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Wisdom And Destiny

M >> Maurice Maeterlinck >> Wisdom And Destiny




106. Men, as a rule, sally forth from their homes seeking beauty and
joy, truth and love; and are glad to be able to say to their
children, on their return, that they have met nothing. To be for
ever complaining argues much pride; and those who accuse love and
life are the ones who imagine that these should bestow something
more than they can acquire for themselves. Love, it is true, like
all else, claims the highest possible ideal; but every ideal that
conforms not with some strenuous inward, reality is nothing but
falsehood--sterile and futile, obsequious falsehood. Two or three
ideals, that lie out of our reach, will suffice to paralyse life. It
is wrong to believe that loftiness of soul is governed by the
loftiness of desire or dream. The dreams of the weak will be often
more numerous, lovelier, than are those of the strong; for these
dreams absorb all their energy, all their activity. The perpetual
craving for loftiness does not count in our moral advancement if it
be not the shadow thrown by the life we have lived, by the firm and
experienced will that has come in close kinship with man. Then,
indeed, as one places a rod at the foot of the steeple to tell of
its height by the shadow, so may we lead forth this craving of ours
to the midst of the plain that is lit by the sun of external
reality, that thus we may tell what relation exists between the
shadow thrown by the hour and the dome of eternity.

107. It is well that a noble heart should await a great love; better
still that this heart, all expectant, should cease not from loving;
and that, as it loves, it should scarcely be conscious of its desire
for more exquisite love. In love as in life, expectation avails us
but little; through loving we learn to love; and it is the so-called
disillusions of pettier love that will, the most simply and
faithfully, feed the immovable flame of the mightier love that shall
come, it may be, to illumine the rest of our life.

We treat disillusions often with scantiest justice. We conceive them
of sorrowful countenance, pale and discouraged; whereas they are
really the very first smiles of truth. Why should disillusion
distress you, if you are a man of honest intention, if you strive to
be just, and of service; if you seek to be happy and wise? Would you
rather live on in the world of your dreams and your errors than in
the world that is real? Only too often does many a promising nature
waste its most precious hours in the struggle of beautiful dream
against inevitable law, whose beauty is only perceived when every
vestige of strength has been sapped by the exquisite dream. If love
has deceived you, do you think that it would have been better for
you all your life to regard love as something it is not, and never
can be? Would such an illusion not warp your most significant
actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the
truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your
grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the
second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse
the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion
was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to
regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors
none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest,
that for an instant prostrates you, do not murmur to yourself
through your tears that life is less beautiful than you had dreamed
it to be, but rather that in your dream there must have been
something lacking, since real life has failed to approve. And indeed
the much-vaunted strength of the strenuous soul is built up of
disillusions only, that this soul has cheerfully welcomed. Every
deception and love disappointed, every hope that has crumbled to
dust, is possessed of a strength of its own that it adds to the
strength of your truth; and the more disillusions there are that
fall to the earth at your feet, the more surely and nobly will great
reality shine on you--even as the rays of the sun are beheld the
more clearly in winter, as they pierce through the leafless branches
of the trees of the forest.

