phenomena that had for centuries been
regarded as supernatural. Cures of spinal affections
were confidently believed to have taken place at
the tomb of the Deacon Paris at Saint-MMard
and in other holy places. These cures have ceased
to surprise since it has become known that hysteria

i8o THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

occasionally simulates the symptoms associated
with lesions of the spinal marrow.

The appearance of a new star to the mysterious
personages whom the Gospels call the " Wise Men
of the East " (1 assume the incident to be authentic
historically) was undoubtedly a miracle to the
Astrologers of the Middle Ages, who believed that
the firmament, in which the stars were stuck like
nails, was subject to no change whatever. But,
whether real or supposed, the star of the Magi has
lost its miraculous character for us, who know that
the heavens are incessantly perturbed by the birth
and death of worlds, and who in 1866 saw a star
suddenly blaze forth in the Corona Borealis, shine
for a month, and then go out.

It did not proclaim the Messiah ; all it an-
nounced was that, at an infinitely remote distance
from our earth, an appalling conflagration was
burning up a world in a few days, or rather had
burnt it up long ago, for the ray that brought us
the news of this disaster in the heavens had been
on the road for five hundred years and possibly
longer.

The miracle of Bolsena is familiar to everybody,
immortalized as it is in one of Raphael's Stanze at
the Vatican. A sceptical priest was celebrating
Mass ; the host, when he broke it for Communion,
appeared bespattered with blood. It is only within

MIRACLE i8i

the last ten years that the Academies of Science
would not have been sorely puzzled to explain so
strange a phenomenon. Now no one thinks of
denying it, since the discovery of a microscopic
fungus, the spores of which, having germinated in
the meal or dough, offer the appearance of clotted
blood. The naturalist who first found it, rightly
thinking that here were the red blotches on the
wafer in the Bolsena miracle, named the fungus
micrococcus prodigiosus.

There will always be a fungus, a star, or a disease
that human science does not know of ; and for this
reason it must always behove the philosopher, in
the name of the undying ignorance of man, to deny
every miracle and say of the most startling wonders,
the host of Bolsena, the star in the East, the
cure of the paralytic and the like : Either it is not,
or it is ; and if it is, it is part of nature and there-
fore natural.

CARD HOUSES

CARD HOUSES

HAT makes one mistrust the con-
clusions of aesthetics is that every-
thing is demonstrable by reasoning.
Zeno of Elea found that the flying
arrow is motionless. One might
equally well prove the contrary, though to tell
the truth, that would be harder. For argument
shies at ocular evidence, and it may be said
generally that everything can be demonstrated,
except what we feel to be true. A consecutive
train of argument on a complex subject will never
prove anything but the intellectual capacity ot
the arguer. Men must surely have some lurk-
ing suspicion of this great truth, seeing they
never govern their conduct by reason. It is in-
stinct and sentiment lead them. They obey their
passions, love, hate, and above all wholesome fear.
They prefer Religions to Philosophies, and only
resort to reason to find justification for their evil
inclinations and bad actions, which is venial, if a
trifle ridiculous. The most instinctive acts are as a
rule those in which they succeed the best, and on

185

1 86 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

these Nature has based the preservation of life and
the perpetuation of the species. The philosophical
systems have flourished in virtue of the genius
of their originators, without its ever having been
within our power to recognize in any one of them
distinctive marks of truth to account for their
vogue. In ethics all possible views have been
maintained, and if several appear to be in agree-
ment, it is because moralists have, in most in-
stances, been careful not to cross swords with the
general sentiment and common instinct of mankind.
Pure reason, if they had hearkened only to her,
would have led them by divers roads to the most
monstrous conclusions. This is seen in certain
religious Sects and certain Heresies, whose founders,
their brains turned by solitude, scorned the un-
reasoned consensus of everyday opinion. It would
seem they reasoned very soundly, those Cainite
doctrinaires, who deeming creation evil, taught the
faithful to break deliberately the physical and
moral laws of the universe, following the example
of criminals, and taking as their chosen models
Cain and Judas Iscariot. Their reasoning was
right enough, yet their morality was abominable.
Yes, this blessed and saving truth is found under-
lying all Religions, that men have a more trust-
worthy guide than reason, and that we should
rather obey the dictates of the heart.

CARD HOUSES 187

In aesthetics, that is in the clouds, there is more
opportunity and better ground for argumentation
than in any other subject. It is a region where it
behoves us to be especially mistrustful, where pit-
falls lurk on every side, indifference no less than
partiality, coldness no less than passion, knowledge
no less than ignorance, art, wit, subtlety, and sim-
plicity that is more perilous than cunning. On
aesthetic questions, oh ! beware of alluring sophis-
tries, the more alluring the more dangerous, and
there are many that might deceive the very elect.
Distrust even the Mathematics ; albeit so sublime
and highly perfected, we have here a machine of
such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one
grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put
everything out of gear. One shudders to think to
what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a
Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.

^Esthetics rest on no solid foundation. It is all
a castle in the air. It is supposed to rest on
Ethics ; but there is no such thing as Ethics.
There is no such thing as Sociology ; nor yet
Biology. The complete round of the Sciences has
never existed save in the head of M. Auguste
Comte, whose work is a prophecy. When Biology
is eventually constituted, that is to say some mil-
lions of years hence, it will perhaps be possible to
frame a science of Sociology. This will be a

i88 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

matter of many centuries ; then, and then only, it
will be allowable to build up on solid foundations a
system of eesthetics. But by that time our planet
will be very old and coming near the goal of its
fortunes. The sun, whose spots even now make
us justifiably anxious, will then present to our
globe only a face of a dull, smoky red, half
smothered in opaque masses of scoriae, while the
last denizens of earth, cowering for warmth at the
bottoms of mines, will be thinking less of dis-
cussions on the essence of the sublime and beauti-
ful than of keeping alight in the subterranean
gloom their last bits of coal, before finally perish-
ing in the ice of ages.

Tradition and the general consensus of opinion
are invoked as affording a basis for Criticism. But
they are non-existent. True, an almost universal
approval is accorded to certain works. But these
results form a mere presumption, and by no means
imply anything in the nature of deliberate choice
or spontaneous preference. The works everybody
admires are the ones nobody examines. Each
generation receives them as a precious burden, and
passes them on to the next without so much as
looking at them. Do you really think there is
much freedom of judgment in the approbation
we accord the Classics, Greek and Latin, or
even the French Classics ? Even the predilection

CARD HOUSES 189

we display, as a matter of taste, for such and
such a contemporary production, and our repug-
nance for another, are these really free and
unbiassed judgments ? Are they not determined
by a host of circumstances foreign to the con-
tents of the work under question, the chief being
the spirit of imitation, which is so powerful
both in men and animals ? This faculty of imi-
tation is necessary to enable us to live without
going too utterly astray ; we import it into all
our actions, and let it dominate our aesthetic sense.
But for it, opinions on questions of art would
be far more diverse even than they are. It is
through it that a work which, for any reason
whatsoever, has originally met with some measure
of approval, afterwards wins more and more voices.
The first only were free ; all the rest simply follow
suit. They have no sort of spontaneity, or mean-
ing, or value, or character of their own. Yet by
their mere number they constitute fame. Every-
thing depends on an insignificant beginning. So
we see how works which are contemned at their birth
have small chance of winning popularity later on,
while on the contrary works that are celebrated
from the start long preserve their reputation, and
are highly thought of even after they have grown
unintelligible. What proves clearly that this con-
sensus is purely the eflTect of prejudice, is that it

