CLERAMBAULT
THE STORY OF AN INDEPENDENT SPIRIT DURING THE WAR
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
TRANSLATED BY
KATHERINE MILLER
1921
TO THE READER
This book is not a novel, but rather the confession of a free spirit
telling of its mistakes, its sufferings and its struggles from the
midst of the tempest; and it is in no sense an autobiography either.
Some day I may wish to write of myself, and I will then speak without
any disguise or feigned name. Though it is true that I have lent
some ideas to my hero, his individuality, his character and the
circumstances of his life are all his own; and I have tried to give a
picture of the inward labyrinth where a weak spirit wanders, feeling
its way, uncertain, sensitive and impressionable, but sincere and
ardent in the cause of truth.
Some chapters of the book have a family likeness to the meditations
of our old French moralists and the stoical essays of the end of the
XVIth century. At a time resembling our own but even exceeding it
in tragic horror, amid the convulsions of the League, the
Chief-Magistrate Guillaume Du Vair wrote his noble Dialogues, "De la
Constance et Consolation ès Calamités Publiques," with a steadfast
mind. While the siege of Paris was at its worst he talked in his
garden with his friends, Linus the great traveller, Musée, Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine, and the writer Orphée. Poor wretches lay dead of
starvation in the streets, women cried out that pike-men were eating
children near the Temple; but with their eyes filled with these
horrible pictures these wise men sought to raise their unhappy
thoughts to the heights where one can reach the mind of the ages
and reckon up that which has survived the test. As I re-read these
Dialogues during the war I more than once felt myself close to that
true Frenchman who wrote: Man is born to see and know everything, and
it is an injustice to limit him to one place on the earth. To the wise
man the whole world is his country. God lends us the world to enjoy in
common on one condition only, that we act uprightly.
R.R.
PARIS,
May, 1920
INTRODUCTION [1]
[Footnote 1: This Introduction was published in the Swiss newspapers
in December, 1917, with an episode of the novel and a note explaining
the original title, _L'Un contre Tous_. "This somewhat ironical name
was suggested--with a difference--by La Boëtie's _Le Contr' Un_; but
it must not be supposed that the author entertained the extravagant
idea of setting one man in opposition to all others; he only wishes
to summon the personal conscience to the most urgent conflict of our
time, the struggle against the herd-spirit."]
This book is not written about the war, though the shadow of the war
lies over it. My theme is that the individual soul has been swallowed
up and submerged in the soul of the multitude; and in my opinion such
an event is of far greater importance to the future of the race than
the passing supremacy of one nation.
I have left questions of policy in the background intentionally, as I
think they should be reserved for special study. No matter what causes
may be assigned as the origins of the war, no matter what theses
support them, nothing in the world can excuse the abdication of
individual judgment before general opinion.
The universal development of democracies, vitiated by a fossilized
survival, the outrageous "reason of State," has led the mind of Europe
to hold as an article of faith that there can be no higher ideal than
to serve the community. This community is then defined as the State.
I venture to say that he who makes himself the servant of a blind or
blinded nation,--and most of the states are in this condition at the
present day,--does not truly serve it but lowers both it and himself;
for in general a few men, incapable of understanding the complexities
of the people, force thoughts and acts upon them in harmony with their
own passions and interests by means of the falsehoods of the press and
the implacable machinery of a centralised government. He who would be
useful to others must first be free himself; for love itself has no
value coming from a slave.
Independent minds and firm characters are what the world needs most
today. The death-like submission of the churches, the stifling
intolerance of nations, the stupid unitarianism of socialists,--by all
these different roads we are returning to the gregarious life. Man has
slowly dragged himself out of the warm slime, but it seems as if the
long effort has exhausted him; he is letting himself slip backward
into the collective mind, and the choking breath of the pit already
rises about him. You who do not believe that the cycle of man
is accomplished, you must rouse yourselves and dare to separate
yourselves from the herd in which you are dragged along. Every man
worthy of the name should learn to stand alone, and do his own
thinking, even in conflict with the whole world. Sincere thought,
even if it does run counter to that of others, is still a service to
mankind; for humanity demands that those who love her should oppose,
or if necessary rebel against her. You will not serve her by flattery,
by debasing your conscience and intelligence, but rather by defending
their integrity from the abuse of power. For these are some of her
voices, and if you betray yourself you betray her also.
R.R.
SIERRE, March, 1917.
PART ONE
Agénor Clerambault sat under an arbour in his garden at St. Prix,
reading to his wife and children an ode that he had just written,
dedicated to Peace, ruler of men and things, "Ara Pacis Augustae." In
it he wished to celebrate the near approach of universal brotherhood.
It was a July evening; a last rosy light lay on the tree-tops, and
through the luminous haze, like a veil over the slopes of the hillside
and the grey plain of the distant city, the windows on Montmartre
burned like sparks of gold. Dinner was just over. Clerambault leaned
across the table where the dishes yet stood, and as he spoke his
glance full of simple pleasure passed from one to the other of his
three auditors, sure of meeting the reflection of his own happiness.
