Chapter III: The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal (3)

(_a_) _The extolling of courage_, or more precisely the exhortation to make the supreme virtue Man’s aptitude to face death, while all other virtues, however lofty, are placed below it. This teaching, openly the teaching of Nietzsche, Sorel, Péguy, Barrès, was always the teaching of poets and generals, but is entirely new among the ‘clerks’, I mean among men who put before the world a scale of values in the name of philosophical reflection, or who are willing to be considered as such. From Socrates to Renan they had considered courage as a virtue, but on a lower plane. All, more or less openly, teach with Plato: ‘In the first rank of virtue are wisdom and temperance; courage only comes afterwards.’[119] The impulses they exhort man to venerate are not those whereby he strives to quench his thirst for placing himself in the real, but those whereby he moderates it. It was reserved for our time to see the priests of the spiritual placing in the first rank of forms of soul that which is indispensable to man if he is to conquer and to lay foundations.[120] However, this practical value of courage, plainly expressed by Nietzsche and Sorel, is not equally so expressed by all the modern moralists who praise this virtue. This brings another of their teachings before us:--

(_b_) _The extolling of honour_, by which is meant all those impulses which cause a man to risk his life for no practical interest--to be precise, from desire of glory--_but which are an excellent school of practical courage_, and were always extolled by those who lead men to the conquest of material things. In this connection, let the reader think of the respect in which the institution of the duel has always been held in armies, in spite of certain repressions inspired solely by practical considerations.[121]

Here again, the position attributed to these impulses by so many modern moralists is something new among them, especially in the country of Montaigne, Pascal, La Bruyère, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Renan, who, when they extol honour, mean something very different from man’s cult of his own glory.[122] Nevertheless, the most remarkable thing about all this is that the cult of man for his own glory is currently preached by the Churchmen as a virtue which leads Man to God. Is it not amazing to hear words like the following from a Christian pulpit? ‘The love of grandeurs is the path to God, and the heroic impulse which fully coincides with the search for glories in their cause, permits him who had forgotten God or who thought he knew not God to re-invent Him, to discover this last summit after temporary ascents have rendered him accustomed to the dizziness and air of altitudes.’[123] One cannot forebear quoting the lesson given by a true disciple of Jesus to a Christian teacher who had also strangely forgotten his Master’s word:--

‘Have you noticed that the eight Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the Gospels, the whole of primitive Christian literature, contain not one word which sets military virtues among those which lead to the Kingdom of Heaven?’ (Renan, _First Letter to Strauss_.)[124]

Let me observe that I am not reproaching the Christian preacher for giving their due to glory and other earthly passions, I am only reproaching him for trying to pretend that he is in harmony with his institution when he does so. We do not ask that the Christian shall not violate the Christian law; we only ask him to know that he is breaking it when he does break it. This seems to me admirably brought out by the remark of Cardinal Lavigerie who was asked: ‘What would you do, Eminence, if someone slapped your right cheek?’ and who replied, ‘I know what I ought to do, but I do not know what I should do.’ _I know what I ought to do_, and therefore what I ought to teach. A man who speaks in that way may give way to every species of violence, and yet maintain Christian morality. Here actions are nothing; the judgment on the actions is everything.

Must I repeat that I am not deploring the fact that the cults of honour and courage should be preached to human beings; I am deploring the fact that they are preached _by the ‘clerks’_. Civilization, I repeat, seems to me possible only if humanity consents to a division of functions, if side by side with those who carry out the lay passions and extol the virtues serviceable to them there exists a class of men who depreciate these passions and glorify the advantages which are beyond the material. What I think serious is that this class of men should cease to perform their office, and that those whose duty was to quench human pride should extol the same impulses of soul as the leaders of armies.

I shall be told that this preaching is imposed on the ‘clerks’, at least in war-time, by the laymen, by the States, who to-day intend to mobilize all the moral resources of the nation for their ends.[125] But what amazes me is not so much that I see the ‘clerks’ preaching in this manner, as to see them do it with such docility, such absence of disgust, such enthusiasm, such joy.... The truth is that the ‘clerks’ have become as much laymen as the laymen themselves.

