his envenomed pen to justify the worst accusations that have been made
against Germany. While an Ostwald endeavors to identify the cause of
_Kultur_ with that of civilization, Mann proclaims: "They have nothing
in common. The present war is that of _Kultur_ (i. e., of Germany)
against civilization." And pushing this outrageous boast of pride to the
point of madness, he defines civilization as Reason (_Vernunft,
Aufklärung_), Gentleness (_Sittigung, Sänftigung_), Spirit (_Geist,
Auflösung_), and Kultur as "a spiritual _organization_ of the world"
which does not exclude "bloody savagery." Kultur is "the sublimation of
the demoniacal" (_die Sublimierung des Dämonischen_). It is "above
morality, above reason, and above science." While Ostwald and Haeckel
see in militarism merely an arm or instrument of which Kultur makes use
to secure victory, Thomas Mann affirms that Kultur and Militarism are
brothers--their ideal is the same, their aim the same, their principle
the same. Their enemy is peace, is spirit ("_Ja, der Geist ist zivil,
ist bürgerlich_"). He finally dares to inscribe on his own and his
country's banner the words, "Law is the friend of the weak; it would
reduce the world to a level. War brings out strength."
_Das Gesetz ist der Freund des Schwachen,_
_Möchte gern die Welt verflachen_
_Aber der Krieg lässt die Kraft erscheinen...._
In this criminal glorification of violence, Thomas Mann himself has been
surpassed. Ostwald preached the victory of Kultur, if necessary by
Force; Mann proved that Kultur is Force. Some one was needed to cast
aside the last veil of reserve and say "Force alone. All else be
silent." We have read extracts from the cynical article in which
Maximilian Harden, treating the desperate efforts of his Government to
excuse the violation of Belgian neutrality as feeble lies, dared to
write:
"_Why on earth all this fuss? Might creates our Right. Did a powerful
man ever submit himself to the crazy pretensions or to the judgment of a
band of weaklings?_"
What a testimony to the madness into which German intelligence has been
precipitated by pride and struggle, and to the moral anarchy of this
Empire, whose _organization_ is imposing only to the eyes of those who
do not see farther than the façade! Who cannot see the weakness of a
Government which gags its socialist press and yet tolerates such an
insulting contradiction as this? Who does not see that such words
defame Germany before the whole world for centuries to come? These
miserable intellectuals imagine that with their display of infuriated
Nietzcheism and Bismarckism they are acting heroically and impressing
the world. They merely disgust it. They wish to be believed. People are
only too ready to believe them. The whole of Germany will be made
responsible for the delirium of a few writers. Germany will one day
realize she has had no more deadly enemy than her own intellectuals.
* * * * *
I write here without prejudice, for I am certainly not proud of our
French intellectuals. The Idol of Race, or of Civilization, or of
Latinity, which they so greatly abuse, does not satisfy me. I do not
like any idol--not even that of Humanity. But at any rate those to which
my country bows down are less dangerous. They are not aggressive, and,
moreover, there remains even in the most fanatical of our intellectuals
a basis of native common sense, of which the Germans of whom I have just
spoken seem to have lost all trace. But it must be admitted that on
neither side have they brought honor to the cause of reason, which they
have not been able to protect against the winds of violence and folly.
There is a saying of Emerson's which is applicable to their failure:
"_Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own._"
Their acts and their writings have come to them from others, from
outside, from public opinion, blind and menacing. I do not wish to
condemn those who have been obliged to remain silent either because they
are in the armies, or because the censorship which rules in countries
involved in war has imposed silence upon them. But the unheard-of
weakness with which the leaders of thought have everywhere abdicated to
the collective madness has certainly proved their lack of _character_.
Certain somewhat paradoxical passages in my own writings have caused me
at times to be styled an anti-intellectual; an absurd charge to bring
against one who has given his life to the worship of thought. But it is
true that Intellectualism has often appeared to me as a mere caricature
of Thought--Thought mutilated, deformed, and petrified, powerless, not
only to dominate the drama of life, but even to understand it. And the
events of to-day have proved me more in the right than I wished to be.
