strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do
give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching.
I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality.
When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian
scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality
or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else,
and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without
melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says
Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good,
but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’;
thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still
remains evil. The modern realists are the _moralists_ of realism. For
them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral
character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may
be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes
good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in
Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his
disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess
no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at
least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly
profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is
meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them
as for Hegel, the practical in politics _is the moral_, and if what
the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical,
then _it is the immoral_. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist
meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if
we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that
his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man
and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer
accurately by saying that it is the _divinizing of politics_.[86] This
displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement
of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s
attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those
who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his
political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to
relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the
example of Germany a decade ago.[87]
The extent to which the modern ‘clerks’ have made innovations may be
judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two
sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and
morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: ‘Morality decides politics’;
the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: ‘Politics have nothing to
do with morality.’ To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches:
‘Politics decide morality.’[88] However, the real departure is not
that this doctrine should be put before them, but that they should
accept it. Callicles asserted that force is the only morality; but the
thinking world despised him. Let me also mention that Machiavelli was
covered with insults by most of the moralists of his time, at least in
France.
The modern world also hearkens to other moralists of realism, who are
not lacking in influence as such; I mean the statesmen. Here I shall
point to the same sort of change as above. Formerly, leaders of States
practised realism, but did not honour it; Louis XI, Charles the Fifth
of Spain, Richelieu, Louis XIV, did not claim that their actions were
moral. They saw morality where the Gospel had showed it to them, and
they did not attempt to displace it because they did not apply it.[89]
With them morality was violated, but moral notions remain intact; _and
that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb
civilization_. Signor Mussolini proclaims the morality of his politics
of force and the immorality of everything which opposes it. Like the
writer, the man of government, who formerly was merely a realist, is
now the _apostle_ of realism; and the majesty of his function--if not
of his person--gives weight to his apostleship.
The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is
compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with
a system of morality, a metaphysics, a mysticism. Richelieu, who need
account only to his King, is able to talk only of the practical, and
leaves visions of the eternal to others. Mussolini, Bethmann-Hollweg,
Herriot, are condemned to these heights.[90] Moreover, this shows how
great to-day is the number of those whom I can call ‘clerks’, since by
that word I mean all those who speak to the world in a transcendental
manner. Consequently, I have a right to demand that they give an
account of their acts _as ‘clerks’_.
The preachers of political realism often claim to base themselves
on the teaching of the Church, and call her a hypocrite when she
condemns their theses. This claim has little foundation as regards the
teaching of the Church before the nineteenth century, but has much more
foundation if we consider the present age. I doubt whether one could
now find from the pen of a modern theologian any passage so brutally
denunciatory of a war of aggression as the following:--
‘Glaringly unjust is the war of him who declares war only from ambition
and from the desire to extend his dominions beyond their legitimate
boundaries, from the desire to possess a more commodious country
in which to establish himself, from the fear of the great power of
a neighbouring prince with whom he is at peace, or from the desire
to despoil a rival solely because he is thought unworthy of the
possessions or States he holds or of a right which legitimately belongs
to him, because a ruler is inconvenienced by him and wants to get rid
of this inconvenience by force of arms.’[91] On the other hand, there
are an immense number of works to-day which need only a little twisting
to make them justify every attempt at conquest. For instance, the view
that a war is just ‘if it can invoke the necessity of safeguarding
the common good and public tranquillity, the recapture of things
unjustly carried off, the repression of rebels, the defence of the
innocent’.[92] And the view which asserts that ‘war is just when it
is necessary to a nation either to defend itself against invasion, or
_to overthrow the obstacles thwarting the exercise of its rights_.’[93]
At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war
could only be just for one of the two belligerents.[94] It is heavy
with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day
asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, ‘from the moment
when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right,
considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its
counsellors’.[95] Here is another serious thing: In the past, war
would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had
committed an injury _accompanied by a moral intention_, whereas to-day
it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury
caused without any malice,[96] for instance, an accidental violation of
frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find
in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their
incursions.[97]
The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well
as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the
bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize
on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it;
laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other
“rot”[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been
cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not
say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is
the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it;
to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be
just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,[99]
of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is
the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the
doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.[100] The
‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the
same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other,
according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which
obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts
you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a
system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by
a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government,
which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our
own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle,
urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized
faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to
reverence such a State.[101]
This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears
also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have
amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:--
(_a_) _The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past_ (to
the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force)
in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the
_rights_ of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach,
like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a
good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than
opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, _the_ right, and
consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point
of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the
‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the
French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral
positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’,
of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.[102]
To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a
new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty
centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions
of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul
of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks
here--and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as
Germanic--is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the
justice of the world.’ (_Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht._)
(_b_) The extolling of _policy founded on experience_--by which is
meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved
that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to
make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult
of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if
we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed
that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the
recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational
policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of
Taine or Auguste Comte.[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’
Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and
desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought
from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack
on the Utopians, _Treatise_, I, i.) But he believed he learned from
observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States
possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting
the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.[104] The
cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who
adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and
which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what
scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute,
they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the
facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of
Romanticism, which I shall call the _Romanticism of Positivism_, the
chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my
readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover,
this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an
acquisition of the nineteenth century,[105] i.e. the belief that the
teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will
come straight out of an examination of the _facts_, viz. desires which
have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were
not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they
may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.[106] Let me add that
this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning
of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows
a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been
free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were
certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their
noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they
could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves
‘pure scientists’.
(_c_) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man
as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore
eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions).
This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability
of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you
realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete
uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely
ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators,
professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle
of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’,
that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is
their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are
positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what
is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not
know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature
of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming
it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant
of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will
create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the
institutions which are dear to them.[107]
The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among
some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human
race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point
of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political
writers of our time a real _Romanticism of Pessimism_, as false in its
absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of
whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude
is most impressive to simple souls.[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly
borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there
has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and
merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become
better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work--he has
taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious.
The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing
is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the
matter of moral perfectability.
I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’,
by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary
to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:--
The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great
to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors,
his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty
years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man
who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion,
instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what
it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests
of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of
thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover
certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man
who claims to think for himself.[109]
The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact
that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality
which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers,
while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low
birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’
extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to
belong to the life of the mind--that is what modern humanity sees. But
it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.
