The art of life

Front matter

IIP

By R. de Maulde la Claviere

WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE:

Part The First The Lower Life

CHAl'. PAGE

I. A DOUBLE CARNATION 3

II. THE HARD LIFE 7

III. OF RESTLESSNESS IO

IV. OF THE HAPPINESS OF DOING NOTHING . . 14 V. WHERE SHALL WE SEEK THE ART OF LIFE? . 19

VI. THE NECESSARY COMMUNISM 23

VII. THE REDEEMING SENTIMENT 31

VIII. THE INSUFFICIENCY OF MEN 42

IX. THE TRUE GUIDE TOWARDS THE ART OF LIFE . 46

X. VOICES DEAD AND LIVING . . . . - S°

XI. THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMEN .... 56

Part The Second The Middle Life

I. CREATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT .

III. THE ART OF THINGS

IV. THE ART OF IDEAS

V, THE ART OF SELF

VI. MODESTY

VII. THE HIGH CROSS viii CONTENTS

Part The Third The Flower Of Life

CHAP. PAGE

I. WOMEN MUST LEARN THEIR ART . . . .159

II. MARRIED LIFE 1 72

III. THE NECESSARY AFFECTIONS 1 86

IV. SOCIAL AFFECTION 1 93

V. RELATIONSHIPS 204

VI. CONVERSATION 212

VII. "A MAN IS JUDGED BY WHAT HE LOVES" . .221

VIII. THE DIVINE PLAN 228

IX. A REASONABLE FOLLY 236

Part The Fourth The Fruits Of Life

I. THE WILL 245

II. ACTION 259

III. JOY 267

IV. DESIRE 270

Part The Fifth The Higher Life

i. the assault of sorrow 279

ii. the maladies of sensibility .... 282

iii. the sources of sorrow 287

iv. a moral pharmacopoeia 29 1

v. through sorrow to love 300

vi. the garden of roses and the vale of tears 310

vii. " every life has its romance and its history " 313

viii. mammon, or life? 318

ix. "hitch your waggon to a star" . . . 322

Part The First The Lower Life A Double Carnation

" Bien lire l'univers, c'est lire la vie.

Le monde est l'oeuvre ou rien ne meurt et ne

tresens.

On voit les champs, mais c'est de Dieu qu'on s'eblouit."— V. Hugo.

" L'univers tout entier reflechit ton image, Et mon ame, a son tour, reflechit l'univers." 1 — Lamartine.

By Art I mean the cult of the Beautiful, provoking sympathy and love.

Beauty ! Does it play in our life a necessary part ?

We need but open our eyes to see things of beauty around us, and to perceive in beauty the fulfilment of the law of their being.

Nature is a great artist, who reveals to us the

1 [Rightly to read the universe is reading life. The world's a book in which there is neither death nor error ; whose hallowed words diffuse a perfume. The unrighteous man is he who reads amiss. We see the fields, but it is with God our eyes dazzle.

The whole wide universe reflects thy image, and my soul in its turn reflects the universe.]

true way of life ; her method is selection, and beauty her goal. In the neighbourhood of Mont Dore, for example, you walk on delicious carpets of pansies, yellow asters, thyme, carnations, flowers innumerable. Herein is Nature's art. Month after month she has gathered her forces, germinated, toiled, analysed, wrought miracles in physics and chemistry, to arrive at this result — a flower.

She is all beauty. How she belies the thesis of her undisciplined lovers, to whose imagination she is all violence, and wildness, and horror ! — who would fain set up a precipice in their drawing-room !

She smiles, looking for a higher life.

These pink carnations are all alike : blessings on the man, he too an artist, who lays a compelling hand on them, to assort them, and bring them to a higher perfection still !

Transformed from a single to a double blossom by a new culture, the carnation typifies what has been well called " the fruitage of legitimate desires," in other words, progress.

Winsome flower, in this little nosegay composed so daintily, so thoughtfully, radiant in thy manycoloured comeliness ! Assuredly a handful of herbs culled at random could never please so well. This posy gives me an idea of perfection.

At the point where thy normal life was stayed,

A DOUBLE CARNATION 5

a superior hand took seisin of thee, to continue the movement, and raise thee above thyself. Now thou hast a healthy flower, a fragrant flesh, many and various hues — pure, gay, bright, living : a feast for mortal eyes. Nay more, thou art my friend, dost clasp and hold me with thy exquisite perfume. What didst thou on those heights, in single scentlessness ? Thou wert wont to give me nothing : thee I could but contemplate, or crush under my feet ; whereas flowers of subtle scent are fays who know our need of tenderness, and faith, and intimate fellowship above all, and who seek us out and penetrate our being. This carnation fills my room ; good it is, and beautiful. I love it as a dear friend.

By like laws is the whole world governed ; for flower and animal and man alike the rules are one, differing solely in their mode of operation. Hence this modest flower is a perfect index of the course we should pursue. It has passed through the three great stages we discern in every lifehistory. First, the stage of law : born in humility, its growth was painful ; secondly, the stage of beauty : it developed, put forth its blossom, multiplied its seed ; lastly, it gave birth to a higher life, whence its double form, its wealth of colour, its sweet scent.

So should the art of our life be also : to draw from ourselves all that we are capable of yielding, to set in motion all our elements of vitality, to blossom to the full.

There are people who out of good itself evolve evil : set them in a garden of roses, they will find it a mere wilderness of thorns. The art of life consists, not in forcing or colouring or adapting life, but in the ability from its very evil to bring forth good. The whole problem is to grow double carnations instead of single, for the sweetening of our existence. This problem you may solve, if you will.

THE HARD LIFE

"All men have but one yearning in common : the yearning for life and happiness. In this lies the actual bond linking all men together." — Richard Wagner.

Life is hard at bottom. If perchance you yourself have not suffered, go into the slums of your city and see the human animal ; contemplating those wan, grave faces, with their look of utter weariness and woe, you will understand how life is built up, what a hot-bed of misery and squalor helps to root us in the earth. Our life emanates from death. Life kills.

This primal rigour is due to the urgent need of food and clothing and shelter. We are all cradled between ox and ass ; every living creature has its origin in animality ; life, compact of instinct and energy, resists the tempest by means of the firmness of its roots, and by its very ruggedness — but does the oak leap exultant as he withstands the blast ?

Many a time we hear our poets belauding the earth, her alleged tractableness, her smiles : 'tis rhyme without reason ! The man of the fields, living in close contact with the primal struggle, is persistently prosaic. Your guide, your cicerone, will admire the beauty of things ; the crowd will have no inkling of it ; to them a rock is a mass of stone, a cloud is wetness. Their only touch of art is a somewhat fatalistic philosophy. They do not exult in intellectual activity or self-analysis ; don't ask them if the eye consists of well-drilled microbes, or if man is a bundle of efforts towards a higher life. They see and act ; that is enough for them ; and reflexion itself, with them, sometimes does instinct a disservice, just as, though to spell correctly becomes in general an automatic process, yet, if we pause at a word and reflect, we are at a loss how to write it.

The stress of life produces strength, endurance, fretfulness, boredom, a stunted spiritual life — for the trees that shoot up most loftily into the heavens are slender of stem. It hardens the skin ; and certainly we can only look with respectful admiration at men who have reached a stage of endurance where a blow is preferable to a caress. I know nothing so genuinely beautiful as the lives of certain women, who devote themselves to husband and children with a self-sacrifice, a courage, and a silence beyond praise. Monetary worries,

THE HARD LIFE o

children's ailments, husband's vices — all are powerless to crush their spirit. And in all this there is a beauty so real that heroic and lofty natures have sometimes succumbed to its fascination, and found happiness in the sacred madness of self-immolation. History shows us enthusiasms of this kind pushed to a very sublimity of frenzy.

And yet present trials can only be truly loved so far as they intensify the desire or hope for future happiness. In this regard the rigour of life is precious, a deep fountain of delights ; it quickens our aptitude for joy. Assuredly it is right to inure your children to hardship, so that one day they may be healthy and happy, and bless you in their hearts ! But while we ought not to shrink from the inevitable rudenesses of life, still less ought we to brood upon them, and let the harsh aspects of existence monopolise our thoughts. The life that is really hard is the life of gloom. And sorrow springs more often from the way we take things than from the things themselves.

Be strong, then, to throw off the strain and stress ! Do not go open-armed to meet misfortune, or aggravate it by imaginary woes. Be resolute to nourish life into bloom. Take pity upon yourselves, and begin by bidding sorrow avaunt.

OF RESTLESSNESS

" In man's life there are but three incidents : birth, life, death. Of his birth he knows nothing; to die is agony ; and life he forgets." — La Bruyere.

"I said then to myself: Imagine that you have obtained all that you can wish for in this life ; imagine that you can accomplish in an instant all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are ambitious to bring about : would this be great joy and happiness to you ? And a voice in my conscience that nothing could stifle made answer : No." — John Stuart Mill.

Many people think that life cannot be filled better than by dint of excitements. Tell me frankly, does this lend charm to life ? Life is what it is ; why should we kill ourselves in painting its stucco ? It would often be doing us a service were some one to show us the ridiculous side of a crowd of obligations and ambitions in which we consume ourselves, vainly. To do this thing or that because " everybody does it," to know everybody, to catch the fleeting moment, to think everybody's thoughts, to see what every one sees, to eat the

OF RESTLESSNESS n

fashionable kickshaws and suffer from the fashionable complaint, to reel under the prodigious exertion of doing nothing — truly a fine object in life, this : the life of a circus horse or a squirrel. The world will regard us with admiration, mayhap ; but the physician before whom we presently collapse after our surfeit will treat us as degenerates.

He will tell us to quit Paris and fly to the sea or the mountains. Stuff ! 'tis not the air of Paris that is unwholesome ; what is unwholesome is its moral atmosphere. Still, I do find it a little hard to understand how a Parisian, constantly beset by risks so various, can reach manhood limbwhole, unmaimed. To be alive ! — that is the marvel.

And many people, amid these futile activities, pass life by after all without touching it. Who they were is never known ; you only see their gestures. In sooth, there must be many serious people among the clowns at the fair, judging by the number of clowns and fribbles among serious people.

Not a few of the grave men I happen to meet, lawyers, bankers, men of business, are not really men at all ; they are merely lawyers, bankers, men of business. Is this happiness ?

Mr. Rockefeller, the Oil King, has fallen into a melancholy. Like Charles V, he desires to abdicate ; but this dream is still to him a fresh source of trouble and sorrow, for he seeks a mortal of fit mould and temper to wield the sceptre in his stead, and, though he scours two hemispheres, this mortal is nowhere discoverable.

Will it astonish you, Madam, if I avouch that this rage of unrest has set its mark upon some of your sex ? Would not you yourself think it a slight on your reputation if you were even suspected of being a stay-at-home ? Conversation, writing — what outworn, antiquated things ! You fling out your words, your notes, in the style of a tradesman's list or a telegram ; you are seen in the paddock or the polo-field, on charitable committees, in presidential chairs ; since man is master, you think you are winning a place among the engulfing sex by adopting mannish modes wholesale.

The most charming of women will cut, at best, but a poor figure as a man ; and I cannot, in truth, see what there is in the spectacle of the masculine hurly-burly to attract women who might well live in quietness. To be endlessly getting and spending, to turn all things to laughter and take nothing seriously, to be altogether insensible — oh, a fine philosophy ! With all his wealth and titles and decorations, many a man comes to crawling on

OF RESTLESSNESS 13

all fours, and even finds exceeding comfort in his proneness, like the good soul who, being changed into a hog by the enchantress Circe, refused point-blank to resume his former feature. But all our restless strivings represent in reality nothing but a varnish of egoism, wherefore we cannot desire a woman to take pleasure in them. Moreover, she would have to force her nature to attain an egoism so perfect. Such egoism is very rare among you, ladies ; and often, after the loss of those you love has driven you within your last entrenchments, it happens that Death comes, rather than Forgetfulness.

