Part 12

We mistake if we think that a child is naturally alien to respect, basing this opinion on the very numerous examples of irreverence which he offers us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. His moral being feeds on it. The child aspires confusedly to revere and admire something. But when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it gets corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion and mutual deference, we, the grown-ups, discredit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and that of everything worthy of respect. We inoculate in him a bad spirit whose effects then turn against us.

This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more force than in the relations between masters and servants, as we have made them. Our social errors, our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back upon the heads of our children. There are certainly few people of the middle classes who understand that it is better to part with many thousands of dollars than to lead their children to lose respect for servants, who represent in our households the humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strictly as you will conventions and distances,--that demarkation of social frontiers which permits each one to remain in his place and to observe the law of differences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, but on condition of never forgetting that those who serve us are men and women like ourselves. You require of your domestics certain formulas of speech and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the respect they owe you. Do you also teach your children and use yourselves manners toward your servants which show them that you respect their dignity as individuals, as you desire them to respect yours? Here we have continually in our homes an excellent ground for experiment in the practice of that mutual respect which is one of the essential conditions of social sanity. I fear we profit by it too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but we fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case that we get only hypocrisy and this supplementary result, all unexpected,--the cultivation of pride in our children. These two factors combined heap up great difficulties for that future which we ought to be safeguarding. I am right then in saying that the day when by your own practices you have brought about the lessening of respect in your children, you have suffered a sensible loss.

Why should I not say it? It seems to me that the greater part of us labor for this loss. On all sides, in almost every social rank, I notice that a pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of reciprocal contempt. Here, those who have calloused hands and working-clothes are disdained; there, it is all who do not wear blue jeans. Children educated in this spirit make sad fellow-citizens. There is in all this the want of that simplicity which makes it possible for men of good intentions, of however diverse social standing, to collaborate without any friction arising from the conventional distance that separates them.

If the spirit of caste causes the loss of respect, partisanship, of whatever sort, is quite as productive of it. In certain quarters children are brought up in such fashion that they respect but one country--their own; one system of government--that of their parents and masters; one religion--that which they have been taught. Does anyone suppose that in this way men can be shaped who shall respect country, religion and law? Is this a proper respect--this respect which does not extend beyond what touches and belongs to ourselves? Strange blindness of cliques and coteries, which arrogate to themselves with so much ingenuous complacence the title of schools of respect, and which, outside themselves, respect nothing. In reality they teach: "Country, religion, law--we are all these!" Such teaching fosters fanaticism, and if fanaticism is not the sole anti-social ferment, it is surely one of the worst and most energetic.

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If simplicity of heart is an essential condition of respect, simplicity of life is its best school. Whatever be the state of your fortune, avoid everything which could make your children think themselves more or better than others. Though your wealth would permit you to dress them richly, remember the evil you might do in exciting their vanity. Preserve them from the evil of believing that to be elegantly dressed suffices for distinction, and above all do not carelessly increase by their clothes and their habits of life, the distance which already separates them from other children: dress them simply. And if, on the contrary, it would be necessary for you to economize to give your children the pleasure of fine clothes, I would that I might dispose you to reserve your spirit of sacrifice for a better cause. You risk seeing it illy recompensed. You dissipate your money when it would much better avail to save it for serious needs, and you prepare for yourself, later on, a harvest of ingratitude. How dangerous it is to accustom your sons and daughters to a style of living beyond your means and theirs! In the first place, it is very bad for your purse; in the second place it develops a contemptuous spirit in the very bosom of the family. If you dress your children like little lords, and give them to understand that they are superior to you, is it astonishing if they end by disdaining you? You will have nourished at your table the declassed--a product which costs dear and is worthless.

