Part 8

To-day this desire inspires not only the moralist, but another kind of ‘clerk’ who speaks from much higher ground. I am referring to that teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour the active and _willing_ part of himself with all his devotion. The theory of knowledge from which humanity has taken its values during the past half century assigns a secondary rank to the mind which proceeds by clear and distinct ideas, by categories, by words, and places in the highest rank the mind which succeeds in liberating itself from these intellectual habits and in becoming conscious of itself insofar as it is a ‘pure tendency’, a ‘pure will’, a ‘pure activity’. Philosophy which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think, therefore I am’, now raises him to say, ‘I am, therefore I think’, ‘I think, therefore I am not’ (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action). Formerly philosophy taught him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles the soul of Pythagoras linking up concepts; now she informs him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles that of the small chicken breaking its eggshell.[136] From his loftiest pulpit the modern ‘clerk’ assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical.

During fifty years, especially in France (see Barrès and Bourget) a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, i.e. as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence knows what we ought to do--as individuals, as a nation, as a class--to secure our own advantage. These writers have eagerly expatiated on the example of the insect whose ‘instinct’ (it appears) teaches it to strike its prey precisely in the spot which will paralyse it without killing it, so that its offspring may feed on the living prey and develop better.[137] Other teachers denounce this ‘barbarous’ extolling of instinct in the name of ‘the French tradition’ and preach ‘the superiority of the intelligence’; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required by our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical. This brings us to one of the most remarkable and certainly the most novel forms of this preaching of the practical by the modern ‘clerks’.

I mean that teaching according to which _intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone_. It may be said that since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Plato’s famous hymn to geometry, where that discipline is venerated more than all others because for him it represents the type of speculative thought which brings in nothing material; and with Renan’s verdict which declares that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity.[138] By this standard of values the ‘clerks’ put before the laymen the spectacle of a class of men for whom the value of life lies in its disinterestedness, and they acted as a check on--or at least shamed--the laymen’s practical passions. The modern ‘clerks’ have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim that intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of a concrete advantage, and that the intelligence which takes no interest in its objects is a contemptible activity. They teach that the superior form of the intelligence is that which thrusts its roots into ‘the vital urge’, occupied in discovering what is most valuable in securing our existence. In historical[139] science especially, they honour the intelligence which labours under the guidance of political interests,[140] and they are completely disdainful of all efforts towards ‘objectivity’. Elsewhere they assert that the intelligence to be venerated is that which limits its activities within the bounds of national interests and social order, while the intelligence which allows itself to be guided by the desire for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society, is merely a ‘savage and brutal’ activity, which ‘dishonours the highest of human faculties.’[141] Let me also point out their devotion to the doctrine (Bergson, Sorel) which says that science has a purely utilitarian origin--the necessity of man to dominate matter, ‘knowledge is adaptation’; and their scorn for the beautiful Greek conception which made science bloom from the desire to play, the perfect type of disinterested activity. And then they teach men that to accept an error which is of service to them (the ‘myth’) is an undertaking which does them honour, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them. In other words, as Nietzsche, Barrès and Sorel plainly put it, sensibility to truth in itself apart from any practical aim is a somewhat contemptible form of mind.[142] Here the modern ‘clerk’ positively displays genius in his defence of the material, since the material has nothing to do with the truth, or rather to speak more truly--has no worse enemy. The genius of Callicles in all its profundity lives again in the great masters of the modern soul.[143]

Then the modern ‘clerks’ have preached to men the religion of the practical _by means of their theology_, through the image of God they have set before them. First, they determined that God, who since the Stoics has been infinite, should once more become finite, distinct, endowed with a personality, that He should be the affirmation of a _physical_ and not a _metaphysical_ existence. Anthropomorphism, which in the poets from Prudentius to Victor Hugo existed mingled with pantheism without troubling to define the frontiers between them, since God was personal or indeterminate according to the direction of the emotion and the needs of the lyric impulse, rose up in Péguy and Claudel with the most violent consciousness of itself, the clearest desire to be distinguished from its acolyte and to express contempt for him. At the same time the political teachers attacked the religion of the Infinite with a precision of hatred, a skill in depreciation, unparalleled even in the Church, which consisted in denouncing this religion precisely because it is not practical, because it saps away the feelings which found the great earthly realities: the City and the State.[144] But the modern ‘clerks’ have above all endowed God with the attributes which secure practical advantages. It may be said that, since the Old Testament, God was far more just than strong, or rather that, as Plato thought, His strength was only a form of His justice; and His power, as Malebranche and Spinoza put it, had nothing in common with the power of kings and Empire-builders. The desire to increase was implicitly excluded from His nature, as well as the moral attributes necessary to the satisfaction of that desire--energy, will, the love of effort, the attraction of triumph. This was an inevitable result of His perfect and infinite state of being, which at once constituted the whole of possible reality. Even in creation, the idea of which is essentially inseparable from the ideas of power and increase, these ideas were avoided--the world was far less a result of God’s power than of His love; it came out of God as a ray comes out of the sun, without God feeling any increase of Himself at the expense of anything else. God, to speak in terms of the schools, was far less the transcendent cause of the world than its immanent cause.[145] On the other hand, for the modern teachers (Hegel, Schelling, Bergson, Péguy), God is essentially something which increases; His law is ‘incessant change’, ‘incessant novelty’, ‘incessant[146] creation’; His principle is essentially a principle of growth--Will, Tension, Vital Urge. If He is Intelligence, as with Hegel, He is an intelligence which ‘develops’, which ‘realizes itself’ more and more. The Being situated immediately in all His perfection and knowing nothing of conquest is an object of contempt; He represents (Bergson) an ‘eternity of death’.[147] So the believers in an initial and single creation to-day strive to present this act in its purely practical aspect. The Church condemns with a hitherto unknown clearness every doctrine of immanence and preaches transcendence in all its strictness.[148] God, in creating the world, no longer witnesses an inevitable expansion of His nature; through His power (some, to diminish the arbitrariness, say ‘through His benevolence’) he sees the arising of something clearly distinct from Himself, something on which He sets His hand. His act, whatever may be said to the contrary, is the perfect model of material aggrandisement. Like the prophet of Israel of old, the modern ‘clerk’ says to mankind: ‘Display your zeal for the Eternal, the God of battles.’