(_c_) _The extolling of harshness_ and the scorn for human love--pity, charity, benevolence. Here again, the modern ‘clerks’ are the _moralists_ of realism. They are not content to remind the world that harshness is necessary in order ‘to succeed’ and that charity is an encumbrance, nor have they limited themselves to preaching to their nation or party what Zarathustra preached to his disciples: ‘Be hard, be pitiless, and in this way dominate.’ They proclaim the moral nobility of harshness and the ignominy of charity. This teaching, which is the foundation of Nietzsche’s work, need not surprise one in a country which has not provided the world with a single great apostle,[126] but it is very remarkable in the land of Vincent de Paul and the defender of the Calas. Lines like the following, which might be an extract from the _Genealogy of Morals_, seem to me something wholly new coming from the pen of a French moralist: ‘This perverted pity has degraded love.[127] It has been given the name of charity, and the weak have received its dew. Night after night the seed of this calamity has been scattered. It conquers the earth. It fills the solitary places. In whatever country you go, you cannot go about for a single day without meeting this withered face with its commonplace gestures, inspired by the sole desire of prolonging its shameful life.’[128] There again we can observe how the modern realists have advanced beyond their predecessors. When Machiavelli declares that ‘a Prince in order to maintain his power is forced to govern in a manner contrary to charity and humanity’, he is simply saying that to act contrary to charity may be a practical necessity, but he does not in the least vouch that charity is a degradation of the soul. This teaching is the contribution of the nineteenth century to the moral education of mankind.

Sometimes the modern ‘clerks’ claim that in preaching inhumanity they are only continuing the teaching of their great ancestors, particularly of Spinoza on account of his famous proposition: ‘Pity in itself is bad and useless in a soul which lives according to reason.’ Is it necessary to point out that here pity is depreciated, not to the benefit of inhumanity, but to the benefit of humanity _guided by reason_, because reason alone ‘enables us to give aid to others with certainty’. And Spinoza, determined to stress the fact that for him pity is only inferior to reasoned kindness, adds: ‘It must be fully understood that I am here speaking of the man who lives by reason. For if a man is never led by reason or by pity to go to the assistance of others, then assuredly he deserves the name of inhuman, since he retains no resemblance to a man.’ Let me add that the apostles of harshness cannot claim either that they are supported by the fanatics of justice (Michelet, Proudhon, Renouvier) who, by sacrificing love to justice, do perhaps end up in harshness, but not in a joyous harshness which is precisely the harshness preached by the modern realists, who say--perhaps rightly--that it is the only fertile kind.[129]

This extolling of harshness seems to me to have borne more fruit than any other preaching by the modern ‘clerks’. It is a commonplace that among the great majority of the (so-called) thinking young men, in France for instance, harshness is to-day an object of respect, while human love in all its forms is considered a rather laughable thing. These young men have a cult for doctrines which respect nothing but force, pay no attention to the lamentations of suffering and proclaim the inevitability of war and slavery, while they despise those who are revolted by such prospects and desire to alter them. I should like these cults to be compared with the literary aesthetics of these young men, their veneration for certain contemporary novelists and poets in whom the absence of human sympathy reaches a rare pitch of perfection, and whom they plainly venerate, especially for that characteristic. And I should like you to observe the gloomy gravity and arrogance with which these young men subscribe to these ‘iron’ doctrines. It seems to me that the modern ‘clerks’ have created in so-called cultivated society a positive _Romanticism of harshness_.

They have also created a _Romanticism of contempt_, at least in France, and notably with Barrès, and indeed since Flaubert and Baudelaire. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in recent times contempt has been practised in France for reasons quite other than aesthetic. These peoples have come to see that by feeling contempt for others they are not only obtaining the pleasure of a lofty attitude, but that when they are really expert in expressing contempt they harm what they despise, do it a real damage. And in fact the kind of contempt which Barrès expresses for the Jews and which certain royalist teachers have displayed for democratic institutions every morning for the past twenty years, do really harm their victims, at least among those very numerous artistic minds for whom a superbly executory gesture is as good as an argument. The modern ‘clerks’ deserve a place of honour in the history of realism; they have come to understand the practical value of contempt.