His wife Pauline followed the flight of his thought with difficulty.
After the third phrase anything read aloud made her feel drowsy, and
the affairs of her household took on an absurd importance; one might
say that the voice of the reader made them chirp like birds in a cage.
It was in vain that she tried to follow on Clerambault's lips, and
even to imitate with her own, the words whose meaning she no longer
understood; her eye mechanically noted a hole in the cloth, her
fingers picked at the crumbs on the table, her mind flew back to a
troublesome bill, till as her husband's eye seemed to catch her in the
act, hastily snatching at the last words she had heard, she went into
raptures over a fragment of verse,--for she could never quote poetry
accurately. "What was that, Agénor? Do repeat that last line. How
beautiful it is." Little Rose, her daughter, frowned, and Maxime,
the grown son, was annoyed and said impatiently: "You are always
interrupting, Mamma!"
Clerambault smiled and patted his wife's hand affectionately. He
had married her for love when he was young, poor, and unknown, and
together they had gone through years of hardship. She was not quite
on his intellectual level and the difference did not diminish with
advancing years, but Clerambault loved and respected his helpmate, and
she strove, without much success, to keep step with her great man of
whom she was so proud. He was extraordinarily indulgent to her. His
was not a critical nature--which was a great help to him in life in
spite of innumerable errors of judgment; but as these were always to
the advantage of others, whom he saw at their best, people laughed
but liked him. He did not interfere with their money hunt and his
countrified simplicity was refreshing to the world-weary, like a
wild-growing thicket in a city square.
Maxime was amused by all this, knowing what it was worth. He was a
good-looking boy of nineteen with bright laughing eyes, and in the
Parisian surroundings he had been quick to acquire the gift of rapid,
humorous observation, dwelling on the outside view of men and things
more than on ideas. Even in those he loved, nothing ridiculous escaped
him, but it was without ill-nature. Clerambault smiled at the youthful
impertinence which did not diminish Maxime's admiration for his father
but rather added to its flavour. A boy in Paris would tweak the Good
Lord by the beard, by way of showing affection!
Rosine was silent according to her habit; it was not easy to know her
thoughts as she listened, bent forward, her hands folded and her arms
leaning on the table. Some natures seem made to receive, like the
earth which opens itself silently to every seed. Many seeds fall and
remain dormant; none can tell which will bring forth fruit. The soul
of the young girl was of this kind; her face did not reflect the words
of the reader as did Maxime's mobile features, but the slight flush on
her cheek and the moist glance of her eyes under their drooping lids
showed inward ardour and feeling. She looked like those Florentine
pictures of the Virgin stirred by the magical salutation of the
Archangel. Clerambault saw it all and as he glanced around his little
circle his eye rested with special delight on the fair bending head
which seemed to feel his look.
On this July evening these four people were united in a bond of
affection and tranquil happiness of which the central point was the
father, the idol of the family.
He knew that he was their idol, and by a rare exception this knowledge
did not spoil him, for he had such joy in loving, so much affection
to spread far and wide that it seemed only natural that he should be
loved in return; he was really like an elderly child. After a life of
ungilded mediocrity he had but recently come to be known, and though
the one experience had not given him pain, he delighted in the other.
He was over fifty without seeming to be aware of it, for if there
were some white threads in his big fair moustache,--like an ancient
Gaul's,--his heart was as young as those of his children. Instead of
going with the stream of his generation, he met each new wave; the
best of life to him was the spring of youth constantly renewed, and he
never troubled about the contradictions into which he was led by this
spirit always in reaction against that which had preceded it. These
inconsistencies were fused together in his mind, which was more
enthusiastic than logical, and filled by the beauty which he saw all
around him. Add to this the milk of human kindness, which did not mix
well with his aesthetic pantheism, but which was natural to him.
He had made himself the exponent of noble human ideas, sympathising
with advanced parties, the oppressed, the people--of whom he knew
little, for he was thoroughly of the middle-class, full of vague,
generous theories. He also adored crowds and loved to mingle with
them, believing that in this way he joined himself to the All-Soul,
according to the fashion at that time in intellectual circles. This
fashion, as not infrequently happens, emphasised a general tendency of
the day; humanity turning to the swarm-idea. The most sensitive among
human insects,--artists and thinkers,--were the first to show these
symptoms, which in them seemed a sort of pose, so that the general
conditions of which they were a symptom were lost sight of.