The intellectual lives too much in the realm of shadows, of ideas.
Ideas have no existence in themselves, but only through the hopes or
experiences which can fill them. They are either summaries, or
hypotheses; frames for what has been or will be; convenient or necessary
formulæ. One cannot live and act without them, but the evil is that
people make them into oppressive realities. No one contributes more to
this than the intellectual, whose trade it is to handle them, who,
biased by his profession, is always tempted to subordinate reality to
them. Let there supervene a collective passion which completes his
blindness, and it will be cast in the form of the idea which can best
serve its purpose: it transfers its life-blood to that idea, and the
idea magnifies and glorifies it in turn. Nothing is more long-lived in a
man than a phantom which his own mind has created, a phantom in which
are combined the madness of his heart and the madness of his head. Hence
the intellectuals in the present crisis have not been overcome by the
warlike contagion less than others, but they have themselves contributed
to spreading it. I would add (for it is their punishment) that they are
victims of the contagion for a longer period: for whilst simple folk
constantly submit to the test of every-day action and of experience, and
modify their ideas without conscious regret, the intellectual finds
himself bound in the net of his own creation and every word that he
writes draws the bonds tighter. Hence while we see that in the soldiers
of all armies the fire of hate is rapidly dying down and that they
already fraternize from trench to trench, the writers redouble their
furious arguments. We can easily prophesy that when the remembrance of
this senseless war has passed away among the people its bitterness will
still be smouldering in the hearts of the intellectuals....
Who shall break the idols? Who shall open the eyes of their fanatical
followers? Who shall make them understand that no god of their minds,
religious or secular, has the right to force himself on other human
beings--even he who seems the most worthy--or to despise them? Admitting
that your _Kultur_ on German soil produces the sturdiest and most
abundant human crop, who has entrusted to you the mission of cultivating
other lands? Cultivate your own garden. We will cultivate ours. There is
a sacred flower for which I would give all the products of your
artificial culture. It is the wild violet of Liberty. You do not care
about it. You tread it under foot. But it will not die. It will live
longer than your masterpieces of barrack and hot-house. It is not
afraid of the wind. It has braved other tempests than that of today. It
grows under brambles and under dead leaves. Intellectuals of Germany,
intellectuals of France, labor and sow on the fields of your own minds:
respect those of others. Before _organizing_ the world you have enough
to do to _organize_ your own private world. Try for a moment to forget
your ideas and behold yourselves. And above all, look at us. Champions
of _Kultur_ and of Civilization, of the Germanic races and of Latinity,
enemies, friends, let us look one another in the eyes. My brother, do
you not see there a heart similar to your own, with the same hopes, the
same egoism, and the same heroism and power of dream which forever
refashions its gossamer web? _Vois-tu pas que tu es moi_? said the old
Hugo to one of his enemies....
The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the
center of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky
the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with
his own; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them
his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their
value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike are fed.
Intelligence of the mind is nothing without that of the heart. It is
nothing also without good sense and humor--good sense which shows to
every people and to every being their place in the universe--and humor
which is the critic of misguided reason, the soldier who, following the
chariot to the Capitol, reminds Cæsar in his hour of triumph that he is
bald.
_Journal de Genève_, December 4, 1914.
IX. FOR EUROPE: MANIFESTO OF THE WRITERS AND THINKERS OF CATALONIA
National passions are triumphant. For five months they have rent our
Europe. They think they will soon have compassed its destruction and
effaced its image in the hearts of the last of these who remain faithful
to it. But they are mistaken. They have renewed the faith that we had in
it. They have made us recognize its value and our love. And from one
country to another we have discovered our unknown brothers, sons of the
same mother, who in the hour when she is denied, consecrate themselves
to her defence.
Today, it is from Spain that the voice reaches us, from the thinkers of
Catalonia. Let us pass on their appeal which comes to us from the shores
of the Mediterranean, like the sound of a Christmas bell. Another day
the bells of Northern Europe will be heard in their turn. And soon all
will ring together in unison. The test is good. Let us be thankful.
