From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



against the ill-humour from which its neighbours 

 suffer. To this nation is attributed a smiling and 

 harmonious concept of life. 



* This nation is France. Nevertheless, to read 

 the words of its most representative minds is to see 

 them oppressed by ill, beginning with the suffering 

 of thought, and ending with the suffering of love. 

 Whether we take Musset, Taine, Baudelaire, Maupas- 

 sant, Dumas fils, Renan, Zola, the Goncourts, Leconte 

 de Lisle, Anatole France, or Sully Prudhomme; 

 Parisians or provincials; cosmopolitans, poets, 

 thinkers or philosophers; all show us a troubled 

 soul behind their melodious phrases and their 

 conventional smile. . . . 



' Their predecessors, Chateaubriand, Sainte- 

 Beuve, Lamartine, show similar tragedies present 

 to their consciousness. What are we to say of 

 Bossuet, Racine, Corneille, and so many other 

 illustrious writers ? From all the heights of French 

 thought comes the same note of sadness. Voltaire, 

 of all men the most poised and attached to life, 

 says somewhere quite seriously, " Happiness is but 

 a dream, but pain is real." Elsewhere he says, 

 " I do not know what eternal life may be, but this 

 life is a bad joke." 



' For Diderot " we exist only amid pain and 

 tears. . . . We are the playthings of uncertainty, 

 of error, of necessity, of sickness, of ill-will, and 

 of passion ; and we live among rogues and charlatans 

 of every kind." 



* The moralists join in the chorus of disgust 

 with life. Larochefoucauld, Charron, La Bruyere, 

 Chamfort, and Vauvenarges, all make the same 

 complaint: " Life is not worth the trouble of 

 living! " And the writers of other lands are 

 marked by a despair which is perhaps louder and 

 less musical. . . .' 



292 



