_The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal_
_‘I created him to be spiritual in his flesh; and now he has become
carnal even in the spirit.’_--(Bossuet, _Élévations_, VII, 3.)
In all that I have said hitherto I have been considering only masses,
whether bourgeois or proletarian, kings, ministers, political leaders,
all that portion of the human species which I shall call ‘the laymen’,
whose whole function consists essentially in the pursuit of material
interests, and who, by becoming more and more solely and systematically
realist, have in fact only done what might be expected of them.
Side by side with this humanity whom the poet has described in a
phrase--‘O curvae in terram animae et celestium inanes’--there existed
until the last half century another, essentially distinct humanity,
which to a certain extent acted as a check upon the former. I mean
that class of men whom I shall designate ‘_the clerks_’, by which term
I mean all those whose activity essentially is _not_ the pursuit of
practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art
or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession
of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: ‘My
kingdom is not of this world.’ Indeed, throughout history, for more
than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted
series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists,
men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose
influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the
multitudes. To come down specifically to the political passions--the
‘clerks’ were in opposition to them in two ways. They were either
entirely indifferent to these passions, and, like Leonardo da Vinci,
Malebranche, Goethe, set an example of attachment to the purely
disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the
supreme value of this form of existence; or, gazing as moralists
upon the conflict of human egotisms, like Erasmus, Kant, Renan, they
preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an
abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.
Although these ‘clerks’ founded the modern State to the extent that it
dominates individual egotisms, their activity undoubtedly was chiefly
theoretical, and they were unable to prevent the laymen from filling
all history with the noise of their hatreds and their slaughters; _but
the ‘clerks’ did prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a
religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as
they carried out these activities_. It may be said that, thanks to the
‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.
This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the
rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.
Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change
occurred: _the ‘clerks’ began to play the game of political passions_.
The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began
to act as its stimulators. This upheaval in the moral behaviour of
humanity operated in several ways.
_First: The ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions_
First of all the ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions. No one will
deny that throughout Europe to-day the immense majority of men of
letters and artists, a considerable number of scholars, philosophers,
and ‘ministers’ of the divine, share in the chorus of hatreds among
races and political factions. Still less will it be denied that they
adopt national passions. Doubtless, the names of Dante, Petrarch,
d’Aubigné, certain apologists of Caboche or preachers of the Ligue
will suffice to show that certain ‘clerks’ did not wait for our era
to indulge in these passions with all the strength of their souls.
But, upon the whole, these ‘clerks’ of the forum were exceptions, at
least among the great ones. If, in addition to the great masters named
above, I evoke the phalanx of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei,
Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, Leibniz, Kepler,
Huyghens, Newton, and even Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu (to mention
only a few) I think I may repeat that until our own days the men of
thought or the honest men remained strangers to political passions,
and said with Goethe: ‘Let us leave politics to the diplomats and the
soldiers.’ Or if, like Voltaire, they took these passions into account,
they adopted a critical attitude towards them, did not espouse them
as passions. Or if, like Rousseau, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine,
even Michelet, they did take these passions to heart, they did so with
a generalizing of feeling, a disdain for immediate results, which in
fact make the word ‘passions’ incorrect. To-day, if we mention Mommsen,
Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras,
d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise
political passions with all the characteristics of passion--the
tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive
preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess,
the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased
to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern clerk
is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use
of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his
contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and
takes no interest in the passions of the State.[31] He is violently
on the side of Michaelangelo crying shame upon Leonardo da Vinci for
his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and against the
master of the Last Supper when he replied that indeed the study of
beauty occupied his whole heart. The time has long past by since Plato
demanded that the philosopher should be bound in chains in order to
compel him to take an interest in the State. To have as his function
the pursuit of eternal things and yet to believe that he becomes
greater by concerning himself with the State--that is the view of the
modern ‘clerk’. It is as natural as it is evident that this adhesion
of the ‘clerks’ to the passions of the laymen fortifies these passions
in the hearts of the latter. In the first place, it abolishes the
suggestive spectacle (which I mentioned above) of a race of men whose
interests are set outside the practical world. And then especially,
the ‘clerk’ by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous
influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive
power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.[32]
Before proceeding any further, I feel I ought to make myself clear on
certain points:--
(_a_) I have been talking of the _whole_ of the men of thought anterior
to our own age. When I say that the ‘clerks’ in the past opposed
the realism of the laymen and that the ‘clerks’ of to-day are in
its service, I am considering each of these groups as a whole; I am
contrasting one general characteristic with another. This means that
I shall not feel myself contradicted by a reader who takes pains to
point out to me that so-and-so in the former group was a realist,
and that so-and-so in the second is not, so long as this reader is
obliged to admit that as a whole each of these groups does manifest the
characteristic I have indicated. And also, when I speak of a single
‘clerk’, I am thinking of his work in its chief characteristic, i.e.
in that part of his teaching which dominates all the rest, even if the
remainder sometimes contradicts this dominant teaching. This means that
I do not consider that I ought to refrain from looking upon Malebranche
as a master of liberal thought because a few lines of his ‘Morale’ seem
to be a justification of slavery, or upon Nietzsche as a moralist of
war because the end of ‘Zarathustra’ is a manifesto of fraternity which
outdoes the Gospels. And I see the less reason for doing so, since
Malebranche as a defender of slavery and Nietzsche as a humanitarian
have had no influence at all, and my subject is the influence which the
‘clerks’ have had in the world, and not what they were in themselves.
