Part 9

There is another transformation of the literary soul in men of letters, wherein I think I see a cause of their new political creed. This is, that recently the only one of their faculties they venerate is their artistic sensibility, on which to some extent they base all their judgments. Until the last thirty years it may be said that men of letters, at least in Latin Europe, disciples in this of the Greeks, were determined in their judgments--even their literary judgments--far more by their sensibility to reason than by their artistic sensibility, whereof moreover they were scarcely conscious as something distinct from the former. This remark is true for the men of the Renaissance and their direct descendants (the French writers of the seventeenth and succeeding century) and, despite appearances, it is also true of those who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If the weakening of sensibility to reason and, more generally, of lofty intellectual discipline, is indisputably one of the characteristics of the Romanticism of 1830, the contempt for this sensibility makes no appearance. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet never prided themselves on despising the values of reason in things in order to esteem only their art values. Now, towards 1890, there occurred a revolution whose influence cannot be exaggerated. Enlightened by philosophical analysis (Bergsonism), the men of letters became conscious of the fundamental difference between intellectual sensibility and artistic sensibility; and ardently chose the latter. This is the epoch when they were heard to assert that a book is great as soon as it achieves a literary and artistic success, that its intellectual content is of no interest, that all arguments are equally defensible, that error is no more false than truth, etc.[155] This great change affected their political attitudes. Obviously, as soon as we think things are good only insofar as they content our artistic needs, the only good political systems are those of arbitrary authority. Artistic sensibility is far more gratified by a system which tends to the realization of force and grandeur than by a system which tends to the establishment of justice, for the characteristic of artistic sensibility is the love of concrete realities and the repugnance for abstract conceptions and conceptions of pure reason, the model of which is the idea of justice. Artistic sensibility is especially flattered by the spectacle of a mass of units which are subordinated to each other up to the final head who dominates them all, whereas the spectacle of a democracy, which is a mass of units _where no one is first_, deprives this sensibility of one of its fundamental needs.[156] Add to this that every doctrine which honours Man in the universal, in what is common to all men, is a personal injury to the artist, whose characteristic (at least since Romanticism)[157] is precisely to set himself up as an exceptional being. Add also the sovereignty the artist now attributes to his desires and their satisfaction (the ‘rights of genius’) and, consequently, his natural hatred for systems which limit each person’s liberty of action by that of others. And finally add the artist’s aversion from everything which is general, everything which is only the object of conception, not of sensation.[158] The determination of men of letters to pass judgment only in accordance with their artistic sensibility is only one aspect of their desire (since Romanticism) to exalt feeling at the expense of thought, a desire which itself is one among the thousand results of the decline of intellectual discipline among them. The new political attitude of the ‘clerks’ seems to me to be here the result of a serious modification of their state of mind.

This attitude also seems to me to result from the decline of the study of classical literature in the formation of their minds. The humanities, as the word implies, have always taught the cult of humanity in its universal aspect, at least since the time of the Portico.[159] The decline of Graeco-Roman culture in Barrès and his literary generation, in comparison with that of Taine, Renan, Hugo, Michelet, even Anatole France and Bourget, is undeniable. Still less will it be denied that this decline is considerably more noticeable in Barrès’s successors. However, this decline does not prevent these writers from extolling classical studies, but they do not do this with the idea of reviving the cult for what is human in its universal aspect, but on the contrary to strengthen the ‘French’ mind, or at least the ‘Latin’ mind, in the grasp of its own roots, in consciousness of itself as distinct from other minds. Notice that this decline of classical culture in the French writers coincides with the discovery of the great German realists, Hegel and especially Nietzsche, whose genius had the more effect on these Frenchmen because their lack of classical discipline deprived them of the one real barrier which can be opposed to that genius.[160]

