THE MANIFESTOES
The struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since
Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression
in the form of lying phrases, he had perforce to fight them upon their
own ground. But the vigor of his ideas, the breath of freedom they
conveyed, and the authority of the author's name, made of these
articles, manifestoes which spoke to the whole of Europe and aroused a
spiritual conflagration. Like electric sparks given off from invisible
wires, their energy was liberated in all directions, leading here to
terrible explosions of hatred, throwing there a brilliant light into the
depths of conscience, in every case producing cordial excitement in its
contrasted forms of indignation and enthusiasm. Never before, perhaps,
did newspaper articles exercise so stupendous an influence, at once
inflammatory and purifying, as was exercised by these two dozen appeals
and manifestoes issued in a time of enslavement and confusion by a
lonely man whose spirit was free and whose intellect remained unclouded.
From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by
comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully considered and
fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but
simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that
to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the
"_Journal de Genève_" should be reproduced in the French press), the
ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time
to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and
ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and
appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic
merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their
essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of
incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that
they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the
emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many
millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual.
For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the
invisible Europe.
Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made
available in the volumes _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ and _Les précurseurs_,
be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at
the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a
force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the
significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the
sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic
character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to mind the frenzy of
the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was
devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has
already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We
have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance
the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation
responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal,
that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that
_Au-dessus de la mêlée_, whose trend already seems to us a matter of
course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and
that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was
forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured
wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke
the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal
amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that
Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall
Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more
than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is
scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as
commonplace." To-day, for the moment at any rate, we may have entered
into a period, when many of Rolland's utterances are accounted
commonplace because, since he wrote, they have become the small change
of thousands of other writers. Yet there was a day when each of these
words seemed to cut like a whip-lash. The excitement they aroused gives
us the historic measure of the need that they should be spoken. The
wrath of Rolland's opponents, of which the only remaining record is a
pile of pamphlets, bears witness to the heroism of him who was the first
to take his stand "above the battle." Let us not forget that it was then
the crime of crimes, "de dire ce qui est juste et humain." Men were
still so drunken with the fumes of the first bloodshed that they would
have been fain, as Rolland himself has phrased it, "to crucify Christ
once again should he have risen; to crucify him for saying, Love one
another."