This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it
have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain
of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of
_Pragmatism_ whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly
all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable
turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is
impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who
for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of
an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason
insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks
its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral
act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment
which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to
power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is
its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that
the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and
that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators
of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a
revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all
political upheavals.[110]
I should like to point out certain particularly remarkable aspects of
this preaching, which are probably not sufficiently realized.
I said that the modern ‘clerks’ teach man that his desires are moral
insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an
environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his
species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the
expense of the surrounding world.[111] In other words, the old morality
told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the
universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent
that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set
himself in Nature ‘like an empire within an empire’; the latter exhorts
him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, ‘We desire now to feel
conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.’ The former,
like the master of the _Contemplations_, said: ‘Believe, but not in
ourselves’; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: ‘Believe,
and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.’
Nevertheless, the real originality of Pragmatism is not in that.
Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so
in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes: Pragmatism
exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly
man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of
justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because
he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of
matter. (See the glorifications of the _homo faber_ by Nietzsche,
Sorel, Bergson.)
Moreover, the modern ‘clerks’ extol Christianity insofar as it is
supposed to have been pre-eminently a school of practical, creative
virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions. This
amazing deformation of a doctrine which in its precepts is so obviously
devoted to the love of the spiritual alone, is not only taught by
laymen, who are quite within their rights in trying to place their
practical desires under the patronage of the highest moral authorities;
it is also professed by the ministers of Jesus themselves. Pragmatist
Christianity, as I mean it here, is preached to-day from all Christian
pulpits.[112]
This exhortation to concrete advantages and to that form of soul which
procures them, is expressed by the modern ‘clerk’ in another very
remarkable teaching: By praise of the military life and the feelings
which go with it, and by contempt for civil life and the morality it
implies. We know the doctrine preached in Europe during the past fifty
years by its most esteemed moralists, their apology for war ‘which
purifies’, their veneration for the man of arms ‘the archtype of moral
beauty’, their proclamation of the supreme morality of ‘violence’ or
of those who settle their differences by duels and not before a jury,
while they declare that respect for contracts is the ‘weapon of the
weak’, the need for justice the ‘characteristic of slaves’. It is
not betraying the disciples of Nietzsche or Sorel--that is, the great
majority of contemporary men of letters who attempt to set up a scale
of moral values for the world--to say that according to them Colleoni
is a far superior specimen of humanity to l’Hôpital. The estimates of
the _Voyage du Condottiere_ are not peculiar to the author of that
work. Here is an idealization of practical activity, which humanity had
never before heard from its educators, at least from those who speak
dogmatically.
I shall be told that Nietzsche and his school do not extol the military
life because it procures material advantages, but on the contrary,
because it is the type of disinterested realism, and in opposition to
the realism which in their opinion is the characteristic of civilian
life. Yet it is none the less true that the way of life praised by
these moralists is in fact that which pre-eminently brings material
advantages. Whatever may be said by the author of _Reflections on
Violence_ and his disciples, war is more profitable than the counting
house; to take is more advantageous than to exchange; Colleoni
possesses more than Franklin. (Naturally, I am speaking of the
successful military man, since Nietzsche and Sorel never speak of the
merchant who goes bankrupt.)
Moreover, no one will deny that the irrational activities, of which
the military instinct is only one aspect, are extolled by their great
modern apostles for their practical value. Their historian has put
it admirably: The Romanticism of Nietzsche, Sorel, and Bergson is a
_utilitarian_ Romanticism.
Let me insist that what I am pointing to here, is not the modern
‘clerk’s’ extolling of the military spirit, but of the warlike
instinct. It is the cult of the warlike instinct, outside all social
spirit of discipline or sacrifice which is meant by the following
assertions of Nietzsche, glorified by a French moralist whom himself
has numerous followers:--
‘The values of the warrior aristocracy are founded on a powerful
bodily constitution, excellent health, without forgetting all that is
necessary to the upkeep of that overflowing vigour--war, adventure,
hunting, dancing, physical games and exercises, and in general
everything which implies a robust, free and joyous activity.’
‘That audacity of noble races, a mad, absurd, spontaneous audacity ...
their indifference and scorn for all safety of body, for life, comfort
...’
‘The superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage ...’
‘The terrible gaiety and profound joy felt by heroes in all
destruction, in all the pleasures of victory and cruelty.’
The moralist who quotes those remarks (Sorel, _Reflexions sur la
Violence_, p. 360) adds, in order to leave no doubt about his
recommendation of them to his fellow human beings: ‘It is quite evident
that liberty would be seriously compromised if men came to look upon
the Homeric values’ (which, for him, are the values just praised by
Nietzsche) ‘as being characteristic of the barbarous peoples only.’
Is it necessary to observe how, here again, the moral presentation
dominant among the world’s educators is essentially Germanic, and
shows the bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman thought? Before our times you do
not find in France a single serious moralist (including de Maistre)
or even a poet (if you consider only the great ones) who praises the
‘pleasures of victory and cruelty’.[113] And it is the same for ancient
Rome, among the nations to whom war had given world supremacy. I do
not find a single passage which puts forward the instincts of prey
as the supreme form of human morality in Cicero, Seneca, or Tacitus,
or even in Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. On the other hand, I
find a great many which attribute this rank to the instincts on which
civil life is based.[114] Moreover, in primitive Greece, long before
the philosophers, the myths very soon give an important place to
civil morality. In a poem of Hesiod the tomb of Cycnus is engulfed
in the waters by Apollo’s command, because Cycnus was a brigand. The
defence of warlike instincts by Mediterranean moralists will be one
of the amazements of history. Some of them, moreover, seem uneasy
about it, and feel they ought to claim that the Homeric values (we
have seen what they mean by that) ‘are very close to the values of
Corneille’[115]--as if the French poet’s heroes, with all their sense
of devotion to duty and the State, had anything in common with lovers
of adventure, prey, and carnage!
It will be observed that these passages from Nietzsche praise the
military life apart from any political aim.[116] And, in fact, the
modern ‘clerks’ teach men that war implies a morality _in itself_
and should be exercised even apart from any utility. This thesis, so
familiar in Barrès, has been defended in its full splendour by a young
hero who is an educator of the soul for a whole French generation:
‘In my country we love war and secretly desire it. We have always made
war. Not to conquer a province, not to exterminate a nation, not to
settle a conflict of interests.... We make war for the sake of making
war, with no other purpose.’[117]
The old French moralists, even the soldiers (Vauvenargues, Vigny),
looked upon war as a sad necessity; their descendants recommend it as
a noble inutility. Yet, here again, the cult preached as apart from
the practical and as an art happens to be eminently favourable to the
practical--useless war is the best preparation for useful war.