Any fashion of instructing children whose most evident result is to lead them to despise their parents and the customs and activities among which they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective for nothing but to produce a legion of malcontents, with hearts totally estranged from their origin, their race, their natural interests--everything, in short, that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. Once detached from the vigorous stock which produced them, the wind of their restless ambition drives them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in the end be heaped up to ferment and rot together.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by an evolution slow and certain. In preparing a career for our children, let us imitate her. Let us not confound progress and advancement with those violent exercises called somersaults. Let us not so bring up our children that they will come to despise work and the aspirations and simple spirit of their fathers: let us not expose them to the temptation of being ashamed of our poverty if they themselves come to fortune. A society is indeed diseased when the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the fields, when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of working-men, in the hope of being taken for heiresses, prefer to walk the streets alone rather than beside their honest parents. A society is healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members applies himself to doing very nearly what his parents have done before him, but doing it better, and, looking to future elevation, is content first to fulfill conscientiously more modest duties.

This would be the place to speak of work in general, and of its tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the subject in my books Justice, Jeunesse, and Vaillanos. I must limit myself to referring the reader to them.

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Education should make independent men. If you wish to train your children for liberty, bring them up simply, and do not for a moment fear that in so doing you are putting obstacles in the way of their happiness. It will be quite the contrary. The more costly toys a child has, the more feasts and curious entertainments, the less is he amused.

In this there is a sure sign. Let us be temperate in our methods of entertaining youth, and especially let us not thoughtlessly create for them artificial needs. Food, dress, nursery, amusements--let all these be as natural and simple as possible. With the idea of making life pleasant for their children, some parents bring them up in habits of gormandizing and idleness, accustom them to sensations not meant for their age, multiply their parties and entertainments. Sorry gifts these! In place of a free man, you are making a slave. Gorged with luxury, he tires of it in time; and yet when for one reason or another his pleasures fail him, he will be miserable, and you with him: and what is worse, perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will be ready--you and he together--to sacrifice manly dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer sloth.

Let us bring up our children simply, I had almost said rudely. Let us entice them to exercise that gives them endurance--even to privations. Let them belong to those who are better trained to fatigue and the earth for a bed than to the comforts of the table and couches of luxury. So we shall make men of them, independent and staunch, who may be counted on, who will not sell themselves for pottage, and who will have withal the faculty of being happy.

A too easy life brings with it a sort of lassitude in vital energy. One becomes blasé, disillusioned, an old young man, past being diverted. How many young people are in this state! Upon them have been deposited, like a sort of mold, the traces of our decrepitude, our skepticism, our vices, and the bad habits they have contracted in our company. What reflections upon ourselves these youths weary of life force us to make! What announcements are graven on their brows!

These shadows say to us by contrast that happiness lies in a life true, active, spontaneous, ungalled by the yoke of the passions, of unnatural needs, of unhealthy stimulus; keeping intact the physical faculty of enjoying the light of day and the air we breathe, and in the heart, the capacity to thrill with the love of all that is generous, simple and fine.

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The artificial life engenders artificial thought, and a speech little sure of itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, the ordinary contact with reality, bring frankness with them. Falsehood is the vice of a slave, the refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free and strong is unflinching in speech. We should encourage in our children the hardihood to speak frankly. What do we ordinarily do? We trample on natural disposition, level it down to the uniformity which for the crowd is synonymous with good form. To think with one's own mind, feel with one's own heart, express one's own personality--how unconventional, how rustic!--Oh! the atrocity of an education which consists in the perpetual muzzling of the only thing that gives any of us his reason for being! Of how many soul-murders do we become guilty! Some are struck down with bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows! Everything conspires against independence of character. When we are little, people wish us to be dolls or graven images; when we grow up, they approve of us on condition that we are like all the rest of the world--automatons: when you have seen one of them you've seen them all. So the lack of originality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth can free us from this bondage: let our children be taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack or muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in their gravest failures, if only they acknowledge them, account it for merit that they have not covered their sin.

To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our solicitude as educators. Let us have for this comrade of childhood--a trifle uncivilized, it is true, but so gracious and friendly!--all possible regard. We must not frighten it away: when it has once fled, it so rarely comes back! Ingenuousness is not simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the individual qualities of each of us; it is besides a great informing and educating force. I see among us too many practical people, so called, who go about armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to ferret out naïve things and clip their wings. They uproot ingenuousness from life, from thought, from education, and pursue it even to the region of dreams. Under pretext of making men of their children, they prevent their being children at all;--as if before the ripe fruit of autumn, flowers did not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, and all the fairy springtime.

I ask indulgence for everything naïve and simple, not alone for the innocent conceits that flutter round the curly heads of children, but also for the legend, the folk song, the tales of the world of marvel and mystery. The sense of the marvellous is in the child the first form of that sense of the infinite without which a man is like a bird deprived of wings. Let us not wean the child from it, but let us guard in him the faculty of rising above what is earthy, so that he may appreciate later on those pure and moving symbols of vanished ages wherein human truth has found forms of expression that our arid logic will never replace.

XIV

CONCLUSION

I think I have said enough of the spirit and manifestations of the simple life, to make it evident that there is here a whole forgotten world of strength and beauty. He can make conquest of it who has sufficient energy to detach himself from the fatal rubbish that trammels our days. It will not take him long to perceive that in renouncing some surface satisfactions and childish ambitions, he increases his faculty of happiness and his possibilities of right judgment.

These results concern as much the private as the public life. It is incontestable that in striving against the feverish will to shine, in ceasing to make the satisfaction of our desires the end of our activity, in returning to modest tastes, to the true life, we shall labor for the unity of the family. Another spirit will breath in our homes, creating new customs and an atmosphere more favorable to the education of children. Little by little our boys and girls will feel the enticement of ideals at once higher and more realizable. And transformation of the home will in time exercise its influence on public spirit. As the solidity of a wall depends upon the grain of the stones and the consistence of the cement which binds them together, so also the energy of public life depends upon the individual value of men and their power of cohesion. The great desideratum of our time is the culture of the component parts of society, of the individual man. Everything in the present social organism leads us back to this element. In neglecting it we expose ourselves to the loss of the benefits of progress, even to making our most persistent efforts turn to our own hurt. If in the midst of means continually more and more perfected, the workman diminishes in value, of what use are these fine tools at his disposal? By their very excellence to make more evident the faults of him who uses them without discernment or without conscience. The wheelwork of the great modern machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, incompetence or corruption may produce here disturbances of far greater gravity than would have threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of the society of the past. There is need then of looking to the quality of the individual called upon to contribute in any measure to the workings of this mechanism. This individual should be at once solid and pliable, inspired with the central law of life--to be one's self and fraternal. Everything within us and without us becomes simplified and unified under the influence of this law, which is the same for everybody and by which each one should guide his actions; for our essential interests are not opposing, they are identical. In cultivating the spirit of simplicity, we should arrive, then, at giving to public life a stronger cohesion.

The phenomena of decomposition and destruction that we see there may all be attributed to the same cause,--lack of solidity and cohesion. It will never be possible to say how contrary to social good are the trifling interests of caste, of coterie, of church, the bitter strife for personal welfare, and, by a fatal consequence, how destructive these things are of individual happiness. A society in which each member is preoccupied with his own well-being, is organized disorder. This is all that we learn from the irreconcilable conflicts of our uncompromising egoism.

We too much resemble those people who claim the rights of family only to gain advantage from them, not to do honor to the connection. On all rounds of the social ladder we are forever putting forth claims. We all take the ground that we are creditors: no one recognizes the fact that he is a debtor, and our dealings with our fellows consist in inviting them, in tones sometimes amiable, sometimes arrogant, to discharge their indebtedness to us. No good thing is attained in this spirit. For in fact it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal enemy of universal law, that obstacle to brotherly understanding which is ever presenting itself anew.

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In a lecture delivered in 1882, M. Renan said that a nation is "a spiritual family," and he added: "The essential of a nation is that all the individuals should have many things in common, and also that all should have forgotten much." It is important to know what to forget and what to remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily life. Our memories are lumbered with the things that divide us; the things which unite us slip away. Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his part of agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, public officer, proletary, bourgeois, or political or religious sectarian; but his essential quality, which is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated to the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theoretic notion of it. So that what occupies us and determines our actions, is precisely the thing that separates us from others, and there is hardly place for that spirit of unity which is as the soul of a people.

So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. Men animated by a spirit of particularism, exclusiveness, and pride, are continually clashing. They cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment of division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps up in their remembrance a stock of reciprocal ill-will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad feeling with its consequences.