108. And if it be a great love that you seek, how can you believe
that a soul shall be met with of beauty as great as you dream it to
be, if you seek it with nothing but dreams? Have you the right to
expect that definite words and positive actions shall offer
themselves in exchange for mere formless desire, and yearning, and
vision? Yet thus it is most of us act. And if some fortunate chance
at last accords our desire, and places us in presence of the being
who is all we had dreamed her to be--are we entitled to hope that
our idle and wandering cravings shall long be in unison with her
vigorous, established reality? Our ideal will never be met with in
life unless we have first achieved it within us to the fullest
extent in our power. Do you hope to discover and win for yourself a
loyal, profound, inexhaustible soul, loving and quick with life,
faithful and powerful, unconstrained, free: generous, brave, and
benevolent--if you know less well than this soul what all these
qualities mean? And how should you know, if you have not loved them
and lived in their midst, as this soul has loved and lived? Most
exacting of all things, unskilful, thick-sighted, is the moral
beauty, perfection, or goodness that is still in the shape of
desire. If it be your one hope to meet with an ideal soul, would it
not be well that you yourself should endeavour to draw nigh to your
own ideal? Be sure that by no other means will you ever obtain your
desire. And as you approach this ideal it will dawn on you more and
more clearly how fortunate and wisely ordained it has been that the
ideal should ever be different from what our vague hopes were
expecting. So too when the ideal takes shape, as it comes into
contact with life, will it soften, expand, and lose its rigidity,
incessantly growing more noble. And then will you readily perceive,
in the creature you love, all that which is eternally true in
yourself, and solidly righteous, and essentially beautiful; for only
the good in our heart can advise us of the goodness that hides by
our side. Then, at last, will the imperfections of others no longer
seem of importance to you, for they will no longer be able to wound
your vanity, selfishness, and ignorance; imperfections, that is,
which have ceased to resemble your own; for it is the evil that lies
in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells
within others.

109. Let us have the same confidence in love that we have in life;
for confidence is of our essence; and the thought that works the
most harm in all things is the one that inclines us to look with
mistrust on reality. I have known more than one life that love broke
asunder; but if it had not been love, these lives would no doubt
have been broken no less by friendship or apathy, by doubt,
hesitation, indifference, inaction. For that only which in itself is
fragile can be rent in the heart by love; and where all is broken
that the heart contains, then must all have been far too frail.
There exists not a creature but must more than once have believed
that his life was crushed; but they whose life has indeed been
shattered, and has fallen to ruin, owe their misfortune often to
some strange vanity of the very ruin. Fortunate and unfortunate
hazards there must of necessity be in love as in all the rest of our
destiny. It may so come about that one whose spirit and heart are
abounding with tenderness, energy, and the noblest of human desires,
shall meet, on his first setting forth, all unsought, the soul that
shall satisfy each single craving of love in the ecstasy of
permanent joy; the soul that shall content the loftiest yearning no
less than the lowliest: the vastest, the mightiest no less than the
daintiest, sweetest: the most eternal no less than the most
evanescent. He, it may be, shall instantly find the heart whereto he
can give--the heart which will ever receive--all that is best in
himself. It may happen that he shall at once have attained the soul
that perchance is unique; the soul that is satisfied always, and
always filled with desire; the soul that can ever receive many
thousand times more than is given, and that never fails to return
many thousand times more than it receives. For the love that the
years cannot alter is built up of exchanges like these, of sweet
inequality; and naught do we ever truly possess but that which we
give in our love; and whatever our love bestows, we are no longer
alone to enjoy.

110. Destinies sometimes are met with that thus are perfectly happy;
and each man, it may be, is entitled to hope that such may one day
be his; yet must his hope be never permitted to fasten chains on his
life. All he can do is to make preparation one day to deserve such a
love; and he will be most patient and tranquil who incessantly
strives to this end. It might so have happened that he whom we spoke
of just now should, day after day, from youth to old age, have
passed by the side of the wall behind which his happiness lay
waiting, enwrapped in too secret a silence. But if happiness lie
yonder side of the wall, must despair and disaster of necessity
dwell on the other? Is not something of happiness to be found in our
thus being able to pass by the side of our happiness? Is it not
better to feel that a mere slender chance--transparent, one almost
might call it--is all that extends between us and the exquisite love
that we dream of, than to be divided for ever therefrom by all that
is worthless within us, undeserving, inhuman, abnormal? Happy is he
who can gather the flower, and bear it away in his bosom; yet have
we no cause to pity the other who walks until nightfall, steeped in
the glorious perfume of the flower no eyes can behold. Must the life
be a failure, useless and valueless, that is not as completely happy
as it possibly might have been? It is you yourself would have
brought what was best in the love you regret; and if, as we said,
the soul at the end possess only what it has given, does not
something already belong to us when we are incessantly seeking for
chances of giving? Ah yes--I declare that the joy of a perfect,
abiding love is the greatest this world contains; and yet, if you
find not this love, naught will be lost of all you have done to
deserve it, for this will go to deepen the peace of your heart, and
render still braver and purer the calm of the rest of your days.

