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THE WRACK OF THE STORM
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| |
| THE WORKS OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK |
| |
| ESSAYS |
| |
| The Treasure of the Humble |
| Wisdom and Destiny |
| The Life of the Bee |
| The Buried Temple |
| The Double Garden |
| The Measure of the Hours |
| On Emerson, and Other Essays |
| Our Eternity |
| The Unknown Guest |
| The Wrack of the Storm |
| |
| PLAYS |
| |
| Sister Beatrice, and Ardiane and Barbe Bleue |
| Joyzelle, and Monna Vanna |
| The Blue Bird, A Fairy Play |
| Mary Magdalene |
| Pélléas and Mélisande, and Other Plays |
| Princess Maleine |
| The Intruder, and Other Plays |
| Aglavaine and Selysette |
| |
| HOLIDAY EDITIONS |
| |
| Our Friend the Dog |
| The Swarm |
| The Intelligence of the Flowers |
| Death |
| Thoughts from Maeterlinck |
| The Blue Bird |
| The Life of the Bee |
| News of Spring and Other Nature Studies |
| Poems |
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The
Wrack of the Storm
BY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
_Translated by_
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The reader taking up this volume will, for the first time in the work
of one who hitherto had cursed no man, find words of hatred and
malediction. I would gladly have avoided them, for I hold that he who
takes upon himself to write pledges himself to say nothing that can
derogate from the respect and love which we owe to all men. I have had
to utter these words; and I am as much surprised as saddened at what I
have been constrained to say by the force of events and of truth. I
loved Germany and numbered friends there, who now, dead or living, are
alike dead to me. I thought her great and upright and generous; and to
me she was ever kindly and hospitable. But there are crimes that
obliterate the past and close the future. In rejecting hatred I
should have shown myself a traitor to love.
I tried to lift myself above the fray; but, the higher I rose, the
more I saw of the madness and the horror of it, of the justice of one
cause and the infamy of the other. It is possible that one day, when
time has wearied remembrance and restored the ruins, wise men will
tell us that we were mistaken and that our standpoint was not lofty
enough; but they will say it because they will no longer know what we
know, nor will they have seen what we have seen.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK.
NICE, 1916.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The present volume contains, in the chronological order in which they
were produced, all the essays published and all the speeches delivered
by M. Maeterlinck since the beginning of the war, upon which, as will
be perceived, each one of them has a direct bearing. They are printed
as written; and they throw an interesting light upon the successive
phases of the author's psychology during the Titanic and hideous
struggle that has affected the mental attitude of us all.
_In Italy_ forms the preface to M. Jules Destrée's book, _En Italie
avant la guerre, 1914-15_. Of the remaining essays, some have appeared
in various English and American periodicals; others are now printed in
translation for the first time.
I have also had M. Maeterlinck's leave to include in this volume his
first published work, _The Massacre of the Innocents_. This powerful
sketch in the Flemish manner saw the light originally in the
_Pléïade_, in 1886, and may at the present time, to use the author's
own words in a note to myself, be regarded as "a sort of vague
symbolic prophecy." An English version by Mrs. Edith Wingate Rinder
was printed in the _Dome_ in 1899; another has since been issued by an
English and by an American firm of publishers; but the only authorized
translation to appear in book form is that now added as an epilogue to
_The Wrack of the Storm_.
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.
CHELSEA, 1916.
CONTENTS
PAGE
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 5
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 7
I AFTER THE VICTORY 11
II KING ALBERT 21
III THE HOSTAGE CITIES 31
IV TO SAVE FOUR CITIES 37
V PRO PATRIA: I 45
VI HEROISM 59
VII PRO PATRIA: II 75
VIII PRO PATRIA: III 89
IX BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY 109
X ON THE DEATH OF A LITTLE SOLDIER 117
XI THE HOUR OF DESTINY 131
XII IN ITALY 147
XIII ON REREADING THUCYDIDES 161
XIV THE DEAD DO NOT DIE 179
XV IN MEMORIAM 191
XVI SUPERNATURAL COMMUNICATIONS IN WAR-TIME 197
XVII EDITH CAVELL 217
XVIII THE LIFE OF THE DEAD 229
XIX THE WAR AND THE PROPHETS 241
XX THE WILL OF EARTH 257
XXI FOR POLAND 271
XXII THE MIGHT OF THE DEAD 279
XXIII WHEN THE WAR IS OVER 291
XXIV THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS 303
* * * * *
AFTER THE VICTORY
THE WRACK OF THE STORM
I
AFTER THE VICTORY[1]
1
At these moments of tragedy, none should be allowed to speak who
cannot shoulder a rifle, for the written word seems so monstrously
useless, so overwhelmingly trivial, in front of this mighty drama
which shall for a long time, it may be for ever, free mankind from the
scourge of war: the one scourge among all that cannot be excused, that
cannot be explained, since alone among all it issues entire from the
hands of man.