It may also be said that they have created a _cult for cruelty_. Nietzsche proclaims that ‘every superior culture is built up on cruelty’, a doctrine which is explicitly proclaimed in many places by Barrès, author of _Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort_. Nevertheless, the cult of cruelty, which may also be thought necessary ‘to succeed’[130] has remained limited to a few particularly artistic sensibilities, at least in France. It is very far from becoming the cult of a school, like harshness and contempt. Here again we may notice how new this cult is in the land of those who said ‘Cowardice, the mother of cruelty’ (Montaigne), or, to quote a military moralist, ‘a hero does not feel proud of carrying hunger and misery among foreigners, but of enduring them for the State; nor of giving death, but of risking it.’ (Vauvenargues).[131]

(_d_) _The cult of success_, I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt. This philosophy which is professed by many a modern teacher in political life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a large number in France since de Maistre) is also professed in private life, and has borne its fruits there. In the so-called thinking world to-day there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all who ‘succeed’ and their scorn for all who fail. One moralist places to the credit of Napoleon’s greatness of soul his contempt for ‘the unlucky’; others do the same thing in regard to Mazarin, Vauban, Mussolini. It cannot be denied that the ‘clerks’ are thereby keeping an excellent school of realism, since the cult of success and the contempt for misfortune are obviously admirable moral conditions for obtaining material advantages. Nor can it be denied that this teaching is entirely new among them, especially among the ‘clerks’ of the Latin races, I mean those whose ancestors had taught mankind to honour merit apart from its achievements, to honour Hector as much as Achilles, the Curiatii more than their successful rivals.[132]

We have just seen that the modern moralists extol the warrior at the expense of the man of justice. They also extol him at the expense of the man of learning and, there again, they preach to the world the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life. We all know Nietzsche’s hue and cry against the man of the study, the man of erudition, ‘the mirror man,’ whose only passion is to understand. And also Nietzsche’s esteem for the life of the mind solely insofar as it is emotion, lyricism, action, partiality; his derisive laughter at ‘objective’ methodical research devoted to ‘the horrible old woman known as truth’. And we know Sorel’s denunciations of societies which ‘give a privileged place to the amateurs of _purely intellectual things_’;[133] those of Barrès, Lemaître, Brunetière, thirty years ago, intimating to the ‘intellectuals’ that they are a type of humanity ‘inferior to the soldier’; those of Péguy, who admires philosophies to the extent that ‘they are good fighters’, and admires Descartes because he was in the army, and the dialecticians of French monarchism solely because they are ready to be killed for the sake of their views.[134] I shall be told that most often this is the mere wild talk of men of letters, the posturing of lyricists, to which it is unjust to attribute a dogmatic meaning; that Nietzsche, Barrès and Péguy denounce the life of study on account of their poetic temperaments, their aversion from everything lacking in picturesqueness and the spirit of adventure, and not their resolution to abase disinterestedness. To which I reply that these poets give themselves out as serious thinkers (notice their tone, _quite free from_ naiveté); that the immense majority of their readers accept them as such; that, even if it were true that in depreciating the man of study their motive is not to abase disinterestedness, it is none the less true in fact that the manner of living they hold up to the laughter of mankind happens to be the very type of the disinterested life, while the life they extol at its expense is the very type of practical activity (at least more practical than that of the man of study, for it will be admitted that the activity of du Guesclin and Napoleon is more likely to acquire material advantages than the activity of Spinoza and Mabillon); that, moreover, what these thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who lays no foundations, who does not conquer, who does not predicate the capture of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it, as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his discoveries to others. In Nietzsche, the scorn for the man of study to the benefit of the warrior is only an episode in a desire which nobody will deny inspires the whole of his work as well as the work of Sorel, Barrès and Péguy: _The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action._[135]

To-day this desire inspires not only the moralist, but another kind of ‘clerk’ who speaks from much higher ground. I am referring to that teaching of modern metaphysics which exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour the active and _willing_ part of himself with all his devotion. The theory of knowledge from which humanity has taken its values during the past half century assigns a secondary rank to the mind which proceeds by clear and distinct ideas, by categories, by words, and places in the highest rank the mind which succeeds in liberating itself from these intellectual habits and in becoming conscious of itself insofar as it is a ‘pure tendency’, a ‘pure will’, a ‘pure activity’. Philosophy which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think, therefore I am’, now raises him to say, ‘I am, therefore I think’, ‘I think, therefore I am not’ (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action). Formerly philosophy taught him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles the soul of Pythagoras linking up concepts; now she informs him that his soul is divine insofar as it resembles that of the small chicken breaking its eggshell.[136] From his loftiest pulpit the modern ‘clerk’ assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical.