190 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

breaks down when the latter is exploded. Numer-
ous instances could be given ; I will mention only
one. Fifteen years ago or so, in the examination
for the privilege of only one year's voluntary
service with the colours, the Military Board gave
the candidates as a piece of dictation an unsigned
page which was quoted in different journals and
made fine fun of in their columns, rousing the
ridicule of very cultivated readers. "Wherever
did these military fellows," it was asked, "find
such a farrago of uncouth and ridiculous phrases ?"
Yet, as a matter of fact, they had chosen them
from a very noble book. It was Michelet, and
Michelet at his best, Michelet in his finest
period. The board of officers had taken the
text of their dictation from that brilliant de-
scription of France with which the great Writer
concludes the first volume of his History, and which
is one of the most admired passages in the book.
**/ latitude, the 'zones of France are readily dis-
tinguished by their several products. In the Norths the
rich low-lying plains of Belgium and Flanders with
their fields of flax and colza, and the hop-plant, their
bitter vine of the North,'' and so on. I have heard
literary experts making merry at the style, which
they supposed some old half-pay captain to be
responsible for. The wag who laughed the loudest
was an enthusiastic admirer of Michelet. The

CARD HOUSES 191

page is an admirable piece of writing ; yet to win
unanimous admiration, it must even now be signed
with the author's name. The same may be said of
any and every page written by the hand of man.
Per contra, whatever is recommended by a great
name stands a chance of being blindly praised.
Victor Cousin discovered sublimities in Pascal
which have since been recognized as errors due to
a copyist. He went into ecstasies, for instance, over
certain " raccourcis d^ahime^' which only owe their
existence to a mistaken reading of the text.^ One
can hardly picture M. Victor Cousin admiring the
same expression in the pages of a contemporary
writer. The rhapsodies of a Vrain Lucas were
favourably received by the Academy of Sciences
under the august name of Pascal and Descartes.
Ossian seemed the equal of Homer when he was
deemed an ancient bard. He is neglected now we
know he originated with Macpherson.

When men admire the same things, and give
each his own reason for so admiring, then concord
changes into discord. In one and the same book
they will applaud opposite qualities that cannot

^ "Je lui veux peindre (a I'homme) non-seulement I'univers
visible, mais I'immensite qu'on peut concevoir de la nature, dans
I'enceinte de ce raccourci d'atome (un ciron). Pascal, Pensees, I, i.,
ed. Havet. Pascal wrote "ce raccourci d'atome," a rhetorical way
of indicating the ciron or cheese-mite. The copyist made it *^ rac-
courci d^abimeJ" A. A.

192 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

possibly coexist together. It would form an
extremely interesting book if one could have a
detailed history of the variations of critical opinion
on one of the masterpieces that have most occupied
men's thoughts, Hamlet, the Divina Commedia, or
the Iliad. The Iliad fascinates its readers of to-day
by a certain barbarous and primitive character we
are quite sincere in believing we discern in it. In
the Seventeenth Century Homer was commended
for having duly observed the rules of the Epic.
" Rest assured," wrote Boileau, " that, if Homer
has used the word dog, the word is dignified in
Greek." Such ideas strike us as ludicrous. Our
own will perhaps appear equally laughable in two
hundred years' time, for after all it cannot be set
down as one of the everlasting verities that Homer
is barbarous and that barbarism is to be admired.
There is not in the whole range of literary criticism
any single opinion that cannot easily be matched
with its contrary. Who can settle finally the
disputes of the virtuosos }

Must we therefore abandon aesthetics and criti-
cism altogether } I do not say so ; but we must
recognize that we have to do with an art, and
throw into it the passionate enthusiasm and agree-
able charm, without which there can be no Art.

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS

TO MONSIEUR L. BOURDEAU

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS

WAS suddenly caught away into
regions of dumb darkness, amid
which appeared vague and mys-
terious shapes that filled me with
horror. Little by little my eyes
grew accustomed to the gloom, and I made out,
beside a river whose turbid waters rolled sluggishly
along, the shadowy form of a man of a terrifying
aspect. On his head was an Asiatic cap, and he
carried an oar over his shoulder. I recognized
the wily Odysseus. His cheeks were hollow and
his chin covered with a long, unkempt white beard.
I heard him moan in a weak voice :

" I am hungry. My eyes are dim and my soul
is like a heavy smoke floating in the darkness.
Who will give me a draught to drink of the black
blood, that I may remember once more my
vermilion-painted ships, my blameless wife, and
my mother ? "

When I heard these words of his, I knew I had
been translated to the Infernal Regions. I tried to
direct my steps as well as I could by following the

195

196 ^THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

descriptions of the poets, and I set off for a meadow
where shone a faint, soft light. After a half-hour's
walking, I came upon a group of Shades gathered
in a field of asphodel and conversing together.
The company included souls of all times and
all countries, and I could see amongst them great
philosophers side by side with poor savages.
Hidden in the shade of a myrtle, I listened to
their discourse. First I heard Pyrrho ask, with
a gentle, deprecating air, his hands folded on his
spade like a true gardener :

"What is the soul?"

The Shades who stood about him answered
eagerly, all trying to speak at once.

The divine Plato said, with a look of subtlety :

"The soul is threefold. We have a very gross
soul in the belly, an affectionate soul in the breast,
and a reasonable soul in the head. The soul is
immortal. Women have only two souls. They
lack the reasonable."

A father of the Council of Macon answered
him :

" Plato, you speak like an idolater. The Coun-
cil of Macon, by a majority of voices, accorded,
in the year 585, an immortal soul to woman. Be-
sides, woman is a man, inasmuch as Jesus Christ,
born of a virgin, is called in the Gospels the Son of
Man."

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS 197

Aristotle shrugged his shoulders and replied
to his master, Plato, in a tone of respectful
firmness :

" By my reckoning, Plato, I count five souls in
man and in animals : i, the nutritive; 2, the sensi-
tive ; 3, the motive ; 4, the appetitive ; 5, the
ratiocinative. The soul is the formative element
of the body. It causes it to perish when itself
perishes."

Divers other views were propounded, each con-
tradicting the other.

Origen.

The soul is material and figurative.

St. Augustine.
The soul is incorporeal and immortal.

Hegel.
The soul is a contingent phenomenon.

Schopenhauer.
The soul is a temporary manifestation of the
will.

A Polynesian.

The soul is a puf^ of wind, and when I saw my-
self on the point of expiring, I pinched my nose to
keep my soul inside my body. But I did not squeeze
hard enough. And 1 am dead.

/

./

X.

198 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

An Indian Woman of Florida.
/died in childbed. They put my little baby's
hand over my lips that he might hold in his
mother's breath. But it was too late, my soul slipt
between the poor innocent's fingers.

Descartes.
I proved conclusively that the soul was spiritual.
As for knowing what it will be, I refer to Sir
Kenelm Digby, who has written on the subject.^

Lamettrie.
Where is this Digby .? Let him be fetched !

MiNOS.

Gentlemen, I will have him carefully searched
for in all the purlieus of Hell.

Albertus Magnus.
There are thirty arguments against the immor-
tality of the soul and thirty-six for, ergo^ a majority
of six arguments in favour of the afl^rmative.

Leath er-Stocking.
The spirit of a brave chief does not die, nor yet
his tomahawk nor his pipe.

The Rabbi Maimonides.
It is written : "The wicked man shall be de-
stroyed, and there will be left nothing of him."
1 Nature of Man's Soul (1644).