2
But it is while this scourge is upon us, while we have our being in
its very centre, that we shall do well to balance the guilt of those
who have committed this inexpiable crime. It is now, while we are in
the thick of the horror, undergoing it, feeling it, that we have the
energy, the clear-sightedness needed to judge it; from the depths of
the most fearful injustice justice is best perceived. When the hour
shall have come for settling accounts--and it will not long delay--we
shall have forgotten much of what we have suffered and a blameworthy
pity will creep over us and cloud our eyes. This is the moment,
therefore, for us to frame our inexorable resolution. After the final
victory, when the enemy is crushed--as crushed he will be--efforts
will be made to enlist our sympathy, to move us to pity. We shall be
told that the unfortunate German people were merely the victims of
their monarch and their feudal caste; that no blame attaches to the
Germany we know, which is so sympathetic and so cordial--the Germany
of quaint old houses and open-hearted greeting, the Germany that sits
under its lime-trees beneath the clear light of the moon--but only to
Prussia, hateful, arrogant Prussia; that the homely, peace-loving,
Bavarian, the genial and hospitable dwellers on the banks of the
Rhine, the Silesian and Saxon and I know not who besides--for all
these will suddenly have become whiter than snow and more inoffensive
than the sheep in an English fold--that they all have merely obeyed,
have been compelled to obey orders which they detested but were unable
to resist. We are face to face with reality now; let us look at it
well and pronounce our sentence; for this is the moment when we hold
the proofs in our hands, when the elements of crime are hot before us
and shout out the truth that soon will fade from our memory. Let us
tell ourselves now, therefore, now, that all that we shall be told
hereafter will be false; and let us unflinchingly adhere to what we
decide at this moment, when the glare of the horror is on us.
3
It is not true that in this gigantic crime there are innocent and
guilty, or degrees of guilt. They stand on one level, all those who
have taken part in it. The German from the North has no more special
craving for blood and outrage than he from the South has special
tenderness or pity. It is, very simply, the German, from one end of
his country to the other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which
the firm will of our planet finally repudiates. We have here no
wretched slaves dragged along by a tyrant king who alone is
responsible. Nations have the government which they deserve, or
rather, the government which they have is truly no more than the
magnified and public projection of the private morality and mentality
of the nation. If eighty million innocent people select and support a
monstrous king, those eighty million innocent people merely expose the
inherent falseness and superficiality of their innocence; and it is
the monster they maintain at their head who stands for all that is
true in their nature, because it is he who represents the eternal
aspirations of their race, which lie far deeper than their apparent
and transient virtues. Let there be no suggestion of error, of having
been led astray, of an intelligent people having been tricked or
misled. No nation can be deceived that does not wish to be deceived;
and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks. In the sphere of
intellect such things are not possible; nor in the region of
enlightened, reflecting will. No nation permits herself to be coerced
to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that
she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she
who urges him on.
4
We have forces here quite different from those on the surface, forces
that are secret, irresistible and profound. It is these that we must
judge, these that we must crush under our heel, once and for all; for
they are the only ones that will not be improved or softened or
brought into line by experience or progress, or even by the bitterest
lesson. They are unalterable and immovable, their springs lie far
beneath hope or influence; and they must be destroyed as we destroy a
nest of wasps, since we know that these never can change into a nest
of bees. And, even though individually and singly the Germans were all
innocent and merely led astray, they would be none the less guilty in
the mass. This is the guilt that counts, that alone is actual and
real, because it lays bare, underneath their superficial innocence,
the subconscious criminality of all.
5
No influence can prevail on the unconscious or the subconscious. It
never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a
thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements of art and
education, the subconscious element of the German spirit, which is its
unvarying element, will remain absolutely the same as it is to-day and
would declare itself, when the opportunity came, under the same
aspect, with the same infamy. Through the whole course of history, two
distinct willpowers have been noticed that would seem to be the
opposed, elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, the one
seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suffering, while the other
strives for liberty, the right, radiance and joy. These two powers
stand once again face to face; our opportunity is now to annihilate
the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we
may have no more need for pity. It is a measure of organic defence. It
is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian
militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a
century had disturbed and polluted its days. The health of our planet
is in question. To-morrow the United States of Europe will have to
take measures for the convalescence of the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Translated by Alfred Sutro.]