The democratic evolution of the last forty years had established
popular government politically, but socially speaking had only brought
about the rule of mediocrity. Artists of the higher class at first
opposed this levelling down of intelligence,--but feeling themselves
too weak to resist they had withdrawn to a distance, emphasising their
disdain and their isolation. They preached a sort of art, acceptable
only to the initiated. There is nothing finer than such a retreat when
one brings to it wealth of consciousness, abundance of feeling and
an outpouring soul, but the literary groups of the end of the XIXth
century were far removed from those fertile hermitages where robust
thoughts were concentrated. They cared much more to economise their
little store of intelligence than to renew it. In order to purify it
they had withdrawn it from circulation. The result was that it ceased
to be perceived. The common life passed on its way without bothering
its head further, leaving the artist caste to wither in a make-believe
refinement. The violent storms at the time of the excitement about the
Dreyfus Case did rouse some minds from this torpor, but when they came
out of their orchid-house the fresh air turned their heads and they
threw themselves into the great passing movement with the same
exaggeration that their predecessors had shown in withdrawing from
it. They believed that salvation was in the people, that in them was
virtue, even all good, and though they were often thwarted in their
efforts to get closer to them, they set flowing a current in the
thought of Europe. They were proud to call themselves the exponents
of the collective soul, but they were not victors but vanquished;
the collective soul made breaches in their ivory tower, the feeble
personalities of these thinkers yielded, and to hide their abdication
from themselves, they declared it voluntary. In the effort to convince
themselves, philosophers and aesthetics forged theories to prove that
the great directing principle was to abandon oneself to the stream
of a united life instead of directing it, or more modestly following
one's own little path in peace. It was a matter of pride to be no
longer oneself, to be no longer free to reason, for freedom was an old
story in these democracies. One gloried to be a bubble tossed on the
flood,--some said of the race and others of the universal life. These
fine theories, from which men of talent managed to extract receipts
for art and thought, were in full flower in 1914. The heart of the
simple Clerambault rejoiced in such visions, for nothing could have
harmonised better with his warm heart and inaccurate mind. If one has
but little self-possession it is easy to give oneself up to others, to
the world, to that indefinable Providential Force on whose shoulders
we can throw the burden of thought and will. The great current swept
on and these indolent souls, instead of pursuing their way along the
bank found it easier to let themselves be carried ...Where? No one
took the trouble to ask. Safe in their West, it never occurred to them
that their civilisation could lose the advantages gained; the march of
progress seemed as inevitable as the rotation of the earth. Firm in
this conviction, one could fold one's arms and leave all to nature;
who meanwhile was waiting for them at the bottom of the pit that she
was digging.
As became a good idealist, Clerambault rarely looked where he was
going, but that did not prevent him from meddling in politics in a
fumbling sort of way, as was the mania of men of letters in his day.
He had his word to say, right or wrong, and was often entreated to
speak by journalists in need of copy, and fell into their trap, taking
himself seriously in his innocent way. On the whole he was a fair poet
and a good man, intelligent, if rather a greenhorn, pure of heart
and weak in character, sensitive to praise and blame, and to all the
suggestions round him. He was incapable of a mean sentiment of envy or
hatred, and unable also to attribute such thoughts to others. Amid the
complexity of human feelings, he remained blind towards evil and
an advocate of the good. This type of writer is born to please the
public, for he does not see faults in men, and enhances their small
merits, so that even those who see through him are grateful. If we
cannot amount to much, a good appearance is a consolation, and we love
to be reflected in eyes which lend beauty to our mediocrity.
This widespread sympathy, which delighted Clerambault, was not less
sweet to the three who surrounded him at this moment. They were as
proud of him as if they had made him, for what one admires does seem
in a sense one's own creation, and when in addition one is of the same
blood, a part of the object of our admiration, it is hard to tell if
we spring from him, or he from us.
Agénor Clerambault's wife and his two children gazed at their great
man with the tender satisfied expression of ownership; and he, tall
and high-shouldered, towered over them with his glowing words and
enjoyed it all; he knew very well that we really belong to the things
that we fancy are our possessions.
Clerambault had just finished with a Schilleresque vision of the
fraternal joys promised in the future. Maxime, carried away by his
enthusiasm in spite of his sense of humour, had given the orator a
round of applause all by himself. Pauline noisily asked if Agénor
had not heated himself in speaking, and amid the excitement Rosine
silently pressed her lips to her father's hand.
The servant brought in the mail and the evening papers, but no one was
in a hurry to read them. The news of the day seemed behind the times
compared with the dazzling future. Maxime however took up the popular
middle-class sheet, and threw his eye over the columns. He started
at the latest items and exclaimed; "Hullo! War is declared." No one
listened to him: Clerambault was dreaming over the last vibrations of
his verses; Rosine lost in a calm ecstasy; the mother alone, who could
not fix her mind on anything, buzzing about like a fly, chanced to
catch the last word,--"Maxime, how can you be so silly?" she cried,
but Maxime protested, showing his paper with the declaration of war
between Austria and Servia.
"War with whom?"--"With Servia?"--"Is that all?" said the good woman,
as if it were a question of something in the moon.
Maxime however persisted,--_doctus cum libro_,--arguing that from one
thing to another, this shock no matter how distant, might bring about
a general explosion; but Clerambault, who was beginning to come out
of his pleasant trance, smiled calmly, and said that nothing would
happen.
