it would perhaps be difficult to find a more convincing example than pride to show that the obstacles to a better, stronger, serener life are rather in us than in circumstances. the diversity, and more than that, the contrasts in social conditions give rise inevitably to all sorts of conflicts. yet in spite of this how greatly would social relations be simplified, if we put another spirit into mapping out our plan of outward necessities! be well persuaded that it is not primarily differences of class and occupation, differences in the outward manifestations of their destinies, which embroil men. if such were the case, we should find an idyllic peace reigning among colleagues, and all those whose interests and lot are virtually equivalent. on the contrary, as everyone knows, the most violent shocks come when equal meets equal, and there is no war worse than civil war. [152]but that which above all things else hinders men from good understanding, is pride. it makes a man a hedgehog, wounding everyone he touches. let us speak first of the pride of the great.
what offends me in this rich man passing in his carriage, is not his equipage, his dress, or the number and splendor of his retinue: it is his contempt. that he possesses a great fortune does not disturb me, unless i am badly disposed: but that he splashes me with mud, drives over my body, shows by his whole attitude that i count for nothing in his eyes because i am not rich like himself—this is what disturbs me, and righteously. he heaps suffering upon me needlessly. he humiliates and insults me gratuitously. it is not what is vulgar within me, but what is noblest that asserts itself in the face of this offensive pride. do not accuse me of envy; i feel none; it is my manhood that is wounded. we need not search far to illustrate these ideas. every man of any acquaintance with life has had numerous experiences which will justify our dictum in his eyes. in certain communities devoted to material interests, the pride of wealth dominates to such a degree that men are quoted like values in the stock market. the esteem in [153]which a man is held is proportionate to the contents of his strong box. here "society" is made up of big fortunes, the middle class of medium fortunes. then come people who have little, then those who have nothing. all intercourse is regulated by this principle. and the relatively rich man who has shown his disdain for those less opulent, is crushed in turn by the contempt of his superiors in fortune. so the madness of comparison rages from the summit to the base. such an atmosphere is ready to perfection for the nurture of the worst feeling; yet it is not wealth, but the spirit of the wealthy that must be arraigned.
many rich men are free from this gross conception—especially is this true of those who from father to son are accustomed to ease—yet they sometimes forget that there is a certain delicacy in not making contrasts too marked. suppose there is no wrong in enjoying a large superfluity: is it indispensable to display it, to wound the eyes of those who lack necessities, to flaunt one's magnificence at the doors of poverty? good taste and a sort of modesty always hinder a well man from talking of his fine appetite, his sound sleep, his exuberance of spirits, in the presence of one dying of consumption. [154]many of the rich do not exercise this tact, and so are greatly wanting in pity and discretion. are they not unreasonable to complain of envy, after having done everything to provoke it?
but the greatest lack is that want of discernment which leads men to ground their pride in their fortune. to begin with, it is a childish confusion of thought to consider wealth as a personal quality; it would be hard to find a more ingenuous fashion of deceiving one's self as to the relative value of the container and the thing contained. i have no wish to dwell on this question: it is too painful. and yet one cannot resist saying to those concerned: "take care, do not confound what you possess with what you are. go learn to know the under side of worldly splendor, that you may feel its moral misery and its puerility." the traps pride sets for us are too ridiculous. we should distrust association with a thing that make us hateful to our neighbors and robs us of clearness of vision.
he who yields to the pride of riches, forgets this other point, the most important of all—that possession is a public trust. without doubt, individual wealth is as legitimate as individual existence and liberty. these things are inseparable, and it is a [155]dream pregnant with dangers that offers battle to such fundamentals of life. but the individual touches society at every point, and all he does should be done with the whole in view. possession, then, is less a privilege of which to be proud than a charge whose gravity should be felt. as there is an apprenticeship, often very difficult to serve, for the exercise of every social office, so this profession we call wealth demands an apprenticeship. to know how to be rich is an art, and one of the least easy of arts to master. most people, rich and poor alike, imagine that in opulence one has nothing to do but to take life easy. that is why so few men know how to be rich. in the hands of too many, wealth, according to the genial and redoubtable comparison of luther, is like a harp in the hoofs of an ass. they have no idea of the manner of its use.