(_b_) Some will object to me: ‘How can you treat men like Barrès
and Péguy as “clerks” and blame them for lacking the true spirit of
“clerks” when they are so openly men of action, with whom political
thought is obviously occupied solely with the needs of the present
hour, solely spurred on by the events of the day, while the former
scarcely ever gave expression to his political thought except in
newspaper articles?’ I reply, that this thought, which in truth is
practically nothing but a form of immediate action, is given out by its
authors as the fruits of the highest speculative intellectual activity,
the result of the most truly philosophical meditation. Barrès and
Péguy would never have consented to be looked upon as mere polemical
writers, even in their polemical works.[33] These men, who indeed are
not ‘clerks’, gave themselves out to be ‘clerks’ and were considered
as such, (Barrès gave himself out to be a thinker who condescended to
the arena), and it is precisely as such that they enjoy a particular
prestige among men of action. In this study my subject is not the
‘clerk’ such as he is, but the ‘clerk’ such as he is considered to be
and as he acts upon the world in that capacity.
I shall make the same answer with regard to M. Maurras and the other
instructors of the _Action Française_, of whom it will be said even
more truly that they are men of action and that it is indefensible to
cite them as ‘clerks’. These men claim to carry out their action by
virtue of a doctrine derived from a wholly objective study of history,
from the exercise of the most purely scientific spirit. And they owe
the special attention with which they are listened to by men of action
entirely to this claim that they are _men of learning_, men who are
fighting for a truth discovered in the austerity of the laboratory.
They owe it to their pose as combative ‘clerks’, but essentially _as
‘clerks’_.
(_c_) Finally I should like to define my views on another point and
to say that when the ‘clerk’ descends to the market place I only
consider that he is failing to perform his functions when he does so,
like those I have mentioned, for the purpose of securing the triumph
of a realist passion, whether of class, race or nation. When Gerson
entered the pulpit of Notre Dame to denounce the murderers of Louis
d’Orléans; when Spinoza, at the peril of his life, went and wrote the
words ‘Ultimi barbarorum’ on the gate of those who had murdered the de
Witts; when Voltaire fought for the Calas family; when Zola and Duclaux
came forward to take part in a celebrated lawsuit (Dreyfus affair);
all these ‘clerks’ were carrying out their functions as ‘clerks’ in
the fullest and noblest manner. They were the officiants of abstract
justice and were sullied with no passion for a worldly object.[34]
Moreover, there exists a certain criterion by which we may know whether
the ‘clerk’ who takes public action does so in conformity with his true
functions; and that is, that he is immediately reviled by the laymen,
whose interests he thwarts (Socrates, Jesus). We may say beforehand
that the ‘clerk’ who is praised by the laymen is a traitor to his
office.
But let us return to the modern ‘clerk’s’ adhesion to political
passions.
It is concerning national passions that this adhesion seems to me
particularly novel and big with results. Once again, of course humanity
did not have to wait for the present age to see the ‘clerks’ indulge
in this passion. Without mentioning the poets, whose tender hearts
have always sighed ‘Nescio qua natale dulcedine solum cunctos Ducit’;
and, as regards the philosophers, without going back to antiquity when
all, previous to the Stoics, were ardent patriots; we may yet observe
in history (since the coming of Christianity and long before our own
days) writers, men of learning, artists, moralists, even ministers
of the ‘Universal’ Church, who more or less explicitly displayed a
special attachment for the group to which they belonged. But this
affection among these men was based on reason; it showed itself
capable of judging its object, of denouncing its errors when they
believed such errors had been committed. Need I recall how Fénelon and
Massillon denounced certain wars of Louis XIV? How Voltaire condemned
the destruction of the Palatinate? How Renan denounced the violences
of Napoleon? Buckle, the intolerance of England towards the French
Revolution? And, in our own times, Nietzsche, the brutalities of
Germany towards France?[35] It was reserved for our own time to see men
of thought, or men giving themselves out as such, professing openly
that they would not submit their patriotism to any check on the part of
their judgment, proclaiming (like Barrès) that ‘even if the country is
wrong, we must think it in the right’, denouncing as ‘traitors to the
nation’ those of their compatriots who retain their liberty of mind, or
at least of speech, in regard to their country. In France we have not
forgotten how, during the last war, so many ‘thinkers’ attacked Renan
for the liberty of his judgments on the history of his country.[36] Nor
have we forgotten how, a little before that, a whole set of young men
(who claimed to share in the life of the spirit) bristled up against
one of their masters (Jacob) who tried to teach them a patriotism which
did not exclude all right of criticism. After the violation of Belgium
and other excesses of the Germans, in October, 1914, a German teacher
said: ‘There is nothing for which we need make excuses.’[37] Now, if
their own countries had been in a similar position, the same thing
would have been said by most of the spiritual leaders of that time;
by Barrès in France, by d’Annunzio in Italy, by Kipling in England,
if we may judge by his conduct during the attack of his nation upon
the Boers, and by William James in the United States, if we recall
his attitude when his compatriots seized the island of Cuba.[38] I am
quite ready to agree that this sort of blind patriotism makes powerful
nations, and that the patriotism of Fénelon or of Renan is not the sort
which secures empires. It remains to determine whether the function of
‘clerks’ is to secure empires.
This adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to national passion is particularly
remarkable among those whom I shall call ‘pre-eminently clerks’; I mean
the Churchmen. In all European countries during the past fifty years,
the immense majority of these men have not only given their adhesion to
the national feeling[39] and therefore have ceased to provide the world
with the spectacle of hearts solely occupied with God--but they seem to
have adopted this feeling with the same passion as that I have pointed
out as existing among men of letters, and they too appear to be ready
to support their own countries in the most flagrant injustices. During
the last war this could be most clearly seen in the German clergy, from
whom no one could drag the shadow of a protest against the excesses
committed by their nation, and whose silence does not appear to have
been caused solely by prudence.[40] In contrast to this attitude I
refer the reader to that of the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth
century, to men like Bartholomew de las Casas and Vittoria, earnestly
denouncing the cruelties committed by their compatriots in the conquest
of America. I do not claim that similar behaviour was then the rule
among Churchmen, but I should like to ask whether there is a single
country to-day where they would do likewise, or where they would even
wish to be permitted to do so?[41]
I shall point out another characteristic of patriotism in the modern
‘clerk’: xenophobia. The hatred of man for ‘the man from outside’ (the
_horsain_), his rejection of and scorn for everything which is not
‘from his own home’, all these impulses, so constant among peoples and
apparently necessary to their existence, have been adopted in our days
by the so-called men of thought, and adopted with a seriousness of
application, _an absence of simple-mindedness_, which go far towards
making this adoption worthy of notice. We know how systematically the
mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the
decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in
France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe,
were treated by Frenchmen who claimed to share in the life of the
spirit.[42] You may estimate how curiously new this form of patriotism
is among the men of thought in France by thinking of Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Michelet, Proudhon, Renan, to name only patriotic ‘clerks’ in the
age immediately preceding that we are considering. Is it necessary to
say once again how much the ‘clerks’ have stimulated the passion of the
laymen by adopting this xenophobia?