This teaching leads the modern ‘clerk’ (we have just seen it in
Nietzsche) to confer a _moral_ value upon physical exercise and to
proclaim _the morality of sport_--a most remarkable thing indeed among
those who for twenty centuries have exhorted man to situate good in
states of the mind. The moralists of sport, moreover, do not all
shuffle over the practical essence of their doctrine. Young people,
Barrès clearly teaches, should be trained in physical strength, for the
greatness of the country. The modern educator goes for his inspiration,
not to those who strolled in the Lyceum or to the solitaries of
Clairvaux, but to the founder of a little town in the Peloponnesus.
Moreover, our age has seen this new thing: Men who claim to belong
to the spiritual life teaching that the Greece to venerate is Sparta
with her gymnasiums, not the city of Plato or Praxiteles, while others
maintain that in antiquity we should honour Rome and not Greece. All
these things are perfectly consistent in those who desire to preach to
humanity nothing but strong constitutions and solid ramparts.[118]
The preaching of realism leads the modern ‘Clerk’ to certain teachings,
whose novelty in his history is not sufficiently noticed, nor what a
break they form with the teaching which his class has given to men for
the past two thousand years.
(_a_) _The extolling of courage_, or more precisely the exhortation to
make the supreme virtue Man’s aptitude to face death, while all other
virtues, however lofty, are placed below it. This teaching, openly the
teaching of Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, Barrès, was always the teaching
of poets and generals, but is entirely new among the ‘clerks’, I mean
among men who put before the world a scale of values in the name of
philosophical reflection, or who are willing to be considered as such.
From Socrates to Renan they had considered courage as a virtue, but
on a lower plane. All, more or less openly, teach with Plato: ‘In the
first rank of virtue are wisdom and temperance; courage only comes
afterwards.’[119] The impulses they exhort man to venerate are not
those whereby he strives to quench his thirst for placing himself in
the real, but those whereby he moderates it. It was reserved for our
time to see the priests of the spiritual placing in the first rank of
forms of soul that which is indispensable to man if he is to conquer
and to lay foundations.[120] However, this practical value of courage,
plainly expressed by Nietzsche and Sorel, is not equally so expressed
by all the modern moralists who praise this virtue. This brings another
of their teachings before us:--
(_b_) _The extolling of honour_, by which is meant all those impulses
which cause a man to risk his life for no practical interest--to be
precise, from desire of glory--_but which are an excellent school of
practical courage_, and were always extolled by those who lead men to
the conquest of material things. In this connection, let the reader
think of the respect in which the institution of the duel has always
been held in armies, in spite of certain repressions inspired solely by
practical considerations.[121]
Here again, the position attributed to these impulses by so many modern
moralists is something new among them, especially in the country of
Montaigne, Pascal, La Bruyère, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Renan, who,
when they extol honour, mean something very different from man’s
cult of his own glory.[122] Nevertheless, the most remarkable thing
about all this is that the cult of man for his own glory is currently
preached by the Churchmen as a virtue which leads Man to God. Is it
not amazing to hear words like the following from a Christian pulpit?
‘The love of grandeurs is the path to God, and the heroic impulse which
fully coincides with the search for glories in their cause, permits
him who had forgotten God or who thought he knew not God to re-invent
Him, to discover this last summit after temporary ascents have rendered
him accustomed to the dizziness and air of altitudes.’[123] One cannot
forebear quoting the lesson given by a true disciple of Jesus to a
Christian teacher who had also strangely forgotten his Master’s word:--
‘Have you noticed that the eight Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount,
the Gospels, the whole of primitive Christian literature, contain not
one word which sets military virtues among those which lead to the
Kingdom of Heaven?’ (Renan, _First Letter to Strauss_.)[124]
Let me observe that I am not reproaching the Christian preacher for
giving their due to glory and other earthly passions, I am only
reproaching him for trying to pretend that he is in harmony with his
institution when he does so. We do not ask that the Christian shall not
violate the Christian law; we only ask him to know that he is breaking
it when he does break it. This seems to me admirably brought out by
the remark of Cardinal Lavigerie who was asked: ‘What would you do,
Eminence, if someone slapped your right cheek?’ and who replied, ‘I
know what I ought to do, but I do not know what I should do.’ _I know
what I ought to do_, and therefore what I ought to teach. A man who
speaks in that way may give way to every species of violence, and yet
maintain Christian morality. Here actions are nothing; the judgment on
the actions is everything.
Must I repeat that I am not deploring the fact that the cults of honour
and courage should be preached to human beings; I am deploring the fact
that they are preached _by the ‘clerks’_. Civilization, I repeat, seems
to me possible only if humanity consents to a division of functions, if
side by side with those who carry out the lay passions and extol the
virtues serviceable to them there exists a class of men who depreciate
these passions and glorify the advantages which are beyond the
material. What I think serious is that this class of men should cease
to perform their office, and that those whose duty was to quench human
pride should extol the same impulses of soul as the leaders of armies.
I shall be told that this preaching is imposed on the ‘clerks’, at
least in war-time, by the laymen, by the States, who to-day intend to
mobilize all the moral resources of the nation for their ends.[125]
But what amazes me is not so much that I see the ‘clerks’ preaching in
this manner, as to see them do it with such docility, such absence of
disgust, such enthusiasm, such joy.... The truth is that the ‘clerks’
have become as much laymen as the laymen themselves.