111. And, besides, we always can love. If our own love be admirable,
most of the joys of admirable love will be ours. In the most perfect
love, the lovers' happiness will not be exactly the same, be their
union never so close; for the better of the two needs must love with
a love that is deeper; and the one that loves with a deeper love
must be surely the happier. Let your task be to render yourself
worthy of love--and this even more for your own happiness than for
that of another. For be sure that when love is unequal, and the
hours come clouded with sorrow, it is not the wiser of the two who
will suffer the most--not the one that shows more generosity,
justice, more high-minded passion. The one who is better will rarely
become the victim deserving our pity. For, indeed, to be truly a
victim it must be our own faults, our injustice, wrongdoing, beneath
which we suffer. However imperfect you be, you still may suffice for
the love of a marvellous being; but for your love, if you are not
perfect, that being will never suffice. If fortune one day should
lead to your dwelling the woman adorned with each gift of heart and
of intellect--such a woman as history tells of, a heroine of glory,
happiness, love--you will still be all unaware if you have not
learned, yourself, to detect and to love these gifts in actual life;
and what is actual life to each man but the life that he lives
himself? All that is loyal within you will flower in the loyalty of
the woman you love; whatever of truth there abides in your soul will
be soothed by the truth that is hers; and her strength of character
can be only enjoyed by that which is strong in you. And when a
virtue of the being we love finds not, on the threshold of our
heart, a virtue that resembles it somewhat, then is it all unaware
to whom it shall give the gladness it brings.

112. And whatever the fate your affections may meet with, do you
never lose courage; above all, do not think that, love's happiness
having passed by you, you will never, right up to the end, know the
great joy of human life. For though happiness appear in the form of
a torrent, or a river that flows underground, of a whirlpool or
tranquil lake, its source still is ever the same that lies deep down
in our heart; and the unhappiest man of all men can conceive an idea
of great joy. It is true that in love there is ecstasy that he
doubtless never will know; but this ecstasy would leave deep
melancholy only in the earnest and faithful heart, if there were not
in veritable love something more stable than ecstasy, more profound
and more steadfast; and all that in love is profoundest, most stable
and steadfast, is profoundest in noble lives too--is most stable and
steadfast in them. Not to all men is it given to be hero or genius,
victorious, admirable always, or even to be simply happy in exterior
things; but it lies in the power of the least favoured among us to
be loyal, and gentle, and just, to be generous and brotherly; he
that has least gifts of all can learn to look on his fellows without
envy or hatred, without malice or futile regret; the outcast can
take his strange, silent part (which is not always that of least
service) in the gladness of those who are near him; he that has
barely a talent can still learn to forgive an offence with an ever
nobler forgiveness, can find more excuses for error, more admiration
for human word and deed; and the man there are none to love can
love, and reverence, love. And, acting thus, he too will have drawn
near the source whither happy ones flock--oftener far than one
thinks, and in the most ardent hours of happiness even--the source
over which they bend, to make sure that they truly are happy. Far
down, at the root of love's joys--as at the root of the humble life
of the upright man from whom fate has withheld her smile--it is
confidence, sincerity, generosity, tenderness, that alone are truly
fixed and unchangeable. Love throws more lustre still on these
points of light, and therefore must love be sought. For the greatest
advantage of love is that it reveals to us many a peaceful and
gentle truth. The greatest advantage of love is that it gives us
occasion to love and admire in one person, sole and unique, what we
should have had neither knowledge nor strength to love and admire in
the many; and that thus it expands our heart for the time to come,
And at the root of the most marvellous love there never is more than
the simplest felicity, an adoration, a tenderness within the
understanding of all, a security, faith, and fidelity all can
acquire an intensely human admiration, devotion--and all these the
eager, unfortunate heart could know too, in its sorrowful life, had
it only a little less impatience and bitterness, a little more
initiative and energy.

THE END

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