By the fire side ...

Preface

PREFACE

FOREMOST among the things that never perish, though continually changing, is the family. Among different peoples and in different ages its appearance differs, but in one form or another it always exists.

Not only has the family undergone profound changes, it has suffered grave deterioration, encountered innumerable enemies, contracted vices and taken on stains. It appears to us as a human institution, regulated by customs and laws, exposed to the errors and passions of men ; and by virtue of its exterior conditions it belongs to the ephemeral: but by its root it plunges into the eternal. Love and the ties of blood — the centuries pass, these things endure. As ancient as the world, they are as young as each new morning, and we are men only in proportion to the hold they have taken upon us.

I am going to speak here of these sacred and immortal commonplaces, among which we need to refresh ourselves as in a fountain of youth. The

VIU

PREFACE reader will find in my book^ as in life, lights and shadows; I have not tried to dissimulate the dark points : but I have sought to bring the luminous ones into relief. This honour we owe to the ideal.

Need I ask indulgence for having sometimes called up personal remembrances ? I thought in this way the pages would gain in local colour, and I have given rein to my gratitude in sketching the traits of some dear figures now disappeared from earth.

We shall never feel enough devotion for the hearth. Why is it not given me to offer a more unblemished gift upon its modest altars ? I bring there at least all the warmth of my heart and all my filial piety. If some of my readers should learn to love one another better, no fruit of my labour would seem to me more sweet.

Contents

PAGE

I. THE ROOF-TREE .... 3 II. THE SPIRIT OF FAMILY . . 16

III. TWO MAKE ONE .... 31

II

WHAT is family spirit? Before giving this question a positive answer^ we must proceed to a sort of clearing away of rubbishy a work of elimination.

There are many minds as to what constitutes the spirit of family, and the numerous conceptions of it circulating in the world bear little resemblance to one another and are by no means always of a high order. The detractors and enemies of the home see in family spirit something egoistic, narrow and exclusive; they warn us against displaying it and urge us to declare war against it. There are men who may have reason to complain of their family, for whom simply the word suggests the unhappiest memories and stirs up the bitterest feeling. There are fanatics for figures, applying statistics to everything, who think that in order to properly define family spirit, we must take a sort of mean of different households: to their notion family spirit is the one dominant in the greatest number of cases — a spirit with nothing very exalted about it.

In the wake of any of these categories of men^ we arrive at conclusions confused, inexact and dangerous^ but in disregarding what they have to say, we risk disregarding reality and launching into Utopia. Let us look at their ideas, discuss them^ and make a way through the tangle to the light. Our chief concern is to acknowledge truth wherever we find it, and to find what there is of it, even in the most extravagant opinions.

Unfortunately it is too true that in certain families the ruling spirit is narrow and selfish. We need but to mention some of its traits to call up in the mind of every one numerous illustrations from his own experience. Are there not families animated by a spirit so exclusive that they deserve rather to be called cliques? He who does not share their opinions, lacks intelligence; he who has not their tastes, does not know what is seemly. They are impervious to all foreign influence; what good thing can come from without? Even friendship is excluded. They say to one another, "We must choose our friends among ourselves, and make no others."

Every pact of fellowship outside their severely circumscribed limits is looked upon as felony, and whoever tries to penetrate within them is treated as an intruder.

Again, it is the spirit of caste that infects the family atmosphere, with its pride and its disdainful ways. When we look into some faces we see written there : We are all ! The world is theirs by right of rank, and not to show yourself of this mind by bowing before their superiority, is an evidence of stupidity or of vulgar training.

Other families are organised like trusts, for the monopoly of influence, power, wealth, place; everything is meant for them. They establish themselves in a city or a country like colonists come to exploit it: the common run of its inhabitants are a sort of inferior race, good at most for serving them. And to be of this type, one need not descend from the Crusaders nor belong in any category of notables; obscure families in plenty are organised on this footing. You might call them brigands; the rest of society is their forest. They lie in wait for their prey, and carry off the spoils.

That such a spirit is detestable, that under all these different forms, narrowness, egoism, and f amily pride have got a bad reputation in the world, is certain, and I find it quite natural. But is this family spirit? Is it just to visit on all the hearths round which men gather, the reprobation due to these inhospitable and dangerous ambuscades where lurks the spirit of caste, of inhumanity, of tyranny and spoils ?