* * * * *
KING ALBERT
II
KING ALBERT
1
Of all the heroes of this stupendous war, heroes who will live in the
memory of man, one assuredly of the most unsullied, one of those whom
we can never love enough, is the great young king of my little
country.
He was indeed at the critical hour the appointed man, the man for whom
every heart was waiting. With sudden beauty he embodied the mighty
voice of his people. He stood, upon the moment, for Belgium, revealed
unto herself and unto others. He had the wonderful good fortune to
realize and bestow a conscience in one of those dread hours of tragedy
and perplexity when the best of consciences waver.
Had he not been at hand, there is no doubt but that all would have
happened differently; and history would have lost one of her fairest
and noblest pages. Certainly Belgium would have been loyal and true to
her word; and any government would have been swept away, pitilessly
and irresistibly, by the indignation of a people that had never,
however far we probe into the past, played false. But there would have
been much of that confusion and irresolution inevitable in a host
suddenly threatened with disaster. There would have been vain talking,
mistaken measures, excusable but irreparable vacillations; and, above
all, the much-needed words, the precise and final words, would not
have been spoken and the deeds, than which we can picture none more
resolute, none greater, would not have been done at the right moment.
Thanks to the king, the peerless act shines forth and is maintained
complete, unfaltering; and the path of heroism is straight and
clearly defined and splendid as that of Thermopylæ indefinitely
extended.
2
But what he has suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can
understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero: the most
sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of
controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling
and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children
than as a son loves his adoring mother. Of all that cherished kingdom,
his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his
love and his security, there is left intact but a handful of cities,
which are threatened at every moment by the foulest invader that the
world has ever borne.
All the others--so quaint or so beautiful, so bright, so serene, happy
to be there, so inoffensive--jewels in the crown of Peace, models of
pure and upright family life, homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of
ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the natural welcome, the
ever-proffered hand and the ever-open heart: all the others are dead
cities, of which not one stone is left upon another; and the very
country-side, one of the fairest in this world, with its gentle
pastures, is now no more than one vast field of horror.
Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and
dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which
nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the
most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at
present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent
people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are
doomed to poverty and hunger.
But that remainder has but one soul, which has taken refuge in the
spacious soul of its king. Not a murmur, not a word of reproach! But
yesterday a town of thirty thousand inhabitants received the order to
forsake its white houses, its churches, its ancient streets and
squares, the scene of a light-hearted and industrious life. The thirty
thousand inhabitants, women and children and old men, set forth to
seek an uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city, which is threatened
almost as directly as their own and which to-morrow, it may be, must
in its turn set forth, but whither none can say, for the country is so
small that its boundaries are quickly reached, its shelter soon
exhausted.
No matter: they obey in silence and one and all approve and bless
their sovereign. He did what had to be done, what every one in his
place would have done; and, though they are all suffering as no
people has suffered since the barbarous invasions of the earliest
ages, they know that he suffers more than any of them, for in him all
their sorrows find a goal; in him they are reflected and enhanced.
They do not even harbour the idea that they might have been saved by a
sacrifice of honour. They draw no distinction between duty and
destiny. To them that duty, with its frightful consequences, seems as
inevitable as a natural force against which we cannot even dream of
struggling, so great is it and so invincible.
3
Here is an example of the collective bravery of nameless heroes, an
ingenuous and almost unconscious courage, which rivals and at times
exceeds the most exalted deeds in legend and history, for since the
days of the great martyrs men have never suffered death more simply
for a simple idea.
And, if amid the anguish of our struggle it were seemly to speak of
aught but tears and lamentations, we should find a magnificent
consolation in the spectacle of the unexpected heroism that suddenly
surrounds us on every side. It may well be said that never in the
memory of mankind have men sacrificed their lives with such zest, such
self-abnegation, such enthusiasm; and that the immortal virtues which
to this day have uplifted and preserved the flower of the human race
have never shone more brilliantly, never manifested greater power,
energy or youth.
* * * * *
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
III
THE HOSTAGE CITIES
1
Thanks to the heroism of the Allies, the hour is approaching when the
hordes of William the Madman will quit the soil of afflicted Belgium.