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS 199

St. Augustine.
You are mistaken, Rabbi Maimonides. It is
written : "The accursed shall go to the fire eternal."

Origen.

Yes, Maimonides is mistaken. The wicked man
will not be destroyed, but he will be diminished ;
he will become quite small and imperceptible. This
we must understand of the damned. And the
souls of the Saints will be absorbed in God.

Duns Scotus.
Death makes beings to re-enter into God like a
sound that vanishes in the air.

BOSSUET.

Origen and Duns Scotus are wrong here ; their
words are saturated with the poisons of error.
"What is said in the holy books of the torments
of Hell is to be understood in the precise and
literal meaning. Ever living and ever dying, im-
mortal for the suffering of their torments, too
strong to die, too weak to endure, the damned
shall groan eternally on beds of flame, overwhelmed
in furious and irremediable pangs.

St. Augustine.
Yes, these verities must be taken in the literal
meaning. It is the true flesh of the damned that

20O THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

will suffer in sacula saculorum. Babes dead as soon as
born or even in their mother's womb will not be
exempt from these dire punishments. Such the
fiat of Divine justice. If you find it hard to credit
that bodies plunged in the flames are never con-
sumed, that is the result of sheer ignorance, be-
cause you do not know that there are sorts of flesh
which are preserved in fire ; for instance, the flesh of
the pheasant. I made experience of this at Hippo,
where my cook prepared one of these birds and
served one half for my dinner. After a fortnight
I asked for the other half, which was still good to
eat. Whereby it appeared that the fire had pre-
served it, as it will preserve the bodies of the
damned.

SUMANGALA.

All the doctrines I have just listened to are
black with the black darkness of the West. The
truth is this : souls migrate into divers bodies
before winning to the all-blessed nirvana^ which
puts an end to all the evils of existence. Gautama
went through five hundred and fifty incarnations
before he became Buddha ; he was king, slave,
ape, elephant, crow, frog, plane tree, etc.

The Ecclesiast.
Men die like the beasts of the field and their end
is the same. As men die, the beasts die also.

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS 201

Both breathe the same breath, and men have
nothing which the beasts have not.

Tacitus.
This language is conceivable in the mouth of a
Jew, fashioned for slavery. For myself, I will
speak as a Roman. The soul of famous citizens
is not perishable. This we may well believe. But
we offend the majesty of the gods by supposing
them to grant immortality to the souls of slaves and

freedmen.

Cicero.

Alas ! my son, all they tell us of the Infernal

Regions is a tissue of falsehoods. I ask myself

the question : Am I immortal myself, otherwise

than by the memory of my Consulship, which will

endure for ever ?

Socrates. y

For my part, I believe in the immortality of the

soul. It is a fine hazard to stake, a hope each

man may enchant himself withal.

Victor Cousin.
Dear Socrates, the immortality of the soul, which
I have demonstrated eloquently, is primarily an
ethical necessity. For virtue is a fine subject for
rhetorics, and if the soul is not immortal virtue
will not be recompensed. And God would not be
God if he did not have a care for my French theses.

202 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Seneca.
Are those the maxims of a sage ? Consider,
oh ! philosopher of the Gauls, that the recompense
of good actions is to have done them, and that no
prize meet to reward virtue is to be found ex-
traneous to virtue itself

Plato.
Yet there are divine rewards and punishments.
At death, the soul of the wicked man goes to in-
habit the body of some inferior animal, horse,
hippopotamus, or woman. The soul of the wise
man mingles with the choir of the gods.

Papinian.
Plato will have it that in the future life the jus-
tice of the gods must needs correct the errors of
human justice. On the contrary, it is good that
individuals who were condemned on earth to chas-
tisement they did not merit, but which was laid
upon them by magistrates liable indeed to err, yet
duly appointed and of full competence to deliver
sentence, continue to bear their pains and penal-
ties in the Shades ; human justice is concerned in
this, and it would tend to weaken it to give out
that its judgment can be set aside by the Divine
wisdom.

IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS 203

An Eskimo.
God is very good to the rich and very bad to the
poor. This is because he loves the rich and he
does not love the poor. And inasmuch as he loves
the rich, he will welcome them in Paradise, and as
he does not love the poor, he will put them in
hell.

A Chinese Buddhist.

Know that every man has two souls, one good,
which will be reunited with God, the other bad,
which will be tormented.

The Old Man of Tarentum.
Oh ! sages, answer an old man, a lover of
gardens : Animals, have they a soul }

Descartes and Malebranche.
No. They are machines.

Aristotle.
They are animals and have a soul like ourselves.
This soul is in relation with their organs.

Epicurus.

O ! Aristotle, for their happiness, their soul is

like ours, perishable and subject to death. Dear

Shades, wait patiently in these gardens the time

when you will lose altogether, along with the cruel

204 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

wish to live, life itself and its miseries. Rest your-
selves by anticipation in the peace which nothing

troubles.

Pyrrho.
What is life }

Claude Bernard.

Life is death. ^

"What is death ?" asked Pyrrho further.

But no one answered him, and the group of
Shades slipt away noiselessly, like a cloud flying
before the wind.

I thought I was left alone in the meadow of
asphodels till I caught sight of Menippus, whom I
knew by his air of smiling cynicism.

" How is it," I said, " O Menippus, that these
dead folk speak of death as if they knew nothing
of it, and why are they as ignorant of human
destinies as if they were still on earth }

" It is, no doubt," Menippus told me, " because
they still remain human and mortal in some degree.
When they shall have entered into immortality,
they will not speak nor think any more. They
will be like the gods.

ARISTOS AND POLYPHILOS ON THE
LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS

TO MONSIEUR HORACE DE LANDAU

ARISTOS AND POLYPHILOS ON THE
LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS

K^^Tfir 1

r/^m

Aristos.
OOD day, Polyphilos. What is your
book ? You seem plunged over
head and ears in its pages.

Polyphilos.
It is a Manual of Philosophy,
dear Aristos, one of those little works that bring
the wisdom of the ages within reach of your
hand. It reviews all systems, one by one, from
the old Eleatics down to the latest Eclectics, and
it ends up with M. Lachelier. First I read the
table of contents ; then, opening the book in the
middle, or thereabouts, I lighted on this sentence :
The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates
in the absolute.

Aristos.
Everything indicates that this thought forms
part of a serious argument. There would be no
sense in considering it as it stands by itself

207

2o8 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

POLYPHILOS.

For that reason I paid no attention to what it
might mean. I made no attempt to discover how
much truth it contained. I devoted myself solely
to the verbal form, which is in no wise singular, I
doubt not, or out of the common, and which offers
to an expert like yourself, I should say, nothing
specially precious or rare. All one can say i^ that
it is a metaphysical proposition. And that is what
I was thinking about when you came.

Aristos.
May I share the reflexions I have unfortunately
interrupted .''

POLYPHILOS.

I was merely thinking, thinking how the
Metaphysicians, when they make a language for
themselves, are like knife-grinders, who, instead
of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins
to the grindstone, to efface the lettering, date and
type. When they have worked away till nothing
is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward,
the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say :
" These pieces have nothing either English, German
or French about them ; we have freed them from
all limits of time and space ; they are not worth five
shillings any more ; they are of an inestimable value,
and their circulation is extended infinitely." They

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 209

are right in speaking thus. By this needy knife-
grinder's activity words are changed from a physical
to a metaphysical acceptation. It is obvious that
they lose in the process ; what they gain by it is
not so immediately apparent.

Aristos.

But how, Polyphilos, shall we discover at first
sight what will assure gain or loss, as the case may
be, in the future ?