I shall be told that during the past fifty years, and especially
during the twenty years before the war, the attitude of foreigners to
France was such that the most violent national partiality was forced
upon all Frenchmen who wished to safeguard the nation, and that the
only true patriots were those who consented to this fanaticism. I say
nothing to the contrary; I only say that the ‘clerks’ who indulged
in this fanaticism betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set
up a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth,
in opposition to the peoples and the injustice to which they are
condemned by their religions of this earth. It is true indeed that
these new ‘clerks’ declare that they do not know what is meant by
justice, truth, and other ‘metaphysical fogs’, that for them the true
is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances. All these
things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted
all the important thinkers of his time.
It must be admitted that the German ‘clerks’ led the way in this
adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism. The French
‘clerks’ were, and long remained, animated with the most perfect spirit
of justice towards foreign cultures (think of the cosmopolitanism
of the Romantics!), when already Lessing, Schlegel, Fichte, Goerres
were organizing in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything
German’, and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’
is essentially a German invention. This, moreover, is a theme which
will frequently recur in this book, i.e. that most of the moral and
political attitudes adopted by the ‘clerks’ of Europe in the past fifty
years are of German origin, and that in the world of spiritual things
the victory of Germany is now complete.
It may be said that Germany, by creating for herself the nationalist
‘clerk’ and thereby acquiring the additional strength we know she
has acquired, made this species of ‘clerk’ necessary to all other
countries. It is undeniable that from the moment when Germany had a
Mommsen, France especially was bound to have a Barrès, under penalty
of finding herself in a position of great inferiority in nationalist
fanaticism, and of seeing her existence seriously menaced. Every
Frenchman attached to the continuance of his nation must rejoice that
in the last half century France has possessed a fanatically nationalist
literature. Yet one would like this Frenchman to rise for a moment
superior to his interest, and, faithful in this to the honour of his
race, to think it sad that the course of events in the world should
force him to rejoice in such a thing.
More generally, it may be admitted that a realist attitude has been
imposed on the modern ‘clerks’, chiefly the French ‘clerks’, by
exterior and interior political conditions which have arisen in their
nations. However serious this may be, it would be much less serious
if we found that the ‘clerks’ deplored it while they submitted to
it, if they felt how much their own value is diminished by it, how
greatly civilization is menaced by it, to what an extent the universe
is rendered ugly by it. But this is exactly what we do not see. On the
contrary, we see them joyfully carrying out this realism; we see them
believing that they are rendered greater by their nationalist fury,
that it is a service to civilization, an embellishment to humanity.
Then one feels that one is confronted by something different from
a function thwarted by the events of the moment, and faced with a
cataclysm of moral notions in those who educate the world.
I should like to point out two other characteristics in the patriotism
of the modern ‘clerks’ which seem new to me, the second of which has
not failed to stimulate this passion greatly among the peoples.
The first can best be brought out by contrast with the lines written by
an author of the fifteenth century, lines which are the more remarkable
since he who wrote them proved by his deeds how deep was his love for
his native country. ‘All cities,’ says Guicciardini, ‘all States, all
Kingdoms, are mortal; everything comes to an end, either by accident or
by the course of nature. That is why a citizen who witnesses the end of
his country cannot feel so distressed at her misfortune with so much
reason as he would lament his own ruin. His country has met the fate
which in every way she was bound to meet; the misfortune is wholly for
him whose unhappy lot has caused him to be born in a time when such a
disaster had to occur.’ One wonders whether there is a single modern
thinker, attached to his country as the author of that passage was to
his, who would dare to form, still less to express, a judgment of her
so extraordinarily free in its melancholy. And here we come upon one
of the great impieties of the moderns: The refusal to believe that
above their nations there exists a development of a superior kind, by
which they will be swept away like all other things. The ancients,
so completely the adorers of their States, nevertheless placed them
beneath Fate. The ancient City was under divine protection, but in no
wise believed that she herself was divine and necessarily eternal. All
the literature of the ancients shows us that, in their opinion, the
duration of their institutions was a precarious thing, solely due to
the favour of the Gods, who at any time might withdraw that favour.[43]
We have Thucydides contemplating the image of a world in which Athens
should have ceased to exist; we have Polybius showing us the conqueror
of Carthage meditating over the burning town: ‘And Rome too shall meet
her fatal hour.’ We have Virgil praising the peasant of the fields for
whom ‘res romanae et peritura regna’ are of no value.
It was reserved for the moderns to make of their City a tower which
defies the heavens, and to do it with the aid of their ‘clerks’.
