THE COUNSELOR
During these years, many people, young for the most part, came to
Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing
that their convictions were opposed to war, they ought to refuse
military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and
following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they
should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether
they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their
country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought
spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed
to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed
principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working
moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.
To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your
conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no
ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to
another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own
model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should
seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He
who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he
follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple
imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention
to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate
his ideal and save his inner freedom--provided always he acts in
accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential
was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot
desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who
claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other
maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong,
the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept
away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the
crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical
instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a
Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of
serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died
for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.
There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth
is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own.
Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism,
serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all
remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave."
Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself
believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is
cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie.
There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner
experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are
the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind,
must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a
moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in
consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under
modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion.
"A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of
self-sacrifice."
Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such
free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any
man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of
the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our
present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever
broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked
within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania
were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had
asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier
as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians would
have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments,
a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt,
could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom
of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the
recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience
should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one
recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for
mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and
strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation
of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the
intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a
despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons
who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the
collective impulse."
Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands
that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own
conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks
clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by
words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire
generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the
world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which
he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it
was the moral simplicity of his own example.