During fifty years, especially in France (see Barrès and Bourget) a whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, i.e. as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence knows what we ought to do--as individuals, as a nation, as a class--to secure our own advantage. These writers have eagerly expatiated on the example of the insect whose ‘instinct’ (it appears) teaches it to strike its prey precisely in the spot which will paralyse it without killing it, so that its offspring may feed on the living prey and develop better.[137] Other teachers denounce this ‘barbarous’ extolling of instinct in the name of ‘the French tradition’ and preach ‘the superiority of the intelligence’; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required by our interests, i.e. from exactly the same passion for the practical. This brings us to one of the most remarkable and certainly the most novel forms of this preaching of the practical by the modern ‘clerks’.

I mean that teaching according to which _intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone_. It may be said that since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Plato’s famous hymn to geometry, where that discipline is venerated more than all others because for him it represents the type of speculative thought which brings in nothing material; and with Renan’s verdict which declares that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity.[138] By this standard of values the ‘clerks’ put before the laymen the spectacle of a class of men for whom the value of life lies in its disinterestedness, and they acted as a check on--or at least shamed--the laymen’s practical passions. The modern ‘clerks’ have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim that intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of a concrete advantage, and that the intelligence which takes no interest in its objects is a contemptible activity. They teach that the superior form of the intelligence is that which thrusts its roots into ‘the vital urge’, occupied in discovering what is most valuable in securing our existence. In historical[139] science especially, they honour the intelligence which labours under the guidance of political interests,[140] and they are completely disdainful of all efforts towards ‘objectivity’. Elsewhere they assert that the intelligence to be venerated is that which limits its activities within the bounds of national interests and social order, while the intelligence which allows itself to be guided by the desire for truth alone, apart from any concern with the demands of society, is merely a ‘savage and brutal’ activity, which ‘dishonours the highest of human faculties.’[141] Let me also point out their devotion to the doctrine (Bergson, Sorel) which says that science has a purely utilitarian origin--the necessity of man to dominate matter, ‘knowledge is adaptation’; and their scorn for the beautiful Greek conception which made science bloom from the desire to play, the perfect type of disinterested activity. And then they teach men that to accept an error which is of service to them (the ‘myth’) is an undertaking which does them honour, while it is shameful to admit a truth which harms them. In other words, as Nietzsche, Barrès and Sorel plainly put it, sensibility to truth in itself apart from any practical aim is a somewhat contemptible form of mind.[142] Here the modern ‘clerk’ positively displays genius in his defence of the material, since the material has nothing to do with the truth, or rather to speak more truly--has no worse enemy. The genius of Callicles in all its profundity lives again in the great masters of the modern soul.[143]

Then the modern ‘clerks’ have preached to men the religion of the practical _by means of their theology_, through the image of God they have set before them. First, they determined that God, who since the Stoics has been infinite, should once more become finite, distinct, endowed with a personality, that He should be the affirmation of a _physical_ and not a _metaphysical_ existence. Anthropomorphism, which in the poets from Prudentius to Victor Hugo existed mingled with pantheism without troubling to define the frontiers between them, since God was personal or indeterminate according to the direction of the emotion and the needs of the lyric impulse, rose up in Péguy and Claudel with the most violent consciousness of itself, the clearest desire to be distinguished from its acolyte and to express contempt for him. At the same time the political teachers attacked the religion of the Infinite with a precision of hatred, a skill in depreciation, unparalleled even in the Church, which consisted in denouncing this religion precisely because it is not practical, because it saps away the feelings which found the great earthly realities: the City and the State.[144] But the modern ‘clerks’ have above all endowed God with the attributes which secure practical advantages. It may be said that, since the Old Testament, God was far more just than strong, or rather that, as Plato thought, His strength was only a form of His justice; and His power, as Malebranche and Spinoza put it, had nothing in common with the power of kings and Empire-builders. The desire to increase was implicitly excluded from His nature, as well as the moral attributes necessary to the satisfaction of that desire--energy, will, the love of effort, the attraction of triumph. This was an inevitable result of His perfect and infinite state of being, which at once constituted the whole of possible reality. Even in creation, the idea of which is essentially inseparable from the ideas of power and increase, these ideas were avoided--the world was far less a result of God’s power than of His love; it came out of God as a ray comes out of the sun, without God feeling any increase of Himself at the expense of anything else. God, to speak in terms of the schools, was far less the transcendent cause of the world than its immanent cause.[145] On the other hand, for the modern teachers (Hegel, Schelling, Bergson, Péguy), God is essentially something which increases; His law is ‘incessant change’, ‘incessant novelty’, ‘incessant[146] creation’; His principle is essentially a principle of growth--Will, Tension, Vital Urge. If He is Intelligence, as with Hegel, He is an intelligence which ‘develops’, which ‘realizes itself’ more and more. The Being situated immediately in all His perfection and knowing nothing of conquest is an object of contempt; He represents (Bergson) an ‘eternity of death’.[147] So the believers in an initial and single creation to-day strive to present this act in its purely practical aspect. The Church condemns with a hitherto unknown clearness every doctrine of immanence and preaches transcendence in all its strictness.[148] God, in creating the world, no longer witnesses an inevitable expansion of His nature; through His power (some, to diminish the arbitrariness, say ‘through His benevolence’) he sees the arising of something clearly distinct from Himself, something on which He sets His hand. His act, whatever may be said to the contrary, is the perfect model of material aggrandisement. Like the prophet of Israel of old, the modern ‘clerk’ says to mankind: ‘Display your zeal for the Eternal, the God of battles.’