"It is only a bluff," he declared, "like so many we have had for the
last thirty years; we get them regularly every spring and summer; just
bullying and sabre-rattling." People did not believe in war, no one
wanted it; war had been proved to be impossible,--it was a bugbear
that must be got out of the heads of free democracies ... and he
enlarged on this theme. The night was calm and sweet; all around
familiar sounds and sights; the chirp of crickets in the fields, a
glow-worm shining in the grass,--delicious perfume of honey-suckle.
Far away the noise of a distant train; the little fountain tinkled,
and in the moonless sky revolved the luminous track of the light on
the Eiffel Tower.
The two women went into the house, and Maxime, tired of sitting down,
ran about the garden with his little dog, while through the open
windows floated out an air of Schumann's, which Rosine, full of timid
emotion, was playing on the piano. Clerambault left alone, threw
himself back in his wicker chair, glad to be a man, to be alive,
breathing in the balm of this summer night with a thankful heart.
Six days later ... Clerambault had spent the afternoon in the woods,
and like the monk in the legend, lying under an oak tree, drinking in
the song of a lark, a hundred years might have gone by him like a day.
He could not tear himself away till night-fall. Maxime met him in the
vestibule; he came forward smiling but rather pale, and said: "Well,
Papa, we are in for it this time!" and he told him the news. The
Russian mobilisation, the state of war in Germany;--Clerambault stared
at him unable to comprehend, his thoughts were so far removed from
these dark follies. He tried to dispute the facts, but the news was
explicit, and so they went to the table, where Clerambault could eat
but little.
He sought for reasons why these two crimes should lead to nothing.
Common-sense, public opinion, the prudence of governments, the
repeated assurances of the socialists, Jaurès' firm stand;--Maxime let
him talk, he was thinking of other things,--like his dog with his ears
pricked up for the sounds of the night ...Such a pure lovely night!
Those who recall the last evenings of July, 1914, and the even more
beautiful evening of the first day of August, must keep in their
minds the wonderful splendour of Nature, as with a smile of pity she
stretched out her arms to the degraded, self-devouring human race.
It was nearly ten o'clock when Clerambault ceased to talk, for no
one had answered him. They sat then in silence with heavy hearts,
listlessly occupied or seeming to be, the women with their work,
Clerambault with his eyes, but not his mind, on a book. Maxime went
out on the porch and smoked, leaning on the railing and looking down
on the sleeping garden and the fairy-like play of the light and
shadows on the path.
The telephone bell made them start. Someone was calling Clerambault,
who went slowly to answer, half-asleep and absent so that at first he
did not understand; "Hullo! is that you, old man?" as he recognised
the voice of a brother-author in Paris, telephoning him from a
newspaper office. Still he could not seem to understand; "I don't
hear,--Jaurès? What about Jaurès?...Oh, my God!" Maxime full of a
secret apprehension had listened from a distance; he ran and caught
the receiver from his father's hand, as Clerambault let it drop with
a despairing gesture. "Hullo, Hullo! What do you say? Jaurès
assassinated!..." As exclamations of pain and anger crossed each other
on the wire, Maxime made out the details, which he repeated to his
family in a trembling voice. Rosine had led Clerambault back to the
table, where he sat down completely crushed. Like the classic Fate,
the shadow of a terrible misfortune settled over the house. It was
not only the loss of his friend that chilled his heart,--the kind gay
face, the cordial hand, the voice which drove away the clouds,--but
the loss of the last hope of the threatened people. With a touching,
child-like confidence he felt Jaurès to be the only man who could
avert the gathering storm, and he fallen, like Atlas, the sky would
crumble.
Maxime rushed off to the station to get the news in Paris, promising
to come back later in the evening, but Clerambault stayed in the
isolated house, from which in the distance could be seen the far-off
phosphorescence of the city. He had not stirred from the seat where
he had fallen stupified. This time he could no longer doubt, the
catastrophe was coming, was upon them already. Madame Clerambault
begged him to go to bed, but he would not listen to her. His thought
was in ruins; he could distinguish nothing steady or constant, could
not see any order, or follow an idea, for the walls of his inward
dwelling had fallen in, and through the dust which rose, it was
impossible to see what remained intact. He feared there was nothing
left but a mass of suffering, at which he looked with dull eyes,
unconscious of his falling tears. Maxime did not come home, carried
away by the excitement at Paris.
Madame Clerambault had gone to bed, but about one o'clock she came and
persuaded him to come up to their room, where he lay down; but when
Pauline had fallen asleep--anxiety made her sleepy--he got up and went
into the next room. He groaned, unable to breathe; his pain was so
close and oppressive, that he had no room to draw his breath. With
the prophetic hyper-sensitiveness of the artist, who often lives in
tomorrow with more intensity than in the present moment, his agonised
eyes and heart foresaw all that was to be. This inevitable war between
the greatest nations of the world, seemed to him the failure of
civilisation, the ruin of the most sacred hopes for human brotherhood.
He was filled with horror at the vision of a maddened humanity,
sacrificing its most precious treasures, strength, and genius, its
highest virtues, to the bestial idol of war. It was to him a moral
agony, a heart-rending communion with these unhappy millions. To what
end? And of what use had been all the efforts of the ages? His heart
seemed gripped by the void; he felt he could no longer live if his
faith in the reason of men and their mutual love was destroyed, if he
was forced to acknowledge that the Credo of his life and art rested on
a mistake, that a dark pessimism was the answer to the riddle of the
world.
He turned his eyes away in terror, he was afraid to look it in the
face, this monster who was there, whose hot breath he felt upon him.
Clerambault implored,--he did not know who or what--that this might
not be, that it might not be. Anything rather than this should be
true! But the devouring fact stood just behind the opening door....
Through the whole night he strove to close that door ...
At last towards morning, an animal instinct began to wake, coming from
he did not know where, which turned his despair towards the secret
need of finding a definite and concrete cause, to fasten the blame on
a man, or a group of men, and angrily hold them responsible for the
misery of the world. It was as yet but a brief apparition, the first
faint sign of a strange obscure, imperious soul, ready to break forth,
the soul of the multitude ... It began to take shape when Maxime came
home, for after the night in the streets of Paris, he fairly sweated
with it; his very clothes, the hairs of his head, were impregnated.
Worn out, excited, he could not sit down; his only thought was to go
back again. The decree of mobilisation was to come out that day, war
was certain, it was necessary, beneficial; some things must be put an
end to, the future of humanity was at stake, the freedom of the world
was threatened. "They" had counted on Jaurès' murder to sow dissension
and raise riots in the country they meant to attack, but the entire
nation had risen to rally round its leaders, the sublime days of the
great Revolution were re-born ...Clerambault did not discuss these
statements, he merely asked: "Do you think so? Are you quite sure?" It
was a sort of hidden appeal. He wanted Maxime to state, to redouble
his assertions. The news Maxime had brought added to the chaos, raised
it to a climax, but at the same time it began to direct the distracted
forces of his mind towards a fixed point, as the first bark of the
shepherd's dog drives the sheep together.
Clerambault had but one wish left, to rejoin the flock, rub himself
against the human animals, his brothers, feel with them, act with them....
Though exhausted by sleeplessness, he started, in spite of his
wife, to take the train for Paris with Maxime. They had to wait a
long time at the station, and also in the train, for the tracks were
blocked, and the cars crowded; but in the common agitation Clerambault
found calm. He questioned and listened, everybody fraternised, and
not being sure yet what they thought, everyone felt that they thought
alike. The same questions, the same trials menaced them, but each man
was no longer alone to stand or fall, and the warmth of this contact
was reassuring. Class distinctions were gone; no more workmen or
gentlemen, no one looked at your clothes or your hands; they only
looked at your eyes where they saw the same flame of life, wavering
before the same impending death. All these people were so visibly
strangers to the causes of the fatality, of this catastrophe, that
their innocence led them like children to look elsewhere for the
guilty. It comforted and quieted their conscience. Clerambault
breathed more easily when he got to Paris. A stoical and virile
melancholy had succeeded to the agony of the night. He was however
only at the first stage.
The order for general mobilisation had just been affixed to the doors
of the _Mairies_. People read and re-read them in silence, then went
away without a word. After the anxious waiting of the preceding
days, with crowds around the newspaper booths, people sitting on
the sidewalk, watching for the news, and when the paper was issued
gathering in groups to read it, this was certainty. It was also a
relief. An obscure danger, that one feels approaching without knowing
when or from where, makes you feverish, but when it is there you can
take breath, look it in the face, and roll up your sleeves. There had
been some hours of deep thought while Paris made ready and doubled up
her fists. Then that which swelled in all hearts spread itself abroad,
the houses were emptied and there rolled through the streets a human
flood of which every drop sought to melt into another.
Clerambault fell into the midst and was swallowed up. All at once.
He had scarcely left the station, or set his foot on the pavement.
Nothing happened; there were no words or gestures, but the serene
exaltation of the flood flowed into him. The people were as yet pure
from violence; they knew and believed themselves innocent, and in
these first hours when the war was virgin, millions of hearts
burned with a solemn and sacred enthusiasm. Into this proud, calm
intoxication there entered a feeling of the injustice done to them, a
legitimate pride in their strength, in the sacrifices that they were
ready to make, and pity for others, now parts of themselves, their
brothers, their children, their loved ones. All were flesh of their
flesh, closely drawn together in a superhuman embrace, conscious of
the gigantic body formed by their union, and of the apparition above
their heads of the phantom which incarnated this union, the Country.
Half-beast, half-god, like the Egyptian Sphinx, or the Assyrian Bull;
but then men saw only the shining eyes, the feet were hid. She was the
divine monster in whom each of the living found himself multiplied,
the devouring Immortality where those about to die wished to believe
they would find life, super-life, crowned with glory. Her invisible
presence flowed through the air like wine; each man brought something
to the vintage, his basket, his bunch of grapes;--his ideas, passions,
devotions, interests. There was many a nasty worm among the grapes,
much filth under the trampling feet, but the wine was of rubies and
set the heart aflame;--Clerambault gulped it down greedily.