Polyphilos.

I quite see Aristos, it would not be seemly to
employ in this case the balance with which the
Lombard of the Pont-au-Change used to weigh his
angels and ducats. Let us first of all note that our
spiritual knife-grinder has very freely ground down
the two words possess and participate which occur in
the sentence from the little Manual, where they
glitter with all their original dross removed.

Aristos.
Very true, Polyphilos, they have left nothing
contingent about them.

Polyphilos.

And in the same way they have polished smooth

the word absolute, which concludes the sentence.

When you came in just now, I was thinking two

things about this very word, the word absolute.

210 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

The first is, that the Metaphysicians have all along
shown a marked preference for negative terms,
such as o-existence, /^-tangible, -conscious.
They are never so happy as when they are discours-
ing about the i-finite and the /^-definite, or dealing
with the -knowable. In three pages of Hegel
taken at random, in his Phenomenology, out of six-
and-twenty words, the subjects of important sen-
tences, I found nineteen negative terms as against
seven affirmatives, I mean seven terms the mean-
ing of which was not annulled in advance by some
prefix reversing the essential signification. I can-
not 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. Such is the general
practice, so far as I have observed, of the Meta-
physicians, more correctly the Metataphyskians
(jxera to. (pva-iKo) ; for it is another remarkable fact
to add to the rest, that your science itself has a
negative name, one taken from the order in which
the treatises of Aristotle were arranged, and that
strictly speaking, yougiveyourselves the title : Those
who come after the physicians. I understand of
course that you regard these, the physical books, as
piled atop of each other, so that to come after is really
to take place above. All the same you admit this
much, that you are outside of natural phenomena.

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 211

Aristos.

Keep to one idea at a time, I do beseech you,

dear Polyphilos. If you go jumping perpetually

from one to another, I shall find it very hard to

follow you.

Polyphilos.

Well, I wiU confine myself for the present to
the predilection shown by these thought-distillers
for such terms as express the negative of an
affirmation. And the said predilection, I freely
allow, implies of itself nothing abnormal or fan-
tastic. It is no symptom with them of intempcr-
atenesSj degeneracy, or insanity ; it merely satisfies
the natural cravings of minds of an abstract
tendency. These ahs and ins and nons are more
effective than any grindstone in planing down. At a
stroke they make the most rugged words smooth
and characterless. Sometimes, it is true, they
merely twist them round for you and turn them
upside down. Or else, again, they endow them
with a mysterious and sacred potency as we see in
absolute (absolutus), which is something much more
imposing than solute (solutus). Absolutus is the
patrician amplification of solutus^ and a fine testi-
monial to the majesty of the Latin language.

That is the first remark I wished to make. The
second is, that the philosophers, such as you, Aristos,
who talk metaphysics, take care to select words for

212 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

this smoothing down process of theirs that had
already, ere they touched them, lost somewhat of
the original brilliance of their type and super-
scription. For it must be allowed that we too,
we everyday folk, are not guiltless of the trick of
filing down words, and little by little defacing their
pristine clearness. And in so doing we are Meta-
physicians, without knowing it.

Aristos.
That last admission of yours, Polyphilos, we
had best make a note of, that you may not be
tempted later on to argue that the processes of
metaphysical reasoning are not natural to man-
kind, legitimate and in some sort necessary opera-
tions. However, proceed.

Polyphilos.
I observe, Aristos, that many expressions, as they
pass from mouth to mouth in the course of genera-
tions, take on a polish, or as they say in the studios,
" surface." Whatever you do, do not imagine,
Aristos, that I am blaming the Metaphysicians
because they go out of their way to choose for
polishing such words as come to them a bit rubbed
already. In this way they save themselves a good
half of the labour. Sometimes they are luckier
still, and put their hands on words which, by long

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 213

and universal use, have lost from time immemorial
all trace whatever of an effigy. My sentence from
the little Manual actually contains two of the sort.

Aristos.

You mean, I feel convinced, the words God and
soul.

Polyp HI LOS.

You have guessed them, Aristos. These two
words, worn and rubbed for centuries, have lost
all trace of the design they originally bore. Before
Metaphysics began upon them, they were completely
" metaphysicized." Judge for yourself if the ab-
stractor by profession is likely to let this description
of words escape, words that seem and indeed are
specially adapted for his use, seeing the unknown
hosts of mankind have worked them smooth for
ages, unconsciously, indeed, yet with a genuine
philosophic instinct.

Last of all, to meet the case where they deem
themselves to be thinking what had never been
thought before, and conceiving what had never yet
been conceived, the philosophers coin new words.
These of course issue from the mint as smooth as
so many counters. But after all they have had to
be struck from the old common metal. So here we
have yet another factor to be considered.

214 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

Aristos.
You mean to imply by your last remark, Poly-
philos, if I understand you aright, that the Meta-
physicians speak a language made up of terms, some
of which are borrowed from the vulgar tongue, for
choice whatever words are most abstract, most
general or most negative in it, the rest created
artificially out of elements borrowed from the same
source. Well, what then ?

POLYPHILOS.

Grant me one thing, Aristos, to begin with,
viz. that all the words of human speech were in
the first instance struck with a material type and
that they all represented in their original freshness
some sensible image. There is no term which was
not primitively the sign of an object belonging to
the common stock of shapes and colours, sounds
and scents, and all the illusive phenomena whereby
our senses are mercilessly cajoled.

It was by speaking of the straight road and the
tortuous path that our ancestors expressed the first
moral ideas. The vocabulary of mankind was
framed from sensuous images, and this sensuousness
is so bound up with its constitution that it is still
to be found even in those words to which common
consent has assigned subsequently a vague, spiritual
connotation, and even in the technical terms specially

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 215

concocted by Metaphysicians to express the abstract
at its highest possible power of abstraction. Even
these cannot escape the fatal materialism inherent
in the vocabulary ; they still cling by some root-
let or fibre to the world-old imagery of human
speech.

Aristos.

There is no denying it.

POLYPHILOS.

All these words, whether defaced by wear and
tear, or polished smooth, or even coined expressly
in view of constructing some intellectual concept,
yet allow us to frame some idea to ourselves of
what they originally represented. So chemists
have reagents whereby they can make the effaced
writing of a papyrus or a parchment visible
again. It is by these means palimpsests are de-
ciphered.

If an analogous process were applied to the
writings of the Metaphysicians, if the primitive
and concrete meaning that lurks invisible yet
present under the abstract and new interpreta-
tion were brought to light, we should come
upon some very curious and perhaps instructive
ideas.

Suppose we try, Aristos, to give back form and
colour, to restore the original life and force, to the

2i6 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

words composing the sentence I quoted from my
little Manual :

The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates
in the absolute.

In this endeavour the science of Comparative
Grammar will afford us the same help that the
chemical reagent gives to the scholars who decipher
palimpsests. It will enable us to see the meaning
borne by these ten or a dozen words, not of
course at the first origin of language, which is
lost in the shades of a far-remote past, but at
all events at a period long anterior to all historic
record.

Spirit^ God^ measure^ possess^ participate^ can all be
referred back to their Aryan signification ; absolute
can be broken up into its Latin elements. Now,
restoring to these words their early and undefaced
visage, this (barring errors) is what we get :

The breath is seated by the shining one in the bushel
of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed.

Aristos.
Do you suppose, Polyphilos, that any conclusions
of importance are to be drawn from this rigmarole ?

Polyphilos.
There is one at any rate, to wit, that the Meta-
physicians construct their systems with the frag-

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 217

ments, now all but unrecognizable, of the signs
whereby savages once expressed their joys and
wants and fears.