(_c_) _The extolling of harshness_ and the scorn for human love--pity,
charity, benevolence. Here again, the modern ‘clerks’ are the
_moralists_ of realism. They are not content to remind the world
that harshness is necessary in order ‘to succeed’ and that charity
is an encumbrance, nor have they limited themselves to preaching to
their nation or party what Zarathustra preached to his disciples: ‘Be
hard, be pitiless, and in this way dominate.’ They proclaim the moral
nobility of harshness and the ignominy of charity. This teaching,
which is the foundation of Nietzsche’s work, need not surprise one
in a country which has not provided the world with a single great
apostle,[126] but it is very remarkable in the land of Vincent de Paul
and the defender of the Calas. Lines like the following, which might be
an extract from the _Genealogy of Morals_, seem to me something wholly
new coming from the pen of a French moralist: ‘This perverted pity has
degraded love.[127] It has been given the name of charity, and the weak
have received its dew. Night after night the seed of this calamity has
been scattered. It conquers the earth. It fills the solitary places. In
whatever country you go, you cannot go about for a single day without
meeting this withered face with its commonplace gestures, inspired by
the sole desire of prolonging its shameful life.’[128] There again
we can observe how the modern realists have advanced beyond their
predecessors. When Machiavelli declares that ‘a Prince in order to
maintain his power is forced to govern in a manner contrary to charity
and humanity’, he is simply saying that to act contrary to charity
may be a practical necessity, but he does not in the least vouch that
charity is a degradation of the soul. This teaching is the contribution
of the nineteenth century to the moral education of mankind.
Sometimes the modern ‘clerks’ claim that in preaching inhumanity
they are only continuing the teaching of their great ancestors,
particularly of Spinoza on account of his famous proposition: ‘Pity in
itself is bad and useless in a soul which lives according to reason.’
Is it necessary to point out that here pity is depreciated, not to
the benefit of inhumanity, but to the benefit of humanity _guided by
reason_, because reason alone ‘enables us to give aid to others with
certainty’. And Spinoza, determined to stress the fact that for him
pity is only inferior to reasoned kindness, adds: ‘It must be fully
understood that I am here speaking of the man who lives by reason. For
if a man is never led by reason or by pity to go to the assistance
of others, then assuredly he deserves the name of inhuman, since he
retains no resemblance to a man.’ Let me add that the apostles of
harshness cannot claim either that they are supported by the fanatics
of justice (Michelet, Proudhon, Renouvier) who, by sacrificing love to
justice, do perhaps end up in harshness, but not in a joyous harshness
which is precisely the harshness preached by the modern realists, who
say--perhaps rightly--that it is the only fertile kind.[129]
This extolling of harshness seems to me to have borne more fruit than
any other preaching by the modern ‘clerks’. It is a commonplace that
among the great majority of the (so-called) thinking young men, in
France for instance, harshness is to-day an object of respect, while
human love in all its forms is considered a rather laughable thing.
These young men have a cult for doctrines which respect nothing but
force, pay no attention to the lamentations of suffering and proclaim
the inevitability of war and slavery, while they despise those who are
revolted by such prospects and desire to alter them. I should like
these cults to be compared with the literary aesthetics of these young
men, their veneration for certain contemporary novelists and poets in
whom the absence of human sympathy reaches a rare pitch of perfection,
and whom they plainly venerate, especially for that characteristic.
And I should like you to observe the gloomy gravity and arrogance with
which these young men subscribe to these ‘iron’ doctrines. It seems
to me that the modern ‘clerks’ have created in so-called cultivated
society a positive _Romanticism of harshness_.
They have also created a _Romanticism of contempt_, at least in France,
and notably with Barrès, and indeed since Flaubert and Baudelaire.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that in recent times contempt has been
practised in France for reasons quite other than aesthetic. These
peoples have come to see that by feeling contempt for others they are
not only obtaining the pleasure of a lofty attitude, but that when
they are really expert in expressing contempt they harm what they
despise, do it a real damage. And in fact the kind of contempt which
Barrès expresses for the Jews and which certain royalist teachers have
displayed for democratic institutions every morning for the past twenty
years, do really harm their victims, at least among those very numerous
artistic minds for whom a superbly executory gesture is as good as
an argument. The modern ‘clerks’ deserve a place of honour in the
history of realism; they have come to understand the practical value of
contempt.
It may also be said that they have created a _cult for cruelty_.
Nietzsche proclaims that ‘every superior culture is built up on
cruelty’, a doctrine which is explicitly proclaimed in many places
by Barrès, author of _Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort_.
Nevertheless, the cult of cruelty, which may also be thought necessary
‘to succeed’[130] has remained limited to a few particularly artistic
sensibilities, at least in France. It is very far from becoming the
cult of a school, like harshness and contempt. Here again we may
notice how new this cult is in the land of those who said ‘Cowardice,
the mother of cruelty’ (Montaigne), or, to quote a military moralist,
‘a hero does not feel proud of carrying hunger and misery among
foreigners, but of enduring them for the State; nor of giving death,
but of risking it.’ (Vauvenargues).[131]
(_d_) _The cult of success_, I mean the teaching which says that when a
will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the
will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt. This
philosophy which is professed by many a modern teacher in political
life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a large
number in France since de Maistre) is also professed in private life,
and has borne its fruits there. In the so-called thinking world to-day
there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their
aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all
who ‘succeed’ and their scorn for all who fail. One moralist places
to the credit of Napoleon’s greatness of soul his contempt for ‘the
unlucky’; others do the same thing in regard to Mazarin, Vauban,
Mussolini. It cannot be denied that the ‘clerks’ are thereby keeping
an excellent school of realism, since the cult of success and the
contempt for misfortune are obviously admirable moral conditions for
obtaining material advantages. Nor can it be denied that this teaching
is entirely new among them, especially among the ‘clerks’ of the Latin
races, I mean those whose ancestors had taught mankind to honour merit
apart from its achievements, to honour Hector as much as Achilles, the
Curiatii more than their successful rivals.[132]
We have just seen that the modern moralists extol the warrior at the
expense of the man of justice. They also extol him at the expense of
the man of learning and, there again, they preach to the world the
cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life. We
all know Nietzsche’s hue and cry against the man of the study, the man
of erudition, ‘the mirror man,’ whose only passion is to understand.