After what they have done in cold blood, what excesses, what disasters
must we not expect of the last convulsions of their rage? Our anguish
is all the more poignant in that they are at this moment fighting in
the most ancient and most precious portion of Flanders. Above all
countries, this is historic and hallowed land. They have destroyed
Termonde, Roulers, Charleroi, Mons, Namur, Thielt and more besides;
happy, charming little towns, which will rise again from their ashes,
more beautiful than before. They have annihilated Louvain and
Malines; they have but lately levelled Dixmude; their torches, their
incendiary squirts and their bombs are about to attack Brussels,
Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and Furnes, which are like so many
living museums, forming one of the most delightful, delicate and
fragile ornaments of Europe. The things which are beginning here and
which may be completed would be irreparable. They would mean a loss to
our race for which nothing could atone. A quite peculiar
aspect--familiar, kindly, racy of the soil and unique--of that beauty
which a long series of comely human lives is able to acquire and to
hoard would disappear for ever from the face of the earth; and we
cannot, in the trouble and confusion of these too tragic hours,
realize the extent, the meaning or the consequences of such a crime.
2
We have made every sacrifice without complaining; but this would
exceed all measure. What can be done? How are we to stop them? They
seem to be no longer accessible to reason or to any of the feelings
which men hold in honour; they are sensible only to blows. Very soon,
as they must know, we shall have the power to strike them shrewdly.
Why do not the Allies, this very day, swiftly, while yet there is
time, name so many hostage cities, which would be answerable, stone
for stone, for the existence of our own dear towns? If Brussels, for
example, should be destroyed, then Berlin should be razed to the
ground. If Antwerp were devastated, Hamburg would disappear. Nuremburg
would guarantee Bruges; Munich would stand surety for Ghent.
At the present moment, when they are feeling the wind of defeat that
blows through their tattered standard, it is possible that this
solemn threat, officially pronounced, would force them to reflect, if
indeed they are still at all capable of reflection. It is the only
expedient that remains to us and there is no time to be lost. With
certain adversaries the most barbarous threats are legitimate and
necessary, for these threats speak the only language which they can
understand. And our children must not one day be able to reproach us
with not having attempted everything--even that which is most
repugnant--to save the treasures which are theirs by right.
* * * * *
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
IV
TO SAVE FOUR CITIES
1
First Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Lierre, Dixmude, Nieuport (and I am
speaking only of the disasters of Flanders); now Ypres is no more and
Furnes is half in ruins. By the side of the great Flemish cities,
Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, those vast and incomparable
living museums which have been watchfully preserved by a whole people,
a people above all others attached to its traditions, they formed a
constellation of little towns, delightful and hospitable, too little
known to travellers. Each of them wore its own expression, of peace,
pleasantness, innocent mirth, or meditation. Each possessed its
treasures, jealously guarded: its belfries, its churches, its canals,
its old bridges, its quiet convents, its ancient houses, which gave
it a special physiognomy, never to be forgotten by those who had
beheld it.
But the indisputable queen of these beautiful forsaken cities was
Ypres, with its enormous market-place, bordered by little
dwelling-houses with stepped gables, and its prodigious
market-buildings, which occupied one whole side of the immense oblong.
This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen
it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so
unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to
the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn
itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it,
the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent
witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent
and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the
most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle
of our great liberties. Such as it was yesterday--alas, that I cannot
say, such as it is to-day!--this square, with the enormous but
unspeakably harmonious mass of those market-buildings, at once
powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the
most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town
on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture,
built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should
have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the
Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza
del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at
all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent, an
ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one of those things of
beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy forever.
2
I cannot believe that it no longer exists; and yet in this horrible
war we have to believe everything and, above all, the worst. Now,
fatally and inevitably, it will be the turn of the Belfry of Bruges;
and then the tide of barbarians will rise against Ghent and Antwerp
and Brussels; and there will forthwith disappear one of those portions
of the world's surface in which was hoarded the greatest wealth of
beauty and of memories and of the stuff of history. We did what we
could to preserve it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies
are powerless to prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from
murdering the women and children or from deliberately and uselessly
destroying all that they find along their path of retreat. There is
only one hope left us: the immediate and imperious intervention of
the neutral powers. It is towards them that we turn our tortured gaze.
Two great nations notably--Italy and the United States--hold in their
hands the fate of these last treasures, whose loss would one day be
reckoned among the heaviest and the most irreparable that have been
suffered in the course of long centuries of human civilization. They
can do what they will; it is time for them to do that which it is no
longer lawful to leave undone. By its frantic lies, the beast from
over the Rhine, standing at bay and in peril of death, shows plainly
enough the importance which it attaches to the opinion of the only
nations which the execration of all that lives and breathes have not
yet armed against it. It is afraid. It feels that all is crumbling
under foot, that it is being shunned and abandoned. It seeks in every
direction a glance that does not curse it. It must not, it shall not
find that glance. It is not necessary to tell Italy what our
imperilled cities are worth; for Italy is preeminently the land of
noble cities.