Aristos.
In this they only submit to the necessary con-
ditions of language.

POLYPHILOS.

Without raising the question whether this com-
mon fatality is a subject for humiliation on their
part or something to boast of, I cannot help reflect-
ing on the extraordinary adventures the terms they
employ have gone through in changing from the
particular to the general, the concrete to the ab-
stract. For instance, the word soul or spirit, which
was originally the warm breath of the body, has so
completely altered its essential meaning that we can
say : "This animal has no soul"; a proposition which
strictly and literally signifies : " The creature that
breathes has no breath." Again, the same title,
God, has been given at successive periods to an
appearance of the sky, a fetish, an idol, and the
first cause of things. Well, there you have some
really remarkable and startling vicissitudes for two
poor vocables.

By this sort of precise examination of their past
fortunes, we should be reconstructing the natural
history of metaphysical ideas. It would be neces-

2i8 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

sary to follow out the successive modifications
which words like sou/ and spirit have undergone, and
discover how the present meanings have gradually
been developed. This would throw a lurid light
on the kind of reality these words express.

Aristos.
Why, Polyphilos, you talk as if the ideas we
attach to a word, being dependent upon that word,
were born and suffered change and died together
with it ; and because a noun like God, soul, or spirit
has stood successively as the symbol of several
mutually discrepant ideas, you suppose yourself
able, by studying the history of the word, to com-
prehend the life and death of the idea. In fact
you make metaphysical speculation the slave of its
own phraseology and liable to all the hereditary
defects of the terms it employs. The attempt is so
preposterous that you dared not avow it except in
purposely ambiguous phrases and with evident
anxiety.

Polyphilos.

My only anxiety is to know what limit there will
be to the difficulties I suggest. Every word is the
image of an image, the symbol of an illusion.
Nothing else whatever. And if I convince myself
that it is with the defaced and disfigured remains

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 219

of ancient images and gross illusions that philo-
sophers represent the abstract, ipso facto the abstract
ceases to be represented to my mind ; I see nothing
but the ashes of the concrete, and instead of a
pure, immaterial idea, merely the finely comminuted
dust of the fetishes, amulets, and idols that have
been destroyed.

Aristos.
But did not you say just now that the language
of metaphysics was all completely polished down
and as it were ground smooth on the grindstone ?
And what, pray, did you mean by that, if not that
the terms then used are, so to speak, stripped
bare, in other words, abstract ? And this grind-
stone you talked about, what is it, if not the
definition given to these terms. You forget the
fact that in every metaphysical thesis the terms
are precisely defined, and that being abstract by
definition, they retain nothing of any such concrete
associations as they took over from an earlier
acceptation.

POLYPHILOS.

Yes, you define your words, how ? Why, by
Other words. Are they any the less therefore human
words, that is to say world-old cries of desire or
terror, uttered by unhappy beings in face of the
shadows and lights that hid the veritable world

220 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

from them ? Like our poor degraded ancestors of
the woods and caves, we are imprisoned within
our senses, which bound the universe for us. We
believe our eyes reveal it to us, and all the while
it is a reflexion of ourselves that these actually
give us back. Furthermore, to express the
emotions of our ignorance, what have we but the
voice of the savage, his stammering syllables a
little better articulated and his howls a trifle
mitigated ? That, Aristos, is a description of all
human speech !

Aristos.

If you contemn it in the philosopher, to be
consistent, you must do the same with the rest of
mankind. Those who deal with the exact sciences
likewise employ a vocabulary which first took
shape in the broken stammerings of primitive
man, and which does not for all that lack precision.
Again, the Mathematicians, who, like ourselves,
discuss abstractions, speak a language which might
no less than ours be traced back to the concrete,
inasmuch as it is a form of human speech. You
would have fine work, Polyphilos, if you chose to
materialize an axiom of geometry or an algebraic
formula. Do what you will, you will not destroy
the ideal element. On the contrary, you would
demonstrate, in the process of removing it, that it
was there originally.

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 221

POLYPHILOS

No doubt. But neither the physicist nor the
geometrician are in the same case as the meta-
physician. In the physical sciences and in the
mathematical, the precision of the vocabulary de-
pends solely and entirely on the relations between
the word and the object or phenomenon which it
designates. There we have an infallible standard.
And as name and thing are both equally sensible,
we can apply the one with certainty to the other.
Here the etymological meaning, the intrinsic force
of the term, is of no importance. The signification
of the word is determined within such exact limits
by the sensible object it represents that any other
exactitude is superfluous. Who would ever dream
of trying to affix a more exact precision to the
idea given us by the terms acid and base, as these
are understood by chemists } It would not be
common sense therefore to examine into the his-
tory of the individual words that go to form the
terminology of the sciences. A chemical term,
once installed in the text-books, is not called upon
to tell us of the adventures that befell it in the
days of its frolic youth, when it ran wild in the
woods and mountains. It has given up these
frivolities. Itself and the object it designates can

222 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

both be embraced in the same glance and instantly
and always confronted.

Again, you mention geometry. Yes, no doubt
the geometrician speculates as to abstractions. But
mathematical abstractions differ altogether from
metaphysical, the former being derived from the
sensible and measurable properties of bodies, consti-
tuting a system of physical philosophy. Consequently
the truths of mathematics, albeit intangible in them-
selves, can in every case be compared with Nature,
which, without ever entirely disengaging them, mani-
fests that they are all involved in her. Their expres-
sion is not a matter of the language used ; it is
conditioned by the nature of things ; it is implicit
in the categories of time and space under which
Nature manifests herself to mankind. Thus the
language of mathematics, to be excellent, needs
only to be governed by stable conventions. If
each concrete term in it designates an abstraction,
that abstraction has in nature its concrete repre-
sentation. You are at liberty to say it is a rough
and ready delineation, a sort of coarse, clumsy
caricature ; but that does not prevent its being a
sensible image, a tangible type of the said abstrac-
tion. The word is directly applicable to it, because it
is on the same plane with it, and is therefore readily
transferred to the purely intellectual concept cor-
responding to the sensible or material notion.

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 223

It is not the same with metaphysics, where ab-
straction is no longer the visible result of experience,
as it is in physics, no longer the outcome of specu-
lation on the attributes of sensible nature, as it is in
mathematics, but simply and solely the product of
an operation of the mind, which extracts from a
thing certain qualities, qualities intelligible and
conceivable for itself alone. Of these all we know
is that the mind has framed a concept of them,
which concept it makes known only by way of the
language in which it describes them ; in other
words they have no guarantee of existence save and
except the bare phrase. If these same abstractions
do veritably exist in and by themselves, they reside
in a region accessible to pure intelligence alone,
they inhabit a world which you call the absolute as
contra-distinguished from an opposite of which I
will merely say that in your sense of the word it is
not absolute. And if these two worlds are implicit
one in the other, well I that is their affair, not
mine. It is enough for me to possess the assur-
ance that one is sensible and the other is not ; that
the sensible is not intelligible, and the intelligible is
not sensible. Consequently word and thing can
never coincide with one another, not being in the
same place ; it is impossible they should ever take
account of each other, not being parts of the same
world. Metaphysically, either the word is the

224 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

whole thing, or it has nothing to do with the
thing.

For it to be otherwise, there would have to be
words absolutely abstract and free of all taint of
sensuous association ; and there are none such.
The words we call abstract are so only by being
made so of deliberate intent. They play the part
of the abstract, just as an actor represents the Ghost
in Hamlet.