The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’
is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the
_national_ mind, which they naturally brandish against other national
forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many
men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in
the name of _French_ science, of _German_ science. We know how acridly
so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with _French_
sensibility, _French_ intelligence, _French_ philosophy. Some declare
that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan
music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had
a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him. Here it
is not a question of inquiring whether the form of mind of a scholar
or an artist is the signature of his nationality or his race and to
what extent, but of noting the desire of the modern ‘clerks’ that it
should be so, and noting how new a thing this is. Racine and La Bruyère
never dreamed of setting up their works before themselves and before
the world as manifestation of the French mind, nor did Goethe and
Wincklemann relate theirs to the genius of Germany.[44] Here, chiefly
among the artists, is a very remarkable fact. It is very remarkable to
see men whose activity consists, one might say professionally, in the
assertion of individuality, men who became so violently conscious of
this truth a century ago with the Romantic movement, now (as it were)
abdicating this sort of consciousness and trying to feel themselves
as the expression of some general existence, a manifestation of a
collective mind. It is true that this abdication of the individual in
favour of ‘a great impersonal and eternal Whole’ satisfies another
sort of Romanticism. It is true that this impulse of the artist may
also be explained by the desire (which Barrès does not conceal) to
increase the enjoyment of himself by himself, since the consciousness
of the individual ego is doubled in profundity by consciousness of
the national ego, while at the same time the artist finds new lyrical
themes in this second consciousness. It may also be admitted that
the artist is not blind to his own interest in calling himself the
expression of the genius of his nation, thereby inviting the whole race
to applaud itself in the work he put before it.[45] Whatever their
motives may have been, the great minds or the minds reputed such, by
relating the whole of their value so noisily to their nation, have
laboured in a direction contrary to that expected of them; they have
flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance
with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its
neighbours.[46]
I cannot better bring out all the novelty of this attitude of the
‘clerk’ than by quoting the remark of Renan, which would be signed
by all men of thought from Socrates onwards: ‘Man belongs neither to
his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is
a free being, that is, a moral being.’ To this Barrès replies, amid
the applause of his compeers: ‘To be moral is _not to wish to be free
from one’s race_.’ Here, obviously, is an exaltation of the gregarious
spirit which the nations had heard little of before from the priests of
the spirit.
The modern ‘clerks’ do better still. They declare that their thought
cannot be good, that it cannot bear good fruit, unless they remain on
their native soil, unless they are not ‘uprooted’ (‘_déracinés_’). They
congratulate A on working in _his_ Bearn, B in _his_ Berry, C in _his_
Brittany. And they not only proclaim this law for the poets, but for
critics, moralists, philosophers, the servants of purely intellectual
activity. To declare the mind good to the extent of its refusal to
liberate itself from the earth is something which will make the modern
‘clerks’ certain of a conspicuous place in the annals of the spiritual
life. Obviously, the feelings of this class of men has changed since
Plutarch taught: ‘Man is not a plant created to be immobile and to have
his roots fixed in the soil where he was born,’ and since Antisthenes
replied to his colleagues who boasted that they were native to the
soil, that ‘they shared this honour with the slugs and grasshoppers’.
Need I say that I am only denouncing this desire of the ‘clerk’ to
feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native
soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a
nationalist provocation. The best way for me to define this is by
quoting this hymn of a modern ‘clerk’ to ‘his soil and his dead’, a
hymn completely void of political passion:
‘And the old oak under which I am sitting speaks in its turn, and says
to me:
‘“Read, read in my shadow those Gothic songs whose refrains I heard
in the past mingle with the rustling of my leaves. The souls of your
ancestors are in these songs that are older than I am. Learn to know
those humble ancestors, share their past joys and sorrows. Thus, O
transitory creature, shalt thou live long ages in a few years. Be
pious, venerate the soil of your country. Never take up a handful in
your hand without remembering that it is sacred. Love all those far-off
relatives whose dust mingled with earth has fed me for centuries,
whose minds have passed into you, their Benjamin, the child of better
days. Reproach not your ancestors with their ignorance, nor with the
feebleness of their thought, nor even with the illusions of fear which
sometimes rendered them cruel. As well reproach yourself for having
been a child. Remember that they laboured, that they suffered, that
they hoped for you, and that you owe everything to them!”’[47]
_Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as
‘clerks’._
The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions,
if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions
side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as
‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities.
They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists,
as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their
work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so
many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the
disinterested intelligence.
You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must
not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The
latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask
is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they
hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does
not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of
party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not
numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian,
Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that
political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a
conscious and organized passion _lacking all simplicity_, coldly
scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these
poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted
to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of
weakness in the foreigner--we cannot deny, I say, that this political
passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the
‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like _La Nave_, with its
national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein
the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me
something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The
result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by
the present state of mind of the Italian people.[48] But in our day
the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the
service of political passions is that literary form which may be called
‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of
Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly
philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical
intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial
passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is
doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès
admirably caught the appearance of that spirit--he stole the tool, a
philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’
have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least
in that very important section of them who read and believe they think.
Moreover, in regard to poets and especially the poet I have just named,
it is difficult to know whether the lyrical impulse lends its aid to a
genuine and pre-existing political passion, or whether on the contrary
this passion puts itself at the service of a lyrical impulse which is
seeking inspiration. Alius judex erit.
But there are other ‘clerks’ who introduce political passion into
their works with a remarkable consciousness of what they are doing, in
whom this derogation seems more worthy of notice than in the poets. I
mean the novelists and dramatists, i.e. ‘clerks’ whose function is to
portray in as objective a manner as possible the emotions of the human
soul and their conflicts--a function which, as Shakespeare, Molière,
and Balzac have proved, may be carried out with all the purity I have
here assigned to it. One may show how this function has been more than
ever perverted by its subjection to political ends by the example of
many contemporary novelists, not because they scatter ‘tendencious’
reflections throughout their narratives (Balzac constantly does so),
but because instead of making their heroes feel and act in conformity
with a true observation of human nature, they make them do so as the
passion of the authors requires. Shall I cite those novels where the
traditionalist, whatever his errors, always finally displays a noble
soul, whereas the character without religion inevitably, and in spite
of all his efforts, is capable of none but vile actions?[49] Or the
other novels where the man of the people possesses every virtue and
vileness is the exclusive portion of the bourgeois?[50] Or the novels
where the author displays his compatriots in contact with foreigners
and, more or less frankly, gives all moral superiority to his own
people?[51] There is a two-fold evil in this proceeding; not only does
it considerably inflame political passion in the breast of the reader,
but it deprives him of one of the most eminently civilizing effects of
all works of art, i.e. that self-examination to which every spectator
is impelled by a representation of human beings which he feels to be
true and solely pre-occupied with truth.[52] From the point of view
of the artist and of the value of his activity alone, this partiality
indicates a great degradation. The value of the artist, the thing
which makes him the world’s high ornament, is that he _plays_ human
passions instead of living them, and that he discovers in this ‘play’
emotion the same source of desires, joys and sufferings as ordinary
men find in the pursuit of real things. Now, if this accomplished type
of exuberant activity places itself at the service of the nation or of
a class, if this fine flower of disinterestedness becomes utilitarian,
then I say with the poet of the ‘Vierge aux Rochers’ when the author of
_Siegfried_ exhales his last sigh: ‘The world has lost its import.’