For half a century, such has been the attitude of men whose function is to thwart the realism of nations, and who have laboured to excite it with all their power and with complete decision of purpose. For this reason I dare to call this attitude ‘The Great Betrayal’. If I look for its causes, I see profound causes which forbid me to look upon this movement as a mere fashion, to which the contrary movement might succeed to-morrow.

One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the ‘clerk’ into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe, the ‘clerk’ may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions. No doubt this explanation is not valid for the true ‘clerk’, who submits to the laws of his State without allowing them to injure his soul. He renders unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, i.e. his life perhaps, but nothing more. The true ‘clerk’ is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, who never imbibed national patriotism although they perfectly performed their patriotic duty; he is Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such ‘clerks’ are inevitably rare. So much contempt for suffering is not the law of human nature even among the ‘clerks’; the law is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions. The ‘clerk’s’ new faith is to a great extent a result of the social conditions imposed upon him, and the real evil to deplore is perhaps not so much the ‘great betrayal’ of the ‘clerks’ as the disappearance of the ‘clerks’, the impossibility of leading the life of a ‘clerk’ in the world of to-day. One of the gravest responsibilities of the modern State is that it has not maintained (but could it do so?) a class of men exempt from civic duties, men whose sole function is to maintain non-practical values. Renan’s prophecy is verified; he foretold the inevitable degradation of a society where every member was forced to discharge worldly tasks, although Renan himself was the very type of those whom such servitude would never have prevented--in the phrase of one of his peers--‘from breathing only in the direction of Heaven’.

It would be very unjust to explain the existence of national passion in the modern ‘clerk’ by self-interest alone. This is also to be explained, and in a more simple manner, by the love, the impulse which naturally inspires every man to love the group from which he derives, more than the other groups which share the earth. There again, it may be argued that the ‘clerk’s’ new faith is caused by the changes of the nineteenth century, which by giving national groups a consistency hitherto unknown furnishes food to a passion which in many countries before that period could have been little more than potential. Obviously, attachment to the world of the spirit alone was easier for those who were capable of it when there were no nations to love. And, in fact, it is most suggestive to notice that the true appearance of the ‘clerk’ coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire, i.e. with the time when the great nation collapsed and the little nations had not yet come into existence. It is equally suggestive to notice that the age of the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state of chaos and the nations were unknown; that the regions where pure speculation endured longest seem to be Germany and Italy,[149] i.e. the regions which were the last to be nationalized; and practically ceased to produce pure speculation from the moment when they became nations. Of course, here again the vicissitudes of the world of sense do not affect the true ‘clerk’. The misfortunes of their country, and even its triumphs, did not prevent Einstein and Nietzsche from feeling no passion but the passion for thought. When Jules Lemaître exclaimed that the wound of Sedan made him lose his reason, Renan replied that he perfectly retained his, and that a true priest of the mind could only be wounded in other than earthly interests.[150]

In the cases I have just mentioned, the ‘clerk’s’ devotion to his nation or class is sincere, whether it is from interest or from love. I admit I think this sincerity is infrequent. The practice of the life of the spirit seems to me to lead inevitably to universalism, to the feeling of the eternal, to a lack of vigour in the belief in worldly conventions. The sincerity of national passion especially, in men of letters particularly, seems to me to assume the virtue of naiveté, which everyone will admit is not characteristic of this body of men, apart from their own self-esteem. It will also be hard to convince me that the motives of their public attitudes in artists are such simple things as the desire to live and to eat. I therefore seek--and find--other reasons for the realism of the modern ‘clerk’, and these, although less natural, are none the less profound. They seem to me particularly valid for men of letters, especially in France, the country where the attitude of writers in the past half century differs most from that of their fathers.