Those who desired to separate us have joined our hands.
R. R.
_December 31, 1914._
MANIFESTO OF THE _FRIENDS OF THE MORAL UNITY OF EUROPE_
A number of literary and scientific men at Barcelona, as far removed
from amorphous internationalism on the one hand as from mere
parochialism on the other, have banded themselves together _to affirm
their unchangeable belief in the moral unity of Europe_, and to further
this belief as far as the suffocating conditions resulting from the
present tragic circumstances permit.
We set out from the principle that the terrible war which today is
rending the heart of this Europe of ours is, by implication, a _Civil
War_.
A civil war does not exactly mean an unjust war; still, it can only be
justified by a conflict between great ideals, and if we desire the
triumph of one or the other of these ideals, it must be for the sake of
the entire European Commonwealth and its general well-being. None of the
belligerents, therefore, can be allowed to aim at the complete
destruction of its opponents; and it is even less legitimate to start
out from the criminal hypothesis that one or another of the parties is
_de facto_ already excluded from this superior commonwealth.
Yet we have seen with pain assertions such as these approved and
deliriously spread abroad; and not always amongst common people, or by
the voices of those who speak not with authority. For three months it
seemed as if our ideal Europe were ship-wrecked, but a reaction is
making its appearance already. A thousand indications assure us that, in
the world of intellect at any rate, the winds are quieting down, and
that in the best minds the eternal values will soon spring up once more.
It is our purpose to assist in this reaction, to contribute to making it
known, and, as far as we are able, to ensure its triumph. We are not
alone. We have with us in every quarter of the world the ardent
aspirations of far-sighted minds, and the unvoiced wishes of thousands
of men of good will, who, beyond their sympathies and personal
preferences, are determined to remain faithful to the cause of this
moral unity.
And above all we have, in the far distant future, the appreciation of
the men who tomorrow will applaud this modest work to which we are
devoting ourselves today.
We will begin by giving the greatest possible publicity to those
actions, declarations, and manifestations--whether they emanate from
belligerent or neutral nations--in which the effort of reviving the
feeling of a higher unity and a generous altruism may become apparent.
Later we shall be able to extend our activities and place them at the
service of new enterprises. We demand nothing more of our friends, of
our press, and of our fellow citizens than a little attention for these
quickenings of reality, a little respect for the interests of a higher
humanity, and a little love for the great traditions and the rich
possibilities of a _unified Europe_.
BARCELONA, _November 27, 1914_.
EUGENIO D'ORS, Member of the Institute; MANUEL DE MONTOLIU, Author;
AURELIO RAS, Director of the Review _Estudio_; AUGUSTIN MURUA,
University Professor; TELESFORO DE ARANZADI, University Professor;
MIGUEL S. OLIVER; JUAN PALAU, publicist; PABLO VILA, Director of _Mont
d'Or_ College; ENRIQUE JARDI, Barrister; E. MESSEGUER, publicist; CARMEN
KARR, Director of the _Residencia de Estudiantes El Hogar_; ESTEBAN
TERRADES, Member of the Institute; JOSE ZULUETA, Member of Parliament;
R. JORI, Author; EUDALDO DURAN REYNALS, Librarian of the _Biblioteca de
Cataluna_; RAFAEL CAMPALANS, Engineer; J. M. LOPEZ-PICO, Author; R.
RUCABADO, Author; E. CUELLO CALOU, University Professor; MANUEL
REVENLOS, Professor of the _Escuela de Funcionarios_; J. FARRAN MAYORAL,
Author; JAIME MASSO TORRENTS, Member of the Institute; JORGE RUBIO
BALAGUER, Director of the _Biblioteca de Cataluna_.
_Translated from the Spanish by R. R._
_Journal de Genève_, January 9, 1915.