I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as
‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets,
the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may
be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place
in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation
from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking,
‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason
of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians.
Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of
the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not
await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the
spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that
it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same
intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians
of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past
twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they
belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history
of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history
and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history,
through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan,
Fustel de Coulanges.[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of
this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a
legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master,
‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of
Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it)
for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany
with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of
‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’.
Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the
frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag
behind. Recently one of them, the author of a _History of France_,
which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in
trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents
the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.[54] By
his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative
the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function,
if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions
of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more
cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive
spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he
prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the
market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which,
coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are
equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby
incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself
to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment.
Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French
equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use
of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it
is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de
Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension
if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old
monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures
for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his
own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of
disinterestedness.[55]
I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their
spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs
by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists,
would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy
their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual
things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party,
of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it
with the pen. We are _the spiritual militia of the material_.’
Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested
intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to
practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that
innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar
as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the
genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in
harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the
like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the
just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to
determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities
in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form
of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make
criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of
political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the
moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using
literary criticism in support of the social system in which they
believed.[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For
instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic
ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that
ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion
to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that
Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.[57]
But the most remarkable thing about the modern ‘clerk’ in his desire
to bring political passion into his work, is that he has done so in
philosophy, more precisely, in metaphysics. It may be said that until
the nineteenth century metaphysics remained the inviolate citadel
of disinterested speculation. Among all forms of spiritual labour
metaphysics best deserved the admirable tribute which a mathematician
rendered the theory of numbers above all branches of mathematics, when
he said: ‘This is the really pure branch of our science, by which I
mean that it is unsullied by any contact with practical application.’
In fact thinkers free from any sort of earthly preference, like
Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and even thinkers strongly
imbued with the superiority of their class or nation (like Plato
and Aristotle), never thought of directing their transcendental
speculations towards a demonstration of this superiority or the
necessity of this adoption by the whole world. It has been said
that the morality of the Greeks was national, but their metaphysics
were universal. The Church itself, so often favourable to class or
national interests in its morality, thinks only of God and Man in its
metaphysics. It was reserved for our own age to see metaphysicians of
the greatest eminence turning their speculations to the exaltation
of their own countries and to the depreciation of other countries,
fortifying the will to power of their compatriots with all the power
of abstractive genius. Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German
world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being,
and history has showed whether the action of these ‘clerks’ had an
effect on the hearts of their laymen. Let me hasten to add that this
spectacle of patriotic metaphysics is provided by Germany alone. In
France, even in this age of nationalist ‘clerks’, we have not yet
seen any philosopher (at least one who is taken seriously) build up
a metaphysical system to the glory of France. Neither Auguste Comte
nor Renouvier nor Bergson ever thought of making a French hegemony
the necessary result of the world’s development. Need I add what a
degradation this has been for metaphysics, as it has been for art?
It will be the eternal shame of the German philosophers to have
transformed the patrician virgin who honoured the Gods into a harpy
engaged in shrieking the glory of her children.
_Third: The ‘clerks’ have played the game of political passions by
their doctrines_
But where the ‘clerks’ have most violently broken with their tradition
and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to
place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale
of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for
twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favour
of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a
consciousness which will stupify history) to the task of making these
passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues,
while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any
respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the
principal aspects of this phenomenon.
_A. The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the particular and denounce the
feeling of the universal_
In the first place, the ‘clerks’ have set out to exalt the will of
men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and
to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in
a universal. With the exception of certain authors like Tolstoi
and Anatole France, whose teaching moreover is now looked on with
contempt by most of their colleagues, all the influential moralists of
Europe during the past fifty years, Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy,
d’Annunzio, Kipling, the immense majority of German thinkers, have
praised the efforts of men to feel conscious of themselves in their
nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from
others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every
aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general
sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims. Those whose
activity since the time of the Stoics had been devoted to preaching
the extinction of national egotism in the interest of an abstract and
eternal entity, set out to denounce every feeling of this kind and to
proclaim the lofty morality of that egotism. In our age the descendants
of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism as a
moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it
implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical
common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these
strange ‘clerks’.
I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean
it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to
Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is
usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human
beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more
accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a
pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is
quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what
is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is
the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the
mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it
appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their
neighbours. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and
therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists
in periods when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them
and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth
century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century,
with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel.
This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its
conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many
distinguished minds, who discover two equally repulsive commonplaces in
the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is ‘the patriotic bore’
and the other ‘the universal embrace’.[58]
The humanitarianism which holds in honour the abstract quality of what
is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men. Obviously,
as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this
quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with
Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man, _more or less_ the son
of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern
equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality
except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the
concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their
minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.[59]
Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with
internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national
egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another
egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain
category of men--labourers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across
frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only
oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those
interests.[60]
In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an
idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also
something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple
desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures,
and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.[61] But let us come
back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel
conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others.
What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’
is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have
exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them
_the most distinct_ from others, in their poets rather than in their
scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since
poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national,
more separating than the products of pure intelligence.[62] They have
exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar
as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young
Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy,
and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.[63]
They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in
_everything_ which makes them distinct from others, not only in their
language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture,
and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience
to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting
their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French
hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They
have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their
vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their
nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity.