And also Nietzsche’s esteem for the life of the mind solely insofar
as it is emotion, lyricism, action, partiality; his derisive laughter
at ‘objective’ methodical research devoted to ‘the horrible old woman
known as truth’. And we know Sorel’s denunciations of societies which
‘give a privileged place to the amateurs of _purely intellectual
things_’;[133] those of Barrès, Lemaître, Brunetière, thirty years ago,
intimating to the ‘intellectuals’ that they are a type of humanity
‘inferior to the soldier’; those of Péguy, who admires philosophies to
the extent that ‘they are good fighters’, and admires Descartes because
he was in the army, and the dialecticians of French monarchism solely
because they are ready to be killed for the sake of their views.[134]
I shall be told that most often this is the mere wild talk of men of
letters, the posturing of lyricists, to which it is unjust to attribute
a dogmatic meaning; that Nietzsche, Barrès and Péguy denounce the life
of study on account of their poetic temperaments, their aversion from
everything lacking in picturesqueness and the spirit of adventure, and
not their resolution to abase disinterestedness. To which I reply that
these poets give themselves out as serious thinkers (notice their tone,
_quite free from_ naiveté); that the immense majority of their readers
accept them as such; that, even if it were true that in depreciating
the man of study their motive is not to abase disinterestedness, it
is none the less true in fact that the manner of living they hold
up to the laughter of mankind happens to be the very type of the
disinterested life, while the life they extol at its expense is the
very type of practical activity (at least more practical than that
of the man of study, for it will be admitted that the activity of du
Guesclin and Napoleon is more likely to acquire material advantages
than the activity of Spinoza and Mabillon); that, moreover, what these
thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who lays no
foundations, who does not conquer, who does not predicate the capture
of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it,
as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only
the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his
discoveries to others. In Nietzsche, the scorn for the man of study to
the benefit of the warrior is only an episode in a desire which nobody
will deny inspires the whole of his work as well as the work of Sorel,
Barrès and Péguy: _The desire to abase the values of knowledge before
the values of action._[135]
To-day this desire inspires not only the moralist, but another kind
of ‘clerk’ who speaks from much higher ground. I am referring to that
teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively
little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour
the active and _willing_ part of himself with all his devotion. The
theory of knowledge from which humanity has taken its values during
the past half century assigns a secondary rank to the mind which
proceeds by clear and distinct ideas, by categories, by words, and
places in the highest rank the mind which succeeds in liberating itself
from these intellectual habits and in becoming conscious of itself
insofar as it is a ‘pure tendency’, a ‘pure will’, a ‘pure activity’.
Philosophy which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself
because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think, therefore I am’,
now raises him to say, ‘I am, therefore I think’, ‘I think, therefore
I am not’ (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that
humble region where it is confused with action). Formerly philosophy
taught him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles the soul of
Pythagoras linking up concepts; now she informs him that his soul is
divine insofar as it resembles that of the small chicken breaking its
eggshell.[136] From his loftiest pulpit the modern ‘clerk’ assures man
that he is great in proportion as he is practical.
During fifty years, especially in France (see Barrès and Bourget)
a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of
instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense,
i.e. as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name
of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence
knows what we ought to do--as individuals, as a nation, as a class--to
secure our own advantage. These writers have eagerly expatiated on
the example of the insect whose ‘instinct’ (it appears) teaches it
to strike its prey precisely in the spot which will paralyse it
without killing it, so that its offspring may feed on the living prey
and develop better.[137] Other teachers denounce this ‘barbarous’
extolling of instinct in the name of ‘the French tradition’ and preach
‘the superiority of the intelligence’; but they preach it because
in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions
required by our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the
practical. This brings us to one of the most remarkable and certainly
the most novel forms of this preaching of the practical by the modern
‘clerks’.
I mean that teaching according to which _intellectual activity is
worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent
alone_. It may be said that since the Greeks the predominant attitude
of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as
(like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart
from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers
would have agreed with Plato’s famous hymn to geometry, where that
discipline is venerated more than all others because for him it
represents the type of speculative thought which brings in nothing
material; and with Renan’s verdict which declares that the man who
loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against
that divinity.[138] By this standard of values the ‘clerks’ put before
the laymen the spectacle of a class of men for whom the value of life
lies in its disinterestedness, and they acted as a check on--or at
least shamed--the laymen’s practical passions. The modern ‘clerks’
have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim that intellectual
functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up
with the pursuit of a concrete advantage, and that the intelligence
which takes no interest in its objects is a contemptible activity.
They teach that the superior form of the intelligence is that which
thrusts its roots into ‘the vital urge’, occupied in discovering
what is most valuable in securing our existence. In historical[139]
science especially, they honour the intelligence which labours under
the guidance of political interests,[140] and they are completely
disdainful of all efforts towards ‘objectivity’. Elsewhere they
assert that the intelligence to be venerated is that which limits its
activities within the bounds of national interests and social order,
while the intelligence which allows itself to be guided by the desire
for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society, is
merely a ‘savage and brutal’ activity, which ‘dishonours the highest
of human faculties.’[141] Let me also point out their devotion to
the doctrine (Bergson, Sorel) which says that science has a purely
utilitarian origin--the necessity of man to dominate matter, ‘knowledge
is adaptation’; and their scorn for the beautiful Greek conception
which made science bloom from the desire to play, the perfect type of
disinterested activity. And then they teach men that to accept an error
which is of service to them (the ‘myth’) is an undertaking which does
them honour, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them. In
other words, as Nietzsche, Barrès and Sorel plainly put it, sensibility
to truth in itself apart from any practical aim is a somewhat
contemptible form of mind.[142] Here the modern ‘clerk’ positively
displays genius in his defence of the material, since the material has
nothing to do with the truth, or rather to speak more truly--has no
worse enemy. The genius of Callicles in all its profundity lives again
in the great masters of the modern soul.[143]
Then the modern ‘clerks’ have preached to men the religion of the
practical _by means of their theology_, through the image of God they
have set before them. First, they determined that God, who since the
Stoics has been infinite, should once more become finite, distinct,
endowed with a personality, that He should be the affirmation of a
_physical_ and not a _metaphysical_ existence. Anthropomorphism, which
in the poets from Prudentius to Victor Hugo existed mingled with
pantheism without troubling to define the frontiers between them,
since God was personal or indeterminate according to the direction of
the emotion and the needs of the lyric impulse, rose up in Péguy and
Claudel with the most violent consciousness of itself, the clearest
desire to be distinguished from its acolyte and to express contempt
for him. At the same time the political teachers attacked the religion
of the Infinite with a precision of hatred, a skill in depreciation,
unparalleled even in the Church, which consisted in denouncing this
religion precisely because it is not practical, because it saps away
the feelings which found the great earthly realities: the City and the
State.[144] But the modern ‘clerks’ have above all endowed God with
the attributes which secure practical advantages. It may be said that,
since the Old Testament, God was far more just than strong, or rather
that, as Plato thought, His strength was only a form of His justice;
and His power, as Malebranche and Spinoza put it, had nothing in common
with the power of kings and Empire-builders. The desire to increase was
implicitly excluded from His nature, as well as the moral attributes
necessary to the satisfaction of that desire--energy, will, the love
of effort, the attraction of triumph. This was an inevitable result
of His perfect and infinite state of being, which at once constituted
the whole of possible reality. Even in creation, the idea of which is
essentially inseparable from the ideas of power and increase, these
ideas were avoided--the world was far less a result of God’s power than
of His love; it came out of God as a ray comes out of the sun, without
God feeling any increase of Himself at the expense of anything else.