First of all, I see the interests of their careers. It is an obvious fact that during the past two centuries most of the men of letters who have attained wide fame in France assumed a political attitude--for instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Barrès. With some of them, real fame dates from the moment when they assumed that attitude. This law has not escaped the attention of their descendants, and it may be said to-day that every French writer who desires wide fame (which means every writer endowed with the real temperament of a man of letters) also desires inevitably to play a political part. This desire may arise from other motives. For instance, in Barrès and d’Annunzio, from the desire ‘to act’, to be something more than ‘men at a desk’, to lead a life like that of the ‘heroes’ and not like that of ‘scribes’; or, more ingenuously, as no doubt happened with Renan when he stood as a Parliamentary candidate, from the idea that he could perform a public service. Let me add that the modern writer’s desire to be a political man is excused by the fact that the position is to some extent offered him by public opinion, whereas the compatriots of Racine and La Bruyère would have laughed in their faces if they had thought of publishing their views on the advisability of the war with Holland or the legality of Chambres de réunion. There again, it was easier to be a true ‘clerk’ in the past than to-day.

These observations explain why the contemporary French writer so frequently desires to assume a political attitude, but they do not explain why this attitude is so inevitably in support of arbitrary authority. Liberalism is also a political attitude; and the least which can be said is that the modern French ‘clerk’ has very seldom adopted it in the past twenty years. Another factor comes in here. That is the practical writer’s desire to please the bourgeoisie, who are the creators of fame and the source of honours. It may even be argued that for this sort of writer the necessity to treat the passions of this class with deference is greater than ever, if I may judge by the fate of those who in recent times have dared to defy them, i.e. Zola, Romain Rolland. Now, the bourgeoisie of to-day, terrified by the progress of the opposing class, solely anxious to retain the privileges which are left them, feel nothing but aversion from liberal dogmas; and the man of letters who displays any political flag is bound to wave the flag of ‘Order’ if he wishes to obtain favours. The case of Barrès is particularly instructive from this point of view. He began as a great intellectual sceptic, and his material star waxed a hundredfold greater, at least in his own country, on the day when he made himself the apostle of ‘necessary prejudices’. This sort of thing makes me believe that the present political fashion of French writers is going to last a long time. A phenomenon which is caused by the uneasiness of the French bourgeoisie does not seem likely to disappear quickly.[151]

I have mentioned the lot of those writers who in quite recent times have dared to thwart the passions of the bourgeoisie. This is only one aspect of a very general novelty, of supreme interest to the subject I am discussing. I mean the consciousness of their sovereignty felt by the herd of laymen, and the resolution they display to bring to his senses any writer who dares to say anything but what they wish to hear. This propensity of the layman appears not only in his relations with his writers (and with his press--a newspaper which does not supply its readers with the exact errors they cherish is immediately dropped), but, which is far more remarkable, in his relations with his truly ‘clerical’ teachers, whose voice speaks to him in the name of the Divine. The pulpit-orator who really presumed to censure nationalist passion, who really mortified bourgeois arrogance, would soon (particularly in France) see his flock disperse. He can no longer terrify such a gathering with the fear of punishment, and they no longer believe in anything but the real; consequently they feel stronger and more important than he, and only consent to listen to his preaching on condition that he treats with deference--not to say sanctifies--the egotisms they venerate.[152] Modern humanity is fully determined that those who call themselves its teachers, shall be its servants and not its guides. And most of the teachers understand this admirably.[153]

To come back to the modern writer and the causes for his political attitude--I shall add that he is not only in the service of a bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but that he himself has become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social position and respect which belong to that caste. The Bohemian man of letters has practically disappeared, at least among those who engage public interest. Consequently, he has more and more come to possess the bourgeois form of soul, one of those most conspicuous characteristics is an affectation of the political feelings of the aristocracy--an attachment to systems of arbitrary authority, to military and priestly institutions, a scorn for societies founded upon justice, upon civic equality, a cult for the past, etc.... How many writers in France during the past fifty years, men whose names are on everyone’s lips, obviously think they are ennobling themselves by expressing disgust for democratic institutions![154] In the same way I explain the adoption by many of them of harshness and cruelty, which they think are also attributes of the souls of the nobility.

The reasons I have just mentioned for the new political attitude of men of letters arise from the changes in their social status. Those I am about to mention arise from changes in the structure of their minds, in their literary desires, in their aesthetic cults, in their morality. These reasons seem to me even more worthy of the historian’s attention than those which have gone before.

First of all, we have their Romanticism, taking that word to mean the desire which arose in the writers of the nineteenth century (but which has become greatly perfected in the last thirty years) to treat themes which lend themselves in a literary manner to striking attitudes. About 1890 the men of letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion of the morality of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism. And as a matter of fact, the so-called reactionary doctrines do lend themselves to a pessimistic and contemptuous Romanticism which makes a far deeper impression on the common herd than enthusiastic and optimistic Romanticism. The pose of a Barrès or a d’Annunzio strikes naïve persons far more than that of a Michelet or a Proudhon. Moreover, these doctrines are to-day given forth as founded upon science, upon ‘pure experience’, and thereby permit a tone of calm inhumanity (the Romanticism of Positivism) whose effect on the herd has not escaped the sagacious eye of the man of letters. (Of course, I am only speaking of the elegant herd; Romantic pessimism has no value whatsoever for the people.)