Our cause is her cause; she owes us her support. When a work of beauty
is destroyed, her own genius and her own eternal gods are outraged. As
for America, she more than any other country stands for the future.
She should think of the days that will follow after this war. When the
great peace descends upon the earth, let not the earth be found desert
and robbed of all its jewels. The places at which the earth is
beautiful because of centuries of effort, because of the successful
zeal and patience and genius of a race, are not so many. This corner
of Flanders, over which death now hovers, is one of those consecrated
spots. Were it to perish, men as yet unborn, men who at last, perhaps,
will achieve happiness, would lack memories and examples which nothing
could replace.
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: I
V
PRO PATRIA: I[2]
1
I need not here recall the events that hurled Belgium into the depths
of distress most glorious where she is struggling to-day. She has been
punished as never nation was punished for doing her duty as never
nation did before. She saved the world while knowing that she could
not be saved. She saved it by flinging herself in the path of the
oncoming barbarians, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in
order to give the defenders of justice time, not to rescue her, for
she was well aware that rescue could not come in time, but to collect
the forces needed to save our Latin civilization from the greatest
danger that has ever threatened it. She has thus done this
civilization, which is the only one whereunder the majority of men are
willing or able to live, a service exactly similar to that which
Greece, at the time of the great Asiatic invasions, rendered to the
mother of this civilization. But, while the service is similar, the
act surpasses all comparison. We may ransack history in vain for aught
to approach it in grandeur. The magnificent sacrifice at Thermopylæ,
which is perhaps the noblest action in the annals of war, is illumined
with an equally heroic but less ideal light, for it was less
disinterested and more material. Leonidas and his three hundred
Spartans were in fact defending their homes, their wives, their
children, all the realities which they had left behind them. King
Albert and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew full well that, in
barring the invader's road, they were inevitably sacrificing their
homes, their wives and their children. Unlike the heroes of Sparta,
instead of possessing an imperative and vital interest in fighting,
they had everything to gain by not fighting and nothing to lose--save
honour. In the one scale were fire and the sword, ruin, massacre, the
infinite disaster which we see; in the other was that little word
honour, which also represents infinite things, but things which we do
not see, or which we must be very pure and very great to see quite
clearly. It has happened now and again in history that a man standing
higher than his fellows perceives what this word represents and
sacrifices his life and the life of those whom he loves to what he
perceives; and we have not without reason devoted to such men a sort
of cult that places them almost on a level with the gods. But what had
never yet happened--and I say this without fear of contradiction from
whosoever cares to search the memory of man--is that a whole people,
great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, deliberately
immolated itself thus for the sake of an unseen thing.
2
And observe that we are not discussing one of those heroic resolutions
which are taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when man easily surpasses
himself, and which have not to be maintained when, forgetting his
intoxication, he lapses on the morrow to the dead level of his
everyday life. We are concerned with a resolution that has had to be
taken and maintained every morning, for now nearly four months, in the
midst of daily increasing distress and disaster. And not only has this
resolution not wavered by a hair's breadth, but it grows as steadily
as the national misfortune; and to-day, when this misfortune is
reaching its full, the national resolution is likewise attaining its
zenith. I have seen many of my refugee fellow-countrymen: some used to
be rich and had lost their all; others were poor before the war and
now no longer owned even what the poorest own. I have received many
letters from every part of Europe where duty's exiles had sought a
brief instant of repose. In them there was lamentation, as was only
too natural, but not a reproach, not a regret, not a word of
recrimination. I did not once come upon that hopeless but excusable
cry which, one would think, might so easily have sprung from
despairing lips:
"If our king had not done what he did, we should not be suffering what
we are suffering to-day."
The idea does not even occur to them. It is as though this thought
were not of those which can live in that atmosphere purified by
misfortune. They are not resigned, for to be resigned means to
renounce the strife, no longer to keep up one's courage. They are
proud and happy in their distress. They have a vague feeling that this
distress will regenerate them after the manner of a baptism of faith
and glory and ennoble them for all time in the remembrance of men. An
unexpected breath, coming from the secret reserves of the human race
and from the summits of the human heart, has suddenly passed over
their lives and given them a single soul, formed of the same heroic
substance as that of their great king.