X. FOR EUROPE: AN APPEAL FROM HOLLAND TO THE INTELLECTUALS OF ALL
NATIONS
In the preceding chapter, in which I put before my readers the fine
manifesto of the Catalonian intellectuals "For the Moral Unity of
Europe," I stated that after this appeal from the Mediterranean South I
would make known those of the North. Amongst the latter here is the
voice of Holland:--
The _Nederlandsche Anti-Oorlog Road_ (Dutch Anti-War Council) is perhaps
the most important attempt that these last months has seen to unify
pacifist thought. Whilst recognizing the value of what has been done for
some years past in favor of peace, the N. A. O. R. is convinced that
"all this work could have been much more effective, and could even have
prevented the present catastrophe, if it had been better taken in hand."
There has been lack of co-operation, wastage of energy, lack of
penetration to the mass of the people. The problem is to discover if
this internal defect cannot be remedied. "Will the world-wide tragedy of
rivalry continue even inside the pacifist movement, or will this war
teach those who are fighting against it the necessity of an energetic
organization and preparation?"
To this task the N.A.O.R. is devoting itself. Founded on October 8,
1914, it had succeeded by January 15th in securing the adhesion of 350
Dutch societies (official, political, of all parties, religious,
intellectual, labor), and its manifestoes brought together the
signatures of more than a hundred of the most illustrious names of the
Netherlands--statesmen, prelates, officers, writers, professors,
artists, business men, etc. It therefore represents a considerable moral
force.
Let it be said at once that the N.A.O.R. does not look for an immediate
end of the war by a peace at any price. On the one hand it declares
itself "it has formed no presumptuous idea of its strength; it has no
naïve confidence in vague peace formulæ, nor even in well-defined mutual
obligations. The universal war of today has, alas! taught it much in
this respect also." And, moreover, it is quite aware that a peace at
any price, under present conditions, would only be a consecration of
injustice. The great public meetings which it has organized on December
15th in the chief towns of the Netherlands have unanimously declared
that such a peace seemed neither possible nor even desirable. I will add
that certain of the articles of the N.A.O.R. suggest, with all the
reserve necessitated by its attitude of neutrality and its profound
desire for impartiality, the direction of its suppressed sympathies.
Especially the following:--
"To repair the harm done by this war to the prestige of law in
international relations. To bow before the law, whether customary or
codified in treaties is a duty, even where sanction is wanting. Reform
will be in vain: if there is not respect for law, and nations refuse to
keep their word, a durable peace is out of the question."
The object of the N.A.O.R. is especially to study the conditions in
which we can realize a just, humane, and durable peace, which will
secure for Europe a long future of fruitful tranquility and of common
work, and to interest the public opinion of all nations in securing such
a peace. I cannot analyze here, owing to lack of space, the various
public manifestoes, the _Appeal to the People of Holland_ (October,
1914), or the _Appeal for Co-operation and the Preparation of Peace_, a
kind of attempt to mobilize the pacifist armies (November). The latter
of these contains ideas which agree in many cases with those of the
_Union of Democratic Control_ (the abolition of secret diplomacy, and a
larger control of foreign affairs by Parliaments; the prohibition of
special armament industries; the establishment of the elementary
principle of international law, that no country shall be annexed without
the consent, freely expressed, of the population). I will content myself
here with publishing the manifesto addressed to the thinkers, writers,
artists, and scientists of all nations. In this manifesto we shall find
support for the tasks which we ourselves have undertaken in working to
keep the thought of Europe sheltered from the ravages of the war, and in
continually recalling it to the recognition of its highest duty, which
is, even in the worst storms of passion, to safeguard the spiritual
unity bf civilized humanity.
R. R.
_February 7, 1915._
NEDERLANDSCHE ANTI-OORLOG RAAD
Immediately after the European war had broken out, several groups of
intellectuals belonging to the warring nations have advocated the
justice of their country's cause in manifestoes and pamphlets, which
they have scattered in great numbers throughout the neutral states.[25]
And this still goes on; side by side with the war of the sword a no less
vehement war is carried on with the pen.
Those writings have also reached us, the undersigned, all subjects of a
neutral state. We have read them with the greatest interest, as they
enable us to form a clear opinion not only of the frame of mind brought
about by the outbreak of the war among the intellectuals of the warring
nations, but also of the opinions they hold about the causes and the
nature of the present war.
