Chapter I

What! Have there never been sincere great minds, true friends of mankind?

HE

What I have just said to you must not be taken tragically. The greatest hypocrites are never perfect hypocrites. There is in them always one part of sincerity. The exercise of sincerity is the most natural thing in man. It needs a strong will to create a fictitious character for oneself; it also needs much talent, perhaps even genius. The hypocrite, in showing himself under a fictitious aspect, diminishes his pleasure in living; he will recover it in its entirety only when he has moulded to his pattern a great number of disciples; hence the proselytism of all the great creators of social lies. But hypocrisy ceases when the new environment has been created, itself the creator of new characters. The early Protestants feigned a certain rigidity of manners in order to depreciate the Papists. This hypocrisy became traditional, then hereditary, and it is with veritable good faith that the Calvinists banish from life all that might make its beauty and its sweetness. The Catholics, for strategical purposes, have set, in their sermons at least, a still higher value on the scorn of pleasure, and it is in all naïveté and good faith, like the Calvinists, that they prescribe several virtues whose practice would fling humanity back beyond the state of savagery. The philosophers, moreover, do not to-day hold views different from these, and they would be much astonished, from what they say, to see civilisation, with its delicious complications, fall into ruin, and make the earth like the fields where once was Troy, and the deserts where rises still the phantom of Timgad.

The moral theories of humanity and the form that they give to its daily life must be separately considered.

I have spoken to you of the great hypocrites. There have also been men of great simplicity. Neither have had on the general march of events the influence you might suppose. The world of ideas and of words is one world, and the world of facts and of action is another. They doubtless react on each other, but so slightly, so gently, and with so much delay, that their reciprocal influences are very hard to establish. Hardly before the last fifty or sixty years have the social ideas of Christianity seemed occasionally to take an active form, and then with what timidity! Perhaps Christianity will one day be realised in practice, but it will then have long disappeared as religion, philosophy, or system of ethics. And a new discord between thought and life will be apparent.

Even this much post-dated realisation of the great social doctrines is, perhaps, only an allusion. The field of thought and the parallel field of action are finite; and so the same thoughts must return after a turn of the wheel, and the same acts. Their coincidence, near or distant, is perhaps fortuitous. It is in vain that you think and speak; action enrolls itself upon another plane, and the two planes are perhaps eternally incapable of intersection.

At most it is admissible that the vague spectacle of things inspires in man a chirruping like that which takes the birds at sunrise. But would you say that it was this chirruping that made the sun rise? Your reasonings on the power of ideas, which would make them the creators of action, resemble that supposition. The ideas of man can never be other than ideas after the fact. The future? Do you even know what sort of weather we shall have to-morrow? The future that you pretend to forsee is only a past arranged by your imagination and your sensibility. You believe that what you wish to happen will happen. Children!

The exercise of thought is a game, but this game must be free and harmonious. The more useless you conceive it, the more beautiful you should wish it to be. Beauty; that is, perhaps, its only possible merit. In any case you must not permit in it those little creeping ideas that haunt corrupted brains, as wood-lice haunt rotten wood.