God, to speak in terms of the schools, was far less the transcendent
cause of the world than its immanent cause.[145] On the other hand,
for the modern teachers (Hegel, Schelling, Bergson, Péguy), God is
essentially something which increases; His law is ‘incessant change’,
‘incessant novelty’, ‘incessant[146] creation’; His principle is
essentially a principle of growth--Will, Tension, Vital Urge. If He is
Intelligence, as with Hegel, He is an intelligence which ‘develops’,
which ‘realizes itself’ more and more. The Being situated immediately
in all His perfection and knowing nothing of conquest is an object of
contempt; He represents (Bergson) an ‘eternity of death’.[147] So the
believers in an initial and single creation to-day strive to present
this act in its purely practical aspect. The Church condemns with a
hitherto unknown clearness every doctrine of immanence and preaches
transcendence in all its strictness.[148] God, in creating the world,
no longer witnesses an inevitable expansion of His nature; through
His power (some, to diminish the arbitrariness, say ‘through His
benevolence’) he sees the arising of something clearly distinct from
Himself, something on which He sets His hand. His act, whatever may be
said to the contrary, is the perfect model of material aggrandisement.
Like the prophet of Israel of old, the modern ‘clerk’ says to mankind:
‘Display your zeal for the Eternal, the God of battles.’
For half a century, such has been the attitude of men whose function is
to thwart the realism of nations, and who have laboured to excite it
with all their power and with complete decision of purpose. For this
reason I dare to call this attitude ‘The Great Betrayal’. If I look
for its causes, I see profound causes which forbid me to look upon
this movement as a mere fashion, to which the contrary movement might
succeed to-morrow.
One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the
‘clerk’ into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a
citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult
for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking
upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe,
the ‘clerk’ may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack
on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if
she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not
rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of
enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living,
and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which
takes a pleasure in his productions. No doubt this explanation is
not valid for the true ‘clerk’, who submits to the laws of his State
without allowing them to injure his soul. He renders unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, i.e. his life perhaps, but nothing more.
The true ‘clerk’ is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, who never imbibed
national patriotism although they perfectly performed their patriotic
duty; he is Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never
diverted from single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine
by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such ‘clerks’ are
inevitably rare. So much contempt for suffering is not the law of human
nature even among the ‘clerks’; the law is that the living creature
condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and
thence to the sanctifying of those passions. The ‘clerk’s’ new faith
is to a great extent a result of the social conditions imposed upon
him, and the real evil to deplore is perhaps not so much the ‘great
betrayal’ of the ‘clerks’ as the disappearance of the ‘clerks’, the
impossibility of leading the life of a ‘clerk’ in the world of to-day.
One of the gravest responsibilities of the modern State is that it has
not maintained (but could it do so?) a class of men exempt from civic
duties, men whose sole function is to maintain non-practical values.
Renan’s prophecy is verified; he foretold the inevitable degradation
of a society where every member was forced to discharge worldly tasks,
although Renan himself was the very type of those whom such servitude
would never have prevented--in the phrase of one of his peers--‘from
breathing only in the direction of Heaven’.
It would be very unjust to explain the existence of national passion
in the modern ‘clerk’ by self-interest alone. This is also to be
explained, and in a more simple manner, by the love, the impulse which
naturally inspires every man to love the group from which he derives,
more than the other groups which share the earth. There again, it may
be argued that the ‘clerk’s’ new faith is caused by the changes of
the nineteenth century, which by giving national groups a consistency
hitherto unknown furnishes food to a passion which in many countries
before that period could have been little more than potential.
Obviously, attachment to the world of the spirit alone was easier for
those who were capable of it when there were no nations to love. And,
in fact, it is most suggestive to notice that the true appearance of
the ‘clerk’ coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire, i.e. with the
time when the great nation collapsed and the little nations had not yet
come into existence. It is equally suggestive to notice that the age of
the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger
Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state
of chaos and the nations were unknown; that the regions where pure
speculation endured longest seem to be Germany and Italy,[149] i.e.
the regions which were the last to be nationalized; and practically
ceased to produce pure speculation from the moment when they became
nations. Of course, here again the vicissitudes of the world of sense
do not affect the true ‘clerk’. The misfortunes of their country, and
even its triumphs, did not prevent Einstein and Nietzsche from feeling
no passion but the passion for thought. When Jules Lemaître exclaimed
that the wound of Sedan made him lose his reason, Renan replied that he
perfectly retained his, and that a true priest of the mind could only
be wounded in other than earthly interests.[150]
In the cases I have just mentioned, the ‘clerk’s’ devotion to his
nation or class is sincere, whether it is from interest or from love.
I admit I think this sincerity is infrequent. The practice of the life
of the spirit seems to me to lead inevitably to universalism, to the
feeling of the eternal, to a lack of vigour in the belief in worldly
conventions. The sincerity of national passion especially, in men of
letters particularly, seems to me to assume the virtue of naiveté,
which everyone will admit is not characteristic of this body of men,
apart from their own self-esteem. It will also be hard to convince
me that the motives of their public attitudes in artists are such
simple things as the desire to live and to eat. I therefore seek--and
find--other reasons for the realism of the modern ‘clerk’, and these,
although less natural, are none the less profound. They seem to me
particularly valid for men of letters, especially in France, the
country where the attitude of writers in the past half century differs
most from that of their fathers.