OF THE HAPPINESS OF DOING NOTHING

Shall we at least find joy in the happiness of doing nothing ?

I recognise that, for some women, there is a measure of practical wisdom in remaining idle. Unaccustomed to anything that can be called work, constrained often to periods of real, enforced, idleness, they prefer to avoid all serious undertakings, lest their activity. prove mere beating of the air.

This attitude of mind is familiar to many men also, if they have an income however small, or merely the hope of espousing one. They tell themselves that work brings worry, breeds jealousy and envy : ignorance has its art — the art of shining inexpensively ; and all you have to do for the applause you covet is to unveil a statue in honour of some philosopher comfortably dead and buried. Meanwhile, it is so pleasant a sensation, so conducive to the peace and order of your country, to smoke your cigar without one thought, one desire, one aspiration !

OF DOING NOTHING 15

So pleasant ! But stay, my dear sir, let me deal fairly with you : you are always doing something, even though it be only smoking, hunting, reading the newspaper, emitting your political views, riding, eating, digesting. Only, these occupations are useless to your neighbours. It is very lucky, you will admit, that all men do not profess the same principles of ideal parasitism, for then, who would give you to eat ?

If we could but hug the assurance that wretchedness is the rightful heritage of the poor, and splendour the rightful heritage of the rich, we might beseech the poor to batten on the odours exhaled from your kitchens. But no : uselessness seeks to foist itself as a mark of distinction, and vanity, often more ravenous than hunger, excites violent social strictures, especially among workmen of some intelligence, and sufficiently well off already to have an inkling of what luxury means.

Unhappily, our progress in material things serves only to develop this sense of luxury, by establishing on all sides contacts purely material. Money, and money alone, classifies the passengers on the railway ; we all become mere parcels, some in wadding, others not. We are estimated by the weight of our money, though that is commonly a cause of moral feebleness, or at least of sloth. Will social happiness, any more than personal happiness, be found in this glorification of material indolence and the aristocracy of pleasure ? It seems not, judging by the jealousy that devours our whole society, from top to bottom. There is endless talk of solidarity, fraternity : that is the court dress of the present day — not, as of old, wigs and knee-breeches. But never was egoism so intolerant ; never, consequently, was the tedium of life so grievous.

Men mightily deceive themselves by indulging all their life long the dream of an easy time — retirement from business, quiet days of fishing, and so on ; seeking a path to this happiness by way of a life of inelastic limitations. " I am not an utter fool," a Frenchman will tell you: "as you are aware, I am a decent fellow, though I say so — a public servant, naturally, like all Frenchmen — a good citizen, and a member of no end of societies — academies, too, I assure you. Among the Ministers I serve, at least one out of two seems an absolute ass. Oh, but I serve him ! Simple obedience to rule makes you happy ; that 's the thing for peace and promotion. My wife is so devout that she positively does harm to religion ; she is driving me to agnosticism ; not that it really matters ; indeed, I recognise that in my wife's piety there is a narrow, slavish, so to say utilitarian side, which it is well to inculcate

OF DOING NOTHING 17

upon women, so as to silence argument and stifle thought. And as to work, and the money it brings in — well, I take just as much as I need. You can't imagine, dear fellow, how easy and familiar work becomes when you are used to it, and do it mechanically. It's like your morning tub — becomes a positive mania. When I am on holiday, getting a taste of Nature in my garden at Clamart, I feel quite lost, and have half a mind to go to the office. Still, I look forward with lively impatience to the goal of my life, the time for retiring. Talking of that, I quite envy the far niente of my neighbour, a decent little retired grocer. And, after all, not being miserly, thank Heaven, or stuck-up, I do feel that money is only a means ; it 's a good thing so far as it relieves us of exertion. For the most part, men only want to get rich out of sheer pride, just to have more than their neighbour. I myself have the sense to believe, like the English, that money becomes respectable when you begin to spend it. O the joy of doing nothing, and letting others slave for you ! — the delights of taking it easy, loafing, lolling the time away ! Governments could never give you too much encouragement. How easy they make it to govern a country, and what satisfaction they procure for the governed themselves ! "

B

That is how most of us talk. Our life is either whirl or stagnation. To the women who do nothing, as well as to all these mechanical gentlemen, to those who are enamoured of the world, and to persons flourishing and waxing fat, may I present the woman of my dream ? She has formed the habit of living so actively on the joys and sorrows of others ; she has sustained, encouraged, helped others so often, shared so many fears and hopes, seen so much of birth and death, lived so full a life ; that beneath her blanching hair her heart finds it impossible to retire from the service. It grows and grows. Her activity, always fruitful, brings forth ever more and more. A clear proof that there must be a special secret.

Chapter The Fifth Where Shall We Seek The Art Of Life?

" I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly : I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit." — Eccles. i. 17.

"The beauty of all things, even to the meanest of the minerals, proclaims God." — St. Bonaventure.

To Madame

Madame, — Do you remember a walk (romantic, shall I call it ?) we took one evening under a lovely iridescent sky ? Here and there we saw a few human ants, so to speak ; one man was pitting potatoes with his wife, another was collecting them from the field, a third was mowing, establishing with unvarying regularity of sweep a close-shorn equality around him. Earth, sky, the whole prospect was delightful ; but we alone rejoiced in it ; not one of those poor people so much as raised his eyes. That scene suggested to me the writing of this little book. For our natural development should only lead us to the enjoyment of beauty. As soon as a man has assured his life, he thinks of embellishing it ; if he has no such thought, it is because he still remains at the lower stage. So with societies : they know nothing of artistic evolution, but recognise only economic evolution ; and the movements to which the name ( renaissance ' is given imply merely that a people has made its fortune, and is young enough to wish to enjoy it. Ring out the hour of work, ring in the hour of sensibility.

But how is the appeal to sensibility to be made ? We must love something, but what ?

Some one suggests a love for the intellect in its highest manifestation — science, to wit. But is that an infallible prescription for universal happiness ? In the first place, not every mortal man can love science : the world in general is concerned only with its practical results ; you expect the pear-tree to yield pears, medicine to cure you, and a train to make good running ; but did you ever fall in love with a tunnel or the permanent way ? Secondly, science, even when you love her, proves a somewhat ungrateful mistress ; she yields to you but grudgingly ; she solves one question only to propound another ; she offers a helping hand, but, having stated her problem, leaves you gaping for its solution. Work by no means spells happiness ; and in vaunting the joys of the intellectual life, in persuading ourselves that restlessness of mind will fill the heart, we are bound in the long run to sink

WHERE SHALL WE SEEK IT? 21

into "futility, uncertainty, and sorrow/' as Pascal said. The elements of society that are purely sentimental and not scientific — family, marriage, fatherland — tend to disappear, and with what do we replace them ? With nothing ; as a matter of fact they are replaced by alcoholism, or what you will, for man must and will have his hours of dreaming !

Moralists, for their part, like M. Oll^-Laprune, confound the idea of beauty, not with the idea of work, but with the idea of virtue. Virtue, they declare, is beauty enough for them, and the consciousness of a duty fulfilled ought fully to appease our thirst for love. I am irresistibly reminded of the lament of an extremely ugly woman : "Women never get due credit for remaining virtuous."

I do not mean to say, of course, that evil is beautiful. Evil, in my belief, has no positive existence ; it is a want of vitality, a warped vigour, a stunted growth, and consequently an anti-aesthetic fact. The Book of Genesis puts forward a magnificent thesis in this regard : God is the creator, not of evil, but of liberty. The first man was a rare, choice plant, living without effort in such ordered unvarying happiness as a vegetable may enjoy. Instead of this earthy joy, God in His compassion gives him a wife, work to do, and liberty to sin — in other words, the implements necessary for securing a different kind of happiness, which otherwise he would never have known. Thus it may be said that the knowledge of good' and evil is itself only a sort of science, a method, a means towards a higher life, not life itself. Nothing in itself is either good or bad : evil consists in the abuse, or the insufficient use, of things.

Between dignity and pride, love and lust, prudence and avarice, there is only a shade, depending on the nicest variation of mental bias. " David did evilly in desiring to drink water, Esau foolishly in eating lentils. But God permitteth Noah to eat of any beast that agreeth with his stomach," — a sentence I have just unearthed in St. Augustine.

In a word, Madame, science (the science of ethics included) seems to me the skeleton or framework of life, — the stalk of the flower, the sketch for the picture, the grammar of the discourse, debentures as distinct from the dividend warrant. It is never anything but a groundwork or preparation. Mere reason pencils the sketch ; some one must come and lay on the colours.

But who will this be ? If the majority of us men are suffocating in our reason or unreason from lack of sensibility, may we not say that it is woman's part to widen our lives ? Should we not be advancing if we journeyed towards the country of the heart ?

Chapter The Sixth The Necessary Communism

" L'homme est un point qui vole avec deux ailes, Dont l'une est la pensee et dont l'autre est 1'amour." 1 — Victor Hugo.

We see the good and do it not, because we are unable to love it. Thus morality itself cannot justify its existence unless its final issue is beauty and love, as the flower is the consummation of the plant. Everything that is beautiful is true and moral, though everything that is true and moral is not beautiful. A beautiful building should be strong, but a strong building need not be beautiful. "To think is not to love, but to love is to think." Love is the sum of all. I may have been a respectable man — scholar, manufacturer, or idler at large ; I may have penned most polished verses or painted most academic pictures ; and so lived my life. But to be possessed by a noble sentiment, to extend my personality while apparently destroying it, to please my neighbour and love him as

1 [Man is a point that flies with two wings : one is thought ; the other, love.]

myself, to bestow my life on the outer world and from this outer world to extract a new life — here indeed is a novel state, this is true life !

True life ! — for among us there is infinitely more love than justice. We are strongly moved by passion alone. The brain looks down from his lordly sceptical height upon our internal sensations, and, sorting them, takes note merely of the pains. Of what is going well he has never a word to say. On the other hand, a delicate and complicated apparatus is constantly receiving and transmitting to our nerve centres a host of external sensations, often hardly perceptible ; it is perpetual hurry to and fro ; and all this movement from without acts upon us like an incessant winding of a clock.

There are thus two men in us : the inner man, who digests, and the outer man who breathes the air and perceives external things ; the analyst, and the compounder ; or, to use another figure, the conveyancer or surveyor who proves our title, and the master of the house, who throws up its windows and makes it his home. The analytical spirit is the essence of the scientific spirit, and the synthetic spirit the substance of the aesthetic spirit.

Some people do not admit this duality, which it is so important to recognise, and on which the whole art of life is based. They say that the useful

THE NECESSARY COMMUNISM 25

becomes beautiful on ceasing to be useful ; that love of the beautiful is born of superfluity, and constitutes a luxury. One might as well say that it is a luxury for a plant to bloom. An out-and-out utilitarian would be a monster, and an out-and-out sentimentalist a fool. I heartily agree with Taine's dictum that each of us has two dispositions, the one self-centred, the other beneficent.

According as the one or the other of these dispositions is the more strongly marked, a man, a woman, a society even, assumes an aspect of attraction or of repulsion. Sentiment, of course, may degenerate into abuse or weakness ; but the civilised man is recognised by the predominance of sentiment over pure reason. This is what Jules Simon and Gambetta implicitly proclaimed when, on their accession to power, they advocated a republic of the amiable or Athenian species, which meant practically that hard logic had had its day, and sentiment had come by its own. In point of fact, the Christian nations cannot be led in these days without love. There is no more futile notion than that of an automatic government, a perfectly adjusted constitution, regulated like a cotton-mill. Man must have some craze or other : the good government is not the most talented, nor even the best, but that to which we are well disposed, and which makes us happy. Hence statesmen like Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Balfour, Leo XIII, have always maintained the necessity, amid the ' struggle for life,' of mixing the leaven of the ideal with our daily bread, which otherwise we should be unable to swallow.