3
They have done what had never before been done; and it is to be hoped
for the happiness of mankind that no nation will ever again be called
upon for a like sacrifice. But this wonderful example will not be
lost, even though there be no longer any occasion to imitate it. At a
time when the universal conscience seemed about to bend under the
weight of long prosperity and selfish materialism, suddenly it raised
by several degrees what we may term the political morality of the
world and lifted it all at once to a height which it had not yet
reached and from which it will never again be able to descend, for
there are actions so glorious, actions which fill so great a place in
our memory, that they found a sort of new religion and definitely fix
the limits of the human conscience and of human loyalty and courage.
They have really, as I have already said and as history will one day
establish with greater eloquence and authority than mine, they have
really saved Latin civilization. They had stood for centuries at the
junction of two powerful and hostile forms of culture. They had to
choose and they did not hesitate. Their choice was all the more
significant, all the more instructive, inasmuch as none was so well
qualified as they to choose with a full knowledge of what they were
doing. You are all aware that more than half of Belgium is of Teutonic
stock. She was therefore, thanks to her racial affinities, better able
than any other to understand the culture that was being offered her,
together with the imputation of dishonour which it included. She
understood it so well that she rejected it with an outbreak of horror
and disgust unparalleled in violence, spontaneous, unanimous and
irresistible, thus pronouncing a verdict from which there was no
appeal and giving the world a peremptory lesson sealed with every drop
of her blood.
4
But to-day she is at the end of her resources. She has exhausted not
her courage but her strength. She has paid with all that she possesses
for the immense service which she has rendered to mankind. Thousands
and thousands of her children are dead; all her riches have perished;
almost all her historic memories, which were her pride and her
delight, almost all her artistic treasures, which were numbered among
the fairest in this world, are destroyed for ever. She is nothing more
than a desert whence stand out, more or less intact, four great towns
alone, four towns which the Rhenish hordes, for whom the epithet of
barbarians is in point of fact too honourable, appear to have spared
only so that they may keep back one last and monstrous revenge for the
day of the inevitable rout. It is certain that Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges
and Brussels are doomed beyond recall. In particular, the admirable
Grand'Place, the Hôtel de Ville and the Cathedral at Brussels are, I
know, undermined: I repeat, I know it from private and trustworthy
testimony against which no denial can prevail. A spark will be enough
to turn one of the recognized marvels of Europe into a heap of ruins
like those of Ypres, Malines and Louvain. Soon after--for, short of
immediate intervention, the disaster is as certain as though it were
already accomplished--Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent will suffer the same
fate; and in a moment, as I was saying the other day, there will
vanish from sight one of the corners of this earth in which the
greatest store of memories, of historic matter and artistic beauties
had been accumulated.
5
The time has come to end this foolery! The time has come for
everything that draws breath to rise up against these systematic,
insane and stupid acts of destruction, perpetrated without any
military excuse or strategic object. The reason why we are at last
uttering a great cry of distress, we who are above all a silent
people, the reason why we turn to your mighty and noble country is
that Italy is to-day the only European power that is still in a
position to stop the unchained brute on the brink of his crime. You
are ready. You have but to stretch out a hand to save us. We have not
come to beg for our lives: these no longer count with us and we have
already offered them up. But, in the name of the last beautiful things
that the barbarians have left us, we come with our prayers to the land
of all beautiful things. It must not be, it shall not be that, on the
day when at last we return, not to our homes, for most of these are
destroyed, but to our native soil, that soil is so laid waste as to
have become an unrecognizable desert. You know better than any others
what memories mean, what masterpieces mean to a nation, for your
country is covered with memories and masterpieces. It is also the
land of justice and the cradle of the law, which is simply justice
that has taken cognizance of itself. On this account, Italy owes us
justice. And she owes it to herself to put a stop to the greatest
iniquity in the annals of history, for not to put a stop to it when
one has the power is almost tantamount to taking part in it. It is for
Italy as much as for France that we have suffered. She is the source,
she is the very mother of the ideal for which we have fought and for
which the last of our soldiers are still fighting in the last of our
trenches.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Delivered at the Scala Theatre, Milan, 30 November,
1914.]
* * * * *
HEROISM
VI
HEROISM
1
One of the consoling surprises of this war is the unlooked-for and, so
to speak, universal heroism which it has revealed among all the
nations taking part in it.