Aristos.
You raise difficulties where there were none
before. Pari passu as the mind has abstracted, or,
if you prefer it, decomposed, and as you said just
now, distilled nature to extract the essence, it has
in like fashion abstracted, decomposed, distilled
words, in order to represent thereby the product
of its transcendental operations. Whence It
comes that the sign is exactly coincident with
the object.

POLYPHILOS.

But, Aristos, I have fully proved to you, and
from divers points of view, that the abstract in
words is only a lesser concrete. The concrete,
fined down and extenuated, is still the concrete.
We must not commit the blunder some women fall
into, who because they are thin, pose as pure,
immaterial spirits. You are like children who take

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 225

a twig of elder and keep only the pith to make
little figures of. Their mannikins are small and
light, but they are made of elder for all that.
Similarly, your so-called abstract terms have merely
become something less concrete. If you take them
as being purely abstract and withdrawn entirely
outside their true and proper nature, you do so by
mere arbitrary convention. But, if the ideas repre-
sented by these words are not themselves mere
conventions, if they are realized anywhere else
than in yourselves, if they exist in the absolute, or
in any other imaginary place you choose to name,
if in one word they " are," then they are incapable
of verbal enunciation, they remain ineffable. To
name them is to deny their existence ; to express
them is to destroy them. For, the concrete word
being the symbol of the abstract idea, the latter is
no sooner phrased than it becomes concrete, and
then all the quintessence is gone !

Aristos.
But if I tell you that, for the idea equally with
the word, the abstract is only a lesser concrete,
your argument falls through.

POLYPHILOS.

You will never say such a thing. It would mean
the ruin of metaphysics root and branch, and an

226 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

intolerable injury to the soul, to God, and eventu-
ally to His professors. I am quite aware Hegel
said the concrete was the abstract, and the abstract
the concrete. But then that thinker has turned
your science upside down. You will allow, Aristos,
were it only to keep to the rules of the game, that
the abstract is the opposite of the concrete. Now,
the concrete word cannot be the sign of the abstract
idea. At most it might be the symbol, or, to put
it better, the allegory. The sign designates the
object and recalls it to memory. It has no proper
value of its own. The symbol, on the other hand,
stands for the object. It does not point it out, it
represents it. It does not recall it, it copies it.
It is a picture. It has a reality of its own and a
distinctive signification. Wherefore I was on the
right road when I investigated the meanings in-
herent in the words spirit, God, absolute, which are
symbols and not signs.

" The spirit possesses God in proportion as it partici-
pates in the absolute'^

What is this if not a collection of little symbols,
much worn and defaced, I admit, symbols which
have lost their original brilliance and picturesque-
ness, but which still, by the nature of things,
remain symbols } The image is reduced to the
schema ; but the schema is still the image. And
I have been able, without sacrificing fidelity, to

THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHYSICS 227

substitute one for the other. In this way I have
arrived at the following :

" The breath is seated by the shining one in the
bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed (or
subtle)" whence we easily get as a next step : " He
whose breath is a sign of life, man that is, will find a
place (no doubt, after the breath has been exhaled)
in the divine fire^ source and home of life, and this
place will be meted out to him according to the virtue
that has been given him (by the demons, I imagine)
of sending abroad this warm breathy this little invisible
souly across the free expanse (the blue of the sky,
most likely)."

And now observe, the phrase has acquired quite
the ring of some fragment of a Vedic hymn, and
smacks of ancient Oriental mythology. I cannot
answer for having restored this primitive myth in
full accordance with the strict laws governing
language. But no matter for that. Enough if
we are seen to have found symbols and a myth in
a sentence that was essentially symbolical and
mythical, inasmuch as it was metaphysical.

I think I have at least made you realize one
thing, Aristos, that any expression of an abstract
idea can only be an allegory. By an odd fate, the
very metaphysicians who think to escape the
world of appearances, are constrained to live per-
petually in allegory. A sorry sort of poets, they

228 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

dim the colours of the ancient fables, and are them-
selves but gatherers of fables. Their output is
mythology, an anaemic mythology without body or
blood.

Aristos.

Good-bye, dear Polyphilos. I leave you uncon-
vinced. If only you had reasoned by the rules, I
could have rebutted your arguments quite easily.

THE PRIORY

TO TEODOR DE WYZEWA

THE PRIORY

FOUND my friend Jean at the old
Priory, in the ruins of which he
has made himself a home for the
last ten years. He received me
with the quiet cheerfulness of a
hermit delivered from our human hopes and
fears, and led me down to the unkempt orchard
where every morning he smokes his clay pipe
among his moss-grown plum trees. There we
sat down to wait for dijeuner on a bench in front of
a rickety table, under a crumbling wall where the
soapwort swings the rosy clusters of its flowers,
faded and fresh at the same time. The light of a
rainy sky trembled in the leaves of the poplars that
whispered by the roadside. Clouds of a pearly
grey drifted above our heads, with a suggestion of
gentle but incurable melancholy.

Remembering his manners, Jean asked me news
of the state of my health and affairs ; then he began
in a slow voice and with puckered brows :

" Though I never read as a rule, my ignorance is
not so closely guarded but that I came acquainted

231

232 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

in my hermitage, which you jeered at in former
days, on the second page of a newspaper with a
prophet wise enough and well-meaning enough to
teach that science and intellectual effort are the
source and fountain-head, the well and reservoir of
all the ills men suffer. This seer, if I remember
right, maintained that, to make life innocent and
even amiable, all that was needed was to renounce
reflexion and the acquisition of knowledge, and
that the only happiness in the world is to be found
in a sympathetic, unreasoning charity. Wise pre-
cepts, salutary maxims, whose only fault lay in
their enunciator having expressed them at all and
been so weak as to set them out in fine phrases,
without seeing that to combat art with art and
intellect with intellect is to condemn oneself only to
win the cause for intellect and art. You will do me
the justice, old friend, to admit that I have not
fallen into this pitiful contradiction, and that I have
entirely given up thinking and writing ever since
the day I realized that thought is an evil and
writing a curse. This wise conviction I reached,
as you know, in 1882, after the publication of
a little book of philosophy that had cost me a
thousand pains and which the philosophers con-
temned because it was written in a graceful style.
In it I went to prove that the universe is unin-
telligible, and 1 was angry when I was told that as

THE PRIORY 233

a matter of fact I had not understood it. There-
upon I was for defending my book ; but on re-
reading it, I failed to recover its precise meaning.
I saw that I was as obscure as the greatest meta-
physicians, and that the world was treating me most
unjustly in not awarding me some portion of the
admiration they excite. This finally and com-
pletely weaned me from transcendental speculations.
I turned to the sciences of observation and studied
physiology. Its principles are fairly well estab-
lished, as they have been for thirty years now.
They consist in fixing a frog neatly with pins on a
little slab of cork and opening it up to observe the
nerves and heart, which by the by is double. But
I realized very soon that, by these methods, it
would need far more time than life has to give to
discover the deep-laid secret of living things. I felt
the vanity of pure science, which, embracing only
an infinitely minute fraction of the phenomena, is
confronted with too limited a number of relations
to build up any solid system. I thought for a
moment of throwing myself into industrial pur-
suits. My natural kindness of heart prevented me.
There is no form of enterprise of which we can say
beforehand whether it will do more good than
harm. Christopher Columbus, who lived and died
like a saint and wore the habit of the good St.
Francis, would certainly never have sought out the

234 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

way to the Indies if he had foreseen that his
discovery would lead to the massacre of so many
nations of red-skins, vicious and cruel men no doubt,
but still capable of feeling pain, and that he would
introduce into the Old World, along with the gold
of the New, diseases and crimes hitherto unknown.
I shuddered when people, very honest people too,
invited me to interest myself in big guns and fire-
arms and high explosives, which had won them
money and distinctions. My doubts became
a certainty, that civilization, as it is called, was
nothing more than scientific barbarism, and I made
up my mind to turn savage. I found no difficulty
in putting my design into practice in this remote
little district, lying thirty leagues away from Paris
and declining in population every day. You saw
in the village street houses standing empty and
going to ruin. The peasants' sons, one and all,
make for the towns, abandoning a countryside
where properties are so minutely subdivided that
they can no longer make a living wage.