Among the causes of this new attitude among men of letters I must point to their thirst for sensations, their need to experience things, which in recent times have grown stronger and have caused them to adopt a political attitude which gave them emotions and sensations. Belphegor is not the only star in the literary heavens. A French writer, who was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to History; and he replied, ‘I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a fanfare of trumpets.’ The same thinker gives us to understand that his chief motive in ‘seeking contact with national minds’ was to ‘throw more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down’.[161] I do not think I am mistaken when I say that numbers of our moralists who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter an opportunity for sensations.[162] You will recollect the remark of a young thinker, quoted by Agathon in 1913: ‘Why not a war? It will be amusing.’ I shall be told that this is the mere extravagant saying of a young man. But what of this remark from a man of fifty, and what is more, a scientist (R. Quinton), who saw the tragedy of 1914 coming, and exclaimed: ‘We shall picnic on the grass!’? This scientist was certainly a good soldier, but no more so than Fresnel and Lamarck, of whom I dare to say that they may have approved of war, but not because it satisfied their taste for the picturesque. All who frequented the author of _Reflexions sur la Violence_ know that one of the greatest attractions of any idea for him was that it was ‘amusing’ and likely to exasperate so-called reasonable people. There are many thinkers of the past fifty years whose ‘philosophy’ has one fundamental motive--the pleasure of throwing off irritating paradoxes; while they are only too happy if their rockets fall like swords and satisfy that need for cruelty which they profess as the sign of noble minds. This prodigious decline of morality, this sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism, is usually and quite openly accompanied by a huge contempt for the true ‘clerk’, whose joy comes from the exercise of thought and who disdains sensation, particularly the sensations of action. Here again the new political cult of the men of letters is the result of a modification in the most intimate part of their mind, the very same modification we have been discussing, i.e. a decline of intellectual discipline, which does not mean a decline in intelligence.[163]

On their own showing, many modern ‘clerks’ have adopted these realist doctrines because they want to have done with the moral disarray into which they are thrown by the spectacle of philosophies, ‘none of which bring certainty,’ and which all collapse upon each other as they cry to heaven their contradictory absolutes. There again the ‘clerk’s’ political attitude is the result of a great decline in his intellectual discipline, whether we consider that this decline is shown by his belief that any philosophy can bring certainty, or whether we think that it lies in his inability to stand upright on the ruins of the schools, devoting himself to reason, which is above all the schools, and is their judge.

I shall also admit as one other cause of realism in the modern ‘clerks’ the irritation produced in them by the teaching of some of their predecessors--I mean certain masters of the year 1848, with their visionary idealism, their belief that justice and love were suddenly about to become the essence of the soul of nations, an irritation greatly increased by seeing the dreadful contrast between these idyllic prophecies and the events which followed them. Nevertheless, the point to remember is that the modern ‘clerks’ replied to these errors by hurling anathemas at every sort of idealism, whether visionary or not, thereby showing incapacity to distinguish between species, inability to rise above passion to judgment. And this is but one other aspect of their loss of the good manners of the mind.

Let me recapitulate the causes for this change in the ‘clerks’: The imposition of political interests on all men without any exception; the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions; the desire and the possibility for men of letters to play a political part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play the game of a class which is daily becoming more anxious; the increasing tendency of the ‘clerks’ to become bourgeois and to take on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism; the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual discipline. It will be seen that these causes arise from certain phenomena which are most profoundly and generally characteristic of the present age. The political realism of the ‘clerks’, far from being a superficial fact due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me bound up with the very essence of the modern world.

IV

_Summary--Predictions_

To sum up: If I look at contemporary humanity from the point of view of its moral state as revealed by its political life, I see (_a_) A mass in whom realist passions in its two chief forms--class passion, national passion--has attained a degree of consciousness and organization hitherto unknown; (_b_) A body of men who used to be in opposition to the realism of the masses, but who now, not only do not oppose it, but adopt it, proclaim its grandeur and morality; in short, a humanity which has abandoned itself to realism with a unanimity, an absence of reserve, a sanctification of its passion unexampled in history.

