Part 4 (1/2)

I will reply first of all without ambiguity to this second reproach.

Yes, I have German friends as I have French, Italian, and English friends, and friends of every race. They are my wealth: I am proud of it and keep it. When one has had the good fortune to meet in this world loyal souls with whom one shares one's most intimate thoughts, and with whom one has formed bonds of brotherly union, such bonds are sacred, and not to be broken asunder in the hour of trial. He would be a coward who timidly ceased to own them, in order to obey the insolent summons of a public opinion which has no right over the heart. Does the love of country demand this unkindness of thought which is a.s.sociated with the name Cornelienne? Corneille himself has given the answer:

--_Albe vous a nomme, je ne vous connais plus._ --_Je vous connais encore, et c'est ce qui me tue._

Certain letters, which I shall reproduce later, will show the grief, sometimes almost tragic, that such friends.h.i.+ps mean in these moments.

Thanks to them, we have at least been able to defend ourselves against a hatred which is more murderous than war, since it is an infection produced by its wounds; and it does as much harm to those whom it possesses as to those against whom it is directed.

This poison I see with apprehension spreading at the present moment.

Amongst the victim populations, the cruelties and ravages committed by the German armies have brought to birth a desire for reprisals. This, when once in existence, is not for the press to exasperate, for such a desire runs the risk of leading to dangerous injustice--dangerous not only for the conquered but above all for the conquerors. France has, in this war, the chance of playing the n.o.bler part, the rarest chance that the world has even seen. A German wrote to me a few weeks ago: ”France has won in this war a prodigious moral triumph. The sympathies of the whole world are drawn towards her; and, most extraordinary of all, Germany herself has a secret leaning towards her enemy.” All should wish that this moral triumph may be hers to the end, and that she may remain to the end just, straightforward, and humane. I could never distinguish the cause of France from that of humanity. It is just because I am French that I leave to our Prussian enemies the motto: ”_Oderint, dum metuant._” I wish France to be loved, I wish her to be victorious not only by force, not only by right (that would be difficult enough), but by that large and generous heart which is pre-eminently hers. I wish her to be strong enough to fight without hatred and to regard even those against whom she is forced to fight as misguided brothers who must be pitied when they have been rendered harmless.

Our soldiers know it well, and I say nothing here of letters from the front which tell us of compa.s.sion and kindness between the combatants.

But the civilians who are outside the combat, who do not fight, but talk, who write and embroil themselves in a fact.i.tious and lunatic agitation and are never exhausted; these are delivered over to the winds of feverish violence. And there is the danger. For they form opinion, the only opinion that can be expressed (all others are forbidden). It is for these that I write, not for those who are fighting (they have no need of us!).

And when I hear the publicists trying to rouse the energies of the nation by all the stimulants at their disposal for this one object, the total crus.h.i.+ng of the enemy nation, I think it my duty to rise in opposition to what I believe to be at once a moral and a political error. You make war against a State, not against a people. It would be monstrous to hold sixty-five million men responsible for the acts of some thousands--perhaps some hundreds. Here in French Switzerland, so pa.s.sionately in sympathy with France, so eager both in its sympathies and in the duty of restraining them, I have been able for three months, by reading German letters and pamphlets, to examine closely the conscience of the German nation. And I have been able thus to take account of a good many facts which escape the greater part of the French people. The first, the most striking, the most ignored, is that there is not in Germany as a whole any real hatred of France (all the hatred is turned against England). The especial pathos of the situation lies in the fact that the French spirit only really began to exercise an attraction upon Germany some two or three years ago. Germany was beginning to discover the true France, the France of work and of faith.

The new generations, the young cla.s.ses that they have just led to the abattoir of Ypres and Dixmude, numbered the purest souls, the greatest idealists, those most possessed by the dream of universal brotherhood.

If I say that for many among them the war has been a laceration, ”a horror, a failure, a renunciation of every ideal, an abdication of the spirit,” as one of them wrote on the eve of his death--if I say that the death of Peguy has been mourned by many young Germans, no one would believe me. But belief will be a necessity the day I publish the doc.u.ments which I have collected.

It is somewhat better understood in France how this German nation, enveloped in the network of lies woven by its Government, and abandoning herself thereto with a blind and obstinate loyalty, is profoundly convinced that she was attacked, hemmed in by the jealousy of the world; and that she must defend herself at all costs or die. It is among the chivalrous traditions of France to render homage to the courage of an adversary. One owes it to that adversary to recognize that in default of other virtues the spirit of sacrifice is, in the present instance, almost boundless. It would be a great mistake to force it to extremes.

Instead of driving this blind people to a magnificent and desperate defense, let us try to open their eyes. It is not impossible. An Alsatian patriot, to whom one could not impute indulgence for Germany, Dr. Bucher of Strasbourg, told me not long since, that even though the German is full of haughty prejudices carefully fostered by his teachers, he is at any rate always amenable to discussion and his docile spirit is accessible to arguments. As an example, I would instance the secret evolution that I see in progress in the thought of certain Germans.

Numbers of German letters that I have read this month begin to utter agonized questionings as to the legitimacy of the proceedings of Germany in Belgium. I have seen this anxiety growing, little by little, in consciences which at first reposed in the conviction of their right.

