Chapter IX: 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."