First of all, I see the interests of their careers. It is an obvious
fact that during the past two centuries most of the men of letters who
have attained wide fame in France assumed a political attitude--for
instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
Anatole France, Barrès. With some of them, real fame dates from the
moment when they assumed that attitude. This law has not escaped the
attention of their descendants, and it may be said to-day that every
French writer who desires wide fame (which means every writer endowed
with the real temperament of a man of letters) also desires inevitably
to play a political part. This desire may arise from other motives. For
instance, in Barrès and d’Annunzio, from the desire ‘to act’, to be
something more than ‘men at a desk’, to lead a life like that of the
‘heroes’ and not like that of ‘scribes’; or, more ingenuously, as no
doubt happened with Renan when he stood as a Parliamentary candidate,
from the idea that he could perform a public service. Let me add that
the modern writer’s desire to be a political man is excused by the fact
that the position is to some extent offered him by public opinion,
whereas the compatriots of Racine and La Bruyère would have laughed
in their faces if they had thought of publishing their views on the
advisability of the war with Holland or the legality of Chambres de
réunion. There again, it was easier to be a true ‘clerk’ in the past
than to-day.
These observations explain why the contemporary French writer so
frequently desires to assume a political attitude, but they do not
explain why this attitude is so inevitably in support of arbitrary
authority. Liberalism is also a political attitude; and the least
which can be said is that the modern French ‘clerk’ has very seldom
adopted it in the past twenty years. Another factor comes in here. That
is the practical writer’s desire to please the bourgeoisie, who are the
creators of fame and the source of honours. It may even be argued that
for this sort of writer the necessity to treat the passions of this
class with deference is greater than ever, if I may judge by the fate
of those who in recent times have dared to defy them, i.e. Zola, Romain
Rolland. Now, the bourgeoisie of to-day, terrified by the progress
of the opposing class, solely anxious to retain the privileges which
are left them, feel nothing but aversion from liberal dogmas; and the
man of letters who displays any political flag is bound to wave the
flag of ‘Order’ if he wishes to obtain favours. The case of Barrès
is particularly instructive from this point of view. He began as a
great intellectual sceptic, and his material star waxed a hundredfold
greater, at least in his own country, on the day when he made himself
the apostle of ‘necessary prejudices’. This sort of thing makes me
believe that the present political fashion of French writers is going
to last a long time. A phenomenon which is caused by the uneasiness of
the French bourgeoisie does not seem likely to disappear quickly.[151]
I have mentioned the lot of those writers who in quite recent times
have dared to thwart the passions of the bourgeoisie. This is only one
aspect of a very general novelty, of supreme interest to the subject
I am discussing. I mean the consciousness of their sovereignty felt
by the herd of laymen, and the resolution they display to bring to
his senses any writer who dares to say anything but what they wish to
hear. This propensity of the layman appears not only in his relations
with his writers (and with his press--a newspaper which does not
supply its readers with the exact errors they cherish is immediately
dropped), but, which is far more remarkable, in his relations with
his truly ‘clerical’ teachers, whose voice speaks to him in the name
of the Divine. The pulpit-orator who really presumed to censure
nationalist passion, who really mortified bourgeois arrogance, would
soon (particularly in France) see his flock disperse. He can no
longer terrify such a gathering with the fear of punishment, and they
no longer believe in anything but the real; consequently they feel
stronger and more important than he, and only consent to listen to
his preaching on condition that he treats with deference--not to say
sanctifies--the egotisms they venerate.[152] Modern humanity is fully
determined that those who call themselves its teachers, shall be its
servants and not its guides. And most of the teachers understand this
admirably.[153]
To come back to the modern writer and the causes for his political
attitude--I shall add that he is not only in the service of a
bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but that he himself has
become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social
position and respect which belong to that caste. The Bohemian man of
letters has practically disappeared, at least among those who engage
public interest. Consequently, he has more and more come to possess the
bourgeois form of soul, one of those most conspicuous characteristics
is an affectation of the political feelings of the aristocracy--an
attachment to systems of arbitrary authority, to military and priestly
institutions, a scorn for societies founded upon justice, upon civic
equality, a cult for the past, etc.... How many writers in France
during the past fifty years, men whose names are on everyone’s lips,
obviously think they are ennobling themselves by expressing disgust for
democratic institutions![154] In the same way I explain the adoption
by many of them of harshness and cruelty, which they think are also
attributes of the souls of the nobility.
The reasons I have just mentioned for the new political attitude of
men of letters arise from the changes in their social status. Those I
am about to mention arise from changes in the structure of their minds,
in their literary desires, in their aesthetic cults, in their morality.
These reasons seem to me even more worthy of the historian’s attention
than those which have gone before.
First of all, we have their Romanticism, taking that word to mean the
desire which arose in the writers of the nineteenth century (but which
has become greatly perfected in the last thirty years) to treat themes
which lend themselves in a literary manner to striking attitudes. About
1890 the men of letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with
astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority,
discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion
of the morality of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and
rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple
souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism.
And as a matter of fact, the so-called reactionary doctrines do lend
themselves to a pessimistic and contemptuous Romanticism which makes
a far deeper impression on the common herd than enthusiastic and
optimistic Romanticism. The pose of a Barrès or a d’Annunzio strikes
naïve persons far more than that of a Michelet or a Proudhon. Moreover,
these doctrines are to-day given forth as founded upon science, upon
‘pure experience’, and thereby permit a tone of calm inhumanity (the
Romanticism of Positivism) whose effect on the herd has not escaped
the sagacious eye of the man of letters. (Of course, I am only speaking
of the elegant herd; Romantic pessimism has no value whatsoever for the
people.)
There is another transformation of the literary soul in men of letters,
wherein I think I see a cause of their new political creed. This is,
that recently the only one of their faculties they venerate is their
artistic sensibility, on which to some extent they base all their
judgments. Until the last thirty years it may be said that men of
letters, at least in Latin Europe, disciples in this of the Greeks,
were determined in their judgments--even their literary judgments--far
more by their sensibility to reason than by their artistic sensibility,
whereof moreover they were scarcely conscious as something distinct
from the former. This remark is true for the men of the Renaissance
and their direct descendants (the French writers of the seventeenth
and succeeding century) and, despite appearances, it is also true
of those who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If
the weakening of sensibility to reason and, more generally, of lofty
intellectual discipline, is indisputably one of the characteristics of
the Romanticism of 1830, the contempt for this sensibility makes no
appearance. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet never prided themselves
on despising the values of reason in things in order to esteem only
their art values. Now, towards 1890, there occurred a revolution whose
influence cannot be exaggerated. Enlightened by philosophical analysis
(Bergsonism), the men of letters became conscious of the fundamental
difference between intellectual sensibility and artistic sensibility;
and ardently chose the latter. This is the epoch when they were heard
to assert that a book is great as soon as it achieves a literary and
artistic success, that its intellectual content is of no interest,
that all arguments are equally defensible, that error is no more false
than truth, etc.[155] This great change affected their political
attitudes. Obviously, as soon as we think things are good only
insofar as they content our artistic needs, the only good political
systems are those of arbitrary authority. Artistic sensibility is far
more gratified by a system which tends to the realization of force
and grandeur than by a system which tends to the establishment of
justice, for the characteristic of artistic sensibility is the love
of concrete realities and the repugnance for abstract conceptions and
conceptions of pure reason, the model of which is the idea of justice.