For half a century, such has been the attitude of men whose function is to thwart the realism of nations, and who have laboured to excite it with all their power and with complete decision of purpose. For this reason I dare to call this attitude ‘The Great Betrayal’. If I look for its causes, I see profound causes which forbid me to look upon this movement as a mere fashion, to which the contrary movement might succeed to-morrow.

One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the ‘clerk’ into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe, the ‘clerk’ may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions. No doubt this explanation is not valid for the true ‘clerk’, who submits to the laws of his State without allowing them to injure his soul. He renders unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, i.e. his life perhaps, but nothing more. The true ‘clerk’ is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, who never imbibed national patriotism although they perfectly performed their patriotic duty; he is Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such ‘clerks’ are inevitably rare. So much contempt for suffering is not the law of human nature even among the ‘clerks’; the law is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions. The ‘clerk’s’ new faith is to a great extent a result of the social conditions imposed upon him, and the real evil to deplore is perhaps not so much the ‘great betrayal’ of the ‘clerks’ as the disappearance of the ‘clerks’, the impossibility of leading the life of a ‘clerk’ in the world of to-day. One of the gravest responsibilities of the modern State is that it has not maintained (but could it do so?) a class of men exempt from civic duties, men whose sole function is to maintain non-practical values. Renan’s prophecy is verified; he foretold the inevitable degradation of a society where every member was forced to discharge worldly tasks, although Renan himself was the very type of those whom such servitude would never have prevented--in the phrase of one of his peers--‘from breathing only in the direction of Heaven’.

It would be very unjust to explain the existence of national passion in the modern ‘clerk’ by self-interest alone. This is also to be explained, and in a more simple manner, by the love, the impulse which naturally inspires every man to love the group from which he derives, more than the other groups which share the earth. There again, it may be argued that the ‘clerk’s’ new faith is caused by the changes of the nineteenth century, which by giving national groups a consistency hitherto unknown furnishes food to a passion which in many countries before that period could have been little more than potential. Obviously, attachment to the world of the spirit alone was easier for those who were capable of it when there were no nations to love. And, in fact, it is most suggestive to notice that the true appearance of the ‘clerk’ coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire, i.e. with the time when the great nation collapsed and the little nations had not yet come into existence. It is equally suggestive to notice that the age of the great lovers of spiritual things, the age of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Erasmus, was the age when most of Europe was in a state of chaos and the nations were unknown; that the regions where pure speculation endured longest seem to be Germany and Italy,[149] i.e. the regions which were the last to be nationalized; and practically ceased to produce pure speculation from the moment when they became nations. Of course, here again the vicissitudes of the world of sense do not affect the true ‘clerk’. The misfortunes of their country, and even its triumphs, did not prevent Einstein and Nietzsche from feeling no passion but the passion for thought. When Jules Lemaître exclaimed that the wound of Sedan made him lose his reason, Renan replied that he perfectly retained his, and that a true priest of the mind could only be wounded in other than earthly interests.[150]

In the cases I have just mentioned, the ‘clerk’s’ devotion to his nation or class is sincere, whether it is from interest or from love. I admit I think this sincerity is infrequent. The practice of the life of the spirit seems to me to lead inevitably to universalism, to the feeling of the eternal, to a lack of vigour in the belief in worldly conventions. The sincerity of national passion especially, in men of letters particularly, seems to me to assume the virtue of naiveté, which everyone will admit is not characteristic of this body of men, apart from their own self-esteem. It will also be hard to convince me that the motives of their public attitudes in artists are such simple things as the desire to live and to eat. I therefore seek--and find--other reasons for the realism of the modern ‘clerk’, and these, although less natural, are none the less profound. They seem to me particularly valid for men of letters, especially in France, the country where the attitude of writers in the past half century differs most from that of their fathers.

First of all, I see the interests of their careers. It is an obvious fact that during the past two centuries most of the men of letters who have attained wide fame in France assumed a political attitude--for instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Barrès. With some of them, real fame dates from the moment when they assumed that attitude. This law has not escaped the attention of their descendants, and it may be said to-day that every French writer who desires wide fame (which means every writer endowed with the real temperament of a man of letters) also desires inevitably to play a political part. This desire may arise from other motives. For instance, in Barrès and d’Annunzio, from the desire ‘to act’, to be something more than ‘men at a desk’, to lead a life like that of the ‘heroes’ and not like that of ‘scribes’; or, more ingenuously, as no doubt happened with Renan when he stood as a Parliamentary candidate, from the idea that he could perform a public service. Let me add that the modern writer’s desire to be a political man is excused by the fact that the position is to some extent offered him by public opinion, whereas the compatriots of Racine and La Bruyère would have laughed in their faces if they had thought of publishing their views on the advisability of the war with Holland or the legality of Chambres de réunion. There again, it was easier to be a true ‘clerk’ in the past than to-day.

These observations explain why the contemporary French writer so frequently desires to assume a political attitude, but they do not explain why this attitude is so inevitably in support of arbitrary authority. Liberalism is also a political attitude; and the least which can be said is that the modern French ‘clerk’ has very seldom adopted it in the past twenty years. Another factor comes in here. That is the practical writer’s desire to please the bourgeoisie, who are the creators of fame and the source of honours. It may even be argued that for this sort of writer the necessity to treat the passions of this class with deference is greater than ever, if I may judge by the fate of those who in recent times have dared to defy them, i.e. Zola, Romain Rolland. Now, the bourgeoisie of to-day, terrified by the progress of the opposing class, solely anxious to retain the privileges which are left them, feel nothing but aversion from liberal dogmas; and the man of letters who displays any political flag is bound to wave the flag of ‘Order’ if he wishes to obtain favours. The case of Barrès is particularly instructive from this point of view. He began as a great intellectual sceptic, and his material star waxed a hundredfold greater, at least in his own country, on the day when he made himself the apostle of ‘necessary prejudices’. This sort of thing makes me believe that the present political fashion of French writers is going to last a long time. A phenomenon which is caused by the uneasiness of the French bourgeoisie does not seem likely to disappear quickly.[151]

I have mentioned the lot of those writers who in quite recent times have dared to thwart the passions of the bourgeoisie. This is only one aspect of a very general novelty, of supreme interest to the subject I am discussing. I mean the consciousness of their sovereignty felt by the herd of laymen, and the resolution they display to bring to his senses any writer who dares to say anything but what they wish to hear. This propensity of the layman appears not only in his relations with his writers (and with his press--a newspaper which does not supply its readers with the exact errors they cherish is immediately dropped), but, which is far more remarkable, in his relations with his truly ‘clerical’ teachers, whose voice speaks to him in the name of the Divine. The pulpit-orator who really presumed to censure nationalist passion, who really mortified bourgeois arrogance, would soon (particularly in France) see his flock disperse. He can no longer terrify such a gathering with the fear of punishment, and they no longer believe in anything but the real; consequently they feel stronger and more important than he, and only consent to listen to his preaching on condition that he treats with deference--not to say sanctifies--the egotisms they venerate.[152] Modern humanity is fully determined that those who call themselves its teachers, shall be its servants and not its guides. And most of the teachers understand this admirably.[153]