" The day seems coming when a clever speculator
will buy up all these lands and re-establish large
landholding, and we shall very likely see the small
cultivator disappear from the country, as even
now the small tradesman tends to disappear from
the big towns. This must be as it will. I care
nothing one way or the other. I have paid down

THE PRIORY 235

six thousand francs and bought the remains of an
old Priory, with a fine stone staircase, a round
tower and this orchard, which I leave to go waste.
There I spend my time in watching the clouds in
the sky, or in the grass the white spindles of the
wild carrot. That is surely better than dissecting
frogs or creating a new model of torpedo-boat.

" When the night is fine, if I am awake, I gaze
at the stars, which I am fond of looking at now
that I have forgotten their names. I see no
visitors, I think of nothing. I have been at no
pains whether to attract you to my retreat or keep
you away.

" I am happy to oflfer 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 uses in
writing novels that disturb men's minds or text-
books of physiology that poison existence."

At this moment a fine-looking girl, with red
cheeks and light blue eyes, brought us eggs and
a bottle of light red wine. I asked my friend Jean
if he hated arts and letters as cordially as he did
the sciences.

" Oh, no ! " he assured me ; " there is a childish
element in the arts which disarms strong dislike.
They are infants' games. Painters and sculptors

236 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

are daubers of pretty pictures and makers of dolls.
That is all ; and what great harm is there in that ?
We ought even to feel grateful to the poets for
only using words after they have stripped them
of all serious meaning, if only the poor fellows who
follow this amusement did not take their work, as
they call it, seriously, and if it did not make them
odiously selfish, irritable, jealous and envious, a
sort of crack-brained lunatics. They actually expect
to reap renown from this foolish trumpery. This
is proof positive of their insanity. For of all the
hallucinations that can spring from a sick brain,
surely the desire of fame is the most grotesque and
mischievous. I can only pity them. Here the
labourers sing at the plough the old songs their
fathers sang ; the shepherds, sitting on the hill-
sides, carve with their knives little figures out of
boxwood roots, and the housewives knead loaves
for f^te days in the shape of doves. These are
innocent arts, which no poisonous pride envenoms.
They are easy and proportioned to human feeble-
ness. On the contrary, the arts of the towns
demand effort, and every effort results in pain.

"But what above all afflicts and hideously dis-
figures and deforms our fellow-creatures is Science,
which brings them into relations with objects to
which they are out of all proportion and distorts
the true conditions of their intercourse with nature.

THE PRIORY 237

It provokes them to understand, when it is manifest
that an animal is made to feel and not to under-
stand ; it develops the brain, which is a useless
organ, at the expense of the useful organs which
we possess in common with the beasts ; it turns us
against enjoyment, for which we experience an
instinctive craving ; it tortures us with terrifying
illusions, showing us horrors that only exist by its
instrumentality ; it establishes our pettiness by
measuring the heavenly bodies, the shortness of
life by calculating the antiquity of the world, our
helplessness by leading us to suspect what we can
neither see nor touch, our ignorance by bringing
us up continually against the unknowable, and
our wretchedness by multiplying our subjects of
curiosity without supplying answers.

" I am not speaking of its purely speculative
researches. When it goes on to practical applica-
tions, its inventions are only new and ingenious
instruments of torture, machines in which un-
happy human beings are done to death. Visit any
manufacturing town or go down into a mine, and
say if the sights you see do not exceed all that the
most ferocious theologians have imagined of Hell.
Yet, on reflexion, it may be doubted if the pro-
ducts of industry are not less hurtful to the poor
who manufacture them than they are to the rich
who use them, and whether, of all the ills of life.

238 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

luxury is not the worst. I have known people of all
social conditions ; I have met none so wretched as a
lady of position in Paris, a young and pretty woman,
who spends fifty thousand francs every year on her
dresses. It is a state of things that leads to in-
curable neurosis."

The good-looking country-girl with the clear
eyes poured us out our coffee with an air of con-
tented stolidity.

My friend Jean pointed to her with the stem of
his pipe, which he had just filled, and

" Look at that girl," he said ; " she lives on
bread and bacon, and no longer ago than yesterday
she was carrying trusses of straw on a pitchfork ; you
can see bits of it in her hair now. She is happy
and innocent in all she does. For it is science and
civilization have created sin as well as disease. I
am almost as happy as she is, being almost as stupid.
Thinking about nothing, I never torment my wits.
Doing nothing, I am not afraid of doing ill. I do
not even till my garden, for fear of performing an
act the consequences of which I could not calculate.
In this way, I enjoy perfect peace of mind."

" In your place," I told him, " I should not feel
the same security. You cannot have so completely
crushed out all knowledge, thought and action in
yourself as to taste a genuine tranquillity. Mind
this : do what we will, to live is to act. The con-

THE PRIORY 239

sequences of a scientific discovery or invention
alarm you, because they are incalculable. But the
simplest thought, the most instinctive act, likewise
involves incalculable consequences. You pay a
great compliment to intellect, science and in-
dustry in thinking they only are concerned in
weaving the web of men's destinies. Many a mesh
is framed by unconscious forces. Can we foretell
the effect of the tiniest pebble dislodged from a
mountain side ? It may modify the lot of humanity
more notably than the publication of the Novum
Organuniy or the discovery of electricity.

"It was an act neither original nor deeply pondered,
nor surely of a scientific sort, to which Alexander or
Napoleon owed their appearance in the world. Yet
millions of human destinies were involved. Do we
even know the value and true meaning of what we
do ? There is a tale in the Arabian Nights to which
I cannot somehow help attaching a philosophical
interpretation. I mean the story of the Arab
merchant who, on his way back from a pilgrimage
to Mecca, seats himself on the margin of a spring to
eat dates, the stones of which he tosses up in the
air. One of these date-stones kills an invisible
being, the son of a Genie. The poor man never
dreamt he could do so much with a date-stone,
and when he was informed of the crime he had
committed, he was dumbfounded with horror. He

240 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

had never pondered sufficiently on the possible con-
sequences of every act we do. Can we ever tell,
when we lift our arm, if we may not strike, as the
merchant did, a genie of the air ? In your place, I
should not feel at ease at all. How do you know
that your quiet sojourn in this old Priory, overgrown
with ivy and saxifrage, is not an act of more pro-
found importance to humanity than all the dis-
coveries of all the savants, and productive of effects
of direst import in days to come ?"

" It is not probable."

" It is not impossible. You lead a strange life.
You speak strange words that may be collected and
published. Quite enough, under given circum-
stances, to make of you, in spite of, even against
your will, the founder of a new Religion. Millions
of men might embrace it, whom it would render
unhappy and ill-conditioned, and who would in
your name massacre thousands upon thousands of
their fellow-men."