The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots
to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’,
with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as
well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur.
Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and
it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and
models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not
that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the
‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge
their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common
to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of
Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.
This glorifying of national particularism, so unexpected among
all ‘clerks’ is especially so among those whom I described as
‘pre-eminently clerks’--the Churchmen. Those who for centuries have
exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their
differences in order to take cognizance of each other in the divine
essence which brings all men together, have now come to praise them,
according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the
French soul’, for ‘the immutability of their German consciousness’,
for the ‘fervour of their Italian hearts’.[64] The sight is indeed
surprising and remarkable! What would be thought by him who, by the
mouth of his apostle, declared: ‘There is neither Greek nor Jew nor
barbarian, but Christ is in all things,’ if to-day he entered one of
his churches and saw offered to the veneration of his faithful, a
national heroine with a sword on her thigh and a flag in her hand?[65]
This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the
precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the
history of the Church. It is not necessary to go back as far as
Saint Augustine, who preached the extinction of all patriotisms in
the embrace of ‘the City of God’; nor even to Bossuet, who shows us
the indignation of Jesus at observing ‘that because we are separated
by a few rivers or mountains, we seem to have forgotten that we are
all of one nature’. So recently as 1849 a lofty assembly of prelates
asserted that ‘this movement of nationalities is a relic of paganism,
differences of language are a consequence of sin and the fall of man’.
Certainly this declaration was an interested one, since it was provoked
by the Most Catholic Francis Joseph to check the separatist tendencies
among the peoples of his Empire; but I dare to assert that the Church
would no longer make such a declaration, even for motives of interest.
I shall be told that even if the Church wished to do so, she could
only do it under penalty of delivering up her ministers to a terrible
unpopularity among their respective peoples. As if the ‘clerk’s’
function were not to tell the laymen truths which are displeasing to
them, and to pay the price at the expense of his own peace!
I do not ask so much. Is there a single prelate in any pulpit of Europe
who would now dare to pronounce: ‘The Christian is both a cosmopolitan
and a patriot. These two qualities are not incompatible. The world
indeed is one common fatherland, or, to speak in more Christian terms,
one common exile.’ (Pastoral letter ‘On the pretended philosophy of
modern infidels,’ by Le Franc de Pompignon, Bishop of Puy, 1763.
The ‘infidels’ here are those who refuse the Church the right to be
cosmopolitan.)
Some ‘clerks’ do better, and assert that by extolling national
particularisms they are in complete harmony with the fundamental spirit
of the Church, especially with the teaching of the great Doctors of
the Middle Ages. (This is the thesis which opposes Catholicism to
Christianity.) Need I recall the fact that the most national of these
Doctors limited themselves to considering national particularisms as an
inevitable condition of an earthly and inferior world, which must be
respected like everything else which is the will of God? Or that they
never exhorted men to intensify this feeling in their hearts, still
less did they ever think of putting this intensification before them as
an exercise in moral self-perfection?
When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism,
it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other
men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as
an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.[66]
But the most remarkable thing in all this is that recently--precisely
since the time when Benedict XV was reproached during the last war for
not having denounced the arrogance of German nationalism--there has
arisen a school in the bosom of the Church which tries to prove that
by acting in this way the Holy Father had simply obeyed the teaching
of his Divine Master, who is supposed to have preached explicitly the
love of a man for his own nation. Could anything better symbolize the
determination of the modern ‘clerks’ to place their credit and their
activities at the service of lay passions than these Churchmen making
Jesus an apostle of nationalism?
These strange Christians express themselves thus:
‘Jesus does not look beyond the frontiers of his own country with the
idea of bestowing his benefactions upon other nations. He declares to
the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he heals against his own wish,
that “his mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”
(Matt. xv, 24). He sent his first disciples among the Israelites. And
notice how he insists that they shall not go elsewhere. “Go not on the
paths of the Gentiles, and enter not the cities of the Samaritans, but
go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. x, 6.) Later
on, it will be time enough to announce the good news to foreigners,
but first of all we must bring it to our own people. This is what he
means by the words, so full of patriotic meaning and love: “the house
of Israel.” A group of human beings possessing the same blood, the same
language, the same religion, the same tradition, form “a house”. These
particularities are so many dividing walls.’[67]
They also say:
‘The most striking thing about Jesus when he consents to pay tribute
to Caesar and refuses the crown which the people offer him in the
desert, is not so much his prudence and his disinterestedness, as his
patriotism ... One of the most important characteristics of Jesus’s
teaching is its absolutely national character....’[68]
If the reader desires, he will himself go and find out the solidity
of the proofs on which these teachers base their thesis (one of these
proofs is that Jesus was strongly attached to the institutions of his
nation, which he showed by accepting circumcision eight days after he
was born). The point I wish to insist on is the eagerness of these
Christians to make their Master a supporter of national egotism, at
least at one period of his life.
These views on the attitude of the Church towards nationalism seem to
me to remain unmodified by the recent declarations of the Holy See
concerning a certain type of French nationalism, for these declarations
only condemn an openly anti-Christian nationalism (hence a very
exceptional form of nationalism) and do not utter a word of blame for
the desire of the peoples to set themselves up as distinct from others
and to reject universalism. Moreover, this is how a universalist is
answered by a publication which is to some extent the official organ of
Pontifical views:
‘Yes, all men are sons of one Father; but they were divided in the
beginning and have never been brought together again. The family was
broken up and never joined up again. On the contrary. Certainly, I am
glad to recognize the fraternity of all living beings; but are all
the dead our fathers? Have they all loved us? Have they all suffered
and laboured for us? Some lived on the other side of the globe, and,
so to speak, in another world. Some laboured against us, or, if
they supported our ancestors, it was in the hope of safeguarding or
enriching their own bequest to others, not to us. Where is the debt?