Let us pass now to those who through the family feel themselves aggrieved. At the very mention of the word, they cringe. " Oh, the family ! " they cry, in a voice wherein are concentrated all their hurts, *' don't speak of it to me ! It has done me nothing but injury. Our worst enemies are our kin and connections. Better solitude and savagery than family life."

These cries, alas! are not always uttered by the ungrateful, men void of natural affection and insensible to it; they as often come from the victims of human cruelty, to whom this affection has been denied. There is within man a brute, and this brute is nowhere else so terrible as in the family. When it wakes, with its evil instincts, its perversities and diabolical subtleties, woe to him who falls into its power !

We have a proverb from antiquity which sums up the sad truth that through corruption the best things become the worst. How many grievous illustrations has family life not furnished this formula of ancient wisdom! In truths many a family is pervaded by a thoroughly bad spirit^ a spirit of jealousy and division. Nowhere else is hatred more implacable than in families; among people unrelated, it can not outdo the fierceness it reaches among those who are akin. Sons hate their fathers, and fathers their sons ; brothers and sisters detest each other ; hatred comes between husband and wife, and then the evil may be said to have reached its limit. No other passion, no murderous power, has ever made the human heart undergo more intimate and horrible tortures than has family hatred. We could not feel pity enough for its victims : but this frankly avowed and deplored, we have the right to protest and to say, this is not family spirit!

Here, however, we are met by the statisticians, who count the cases and draw the conclusions their pessimism demands. They make scrupulous analysis of all the different family atmospheres, and confide the results to their accusing note-books; then from this mass of evidence they establish proportions. Out of every hundred families there are so many unhappy marriages, so many rebellious children_, so many hostile brothers^ so many relatives at war over inheritance^ so many j ealous husbands and termagant wives^ so many centres of gossip for calumniating and pestering our neighbour^ so many cabals plotting to rob him of his goods. Deducting all these deplorable cases^ there remains not much more than a family here and there where life goes on somewhat in keeping. Then have we not the right to say that the spirit of family is bad.^

If we must hold to statistics^ I acknowledge there is nothing to do but grant that the great majority of families^ in some sense at leasts fall under this pitiless arraignment^ and that in face of the brutality of figures we make a sorry showing. Besides the families where the spirit is frankly bad, how many are vulgar, materialistic, uninteresting! But statistics are out of place here ; they are not profitable, not even truthful.

What should we think of the man who in response to the questions, "What is painting? What is poetry? " should set about making a category of all the works of brushes and pens innumerable, and taking a sort of mean out of this medley, should declare^ " This is paintings this is poetry " ? Poetry would then be represented by myriads of unknown men who have written bad verses. The spirit of poetry would not be that of Homer^ Shakespeare, Goethe, Corneille, but the spirit of the majority: Raphael and Titian would no longer be painters.

The fact is that statistics, though an excellent and useful science, is not all-sufficient. Applied to certain questions, it becomes absurd. To find out what art is, we must go to the works of the masters. And yet, the masters themselves, if we might question them, would reply : " What is Art ? Not we and our works. It is what we dreamed rather than what we accomplished. Our happiest achievements fell far short of our aspirations ; they were only the reflection of an unattainable ideal. The most beautiful songs have never been written, the most beautiful pictures never painted."

Let us apply these reflections to the spirit of the family.

Evidently it is not the spirit of the greatest number of families. It is not so much what is as what ought to be, something made manifest here and there, appearing intermittently, even among people of generally commonplace type.

The spirit of family is made of the best that family life produces^ though this best be rare^ and not of the ordinary or worsts though these may be met at every street corner.

Were you to point out to me a thousand families of egoists^ vain^ sordidly selfish^ given to wrangling^ impure of lif e^ I have no less the right to show you a group of kindly f olk^ united, great-hearted^ selfsacrificing^ and to say to you: " This is a true famil}^^ animated by the spirit all families should have ! '' And supposing such a group cannot be founds perfection not being of this worlds wherever there is manifest in the midst of our errors and aberrations a lofty spirit^ better^ more generous^ tender and pure^ I have the right to say: *' Here are signs of the family spirit; " and focussing into one all the scattered rays of this benign lights do I not speak spiritual truth when I say: This is the spirit of family ?

Now let us try to characterise this spirit^ as here and there it discloses itself^ incorrupt and ideal, across our fragmentary and thwarted lives.