This remark may be put in another form. Imagine an observer of the twelfth century taking a bird’s-eye view of the Europe of his time. He would see men groping in the obscurity of their minds and striving to form themselves into nations (to mention only the most striking aspect of the realist will); he would see them beginning to succeed; he would see groups of men attaining consistency, determined to seize a portion of the earth and tending to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from the groups surrounding them. But at the same time he would see a whole class of men, regarded with the greatest reverence, labouring to thwart this movement. He would see men of learning, artists and philosophers, displaying to the world a spirit which cared nothing for nations, using a universal language among themselves. He would see those who gave Europe its moral values preaching the cult of the human, or at least of the Christian, and not of the national, he would see them striving to found, in opposition to the nations, a great universal empire on spiritual foundations. And so he might say to himself: ‘Which of these two currents will triumph? Will humanity be national or spiritual? Will it depend on the will of the laymen or of the “clerks”?’ And for long ages the realist cause will not be completely victorious; the spiritual body will remain faithful to itself long enough to our observer to be uncertain of the result. To-day the game is over. Humanity is national. The layman has won. But his triumph has gone beyond anything he could have expected. The ‘clerk’ is not only conquered, he is assimilated. The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-labourer and the merchant. Those who make the world’s values, make them for a nation; the Ministers of Jesus defend the national. All humanity including the ‘clerks’, have become laymen. All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

I said above that the humanity of the past, more precisely the humanity of Europe in the Middle Ages, with the values imposed upon it by the ‘clerks’, acted ill but honoured the good. It may be said that modern Europe with teachers who inform it that its realist instincts are beautiful, acts ill and honours what is ill. Modern Europe is like the brigand in one of Tolstoi’s stories, who made his confession to a hermit, and the hermit said in amazement: ‘Others were at least ashamed of being brigands; but what is to be done with this man, who is proud of it?’

Indeed, if we ask ourselves what will happen to a humanity where every group is striving more eagerly than ever to feel conscious of its own particular interests, and makes its moralists tell it that it is sublime to the extent that it knows no law but this interest--a child can give the answer. This humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes. A race of which one group exalts one of its masters (Barrès) to the skies because he teaches: ‘We must defend the essential part of ourselves as sectarians,’ while a neighbouring group acclaims a leader because, when he attacks a defenceless small nation, he says, ‘Necessity knows no law’--such a race is ripe for the zoological wars Renan talks about, which, he said, would be like the life and death wars which occur among rodents and among the carnivora. As regards the nation, think of Italy; as regards class, think of Russia; and you will see the hitherto unknown point of perfection attained by the spirit of hatred against what is ‘different’ among a group of men, consciously realist and at last liberated from all non-practical morality. And my predictions are not rendered less probable by the fact that these two nations are hailed as models throughout the world by those who desire either the grandeur of their nation or the triumph of their class.

These dark predictions do not seem to me to need as much modification as some people think, on account of certain actions resolutely directed against war, such as the setting up of a supernational institution and the agreements recently made by the rival nations. Imposed upon the nations by their Ministers rather than desired by them, dictated solely by interest (the fear of war and its ravages) and not at all by a change in public morality, these new institutions may perhaps be opposed to war but leave intact the _spirit of war_, and nothing leads us to suppose that a nation which only respects a contract for practical reasons, will not break it as soon as breaking it appears more profitable. Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.[164] In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing. And moreover these tribunals leave untouched the economic war between the nations and the class wars.

Peace, it must be repeated after so many others have said this, is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things ‘which cannot be shared’, and if they raise themselves to a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of human morality. But, as I have pointed out above, not only do men to-day steel themselves entirely against this, but the very first condition of peace, which is to recognize the necessity for this progress of the soul, is seriously menaced. A school arose in the nineteenth century which told men to expect peace from enlightened self-interest, from the belief that a war, even when victorious, is disastrous, especially to economic transformations, to ‘the evolution of production’, in a phrase, to factors totally foreign to their moral improvement, from which, these thinkers say, it would be frivolous to expect anything. So that humanity, even if it had any desire for peace, is exhorted to neglect the one effort which might procure it, an effort it is delighted not to make. The cause of peace, which is always surrounded with adverse factors, in our days has one more against it--the pacifism which pretends to be scientific.[165]