It has not surprised us neutrals to see that the spokesmen of the
opposing nations are equally convinced of the justice of their cause.
Neither has it surprised us that those spokesmen evince such a strong
inclination to advocate their rights before the neutral states. Indeed,
in such a terrible struggle it is a psychologic necessity for all the
nations concerned that they should believe implicitly in the justice of
their cause; they must ardently desire to testify to their faith before
others. Only an unshakable confidence in the absolute justice of their
cause can keep them from wavering or despairing during the gigantic
struggle.
But we have perceived with great sorrow that the greater part of those
writings are absolutely lacking in the slightest effort to be just
towards opponents; that the meanest and most malicious motives are
ascribed to them.
We respect the conviction of every one of the warring nations that they
are fighting for a just cause. Even if we should have formed an opinion
about the origin of the war, we should yet not think the present a fit
moment to oppose different opinions or arguments to each other. This
should be the work of the future, when scientific research will be able
to consider all the facts quietly, when national passions will have
subsided and the nations will listen with more composure to the verdict
of history.
Yet we think it our duty and we consider it a privilege given to us as
neutrals to utter a serious warning against the systematic rousing of a
lasting bitterness between the now warring parties.
Though fully aware that the late events have irritated the feeling of
nationality to the utmost, yet we believe that patriotism should not
prevent any one from doing justice to the character of one's enemy;
that faith in the virtues of one's own nation need not be coupled with
the idea that all vices are inherent in the opposing nation; that
confidence in the justice of one's own cause should not make one forget
that the other side cherishes that conviction with the same energy.
Besides, no one should forget that the question: "What nations will be
enemies?" depends on political relations, which vary according to
unexpected circumstances. Today's enemy may be tomorrow's friend.
The tone, in which of late not only the papers to which we have referred
above, but also the newspaper press of the warring nations has written
about the enemy, threatens to arouse and to perpetuate the bitterest
hatred.
To the evils directly resulting from the war, will be added the
regrettable consequence that co-operation between the belligerent
nations in art, science, and all other labors of peace will be delayed
for some time, nay, even made quite impossible. Yet the time will come
after this war, when the nations will have to resume some form of
intercourse, social as well as spiritual.
The fewer fierce accusations have been breathed on either side, the less
one nation has attacked the character of the other: in short, the less
lasting bitterness has been roused, so much the easier will it be
afterwards to take up again the broken threads of international
intercourse.
This rousing of hatred and bitterness is also an impediment in the way
that leads our thoughts towards peace.
Every one who in word or writing rails at the enemy or excites national
passions is responsible for the longer duration of this horrible war.
Therefore, we the undersigned, appeal to all those of the same mind,
especially among those belonging to the warring nations, to co-operate
for this purpose: that in word and writing everything be avoided that
may rouse lasting animosity.
We especially address this appeal to those who influence public opinion
in their own country, to men of science and to artists, to those who
long ago have realized that in all civilized countries there are men and
women with the same notions of justice and morality as they have
themselves.
May the representatives of all countries--according to the saying of a
Dutch statesmen--remember what unites them and not only what separates
them!
_Signed_:--H.-C. DRESSELHUYS, Secretary-General of the Ministry of
Justice, _President_ of the N.A.O.R. J.-H. SCHAPER, member of the
Second Chamber, _Vice-President_. Madame M. ASSER-THORBEKE, secretary of
the Dutch League for Women's Suffrage. Professor Dr. D. VAN EMBDEN,
Professor of law at Amsterdam. Dr. KOOLEN, member of the Second Chamber.
V.-H. RUTGERS, member of the Second Chamber. Baron de JONG VAN BEEK EN
DONK, _Secretary_ of the N.A.O.R. (and also subscribed to by 130
politicians, intellectuals, and artists, including FREDERIK VAN EEDEN,
WILLEM MENGELBERG, etc.). Office: Theresiastraat, 51, The Hague.
_Journal de Genève_, February 15, 1915.
XI. LETTER TO FREDERIK VAN EEDEN
_January 12, 1915._
MY DEAR FRIEND: