Chapter XV: 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.