so when we encounter a man at once rich and simple, that is to say, who considers his wealth as a means of fulfilling his mission in the world, we should offer him our homage, for he is surely mark-worthy. he has surmounted obstacles, borne trials, and triumphed in temptations both gross and subtle. he does not fail to discriminate between the contents of his pocketbook and the contents of his [156]head or heart, and he does not estimate his fellow-men in figures. his exceptional position, instead of exalting him, makes him humble, for he is very sensible of how far he falls short of reaching the level of his duty. he has remained a man—that says it all. he is accessible, helpful, and far from making of his wealth a barrier to separate him from other men, he makes it a means for coming nearer and nearer to them. although the profession of riches has been so dishonored by the selfish and the proud, such a man as this always makes his worth felt by everyone not devoid of a sense of justice. each of us who comes in contact with him and sees him live, is forced to look within and ask himself the question, "what would become of me in such a situation? should i keep this modesty, this naturalness, this uprightness which uses its own as though it belonged to others?" so long as there is a human society in the world, so long as there are bitterly conflicting interests, so long as envy and egoism exist on the earth, nothing will be worthier of honor than wealth permeated by the spirit of simplicity. and it will do more than make itself forgiven; it will make itself beloved.
more[157] dangerous than pride inspired by wealth is that inspired by power, and i mean by the word every prerogative that one man has over another, be it unlimited or restricted. i see no means of preventing the existence in the world of men of unequal authority. every organism supposes a hierarchy of powers—we shall never escape from that law. but i fear that if the love of power is so wide-spread, the spirit of power is almost impossible to find. from wrong understanding and misuse of it, those who keep even a fraction of authority almost everywhere succeed in compromising it.
power exercises a great influence over him who holds it. a head must be very well balanced not to be disturbed by it. the sort of dementia which took possession of the roman emperors in the time of their world-wide rule, is a universal malady whose symptoms belong to all times. in every man there sleeps a tyrant, awaiting only a favorable occasion for waking. now the tyrant is the worst enemy of authority, because he furnishes us its intolerable caricature, whence come a multitude of social complications, collisions and hatreds. every man who says to those dependent on him: "do [158]this because it is my will and pleasure," does ill. there is within each one of us something that invites us to resist personal power, and this something is very respectable. for at bottom we are equal, and there is no one who has the right to exact obedience from me because he is he and i am i: if he does so, his command degrades me, and i have no right to suffer myself to be degraded.
one must have lived in schools, in work-shops, in the army, in government offices, he must have closely followed the relations between masters and servants, have observed a little everywhere where the supremacy of man exercises itself over man, to form any idea of the injury done by those who use power arrogantly. of every free soul they make a slave soul, which is to say the soul of a rebel. and it appears that this result, with its social disaster, is most certain when he who commands is least removed from the station of him who obeys. the most implacable tyrant is the tyrant himself under authority. foremen and overseers put more violence into their dealings than superintendents and employers. the corporal is generally harsher than the colonel. in certain families where madam has not much more education than her maid, the [159]relations between them are those of the convict and his warder. and woe everywhere to him who falls into the hands of a subaltern drunk with his authority!
we forget that the first duty of him who exercises power is humility. haughtiness is not authority. it is not we who are the law; the law is over our heads. we only interpret it, but to make it valid in the eyes of others, we must first be subject to it ourselves. to command and to obey in the society of men, are after all but two forms of the same virtue—voluntary servitude. if you are not obeyed, it is generally because you have not yourself obeyed first.
the secret of moral ascendancy rests with those who rule with simplicity. they soften by the spirit the harshness of the fact. their authority is not in shoulder-straps, titles or disciplinary measures. they make use of neither ferule nor threats, yet they achieve everything. why? because we feel that they are themselves ready for everything. that which confers upon a man the right to demand of another the sacrifice of his time, his money, his passions, even his life, is not only that he is resolved upon all these sacrifices himself, but [160]that he has made them in advance. in the command of a man animated by this spirit of renunciation, there is a mysterious force which communicates itself to him who is to obey, and helps him do his duty.
in all the provinces of human activity there are chiefs who inspire, strengthen, magnetize their soldiers: under their direction the troops do prodigies. with them one feels himself capable of any effort, ready to go through fire, as the saying has it; and if he goes, it is with enthusiasm.
but the pride of the exalted is not the only pride; there is also the pride of the humble—this arrogance of underlings, fit pendant to that of the great. the root of these two prides is the same. it is not alone that lofty and imperious being, the man who says, "i am the law," that provokes insurrection by his very attitude; it is also that pig-headed subaltern who will not admit that there is anything beyond his knowledge.
there are really many people who find all superiority irritating. for them, every piece of advice is an offense, every criticism an imposition, every [161]order an outrage on their liberty. they would not know how to submit to rule. to respect anything or anybody would seem to them a mental aberration. they say to people after their fashion: "beyond us there is nothing."
