Part 4

Need I say that I am only denouncing this desire of the ‘clerk’ to feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a nationalist provocation. The best way for me to define this is by quoting this hymn of a modern ‘clerk’ to ‘his soil and his dead’, a hymn completely void of political passion:

‘And the old oak under which I am sitting speaks in its turn, and says to me:

‘“Read, read in my shadow those Gothic songs whose refrains I heard in the past mingle with the rustling of my leaves. The souls of your ancestors are in these songs that are older than I am. Learn to know those humble ancestors, share their past joys and sorrows. Thus, O transitory creature, shalt thou live long ages in a few years. Be pious, venerate the soil of your country. Never take up a handful in your hand without remembering that it is sacred. Love all those far-off relatives whose dust mingled with earth has fed me for centuries, whose minds have passed into you, their Benjamin, the child of better days. Reproach not your ancestors with their ignorance, nor with the feebleness of their thought, nor even with the illusions of fear which sometimes rendered them cruel. As well reproach yourself for having been a child. Remember that they laboured, that they suffered, that they hoped for you, and that you owe everything to them!”’[47]

_Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as ‘clerks’._

The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions, if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as ‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities. They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the disinterested intelligence.

You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian, Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a conscious and organized passion _lacking all simplicity_, coldly scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of weakness in the foreigner--we cannot deny, I say, that this political passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the ‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like _La Nave_, with its national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by the present state of mind of the Italian people.[48] But in our day the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the service of political passions is that literary form which may be called ‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès admirably caught the appearance of that spirit--he stole the tool, a philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’ have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least in that very important section of them who read and believe they think. Moreover, in regard to poets and especially the poet I have just named, it is difficult to know whether the lyrical impulse lends its aid to a genuine and pre-existing political passion, or whether on the contrary this passion puts itself at the service of a lyrical impulse which is seeking inspiration. Alius judex erit.

But there are other ‘clerks’ who introduce political passion into their works with a remarkable consciousness of what they are doing, in whom this derogation seems more worthy of notice than in the poets. I mean the novelists and dramatists, i.e. ‘clerks’ whose function is to portray in as objective a manner as possible the emotions of the human soul and their conflicts--a function which, as Shakespeare, Molière, and Balzac have proved, may be carried out with all the purity I have here assigned to it. One may show how this function has been more than ever perverted by its subjection to political ends by the example of many contemporary novelists, not because they scatter ‘tendencious’ reflections throughout their narratives (Balzac constantly does so), but because instead of making their heroes feel and act in conformity with a true observation of human nature, they make them do so as the passion of the authors requires. Shall I cite those novels where the traditionalist, whatever his errors, always finally displays a noble soul, whereas the character without religion inevitably, and in spite of all his efforts, is capable of none but vile actions?[49] Or the other novels where the man of the people possesses every virtue and vileness is the exclusive portion of the bourgeois?[50] Or the novels where the author displays his compatriots in contact with foreigners and, more or less frankly, gives all moral superiority to his own people?[51] There is a two-fold evil in this proceeding; not only does it considerably inflame political passion in the breast of the reader, but it deprives him of one of the most eminently civilizing effects of all works of art, i.e. that self-examination to which every spectator is impelled by a representation of human beings which he feels to be true and solely pre-occupied with truth.[52] From the point of view of the artist and of the value of his activity alone, this partiality indicates a great degradation. The value of the artist, the thing which makes him the world’s high ornament, is that he _plays_ human passions instead of living them, and that he discovers in this ‘play’ emotion the same source of desires, joys and sufferings as ordinary men find in the pursuit of real things. Now, if this accomplished type of exuberant activity places itself at the service of the nation or of a class, if this fine flower of disinterestedness becomes utilitarian, then I say with the poet of the ‘Vierge aux Rochers’ when the author of _Siegfried_ exhales his last sigh: ‘The world has lost its import.’

I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as ‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking, ‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians. Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history, through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan, Fustel de Coulanges.[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of ‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’. Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag behind. Recently one of them, the author of a _History of France_, which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.[54] By his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function, if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which, coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment.

Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of disinterestedness.[55]

I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists, would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party, of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it with the pen. We are _the spiritual militia of the material_.’

Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using literary criticism in support of the social system in which they believed.[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.[57]

But the most remarkable thing about the modern ‘clerk’ in his desire to bring political passion into his work, is that he has done so in philosophy, more precisely, in metaphysics. It may be said that until the nineteenth century metaphysics remained the inviolate citadel of disinterested speculation. Among all forms of spiritual labour metaphysics best deserved the admirable tribute which a mathematician rendered the theory of numbers above all branches of mathematics, when he said: ‘This is the really pure branch of our science, by which I mean that it is unsullied by any contact with practical application.’ In fact thinkers free from any sort of earthly preference, like Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and even thinkers strongly imbued with the superiority of their class or nation (like Plato and Aristotle), never thought of directing their transcendental speculations towards a demonstration of this superiority or the necessity of this adoption by the whole world. It has been said that the morality of the Greeks was national, but their metaphysics were universal. The Church itself, so often favourable to class or national interests in its morality, thinks only of God and Man in its metaphysics. It was reserved for our own age to see metaphysicians of the greatest eminence turning their speculations to the exaltation of their own countries and to the depreciation of other countries, fortifying the will to power of their compatriots with all the power of abstractive genius. Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being, and history has showed whether the action of these ‘clerks’ had an effect on the hearts of their laymen. Let me hasten to add that this spectacle of patriotic metaphysics is provided by Germany alone. In France, even in this age of nationalist ‘clerks’, we have not yet seen any philosopher (at least one who is taken seriously) build up a metaphysical system to the glory of France. Neither Auguste Comte nor Renouvier nor Bergson ever thought of making a French hegemony the necessary result of the world’s development. Need I add what a degradation this has been for metaphysics, as it has been for art? It will be the eternal shame of the German philosophers to have transformed the patrician virgin who honoured the Gods into a harpy engaged in shrieking the glory of her children.

_Third: The ‘clerks’ have played the game of political passions by their doctrines_

But where the ‘clerks’ have most violently broken with their tradition and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favour of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a consciousness which will stupify history) to the task of making these passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues, while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the principal aspects of this phenomenon.

_A. The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal_

In the first place, the ‘clerks’ have set out to exalt the will of men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in a universal. With the exception of certain authors like Tolstoi and Anatole France, whose teaching moreover is now looked on with contempt by most of their colleagues, all the influential moralists of Europe during the past fifty years, Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy, d’Annunzio, Kipling, the immense majority of German thinkers, have praised the efforts of men to feel conscious of themselves in their nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims. Those whose activity since the time of the Stoics had been devoted to preaching the extinction of national egotism in the interest of an abstract and eternal entity, set out to denounce every feeling of this kind and to proclaim the lofty morality of that egotism. In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism as a moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks’.

I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbours. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists in periods when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished minds, who discover two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is ‘the patriotic bore’ and the other ‘the universal embrace’.[58]

The humanitarianism which holds in honour the abstract quality of what is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men. Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man, _more or less_ the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.[59]

Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain category of men--labourers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those interests.[60]

In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.[61] But let us come back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others.

What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’ is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them _the most distinct_ from others, in their poets rather than in their scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national, more separating than the products of pure intelligence.[62] They have exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy, and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.[63] They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in _everything_ which makes them distinct from others, not only in their language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture, and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’, with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur. Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the ‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.