Artistic sensibility is especially flattered by the spectacle of a
mass of units which are subordinated to each other up to the final
head who dominates them all, whereas the spectacle of a democracy,
which is a mass of units _where no one is first_, deprives this
sensibility of one of its fundamental needs.[156] Add to this that
every doctrine which honours Man in the universal, in what is common
to all men, is a personal injury to the artist, whose characteristic
(at least since Romanticism)[157] is precisely to set himself up as an
exceptional being. Add also the sovereignty the artist now attributes
to his desires and their satisfaction (the ‘rights of genius’) and,
consequently, his natural hatred for systems which limit each person’s
liberty of action by that of others. And finally add the artist’s
aversion from everything which is general, everything which is only
the object of conception, not of sensation.[158] The determination of
men of letters to pass judgment only in accordance with their artistic
sensibility is only one aspect of their desire (since Romanticism) to
exalt feeling at the expense of thought, a desire which itself is one
among the thousand results of the decline of intellectual discipline
among them. The new political attitude of the ‘clerks’ seems to me to
be here the result of a serious modification of their state of mind.
This attitude also seems to me to result from the decline of the
study of classical literature in the formation of their minds. The
humanities, as the word implies, have always taught the cult of
humanity in its universal aspect, at least since the time of the
Portico.[159] The decline of Graeco-Roman culture in Barrès and his
literary generation, in comparison with that of Taine, Renan, Hugo,
Michelet, even Anatole France and Bourget, is undeniable. Still less
will it be denied that this decline is considerably more noticeable
in Barrès’s successors. However, this decline does not prevent these
writers from extolling classical studies, but they do not do this
with the idea of reviving the cult for what is human in its universal
aspect, but on the contrary to strengthen the ‘French’ mind, or at
least the ‘Latin’ mind, in the grasp of its own roots, in consciousness
of itself as distinct from other minds. Notice that this decline of
classical culture in the French writers coincides with the discovery of
the great German realists, Hegel and especially Nietzsche, whose genius
had the more effect on these Frenchmen because their lack of classical
discipline deprived them of the one real barrier which can be opposed
to that genius.[160]
Among the causes of this new attitude among men of letters I must point
to their thirst for sensations, their need to experience things, which
in recent times have grown stronger and have caused them to adopt a
political attitude which gave them emotions and sensations. Belphegor
is not the only star in the literary heavens. A French writer, who
was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for
having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to
History; and he replied, ‘I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a
fanfare of trumpets.’ The same thinker gives us to understand that his
chief motive in ‘seeking contact with national minds’ was to ‘throw
more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down’.[161]
I do not think I am mistaken when I say that numbers of our moralists
who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so
because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter
an opportunity for sensations.[162] You will recollect the remark of a
young thinker, quoted by Agathon in 1913: ‘Why not a war? It will be
amusing.’ I shall be told that this is the mere extravagant saying of
a young man. But what of this remark from a man of fifty, and what is
more, a scientist (R. Quinton), who saw the tragedy of 1914 coming,
and exclaimed: ‘We shall picnic on the grass!’? This scientist was
certainly a good soldier, but no more so than Fresnel and Lamarck, of
whom I dare to say that they may have approved of war, but not because
it satisfied their taste for the picturesque. All who frequented the
author of _Reflexions sur la Violence_ know that one of the greatest
attractions of any idea for him was that it was ‘amusing’ and likely
to exasperate so-called reasonable people. There are many thinkers of
the past fifty years whose ‘philosophy’ has one fundamental motive--the
pleasure of throwing off irritating paradoxes; while they are only
too happy if their rockets fall like swords and satisfy that need for
cruelty which they profess as the sign of noble minds. This prodigious
decline of morality, this sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism,
is usually and quite openly accompanied by a huge contempt for the true
‘clerk’, whose joy comes from the exercise of thought and who disdains
sensation, particularly the sensations of action. Here again the new
political cult of the men of letters is the result of a modification
in the most intimate part of their mind, the very same modification we
have been discussing, i.e. a decline of intellectual discipline, which
does not mean a decline in intelligence.[163]
On their own showing, many modern ‘clerks’ have adopted these realist
doctrines because they want to have done with the moral disarray into
which they are thrown by the spectacle of philosophies, ‘none of which
bring certainty,’ and which all collapse upon each other as they cry
to heaven their contradictory absolutes. There again the ‘clerk’s’
political attitude is the result of a great decline in his intellectual
discipline, whether we consider that this decline is shown by his
belief that any philosophy can bring certainty, or whether we think
that it lies in his inability to stand upright on the ruins of the
schools, devoting himself to reason, which is above all the schools,
and is their judge.
I shall also admit as one other cause of realism in the modern ‘clerks’
the irritation produced in them by the teaching of some of their
predecessors--I mean certain masters of the year 1848, with their
visionary idealism, their belief that justice and love were suddenly
about to become the essence of the soul of nations, an irritation
greatly increased by seeing the dreadful contrast between these idyllic
prophecies and the events which followed them. Nevertheless, the point
to remember is that the modern ‘clerks’ replied to these errors by
hurling anathemas at every sort of idealism, whether visionary or not,
thereby showing incapacity to distinguish between species, inability
to rise above passion to judgment. And this is but one other aspect of
their loss of the good manners of the mind.
Let me recapitulate the causes for this change in the ‘clerks’: The
imposition of political interests on all men without any exception;
the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions;
the desire and the possibility for men of letters to play a political
part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play
the game of a class which is daily becoming more anxious; the
increasing tendency of the ‘clerks’ to become bourgeois and to take
on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism;
the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual
discipline. It will be seen that these causes arise from certain
phenomena which are most profoundly and generally characteristic of
the present age. The political realism of the ‘clerks’, far from being
a superficial fact due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me
bound up with the very essence of the modern world.