Nevertheless he was not entirely metamorphosed, for his soul was not
altered, it was only forgotten; as soon as he was alone he could hear
it moaning, and for this reason he avoided solitude. He persisted in
not returning to St. Prix, where the family usually stayed in summer,
and reinstalled himself in his apartment at Paris, on the fifth floor
in the Rue d'Assas. He would not wait a week, or go back to help in
the moving. He craved the friendly warmth that rose up from Paris, and
poured in at his windows; any excuse was enough to plunge into it, to
go down into the streets, join the groups, follow the processions, buy
all the newspapers,--which he despised as a rule. He would come back
more and more demoralised, anaesthetised as to what passed within
him, the habit of his conscience broken, a stranger in his house, in
himself;--and that is why he felt more at home out of doors than in.
Madame Clerambault came back to Paris with her daughter, and the first
evening after their arrival Clerambault carried Rosine off to the
Boulevards. The solemn fervour of the first days had passed. War had
begun, and truth was imprisoned. The press, the arch-liar, poured into
the open mouth of the world the poisonous liquor of its stories of
victories without retribution; Paris was decked as for a holiday; the
houses streamed with the tricolour from top to bottom, and in the
poorer quarters each garret window had its little penny flag, like a
flower in the hair.
On the corner of the Faubourg Montmartre they met a strange
procession. At the head marched a tall old man carrying a flag. He
walked with long strides, free and supple as if he were going to leap
or dance, and the skirts of his overcoat flapped in the wind. Behind
came an indistinct, compact, howling mass, gentle and simple, arm in
arm,--a child carried on a shoulder, a girl's red mop of hair between
a chauffeur's cap and the helmet of a soldier. Chests out, chins
raised, mouths open like black holes, shouting the Marseillaise. To
right and left of the ranks, a double line of jail-bird faces, along
the curbstone, ready to insult any absent-minded passer-by who failed
to salute the colours. Rosine was startled to see her father fall into
step at the end of the line, bare-headed, singing and talking aloud.
He drew his daughter along by the arm, without noticing the nervous
fingers that tried to hold him back.
When they came in Clerambault was still talkative and excited. He kept
on for hours, while the two women listened to him patiently. Madame
Clerambault heard little as usual, and played chorus. Rosine did not
say a word, but she stealthily threw a glance at her father, and her
look was like freezing water.
Clerambault was exciting himself; he was not yet at the bottom, but he
was conscientiously trying to reach it. Nevertheless there remained to
him enough lucidity to alarm him at his own progress. An artist yields
more through his sensibility to waves of emotion which reach him from
without, but to resist them he has also weapons which others have
not. For the least reflective, he who abandons himself to his lyrical
impulses, has in some degree the faculty of introspection which it
rests with him to utilise. If he does not do this, he lacks good-will
more than power; he is afraid to look too clearly at himself for
fear of seeing an unflattering picture. Those however who, like
Clerambault, have the virtue of sincerity without psychological gifts,
are sufficiently well-equipped to exercise some control over their
excitability.
One day as he was walking alone, he saw a crowd on the other side of
the street, he crossed over calmly and found himself on the opposite
sidewalk in the midst of a confused agitation circling about an
invisible point. With some difficulty he worked his way forward, and
scarcely was he within this human mill-wheel, than he felt himself a
part of the rim, his brain seemed turning round. At the centre of the
wheel he saw a struggling man, and even before he grasped the reason
for the popular fury, he felt that he shared it. He did not know if
a spy was in question, or if it was some imprudent speaker who had
braved the passions of the mob, but as cries rose around him, he
realised that he, yes he, Clerambault, had shrieked out: ... "Kill
him." ...
A movement of the crowd threw him out from the sidewalk, a carriage
separated him from it, and when the way was clear the mob surged on
after its prey. Clerambault followed it with his eyes; the sound
of his own voice was still in his ears,--he did not feel proud of
himself....
From that day on he went out less; he distrusted himself, but he
continued to stimulate his intoxication at home, where he felt himself
safe, little knowing the virulence of the plague. The infection came
in through the cracks of the doors, at the windows, on the printed
page, in every contact. The most sensitive breathe it in on first
entering the city, before they have seen or read anything; with others
a passing touch is enough, the disease will develop afterwards alone.
Clerambault, withdrawn from the crowd, had caught the contagion from
it, and the evil announced itself by the usual premonitory symptoms.
This affectionate tender-hearted man hated, loved to hate. His
intelligence, which had always been thoroughly straightforward, tried
now to trick itself secretly, to justify its instincts of hatred by
inverted reasoning. He learned to be passionately unjust and false,
for he wanted to persuade himself that he could accept the fact
of war, and participate in it, without renouncing his pacifism of
yesterday, his humanitarianism of the day before, and his constant
optimism. It was not plain sailing, but there is nothing that the
brain cannot attain to. When its master thinks it absolutely necessary
to get rid for a time of principles which are in his way, it finds
in these same principles the exception which violates them while
confirming the rule. Clerambault began to construct a thesis,
an ideal--absurd enough--in which these contradictions could be
reconciled: War against War, War for Peace, for eternal Peace.