I can point to other sorts of pacifism, whose chief result I dare to say is to weaken the cause of peace, at least among serious-minded persons:--

(_a_) First, there is the pacifism I shall call ‘vulgar’, meaning thereby the pacifism which does nothing but denounce ‘the man who kills’, and sneer at the prejudices of patriotism. When I see certain teachers, even if they are Montaigne, Voltaire, and Anatole France, whose whole case against war consists in saying that highwaymen are no more criminal than leaders of armies, and in laughing at people who kill each other because one party is dressed in yellow and the other in blue, I feel inclined to desert a cause whose champions over-simplify things to this extent, and I begin to feel some sympathy for the impulses of profound humanity which created the nations and which are thereby so grossly insulted.[166]

(_b_) _Mystic pacifism_, by which I mean the pacifism which is solely animated by a blind hatred of war and refuses to inquire whether a war is just or not, whether those fighting are the attackers or the defenders, whether they wanted war or only submit to it. This pacifism is essentially the pacifism of the people (and that of all the so-called pacifist newspapers) and was strikingly embodied in 1914 by a French writer who, having to judge between two fighting nations one of which had attacked the other contrary to all its pledges while the other was only defending itself, could do nothing but intone ‘I have a horror of war’ and condemned them both equally. It is impossible to exaggerate the consequences of this behaviour, which showed mankind that mystic pacifism, just like mystic militarism, may entirely obliterate the feeling of justice in those who are smitten with it.

I think I see another motive in the French writers who in 1914 adopted the attitude of M. Romain Rolland--the fear that they would fall into national partiality if they admitted that their nation was in the right. It may be asserted that these writers would have warmly taken up the cause of France, if France had not been their own country. Whereas Barrès said, ‘I always maintain my country is right even if it is in the wrong,’ these strange friends of justice are not unwilling to say: ‘I always maintain my country is in the wrong, even if it is right.’ There again we see that the frenzy of impartiality, like any other frenzy, leads to injustice.

I have also a word to say about the severities of these ‘justiciaries’ towards France’s attitude immediately after her victory, towards her desire to force the enemy to make good the damage done to her, and to seize on pledges if he refused. The motive which here animated these moralists without their perceiving it, seems to me very remarkable; it was the thought that the just person must inevitably be weak and suffer, that he must be a victim. If the just man becomes strong and comes to possess the means of enforcing justice towards himself, then he ceases to be just to these thinkers. If Socrates and Jesus make their persecutors disgorge, then they cease to embody justice; one step more and the persecutors, having become victims, would embody right. In this the cult of justice is replaced by the cult of misfortune, a Christian Romanticism which is somewhat unexpected in a man like Anatole France. No doubt the events of 1918 upset all the habits of the advocates of right. Outraged right became the stronger, the assailed toga triumphed over the sword, the Curiatii were victorious. Perhaps some coolness of mind was needed to recognize that right remained right, even when thus invested with force. The French pacifists failed to remain cool. In short, their attitude in the past ten years has been inspired by sentiment alone, and nothing could show better the degree of weakness to which intellectual discipline has now fallen among our ‘princes of the mind’.[167]

(_c_) _Pacifism claiming to be patriotic_, by which I mean the pacifism which claims to exalt humanitarianism, to preach the abatement of the militarist spirit and of national passion, and yet not to harm the interests of the nation nor to compromise its power of resistance to foreign nations. This attitude--which is that of all Parliamentary pacifists--is the more antipathetic to upright minds in that it is inevitably accompanied by the assertion (which is also nearly always contrary to the truth) that the nation is not in the least threatened and that the malevolence of neighbouring nations is a pure invention of people who want war. But that is merely an aspect of a very general fact, which is of supreme importance to the matter under discussion.