If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an
inn.’[69]
It appears that we must look among those who have left the Church,
to find Christian ministers who proclaim the true teaching of their
Master, and who declare with no beating about the bush: ‘The Gospel of
Jesus does not imply any country, but obliterates the fatherland.’[70]
The modern ‘clerk’ denounces the feeling of universalism, not only
for the profit of the nation, but for that of a class. Our age has
beheld moralists who have declared to the bourgeois world (or to the
working classes) that, far from trying to check the feeling of their
differences from others and to feel conscious of their common human
nature, they should on the contrary try to feel conscious of this
difference in all its profundity and irreducibleness, and that this
effort is fine and noble, whereas every desire for union is here a
sign of baseness and cowardice, and also of weakness of mind. This,
as everyone knows, is the thesis of the ‘Reflections on Violence’,
which has been praised by a whole galaxy of apostles of the modern
soul. There is certainly something more novel in this attitude of
the ‘clerks’ to class differences than in their attitude towards
national differences. To discover the results of this teaching and the
additional hatred (hitherto unknown) which it has given to either class
in doing violence to its adversary, you have only to look at Italian
Fascism for the bourgeois class, and at Russian Bolshevism for the
working class.[71]
Here again we see realism trying to shelter under cover of the Church.
We see certain Catholic teachers striving to prove that, by encouraging
the bourgeois class, _in the name of morality_, to feel conscious of
themselves as distinct from the opposing class, to plunge religiously
into consciousness of the characteristics which are proper to their
own class, and especially (Johannet) to _intensify their feeling of
property_, these teachers are merely acting in conformity with the
teaching of the Church.[72]
It is easy to point out the equivocation upon which this claim is
based. The Church does indeed admit class distinctions. She exhorts the
faithful to recognize and even to respect them, as something imposed
by God upon a fallen world. She also exhorts the privileged to accept
their situation, to carry out the activities it implies, and to
perform ‘the duties of their state of life’. She even tells them that
by performing these duties they are pleasing God and ‘making an act of
prayer’. But the Church never exhorted them to glorify in themselves
the feeling of this distinction, still less did she ever do so in the
name of morality. On the contrary, she exhorted them in the name of
morality to extinguish (beneath this privileged life) all belief in
a particularity of essence in their persons, and told them to feel
conscious of themselves in that humanity which is common to all men
beneath the inequality of ranks and states of life.[73] Jesus Christ,
the Church states explicitly and constantly, _only accepts the man who
is reconciled_, i.e. the man who has obliterated from his heart every
feeling of difference between himself and other men. (See Bossuet’s
_Sermon on Reconciliation_.) It seems unnecessary to insist further on
the unimpeachable character of this Christian teaching--I am speaking
of teaching, not of practice. But one cannot meditate too much on the
eagerness of so many modern Church teachers to try to find some means
of sanctifying bourgeois egotism through the words of the Gospels.[74]
Let me point out another and remarkable form of this extolling of
particularism by the ‘clerks’: the extolling of particular systems
of morality and the scorn for universal morality. During the past
half century a whole school, not only of men of action but of serious
philosophers, has taught that a people should form a conception of its
rights and duties from a study of its particular genius, its history,
its geographical position, the particular circumstances in which it
happens to be, and not from the commands of a so-called conscience of
man in all times and places. Moreover, this same school teaches that
a class should construct a scale of good and evil, determined by an
inquiry into its particular needs, its particular aims, the particular
conditions surrounding it, and should cease to encumber itself with
such sensibilities as ‘justice in itself’, ‘humanity in itself’ and
other ‘rags and tatters’ of general morality. To-day with Barrès,
Maurras, Sorel, even Durckheim[75] we are witnessing the complete
bankruptcy among the ‘clerks’ of that form of soul which, from Plato
to Kant, looked for the notion of good in the heart of eternal and
disinterested man. The example of Germany in 1914 shows the results of
this teaching which exhorts a group of men to set themselves up as the
sole judges of the morality of their actions, shows what deification of
their appetites it leads to, what codification of their violence, what
tranquillity in carrying out their plans. One day perhaps we shall see
the same thing throughout Europe exemplified by the bourgeois class,
unless the doctrines of that class are turned against itself and we see
it exemplified by the working classes.[76]
I dare to say that the indignation of certain French moralists at
the action of Germany in 1914 surprises me, when I reflect that some
sixteen years earlier, during the famous ‘affair’ which I have already
mentioned, these moralists preached to their compatriots exactly the
same doctrines, urging them to reject the concept of absolute justice,
and to desire only a form of justice ‘adapted to France’, to its
particular genius, its particular history, its particular, eternal, and
present needs.[77] For the honour of these thinkers--I mean for the
honour of their consistency--one likes to think that their indignation
in 1914 was not the result of any moral conviction, but only of the
desire to place the enemy of their nation in the wrong with a naïve
universe.
This last-named activity of the ‘clerks’ seems to me one of those
which best display their determination and skill in serving the
passions of the laymen. If a man exhorts his compatriots to recognize
only a personal morality and to reject all universal morality, he is
showing himself a master of the art of encouraging them to want to be
distinct from all other men, i.e. of the art of perfecting national
passion in them, at least in one of its aspects. The desire to take
none but oneself as a judge of one’s actions and to scorn every opinion
of other people is undoubtedly a source of strength to a nation, as
every exertion of pride is a source of strength to an institution,
whose fundamental principle--whatever may be said to the contrary--is
the assertion of an ego against a non-ego. What ruined Germany in the
last war was not its ‘irritating arrogance’, as is asserted by certain
visionaries who have made up their minds that malevolence of soul
must be an element of weakness in practical life, but the fact that
its material strength was not equal to its arrogance. When arrogance
finds an equivalent material power at its disposal, it is very far from
ruining nations; witness Rome and the Prussia of Bismarck. The ‘clerks’
who, thirty years ago, exhorted France to make herself the sole judge
of her own actions and to despise eternal morality, showed that
they possessed in the highest degree the perception of the national
interest, insofar as that interest is wholly realist and has nothing
to do with disinterested passion. It remains to be seen, once more,
whether the function of the ‘clerks’ is to serve this sort of interests.