The sentiment of family is the conscious and deliberate expression of what we call the tie of blood; it has therefore its origin in obscurity, is instinctive before it becomes rational, seizes upon the heart before it speaks to the disciplined emotions and the intelligence. And this obscure basis which supplies the place of reflection while that is still dormant, remains after it has wakened to conscious life. The sentiment of family has its roots in our bones and marrow. It is stronger than reason or will, wider than the domain of speech. It reaches to the sacred and mysterious bounds where being merges in the Eternal Essence, in the very will of God itself.

The form of the family fluctuates. It differs with pre-historic man, the savage and the civilised; it is not the same among the ancients and the moderns; it submits itself over and over to the influence of changing historic environment. Profoimd diff'erences and striking contrasts separate the patriarchal family from the feudal; the family of the old regime, with its rights of seniority, from the family of to-day ; the polygamous family from the monogamous. But underneath all these forms there is one thing which persists, the tie of blood. These changing relations between father and son and between brothers, make no diff*erence; across this fluctuating surface of things, the immutable comes to the light. In those hours when the cry of blood makes itself heard, in those moments when some strange exaltation possesses us^ to teach us by experience the strength of natural ties, a father is a father, a son a son, a mother a mother, little matter the customs, the laws, the times, or the social estate.

The depth and energy of the spirit of family are comparable to the great forces of Nature: we see their effects, beneficent or blasting, but it is impossible to control or measure them. There are no scales on earth to weigh the rapture and tenderness or the anguish and despair that men have put in turn into these simple cries : My father ! my child ! my brother !

When we speak of the family spirit, of family instincts and sentiments, we touch, then, the very base of life, the very springs of being, that which is at once the most primitive and indestructible and the newest and most surprising. Whether they transport us with felicity or slay us with grief, these sentiments have this strange thing about them, that they are incommunicable and inexpi^essible. Only those who feel them understand them, and it seems then as though the experience must be new to the world.

The family spirit destroys neither the value nor the force of individuality, but it teaches the individual that he is a member of a whole, and makes him incapable of living as though he were alone or absolutely separate from those about him. Through the family spirit we learn that others are somewhat a part of ourselves, man touches man. Thee and me — those two great antagonists, those ardent rivals, mad to distinguish themselves, to separate their interests, to establish their boundaries, suddenly perceive that they have been labouring under a delusion. Let an egoist become a father, for example: he experiences an inconceivable surprise. This Other, who has never hitherto interested him, not even appealed to him, now becomes as close as though a part of him. What confusion of mind, what agitation! From this time on there is some one whom he calls "thou,'* as he already calls others; but when this some one is struck, he himself feels the blow. He is captured. He has made the prime discovery for us : he has perceived that our life circulates in other lives, and other lives in ours. God gives this lesson to man, that egoist by nature, and He gives it to him in the family, that later he may profit from it in society.

Our natural ferocity would be untamable, were we not held in leash by the ties of blood, but thanks to them, we are vulnerable and there is hope of subduing us. While this is going on, the sentiment of family forms a contrast with our lower self, as well as with the world's apparent law. This sentiment cannot be qualified otherwise than as a sacred madness. What more mad than to suffer from another man's pain.^ That is an extravagance, an aberration. No one could justify it in face of the practical, calculating sense, personal in the extreme, that makes the basis of this world's law.

The law of the world, the pillar of the edifice, without which — at least, so it seems to us — everything would crumble in ruins about us, is the conflict of interests, competition, the strict maintenance of personal rights. When we apply our acutest reasoning to affairs, we find no other issue.

The spirit of family overturns all this. Instead of drawing to itself, it bestows; instead of selling for a price, it grants ; instead of taking vengeance, it pardons. Here the law of the stronger is to protect, to guide, to care for the little ones. So it is not strange that there should be endless war between the spirit of the family and the spirit of the world, and that the hearths and hearts of us all should be their chosen battle-field. Hence the vacillations, the wrenching^ the ups and downs of our family life. But here^ too, lies what is most interesting about it. Nothing else in life is so alluring, so absorbing, as this struggle between the law of rivalry and the law of succour; nothing worthier of our attention than this series of lessons, forever forgotten, forever repeated, through which, in spite of ourselves, we climb one by one the steps that separate the human brute from the brother.

The family spirit is a touchstone of humanity's future, of that ideal realm of righteousness so far off from our present wretchedness, that even to hope for it needs the dauntless and patient faith counting on eons to remove the deepest-rooted obstacles. A mother's kiss has dedicated each of us to citizenship in that country. Making him the free gift of life and all that it contains, the mother says to her child, in the name of humanity: " Remember ! love as thou hast been loved, give as thou hast received ! "

Thus we see the spirit of family as a spirit of cohesion, but of cohesion tending to extend itself endlessly. It reaches from our immediate contemporaries . to our predecessors, from whom come our traditions, our inheritance, our customs and ideas ; it binds us to posterity, whose interests are in our care. In a word, the family in the restricted sense is incorporated in the family in the large sense. It comes from it and leads to it by an irresistible movement, strikingly symbolised in the simplest genealogical tree. If we have but one father and mother, we have four grandparents, eight greatgrandparents, and so back by increasing proportions. Through our ancestors we come from the crowd, through our descendants we return to it : how can it be indifferent to us ?

A school where such facts are taught and learned, cannot be, as some blind theorists hold, an obstruction to the public welfare; it is its strongest safeguard. The family is, as it were, the cell of society and of the nation; we have nothing more dependable on which to base our hopes, with which to cure our ills, through which to make our way out of the difficulties of the world of to-day. All the weighty social problems present themselves in the home, and have no solution anywhere if not there. How shall we have enough of the spirit of self-sacrifice to replace the savage conflict of society by good understanding, if we make no effort for good understanding with our own flesh and blood ? The desertion of the family life is the desertion of the field of honour where the future must be conquered in noble strife. In the weakening of the bonds of family is the destruction of all social bonds, for whom shall I call brother, if my own be estranged from me? The greater part of our public disaster comes from our neglect of private duty.

We must fall back upon the family, upon the home life, the home virtues, the home joys, the religion of the fireside.

Ill

THE tie of bloody which unites the members of a family^ derives from another tie^ a tie of choice, the result of attachment between two beings. Before the family, is the primordial fact of love. When a man and a woman agree to belong to each other, and to establish a home, the lines of their destinies merge, and their essential interests become identical. Two make one is the foundation stone of the pact.

From the beginning of the matter we are forced to deal with situations that are exceptional, but too numerous to be passed in silence. Whenever we speak at once of marriage and love, we are reminded that they do not of necessity dwell together. Why should we try to deceive ourselves? life proclaims the fact in every key. Before speaking of the normal marriage, we must think of the far more numerous marriages that are imperfect, mutilated or compromised. Truth seekers arrive at the heights by arduous paths^ and man's salvation lies in seeing life as it is^ and illumining its dark corners with light from above.

One cause for the bad result of many marriages of to-day is in the manner of their arrangement. Too many homes are established like those commercial and industrial enterprises where the business is set up in advance of the demand. Provided there is some correspondence of taste and education, some harmony of sentiment, a little growing esteem and the best intentions to please, in due time, it would seem, love cannot fail to come.

We should be quite inhuman not to wish those well who marry under such conditions, and in a multitude of cases it seems the only course. Young people are obliged to accommodate themselves as best they can to numerous duties and difficulties; with the best disposition in the world, the desire to do right, the noblest and most upright sentiments, they are sometimes forced to temporise. They marry, looking for love to come afterward; they make ready for it, as the Alsatian peasant makes ready on his roof the nests for those beloved forerunners of spring, those bearers of good fortune to their hosts — the storks. Often the storks accept the invitation; often^ too^ they pass unheeding^ to carry the happiness elsewhere; and never does any one know why they alight or why they pass on. So it is with this anticipated love ; it comes or it comes not. Why.^ That is a mystery.

No matter; whether it comes or not^ from the moment when two people take upon themselves vows to share lif e^ their interests^ their risks^ their reputation, everything that is theirs, is theirs in common. And this is true not only in the households where^ though love be lacking, there is a spirit of cordiality^ frank friendliness and mutual regard, but also in divided households. Perhaps in these it should be most frequently recalled. The husband and wife are one. He who wrongs the one, wrongs the other, and if they dispute, are jealous^ scornful or irritating, each does himself the injury he inflicts.

It seems as if there must be in human intelligence some serious obstacle to the recognition of this simple truths for from the beginning of the world it has been everywhere and endlessly repeated, yet scarcely any one deigns to pay it the slightest heed. The oldest tradition which states that two make one, is the tradition of Paradise, and the first couple proceeded at once to forget the truth. By a deplorable proceedings which has become a sort of hereditaryvice of the stronger sex^ Adam casts his fault upon the God-given woman^ not perceiving that he thus reproaches God over the shoulders of Eve. True, in the sequel, the daughters of Eve have often appropriated Adam's device; it is long since it has appertained specially to one sex. Sorry inheritance, abominable tradition, surviving all changes of manners and customs ! It often prevents husband and wife from understanding each other, pardoning each other's mistakes and insufficiencies, atoning for each other's faults. By accumulating grievances all along the route, two people who once esteemed each other, and very likely began by loving each other, after years of life together, end as open adversaries or irreconcilable enemies. V Two make one. It must be said on waking in the

morning, and repeated at each little incident of the day as well as in the serious crises of life.

Two make one — before the world, which generally embraces husband and wife in one judgment, without taking account of the details of their differences.

Especially two make one before the children. When parents appear to their children as people of opposing views^ wills and tastes^ and different ideals of life^ the home education is no longer possible. One undoes what the other achieves, and the family edifice, racked and shaken from its foundation^ falls in ruins about parents and children together. Whatever may be your differences of opinion or desires, your peculiar fashions of looking at life, your moral and religious convictions, the thing most needful is to present yourselves before your children as one ! Otherwise, through the breach opened in the joints of your union, and between your tendencies straining in opposite directions, disobedience, rebellion and the lawlessness of these young wills will rush in like a torrent, and submerge you. And what shall we say of parents who submit their cause to the judgment of their children, even the yoimg ones ; plead against each other before them, repudiate responsibilities, make comparisons and mutual accusations.^ In such cases any triumph is a defeat; judge, attorneys and all concerned lose the case.

If your consort is lacking in wisdom, in thoughtfulness, in moderation of judgment or conduct, try to help him remedy this. But if he prove inaccessible to your efforts, your example, even your devotion, only one expedient is left you — to have for both of you the qualities he lacks. I should not like to have this observation taken for one of those beautiful theories so easy to formulate but absolutely impossible to apply. I am transcribing here a lesson from life, the experience of people whom I have seen in the act, who, under circumstances exceptionally difficult and sometimes intolerable, have seemed to me to resolve most successfully the problem presented to so many whose lives have made irreparable shipwreck.

We are entering here a world of personal suffering and moral torture that has not its like. In certain cases the wrong is too evidently on one side for there to be the shadow of a doubt about it ; even if the other may be justly reproached, the cause is generally the deeper wrong. We must face the distressful spectacle of two beings held together by bonds which perhaps the birth of children has strengthened, yet incapable of moral association. The best intentions of the one always thwarted, her most generous efforts made fruitless; her life harassed, darkened, soiled sometimes by the constant and contaminating intrusion of a will that respects nothing and stops at no littleness or injustice: accusations to bear in whose face she is reduced to silence, like a criminal^ because defence would be only a worse evil .... no words^ no fantastic imaginings will ever sound to the circle of some domestic hells !

And even here^ two make one^ not only through the universal law which visits upon the innocent the sins of the guilty^ but through the fact of the primitive union. It is true we have divorce^ that heroic measure for desperate situations; but divorce^ even when it seems the sole possible issue^ is an end^ not a solution. No law^ no advocate^ no judicial process can blot out the common past: husband and wife, even separated, preserve mutual interests of dignity and feeling. Divorce is like surgical operations; the most successful leaves its scars behind. Divorce in attempting to loose the conjugal knot demonstrates its firmness, its inextricable entanglement; after its fashion it establishes the fact that two make one.

* * * * *

Let us enter now a land more cheerful and smiling, and turn our eyes toward households where a thorough understanding and harmony more or less perfect have been established. And let it be remarked that such harmony has nothing fortuitous or spontaneous about it. Nourished by good will and patience_, it ripens under skies that are not always cloudless. There may have been love at first sight, but such love often has along with the nature of lightning its brief duration. Time must pass before harmony is attained. Home lessons in this art are indispensable. Their price must be paid, and it is sometimes very high. Why do people not speak of this matter? Is there anything in life more interesting or more essential to know ?

Are not the bald realities of domestic life, its daily difficulties and the efforts made to resolve them, a worthier subject of consideration than hypocritical or at best superficial conventionalities ? I think we render young people a poor service in concealing from them what life really is. And this life, with all its complications, is finer than the fantastic idyl. The myth of the honeymoon has a particularly disastrous effect; it is likely to make us begin with dissatisfaction what is called the prosaic life of every day. It were better to make good prose, putting into it somewhat of soul and poetry. No, the accord of two wills is neither easy nor swift. It is not bestowed with the engagement ring, or with the bridegroom's gift. It must be acquired and conquered, like everything of real worth. Like artistic faculty and moral strength, it demands constant cultivation, and even those who once attain it may gradually lose it from lack of care.