Truth is slowly dawning. What will happen if its light conquers and spreads? Carry truth in your hands! Let it be our strongest weapon! Let us, like the soldiers of the Revolution, whose hearts live again in our troops, fight not against our enemies, but for them. In saving the world, let us save them too. France does not break old chains in order to rivet new.

Your thoughts are fixed on victory. I think of the peace which will follow. For however insistently the most militarist among you may talk, venturing as did an article to hold out the delightful promise of a perpetual war--”a war which will last after this war, indefinitely....”[22]

(it will come to an end, nevertheless--for lack of combatants!) ...

there must come a day when you will stretch out the hand of friends.h.i.+p, you and your neighbors across the Rhine, if it were only to come to an agreement, for the sake of your own business. You will have to re-establish supportable and humane relations: so set to work in such a manner as not to make them impossible! Do not break down all the bridges, since it will ever be necessary to cross the river. Do not destroy the future. A good open, clean wound will heal; but do not poison it. Let us be on our guard against hatred. If we prepare for war in peace according to the wisdom of nations, we should also prepare for peace in war. It is a task which seems to me not unworthy of those among us who find themselves outside the struggle, and who through the life of the spirit have wider relations with the universe--a little lay church which, today more than the other, preserves its faith in the unity of human thought and believes that all men are sons of the same Father. In any case, if such a faith merits insult, the insults const.i.tute an honor that we will claim as ours before the tribunal of posterity.

VIII. THE IDOLS

For more than forty centuries it has been the effort of great minds who have attained liberty to extend this blessing to others; to liberate humanity and to teach men to see reality without fear or error, to look themselves in the face without false pride or false humility and to recognize their weakness and their strength, that they may know their true position in the universe. They have illumined the path with the brightness of their lives and their example, like the star of the magi, that mankind may have light.

Their efforts have failed. For more than forty centuries humanity has remained in bondage--I do not say to masters (for such are of the order of the flesh, of which I am not speaking here; and their chains break sooner or later), but to the phantoms of their own minds. Such servitude comes from within. We grow faint in the endeavor to cut the bonds which bind mankind, who straightway tie them again to be more firmly enthralled. Of every liberator men make a master. Every ideal which ought to liberate is transformed into a clumsy idol. The history of humanity is the history of Idols and of their successive reigns; and as humanity grows older the power of the Idol seems to wax greater and more destructive.

At first the divinities were of wood, of stone, or of metal. Those at any rate were not proof against the axe or against fire. Others followed that no material force could reach, for they were graven in the invisible mind. Yet all aspired to material dominion, and to secure for them that dominion the peoples of the world have poured out their best blood: Idols of religions and of nationality: the Idol of liberty whose reign was established in Europe by the armies of the _sans-culotte_ at the point of the bayonet. The masters have changed, the slaves are still the same. Our century has made the acquaintance of two new species. The Idol of Race, at first the outcome of n.o.ble ideas, became in the laboratories of spectacled savants the Moloch which Germany herself hurled against France in 1870 and which her enemies now wish to use against the Germany of today. The latest on the scene is that authentic product of German science, fraternally allied to the labors of industry, of commerce, and of the firm of Krupp--the Idol of Kultur surrounded by its Levites, the thinkers of Germany.

The common feature of the cult of all Idols is the adaptation of an ideal to the evil instincts of mankind. Man cultivates the vices which are profitable to him, but feels the necessity of legitimizing them; being unwilling to sacrifice them, he must idealize them. That is why the problem at which he has never ceased to labor throughout the centuries has been to harmonize his ideals with his own mediocrity. He has always succeeded. The crowd has no difficulty here. It sets side by side its virtues and its vices, its heroism and its meanness. The force of its pa.s.sions and the rapid course of the days which carry it along cause it to forget its lack of logic.

But the intelligent few cannot satisfy themselves with so little effort.

Not that they are, as is often said, less readily swayed by pa.s.sion.

This is a grave error; the richer a life becomes the more does it offer for pa.s.sion to devour, and history sufficiently shows the terrifying paroxysms to which the lives of religious leaders and revolutionaries have attained. But these toilers in the spirit love careful work, and are repelled by popular modes of thought which perpetually break through the meshes of reasoning. They have to make a more closely woven net in which instinct and idea, cost what it may, combine to form a stouter tissue. They thus achieve monstrous _chefs-d'uvre_. Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil pa.s.sion and he will always succeed in harmonizing the twain. The love of G.o.d and the love of mankind have been invoked in order to burn, kill, and pillage. The fraternity of 1793 was sister to the Holy Guillotine. We have in our time seen Churchmen seeking and finding in the Gospels the justification of Banking and of War. Since the outbreak of the war a clergyman of Wurtemberg established the fact that _neither Christ nor John the Baptist nor the apostles desired to suppress militarism_.[23] A clever intellectual is a conjuror in ideas. ”_Nothing in my hands--nothing up my sleeves._” The great trick is to extract from any given idea its precise contrary--war from the Sermon on the Mount, or, like Professor Ostwald, the military dictators.h.i.+p of the Kaiser from the dream of an intellectual internationalism. For such conjurors these things are but child's play.

Let us expose them, by examining the words of this Dr. Ostwald, who has appeared during the last few months as the Baptist of the Gospel of the spiked helmet.