" A man must needs die then to be innocent and
win tranquillity .? "

" Mind what you say, again ; to die is to accom-
plish an act of incalculably far-reaching poten-
tialities."

END.

TH E WO RKS OF
ANATOLE FRANCE

T has long been a reproach to England
that only one volume by Anatole
France has been adequately rendered into
English ; yet outside this country he shares
the distinction with Tolstoi of being
the greatest and most daring student of
humanity now living.
H There have been many difficulties to encounter in
completing arrangements for a uniform edition, though
perhaps the chief barrier to publication here has been the
fact that his writings are not for babes but for men and
the mothers of men. Indeed, some of his Eastern romances
are written with biblical candour. " I have sought truth
strenuously," he tells us, " I have met her boldly. I have
never turned from her even when she wore an unexpected
aspect." Still, it is believed that the day has come for
giving English versions of all his imaginative works, and of
his monumental study Joan of Arc, which is undoubtedly
the most discussed book in the world of letters to-day.

II Mr. John Lane has pleasure in announcing that he
will commence publication of works by M. Anatole France
in English, which will be under the general editorship of
Mr. Frederic Chapman, with the following volumes :

1. The Red Lily. A Translation by Winifred

Stephens.

2. Mother of Pearl. A Translation by the Editor.

THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE

3. The Garden of Epicurus. A Translation by

Alfred Allinson.

4. The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. A Trans-

lation by Lafcadio Hearn.

U During the autumn and next year will appear the
remaining volumes, including Joan of Arc. All the books
will be published at SIX SHILLINGS each, with the
exception of Joan of Arc.

11 The format of the volumes leaves little to be desired.
The size is Demy 8vo (9 x 5f in.), and they will be printed
from Caslon type upon a paper light of weight but strong
in texture, with a cover design, a gilt top, end-papers from
designs by Aubrey Beardsley, initials by Henry Ospovat.
In short, these are volumes for the bibliophile as well
as the lover of fiction, and form perhaps the cheapest library
edition of copyright novels ever published, for the price is
only that of an ordinary novel.

^ The translation of these books has been entrusted to
such competent French scholars as Mr. Alfred Allinson,
Hon. Maurice Baring, Mr. Frederic Chapman, Mr.
Robert B. Douglas, Mr. A. W. Evans, Mrs.
Farley, Lafcadio Hearn, Mrs. John Lane, Mrs. New-
march, Mr. C. E. Roche, Miss Winifred Stephens, and
Miss M. P. Willcocks.

H As Anatole Thibault, dit Anatole France, is to most
English readers merely a name, it will be well to state that
he was born in 1844 in the picturesque and inspiring
surroundings of an old bookshop on the Quai Voltaire,
Paris, kept by his father. Monsieur Thibault, an authority
on 18th-century history, from whom the boy caught the
passion for the principles of the Revolution, while from his
mother he was learning to love the ascetic ideals chronicled
in the Lives of the Saints. He was schooled with the lovers
of old books, missals, and manuscripts ; he matriculated on
the Quais with the old Jewish dealers of curios and objets
d'art; he graduated in the great university of life and ex-
perience. It will be recognised that all his work is permeated
by his youthful impressions ; he is, in fact, a virtuoso at large.

H He has written about thirty volumes of fiction. His

THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE

first novel was Jocasta and The Famished Cat (1879).
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard appeared in 188 1,
and had the distinction of being crowned by the French
Academy, into which he was received in 1896.

H His work is illuminated with style, scholarship, and
psychology; but its outstanding features are the lambent wit,
the gay mockery, the genial irony with which he touches
every subject he treats. But the wit is never malicious, the
mockery never derisive, the irony never barbed. To quote
from his own Garden of Epicurus, " Irony and Pity are
both of good counsel ; the first with her smiles makes life
agreeable ; the other sanctifies it to us with her tears. The
Irony I invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love
nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth
disarms anger, and it is she teaches us to laugh at rogues and
fools whom but for her we might be so weak as to hate."

U Often heshows howdivine humanity triumphs over mere
asceticism, and with entire reverence ; indeed, he might be
described as an ascetic overflowing with humanity, just as he
has been termed a " pagan, but a pagan constantly haunted
by the preoccupation of Christ." He is in turn like his
own Choulette in The Red Lily saintly and Rabelaisian,
yet without incongruity. At all times he is the unrelenting
foe of superstition and hypocrisy. Of himself he once
modestly said : '* You will find in my writings perfect sin-
cerity (lying demands a talent I do not possess), much indul-
gence, and some natural affection for the beautiful and good."

H The mere extent of an author's popularity is perhaps
a poor argument, yet it is significant that two books by this
author are in their Hundred and Tenth Thousand, and
numbers of them well into their Seventieth Thousand,
whilst the one which a Frenchman recently described as
"Monsieur France's most arid book" is in its Fifty-Eighth
Thousand.

H Inasmuch as M. France's only contribution to an
English periodical appeared in " The Yellow Book,"
Vol. V, April 1895, together with the first important
English appreciation of his work from the pen of the Hon.
Maurice Baring, it is peculiarly appropriate that the English
edition of his works should be issued from the Bodley Head.

FRENCH NOVELISTS

: : OF TO-DAY : :

BY WINIFRED STEPHENS

WITH A PORTRAIT FRONTISPIECE
Cr. 8vo, PRICE FIVE SHILLINGS, NET.

" No book of the spring season will receive a heartier welcome than Miss
Winifred Stephens' ' French Novelists of To-day.' It provides what thousands
of educated readers have long been asking for in vain a guide to the writings
of the great living masters of French fiction. It is evid_ent that Miss Stephens
has gathered much of her material in France, and that she has been in contact
with the personal as well as the artistic life of the authors described. The
biographical passages in each chapter add much to our knowledge, and are
obviously compiled from first-hand information. Miss Stephens shows critical
powers of a high order. Her accounts of the chief novels arc pleasant reading
for those already acquainted with the books, while for the beginner they afford
a clear, judicious, comprehensive guide. . . . We cannot praise too highly
this sparkling and graceful book, which should have a place in the library of
every student of French literature. Its practical value is enhanced by the full
and careful bibliographies." British Weei^y.

"These light chapters will be serviceable in helping the English reader to
realise the personality and work of the writers they deal with." Times.

"The book may be welcomed as a further sign of the progress of France
and England towards mutual comprehension. Thanks to its useful biblio-
graphies, it will serve as an excellent guide to all those who are anxious to
make themselves acquainted with what is best in modern French fiction. . . ,
The criticism of this book is good, and gains much by its connection with a
concise biography of the author discussed. . . . The book may be recom-
mended to all English readers of French fiction." Daily !}\ews.

" A felicitous and graceful little volume, presenting very adequately the
eight French novelists of to-day who are read, criticised, and sold . . . should
be read along with recent essays on French writers by Mr. Edmund Gosse."

Daily Chronicle.

**. . . These essays form a useful introduction to modern French fiction.
They are, for the most part, well judged and tersely written."

Evening Standard.

"As a guide to modem French fiction and its authors, this book is useful,
especially in its bibliographies." 'Daily Mail,

". . . Miss Winifred Stephens puts her hand to a most welcome and timely
undertaking in this book, which will supply English readers with an intelligent
introduction to the study of leading French novelists. What she says about
the writers she selects is excellent." Daily Graphic.

" Miss Stephens' primary object was to indicate what contemporary French
novels are likely to interest English readers, and on the whole she has suc-
ceeded : her book will serve a very useful purpose."

Manchester Guardian.

JOHN LANE : The Bodley Head, London and New York.

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