The enthusiasm of his son was a great help to him. Maxime had
enlisted. His generation was carried away on a wave of heroic joy;
they had waited so long--they had not dared to expect an opportunity
for action and sacrifice.
Older men who had never tried to understand them, stood amazed; they
remembered their own commonplace, bungling youth, full of petty
egotisms, small ambitions, and mean pleasures. As they could not
recognise themselves in their children they attributed to the war this
flowering of virtues which had been growing up for twenty years around
their indifference and which the war was about to reap. Even near
a father as large-minded as Clerambault, Maxime was blighted.
Clerambault was interested in spreading his own overflowing diffuse
nature, too much so to see clearly and aid those whom he loved: he
brought to them the warm shadow of his thought, but he stood between
them and the sun.
These young people sought employment for their strength which really
embarrassed them, but they did not find it in the ideals of the
noblest among their elders; the humanitarianism of a Clerambault was
too vague, it contented itself with pleasant hopes, without risk or
vigour, which the quietude of a generation grown old in the talkative
peace of Parliaments and Academies, alone could have permitted. Except
as an oratorical exercise it had never tried to foresee the perils of
the future, still less had it thought to determine its attitude in the
day when the danger should be near. It had not the strength to make
a choice between widely differing courses of action. One might be a
patriot as well as an internationalist or build in imagination peace
palaces or super-dreadnoughts, for one longed to know, to embrace, and
to love everything. This languid Whitmanism might have its aesthetic
value, but its practical incoherence offered no guide to young people
when they found themselves at the parting of the ways. They pawed
the ground trembling with impatience at all this uncertainty and the
uselessness of their time as it went by.
They welcomed the war, for it put an end to all this indecision,
it chose for them, and they made haste to follow it. "We go to our
death,--so be it; but to go is life." The battalions went off singing,
thrilling with impatience, dahlias in their hats, the muskets adorned
with flowers. Discharged soldiers re-enlisted; boys put their names
down, their mothers urging them to it; you would have thought they
were setting out for the Olympian games.
It was the same with the young men on the other side of the Rhine, and
there as here, they were escorted by their gods: Country, Justice,
Right, Liberty, Progress of the World, Eden-like dreams of re-born
humanity, a whole phantasmagoria of mystic ideas in which young men
shrouded their passions. None doubted that his cause was the right
one, they left discussion to others, themselves the living proof, for
he who gives his life needs no further argument.
The older men however who stayed behind, had not their reasons for
ceasing to reason. Their brains were given to them to be used, not for
truth, but for victory. Since in the wars of today, in which entire
peoples are engulfed, thoughts as well as guns are enrolled. They slay
the soul, they reach beyond the seas, and destroy after centuries have
passed. Thought is the heavy artillery which works from a distance.
Naturally Clerambault aimed his pieces, also the question for him was
no longer to see clearly, largely, to take in the horizon, but to
sight the enemy,--it gave him the illusion that he was helping his
son.
With an unconscious and feverish bad faith kept up by his affection,
he sought in everything that he saw, heard, or read, for arguments
to prop up his will to believe in the holiness of the cause, for
everything which went to prove that the enemy alone had wanted war,
was the sole enemy of peace, and that to make war on the enemy was
really to wish for peace.
There was proof enough and to spare; there always is; all that is
needed is to know when to open and shut your eyes ...But nevertheless
Clerambault was not entirely satisfied. These half-truths, or truths
with false tails to them, produced a secret uneasiness in the
conscience of this honest man, showing itself in a passionate
irritation against the enemy, which grew more and more. On the same
lines--like two buckets in a well, one going up as the other goes
down--his patriotic enthusiasm grew and drowned the last torments of
his mind in a salutary intoxication.
From now on he was on the watch for the smallest newspaper items
in support of his theory; and though he knew what to think of the
veracity of these sheets, he did not doubt them for an instant when
their assertions fed his eager restless passion. Where the enemy was
concerned he adopted the principle, that the worst is sure to be
true--and he was almost grateful to Germany when, by acts of cruelty
and repeated violations of justice, she furnished him the solid
confirmation of the sentence which, for greater security, he had
pronounced in advance.
