Читать книгу The Man Who Lost Himself - Beaunier André - Страница 4

DEDICATION: TO PAUL BOURGET

My dear master and friend,

You have been kind enough to accept the dedication of this novel. I offer it to you as evidence of my deferential and affectionate admiration, and also in memory of hours, unforgettable for me, of common toil in which I have sensed your mastery and your amity.

As in my previous writings—but this time, perhaps a little more clearly—I have tried to make contact here between pure ideas and the souls that receive them, who make them the rule of their life, and, in so doing, cannot help but alter them. If I had an exegete or a commentator, and if I merited it, he would doubtless indicate that such, moreover, is the object of all my works: the encounter of ideas and souls.

As a historian, I would have shown how humanity has been occupied, throughout the centuries, in diverting from their true significance the ideas that the princes of intelligence find, spread and thus deliver to troubling tribulations.

This novel is merely an anecdote, but an emblematic one. I have utilized it for the purpose I had of comparing science and religion, which are the two ideological compendia between which the epochs hesitate. The argument between scientists and the faithful goes back a long way, and it is ongoing. Where is the truth? It is not my prerogative to say. If I had had the audacity to claim that, I would certainly not have produced a novel but a dogmatic tract—and I would, for preference, have written in Latin, in order immediately to deter a reader who has good reason to be frivolous.

Whatever the dialectical conflict is in which scientists and the faithful are caught up, what I think I have perceived, having arrived at the end of my youth, is this: that one is wrong to count on science for the organization of societies and individuals.

In spite of the cherished individualism to which I remember having consecrated all my adolescent fervor, I can see today that we are not simply locations where ideas are brought into logical connection. My protagonist tries to do that, and he loses himself; I mean to say that science does not favor the happy and normal development of our individuality. It is abstract, and we are alive.

If my protagonist seems bizarre, that it because he takes his project to its conclusion, whereas, in reality, even the most scientific do not live entirely scientifically. They are scientists; that is their profession; but the essential principle of their life they have borrowed from other disciplines.

Michel Bedée proves, to his detriment, that science is inhuman. That word is not intended to denigrate it, but I observe that admirable science is something very different from us and, in brief, has almost nothing to do with us.

In 1890, when men of my generation spent their twenties, we were strongly influenced by a book that dated from 1848 but had just appeared, The Future of Science by Ernest Renan. We imagined then, with a prompt certainty, that science alone was going to govern our minds and guide our lives. We ardently read the preface to Ten Years of Historical Studies in which old Augustin Thierry, ill and blind by virtue of having worked incessantly, composed the sublime gospel of devotion to science.1 And I had for a teacher the great Gaston Paris, who resembled Charlemagne and whom I loved respectfully. In 1870, at the Collège de France, he affirmed tragically that the quest for the exact truth is paramount, and did so with patriotic fervor. He was animated by an immense love of France; and, when he announced those noble formulae in the midst of war, he offered to his scientific faith a magnificent and paradoxical sacrifice.2

Such imposing doctrines stirred me; my entire generation was aware of their prestige; they produced scientists, scholars and philosophers who made good use of science and served it well.

Those philosophers, scholars and scientists did not, however, go as far as my protagonist in the absolute abandonment of everything that is not pure idea. They did not, like him, make the sacrifice of their selves. They were, therefore, able to endure, and so I think that their example is illusory, if it is a question of establishing that science is sufficient in itself to constitute an ethic.

How much more human and better adapted to our needs is a very ancient belief, which has accompanied, through many ups and downs, our families, our ancestors, and which had gradually, even before our birth, prepared our souls and the conditions of their natural blossoming!

That is what I have attempted to say, in the form of a persuasive allegory, in this novelistic account of The Man Who Lost Himself. Will it be understood? I hope so. And will it be understood, as I desire, that I have examined, with tremulous sincerity, a fact about which nothing can be done, a poignant fact: the necessity of having, in the final account, fortified reasoning only to submit to it? It was at the time when I was reaching the middle of what is a very long life that I experienced a grave tenderness for my childhood, from which I once hastened to escape.

In sum, my dear Paul Bourget, here is this novel. I fear for it, but I have placed it under the tutelary protection of your name.

—André Beaunier

1. Author’s Note: “Here are a few lines from the preface of Ten Years of Historical Studies. This preface is dated Vesoul, 10 November 1834. ‘If, as I am inclined to believe, the interest of science is counted among the number of great national interests, I have given my country all that a useful soldier does on the field of battle. Whatever the destiny of my works might be, that example, I hope, will not go to waste. I would like it to serve to combat the kind of moral collapse that is the malady of the young generation; that it might bring back to the straight road of life some of those enervated souls who complain of lacking faith, who do not know where to go and search everywhere without finding anywhere an object of worship and devotion. Why say with so much bitterness that, in the world constituted as it is, there is no air for lungs, no employment for intelligences? Is there not serious and calm study? And is it not a refuge, a hope, a career within the range of everyone? With it, one gets through bad days without feeling their weight; one makes one’s own destiny; one uses one’s life nobly. That is what I have done, and would do again if I had to begin again; I would take the route that has led me to where I am. Blind and suffering, without hope and almost without release, I can render this testimony, which cannot be suspect on my part: there is something in the world worth more than material enjoyments; better than fortune; better than health itself; which is devotion to science.’ In 1890, some of us recited that page like a gospel.”

2. Author’s Note: “The lecture by Gaston Paris to which I make allusion was given on 8 December 1870 at the Collège de France; it was entitled ‘The Chanson de Roland and French Nationality.’ Gaston Paris was substituting for his father, Paulin Paris. The 1870 lecture was not published until 1885 by Hachette in the first volume of La Poésie du moyen âge. Gaston Paris delivered his lecture in the middle of the ‘circle of steel’ that the German armies made around him, in ‘terrible circumstances from which every moment that distracts us in patriotic preoccupations almost seems an illegitimate self-indulgence.’ He declared: “I profess absolutely and without reserve this doctrine, that science has no other object than the truth, and the truth for its own sake, without any concern for the good or bad, regrettable or fortunate consequences that the truth might have in practice. Anyone who, for patriotic, religious or even moral motives, permits himself, in the facts he studies and the conclusions he draws therefrom, the slightest dissimulation or alteration, is not worthy of his place in the great laboratory, in which probity is a more indispensable entitlement for admission than skill.’ The entire lesson is magnificent.”