We were rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral
fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of
comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death
belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less
intelligent nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of
appreciating danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful
abyss that separates this life from the life unknown. We were even
almost persuaded that war would one day cease for lack of soldiers,
that is to say, of men foolish enough or unhappy enough to risk the
only absolute realities--health, physical comfort, an unimpaired body
and, above all, life, the greatest of earthly possessions--for the
sake of an ideal which, like all ideals, is more or less invisible.
And this argument seemed the more natural and convincing because, as
existence grew gentler and men's nerves more sensitive, the means of
destruction by war showed themselves more cruel, ruthless and
irresistible. It seemed more and more probable that no man would ever
again endure the infernal horrors of a battlefield and that, after the
first slaughter, the opposing armies, officers and men alike, all
seized with insuppressible panic, would turn their backs upon one
another, in simultaneous, supernatural affright, and flee from
unearthly terrors exceeding the most monstrous anticipations of those
who had let them loose.
2
To our great astonishment the very opposite is now proclaimed.
We realize with amazement that until to-day we had but an incomplete
and inaccurate conception of man's courage. We looked upon it as an
exceptional virtue and one which is the more admired as being also the
rarer the farther we go back in history. Remember, for instance,
Homer's heroes, the ancestors of all the heroes of our day. Study them
closely. These models of antiquity, the first professors, the first
masters of bravery, are not really very brave. They have a wholesome
dread of being hit or wounded and an ingenuous and manifest fear of
death. Their mighty conflicts are declamatory and decorative but not
so very bloody; they inflict more noise than pain upon their
adversaries, they deliver many more words than blows. Their defensive
weapons--and this is characteristic--are greatly superior to their
arms of offence; and death is an unusual, unforeseen and almost
indecorous event which throws the ranks into disorder and most often
puts a stop to the combat or provokes a headlong flight that seems
quite natural. As for the wounds, these are enumerated and described,
sung and deplored as so many remarkable phenomena. On the other hand,
the most discreditable routs, the most shameful panics are frequent;
and the old poet relates them, without condemning them, as ordinary
incidents to be ascribed to the gods and inevitable in any warfare.
This kind of courage is that of all antiquity, more or less. We will
not linger over it, nor delay to consider the battles of the Middle
Ages or the Renascence, in which the fiercest hand-to-hand encounters
of the mercenaries often left not more than half-a-dozen victims on
the field. Let us rather come straight to the great wars of the
Empire. Here the courage displayed begins to resemble our own, but
with notable differences. In the first place, those concerned were
solely professionals. We see not a whole nation fighting, but a
delegation, a martial selection, which, it is true, becomes gradually
more extensive, but never, as in our time, embraces every man between
eighteen and fifty years of age capable of shouldering a weapon.
Again--and above all--every war was reduced to two or three pitched
battles, that is to say, two or three culminating moments; immense
efforts, but efforts of a few hours, or a day at most, towards which
the combatants directed all the vigour and all the heroism accumulated
during long weeks or months of preparation and waiting. Afterwards,
whether the result was victory or defeat, the fighting was over;
relaxation, respite and rest followed; men went back to their homes.
Destiny must not be defied more than once; and they knew that in the
most terrible affray the chances of escaping death were as twenty to
one.
3
Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it
was. Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and
who sent it to you. It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained
human. Its ways were not unknown: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours. At present, to all these
horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery. It no longer
has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is
never still. It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere
present, scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly,
diffuse, all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the
horizon, rising from the waters and falling from the skies,
indefatigable, inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for
days, weeks and months without a minute's lull, without a second's
intermission. Men live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web.
They know that the least step to the right or left, a head bowed or
lifted, a body bent or upright is seen by its eyes and draws its
thunder.
Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive
forces. We should never have believed that man's nerves could resist
so great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face
death for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly
expectation of death and nothing else. Heroism was once a sharp and
rugged peak, reached for a moment but soon quitted, for
mountain-peaks are not inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as
uninhabitable as the peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from
it. And so, at the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and
enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment
when he was happiest and therefore most selfish, when, possessing the
minimum of faith and vainly seeking a new ideal, he seemed least
capable of sacrificing himself for an idea of any kind, he finds
himself suddenly confronted with an unprecedented danger, which he is
almost certain that the most heroic nations of history would not have
faced nor even dreamed of facing, whereas he does not even dream that
it is possible to do aught but face it. And let it not be said that we
had no choice, that the danger and the struggle were thrust upon us,
that we had to defend ourselves or die and that in such cases there
are no cowards. It is not true: there was, there always has been,
there still is a choice.