Germany gave him full measure. Never did a country at war seem more
anxious to raise the universal conscience against her. This apoplectic
nation bursting with strength, threw itself upon its adversary in a
delirium of pride, anger and fear. The human beast let loose, traced
a ring of systematic horror around him from the first. All his
instinctive and acquired brutalities were cleverly excited by those
who held him in leash, by his official chiefs, his great General
Staff, his enrolled professors, his army chaplains. War has always
been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she
did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over
it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of
Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world
and regenerate it, the Super-Man and Christ were mobilised. The
regeneration began in Belgium--a thousand years from now men will tell
of it. The affrighted world looked on at the infernal spectacle of
the ancient civilisation of Europe, more than two thousand years old,
crumbling under the savage expert blows of the great nation which
formed its advance guard. Germany, rich in intelligence, in science
and in power, in a fortnight of war became docile and degraded; but
what the organisers of this Germanic frenzy failed to foresee was
that, like army cholera, it would spread to the other camp, and once
installed in the hostile countries it could not be dislodged until it
had infected the whole of Europe, and rendered it uninhabitable for
centuries. In all the madness of this atrocious war, in all its
violence, Germany set the example. Her big body, better fed, more
fleshly than others, offered a greater target to the attacks of the
epidemic. It was terrible; but by the time the evil began to abate
with her, it had penetrated elsewhere and under the form of a slow
tenacious disease it ate to the very bone. To the insanities of German
thinkers, speakers in Paris and everywhere were not slow to respond
with their extravagances; they were like the heroes in Homer; but if
they did not fight, they screamed all the louder. They insulted not
only the adversary, they insulted his father, his grandfather, and
his entire race; better still they denied his past. The tiniest
academician worked furiously to diminish the glory of the great men
asleep in the peace of the grave.
Clerambault listened and listened, absorbed, though he was one of the
few French poets who before the war had European relations and whose
work would have been appreciated in Germany. He spoke no foreign
language, it is true; petted old child of France that he was, who
would not take the trouble to visit other people, sure that they would
come to him. But at least he welcomed them kindly, his mind was free
from national prejudices, and the intuitions of his heart made up for
his lack of instruction and caused him to pour out without stint his
admiration for foreign genius. But now that he had been warned to
distrust everything, by the constant: "Keep still,--take care," and
knew that Kant led straight to Krupp, he dared admire nothing without
official sanction. The sympathetic modesty that caused him in times
of peace to accept with the respect due to words of Holy Writ the
publications of learned and distinguished men, now in the war took on
the proportions of a fabulous credulity. He swallowed without a gulp
the strange discoveries made at this time by the intellectuals of his
country, treading under foot the art, the intelligence, the science
of the enemy throughout the centuries; an effort frantically
disingenuous, which denied all genius to our adversary, and either
found in its highest claims to glory the mark of its present infamy
or rejected its achievements altogether and bestowed them on another
race.
Clerambault was overwhelmed, beside himself, but (though he did not
admit it), in his heart he was glad.
Seeking for someone to share in his excitement and keep it up by fresh
arguments, he went to his friend Perrotin.
Hippolyte Perrotin was of one of those types, formerly the pride of
the higher instruction in France but seldom met with in these days--a
great humanist. Led by a wide and sagacious curiosity, he walked
calmly through the garden of the centuries, botanising as he went. The
spectacle of the present was the object least worthy of his attention,
but he was too keen an observer to miss any of it, and knew how to
draw it gently back into scale to fit into the whole picture. Events
which others regarded as most important were not so in his eyes, and
political agitations appeared to him like bugs on a rose-bush which he
would carefully study with its parasites. This was to him a constant
source of delight. He had the finest appreciation of shades of
literary beauty, and his learning rather increased than impaired the
faculty, giving to his thought an infinite range of highly-flavoured
experiences to taste and compare. He belonged to the great French
tradition of learned men, master writers from Buffon to Renan and
Gaston Pâris. Member of the Academy and of several Classes, his
extended knowledge gave him a superiority, not only of pure and
classic taste, but of a liberal modern spirit, over his colleagues,
genuine men of letters. He did not think himself exempt from study,
as most of them did, as soon as they had passed the threshold of the
sacred Cupola; old profesor as he was, he still went to school. When
Clerambault was still unknown to the rest of the Immortals, except to
one or two brother poets who mentioned him as little as possible with
a disdainful smile, Perrotin had already discovered and placed him in
his collection, struck by certain pictures, an original phraseology,
the mechanism of his imagination, primitive yet complicated by
simplicity. All this attracted him, and then the man interested him
too. He sent a short complimentary note to Clerambault who came to
thank him, overflowing with gratitude, and ties of friendship were
formed between the two men. They had few points of resemblance;
Clerambault had lyrical gifts and ordinary intelligence dominated by
his feelings, and Perrotin was gifted with a most lucid mind, never
hampered by flights of the imagination. What they had in common were
dignity of life, intellectual probity, and a disinterested love of art
and learning, for its own sake, and not for success. None the less as
may be seen, this had not prevented Perrotin from getting on in the
world; honours and places had sought him, not he them; but he did not
reject them; he neglected nothing.
Clerambault found him busy unwinding the wrappings with which the
readers of centuries had covered over the original thought of a
Chinese philosopher. At this game which was habitual with him, he came
naturally to the discovery of the contrary of what appeared at first
to be the meaning; passing from hand to hand the idol had become
black.
Perrotin received Clerambault in this vein, polite, but a trifle
absent-minded. Even when he listened to society gossip he was inwardly
critical, tickling his sense of humour at its expense.