But the modern ‘clerks’ have held up universal truth to the scorn
of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the ‘clerks’ have
positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the
laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who
wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they
accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a
universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere
phantom, that there exist only particular truths, ‘Lorrain truths,
Provençal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course
of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, _true in
France_’[78] (the neighbour similarly speaks of what is _true in
Germany_), that in other words Pascal had the mind of a clown, and that
what is true on one side of the Pyrenees may perfectly well be error
on the other side! Humanity hears the same teaching about the classes
and learns that there is a bourgeois truth and a working-class truth;
better still, that the functioning of our minds should be different
according to whether we are working men or bourgeois. The source of
your troubles (Sorel teaches the working classes) is that you do not
think in the mental way suited to your class. His disciple, Johannet,
says the same thing to the capitalist class. Perhaps we shall soon see
the results of this truly supreme art of the ‘clerks’ in exasperating
the feeling in their differences among the classes.
The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a
reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching
of the modern ‘clerks’, who proclaim them in a far higher sphere of
thought than politics. The metaphysics adopted in the last twenty
years by almost all those who think or pretend to think, set up as the
supreme state of human consciousness that state--‘duration’--where we
succeed in taking cognizance of ourselves in what is most individual,
most distinct from everything not ourselves, and in freeing ourselves
from those forms of thought (concept, reason, habits of speech) through
which we can only become conscious of ourselves in what is common to
us and others. These metaphysics put forward as a superior form of
cognizance of the world that which grasps each thing by what is unique
in it, distinct from every other, and is full of scorn for the mind
which seeks to discover general states of being. Our age has seen a
fact hitherto unknown, at least from my point of view; and this in
metaphysics preaching adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the
eternal.[79] Nothing could show better how profound is the modern
‘clerk’s’ desire to exalt the real, the practical side of existence,
and to degrade the ideal, the truly metaphysical side. In the history
of philosophy this veneration for the individual comes from the German
thinkers (Schlegel, Nietzsche, Lotze), while the metaphysical cult of
the universal (added to a certain contempt for the experimental) is
pre-eminently a legacy of Greece to the human mind. So here again, and
moreover in its profoundest part, the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’
shows the triumph of Germanic values and the bankruptcy of Hellenism.
I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable,
which this preaching of particularism assumes among the ‘clerks’. I
mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists _in
time_, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a
‘becoming’, a ‘history’, and never as it presents a state of permanence
beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially
their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is
the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at
them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts,
and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception
inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group
of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less
whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses ‘the present’
aspirations of ‘the contemporary soul’.[80] It may be seen in a whole
school of moralist-historians who admire a doctrine, not because it
is just or good, but because it embodies the morality _of its time_,
the scientific spirit _of its time_. (This is the principal reason why
Sorel admires Bergsonism and why Nietzsche admires the philosophy of
Nicolas de Cuse.) It may be seen especially in all our metaphysicians.
Whether they put forward _Entwickelung_ or _Duration_ or _Creative
Evolution_ or _Pluralism_ or _Integral Experience_ or the _Concrete
Universal_, they all teach that the absolute is developed _in time_,
in the circumstantial, and proclaim the decadence of that form of
mind which, from Plato to Kant, hallows existence as conceived beyond
change.[81] If, with Pythagoras, we assume that the Cosmos is the place
of regulated and uniform existence, and the Ouranos the place of the
becoming and the moving, we may say that all modern metaphysics place
the Ouranos at the top of their scale of values and hold the Cosmos in
very slight esteem. Is it not remarkable to see the ‘clerks’, even in
the lofty function of metaphysicians, teaching the laymen that the real
alone is worthy of consideration, and that the supersensible is only
worthy of derisive laughter?[82]
(_B_) _The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the practical, and denounce
love of the spiritual_
But the ‘clerks’ with their doctrines have inflamed the realism of the
laymen in other ways besides praising the particular and denouncing the
universal. At the very top of the scale of moral values they place the
possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by
which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly
spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values.
This they have done, first of all, as regards the State. For twenty
centuries the ‘clerks’ preached to the world that the State should be
just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should
care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief
French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength
of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems,
arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach
blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce
all institutions based on liberty and discussion.[83] This denunciation
of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of
letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to
History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed
on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the
Prussian manner, where everyone has his post, and under orders from
above, labours for the greatness of the nation, without there being
any place left for particular wills.[84] Owing to their cult of the
powerful State (and also for other reasons I shall mention later),
they want the military element to preponderate in the State, they want
it to have a right to privileges and they want the civil element to
agree to this right. (See _L’Appel au Soldat_, and the declarations of
numerous writers during the Dreyfus affair.) It is certainly something
new to see men of thought preaching the abasement of the toga before
the sword, especially in the country of Montesquieu and Renan. And
then they preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of
justice, above all in its relations with other States. To this end
they praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the
desire for ‘strong frontiers’, the effort to keep his neighbours under
his domination. And they glorify those means which to them seem likely
to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith,
contempt for treaties. This apology for Machiavellianism has inspired
all the German historians for the past fifty years, and in France it is
professed by very influential teachers, who exhort France to venerate
her Kings because they are supposed to have been models of the purely
practical spirit, exempt from all respect for any silly justice in
their relations with their neighbours.
The novelty of this attitude among the ‘clerks’ can best be displayed
by quoting the famous answer of Socrates to the realist in the
_Georgias_:
‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who
made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything
they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in
food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not
see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled
with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former
politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes,
and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’
Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I
am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those
words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise,
have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the
Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess
the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak
only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of
justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens
judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in
this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his
essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the
serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should
perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a
folly--‘a cloud’--and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls.
To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of
the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who
condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.[85] And
that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the
human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.