to the family of the proud belong also those difficult and supersensitive people who in humble life find that their superiors never do them fitting honor, whom the best and most kindly do not succeed in satisfying, and who go about their duties with the air of a martyr. at bottom these disaffected minds have too much misplaced self-respect. they do not know how to fill their place simply, but complicate their life and that of others by unreasonable demands and morbid suspicions.
when one takes the trouble to study men at short range, he is surprised to find that pride has so many lurking-places among those who are by common consent called the humble. so powerful is this vice, that it arrives at forming round those who live in the most modest circumstances a wall which isolates them from their neighbors. there they are, intrenched, barricaded with their ambitions and their contempts, as inaccessible as the powerful of earth behind their aristocratic prejudices. obscure or [162]illustrious, pride wraps itself in its dark royalty of enmity to the human race. it is the same in misery and in high places—solitary and impotent, on guard against everybody, embroiling everything. and the last word about it is always this: if there is so much hostility and hatred between different classes of men, it is due less to exterior conditions than to an interior fatality. conflicting interests and differences of situation dig ditches between us, it is true, but pride transforms the ditches into gulfs, and in reality it is pride alone which cries from brink to brink: "there is nothing in common between you and us."
we have not finished with pride, but it is impossible to picture it under all its forms. i feel most resentful against it when it meddles with knowledge and appropriates that. we owe our knowledge to our fellows, as we do our riches and power. it is a social force which ought to be of service to everybody, and it can only be so when those who know remain sympathetically near to those who know not. when knowledge is turned into a tool for ambition, it destroys itself.
[163]and what shall we say of the pride of good men? for it exists, and makes even virtue hateful. the just who repent them of the evil others do, remain in brotherhood and social rectitude. but the just who despise others for their faults and misdeeds, cut themselves off from humanity, and their goodness, descended to the rank of an ornament for their vanity, becomes like those riches which kindness does not inform, like authority untempered by the spirit of obedience. like proud wealth and arrogant power, supercilious virtue also is detestable. it fosters in man traits and an attitude provocative of i know not what. the sight of it repels instead of attracting, and those whom it deigns to distinguish with its benefits feel as though they had been slapped in the face.
to resume and conclude, it is an error to think that our advantages, whatever they are, should be put to the service of our vanity. each of them constitutes for him who enjoys it an obligation and not a reason for vainglory. material wealth, power, knowledge, gifts of the heart and mind, become so much cause for discord when they serve to nourish pride. they remain beneficent only so long as they are the source of modesty in those who possess them.
[164]let us be humble if we have great possessions, for that proves that we are great debtors: all that a man has he owes to someone, and are we sure of being able to pay our debts?
let us be humble if we sit in high places and hold the fate of others in our hands; for no clear-sighted man can fail to be sensible of unfitness for so grave a r?le.
let us be humble if we have much knowledge, for it only serves to better show the vastness of the unknown, and to compare the little we have discovered for ourselves with the amplitude of that which we owe to the pains of others.
and, above all, let us be humble if we are virtuous, since no one should be more sensible of his defects than he whose conscience is illumined, and since he more than anyone else should feel the need of charity toward evil-doers, even of suffering in their stead.
and what about the necessary distinctions in life?" someone may ask. "as a result of your simplifications, are you not going to destroy that sense of the difference between men which must be maintained if society exists at all?"
[165]i have no mind to suppress distinctions and differences. but i think that what distinguishes a man is not found in his social rank, his occupation, his dress or his fortune, but solely in himself. more than any other our own age has pricked the vain bubble of purely outward greatness. to be somebody at present, it does not suffice to wear the mantle of an emperor or a royal crown: what honor is there in wielding power through gold lace, a coat of arms or a ribbon? not that visible signs are to be despised; they have their meaning and use, but on condition that they cover something and not a vacuum. the moment they cease to stand for realities, they become useless and dangerous. the only true distinction is superior worth. if you would have social rank duly respected, you must begin by being worthy of the rank that is your own; otherwise you help to bring it into hatred and contempt. it is unhappily too true that respect is diminishing among us, and it certainly is not from a lack of lines drawn round those who wish to be respected. the root of the evil is in the mistaken idea that high station exempts him who holds it from observing the common obligations of life. as we rise, we believe that we free ourselves from the law, forgetting [166]that the spirit of obedience and humility should grow with our possessions and power. so it comes about that those who demand the most homage make the least effort to merit the homage they demand. this is why respect is diminishing.
the sole distinction necessary is the wish to become better. the man who strives to be better becomes more humble, more approachable, more friendly even with those who owe him allegiance. but as he gains by being better known, he loses nothing in distinction, and he reaps the more respect in that he has sown the less pride.