4
It is not man's life that is at stake, but the idea which he forms of
the honour, the happiness and the duties of his life. To save his life
he had but to submit to the enemy; the invader would not have
exterminated him. You cannot exterminate a great people; it is not
even possible to enslave it seriously or to inflict great sorrow upon
it for long. He had nothing to be afraid of except disgrace. He did
not so much as see the infamous temptation appear above the horizon of
his most instinctive fears; he does not even suspect that it is able
to exist; and he will never perceive it, whatever sacrifices may yet
await him. We are not, therefore, speaking of a heroism that would be
but the last resource of despair, the heroism of the animal driven to
bay and fighting blindly to delay death's coming for a moment. No, it
is heroism freely donned, deliberately and unanimously hailed, heroism
on behalf of an idea and a sentiment, in other words, heroism in its
clearest, purest and most virginal form, a disinterested and
whole-hearted sacrifice for that which men regard as their duty to
themselves, to their kith and kin, to mankind and to the future. If
life and personal safety were more precious than the idea of honour,
of patriotism and of fidelity to tradition and the race, there was, I
repeat, and there is still a choice to be made; and never perhaps in
any war was the choice easier, for never did men feel more free, never
indeed were they more free to choose.
But this choice, as I have said, did not dare show its faintest shadow
on the lowest horizons of even the most ignoble consciences. Are you
quite sure that, in other times which we think better and more
virtuous than our own, men would not have seen it, would not have
spoken of it? Can you find a nation, even among the greatest, which,
after six months of a war compared with which all other wars seem
child's-play, of a war which threatens and uses up all that nation's
life and all its possessions, can you find, I say, in history, not an
instance--for there is no instance--but some similar case which allows
you to presume that the nation would not have faltered, would not at
least, were it but for a second, have looked down and cast its eyes
upon an inglorious peace?
5
Nevertheless, they seemed much stronger than we are, all those who
came before us. They were rude, austere, much closer to nature, poor
and often unhappy. They had a simpler and a more rigid code of
thought; they had the habit of physical suffering, of hardship and of
death. But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men
would have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have
endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to
conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so
far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man,
elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him
capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not
know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it seems to
entail corruption, brings intelligence with it and that intelligence,
in days of trial, stands for potential pride, nobility and heroism.
That, as I said in the beginning, is the unexpected and consoling
revelation of this horrible war: we can rely on man implicitly, place
the greatest trust in him, nor fear lest, in laying aside his
primitive brutality, he should lose his manly qualities. The greater
his progress in the conquest of nature and the greater his apparent
attachment to material welfare, the more does he become capable,
nevertheless, unconsciously, deep down in the best part of him, of
self-detachment and of self-sacrifice for the common safety and the
more does he understand that he is nothing when he compares himself
with the eternal life of his forbears and his children.
It was so great a trial that we dared not, before this war, have
contemplated it. The future of the human race was at stake; and the
magnificent response that comes to us from every side reassures us
fully as to the issue of other struggles, more formidable still, which
no doubt await us when it will be a question no longer of fighting our
fellow-men, but rather of facing the more powerful and cruel of the
great mysterious enemies that nature holds in reserve against us. If
it be true, as I believe, that humanity is worth just as much as the
sum total of latent heroism which it contains, then we may declare
that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary than now and that
it is at this moment reaching one of its highest points and capable of
braving everything and hoping everything. And it is for this reason
that, despite our present sadness, we are entitled to congratulate
ourselves and to rejoice.
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: II
VII
PRO PATRIA: II[3]
1
More than three months ago, I was in one of the grandest of your
cities, a city that welcomed in a manner which I shall never forget
the cause which I had come among you to represent. I was there, as I
told my hearers at the time, in the name of the last remnants of
beauty that the barbarians had left us, to plead with the land of
every kind of beauty. Those threatened beauties, our only cities yet
intact, the treasures and sanctuaries of our whole past and of all our
race, are still reeling on the brink of the same abyss and, failing a
miracle which we dare not hope for, they will suffer the fate of
Ypres, Louvain, Malines, Termonde, Dixmude and so many other less
illustrious victims. The danger in which they stand has no doubt
aroused the indignation of the civilized world; but not a hand has
armed itself to defend them. I blame no one; I reproach no one; the
morality of the nations is a virtue that has not yet emerged from the
state of infancy; and fortunately, by the hazard of war, it is not yet
too late to save four innocent cities.
To-day I have not come to speak of monuments, of historical relics,
nor even of the wrongs committed, of the violation of all the rights
and laws of warfare and every international convention, of
incendiarism, pillage and massacre; I have come simply to utter before
you the last distressful cry of a dying nation.