To come back to the modern writer and the causes for his political attitude--I shall add that he is not only in the service of a bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but that he himself has become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social position and respect which belong to that caste. The Bohemian man of letters has practically disappeared, at least among those who engage public interest. Consequently, he has more and more come to possess the bourgeois form of soul, one of those most conspicuous characteristics is an affectation of the political feelings of the aristocracy--an attachment to systems of arbitrary authority, to military and priestly institutions, a scorn for societies founded upon justice, upon civic equality, a cult for the past, etc.... How many writers in France during the past fifty years, men whose names are on everyone’s lips, obviously think they are ennobling themselves by expressing disgust for democratic institutions![154] In the same way I explain the adoption by many of them of harshness and cruelty, which they think are also attributes of the souls of the nobility.

The reasons I have just mentioned for the new political attitude of men of letters arise from the changes in their social status. Those I am about to mention arise from changes in the structure of their minds, in their literary desires, in their aesthetic cults, in their morality. These reasons seem to me even more worthy of the historian’s attention than those which have gone before.

First of all, we have their Romanticism, taking that word to mean the desire which arose in the writers of the nineteenth century (but which has become greatly perfected in the last thirty years) to treat themes which lend themselves in a literary manner to striking attitudes. About 1890 the men of letters, especially in France and Italy, realized with astonishing astuteness that the doctrines of arbitrary authority, discipline, tradition, contempt for the spirit of liberty, assertion of the morality of war and slavery, were opportunities for haughty and rigid poses infinitely more likely to strike the imagination of simple souls than the sentimentalities of Liberalism and Humanitarianism. And as a matter of fact, the so-called reactionary doctrines do lend themselves to a pessimistic and contemptuous Romanticism which makes a far deeper impression on the common herd than enthusiastic and optimistic Romanticism. The pose of a Barrès or a d’Annunzio strikes naïve persons far more than that of a Michelet or a Proudhon. Moreover, these doctrines are to-day given forth as founded upon science, upon ‘pure experience’, and thereby permit a tone of calm inhumanity (the Romanticism of Positivism) whose effect on the herd has not escaped the sagacious eye of the man of letters. (Of course, I am only speaking of the elegant herd; Romantic pessimism has no value whatsoever for the people.)

There is another transformation of the literary soul in men of letters, wherein I think I see a cause of their new political creed. This is, that recently the only one of their faculties they venerate is their artistic sensibility, on which to some extent they base all their judgments. Until the last thirty years it may be said that men of letters, at least in Latin Europe, disciples in this of the Greeks, were determined in their judgments--even their literary judgments--far more by their sensibility to reason than by their artistic sensibility, whereof moreover they were scarcely conscious as something distinct from the former. This remark is true for the men of the Renaissance and their direct descendants (the French writers of the seventeenth and succeeding century) and, despite appearances, it is also true of those who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If the weakening of sensibility to reason and, more generally, of lofty intellectual discipline, is indisputably one of the characteristics of the Romanticism of 1830, the contempt for this sensibility makes no appearance. Victor Hugo, Lamartine, Michelet never prided themselves on despising the values of reason in things in order to esteem only their art values. Now, towards 1890, there occurred a revolution whose influence cannot be exaggerated. Enlightened by philosophical analysis (Bergsonism), the men of letters became conscious of the fundamental difference between intellectual sensibility and artistic sensibility; and ardently chose the latter. This is the epoch when they were heard to assert that a book is great as soon as it achieves a literary and artistic success, that its intellectual content is of no interest, that all arguments are equally defensible, that error is no more false than truth, etc.[155] This great change affected their political attitudes. Obviously, as soon as we think things are good only insofar as they content our artistic needs, the only good political systems are those of arbitrary authority. Artistic sensibility is far more gratified by a system which tends to the realization of force and grandeur than by a system which tends to the establishment of justice, for the characteristic of artistic sensibility is the love of concrete realities and the repugnance for abstract conceptions and conceptions of pure reason, the model of which is the idea of justice. Artistic sensibility is especially flattered by the spectacle of a mass of units which are subordinated to each other up to the final head who dominates them all, whereas the spectacle of a democracy, which is a mass of units _where no one is first_, deprives this sensibility of one of its fundamental needs.[156] Add to this that every doctrine which honours Man in the universal, in what is common to all men, is a personal injury to the artist, whose characteristic (at least since Romanticism)[157] is precisely to set himself up as an exceptional being. Add also the sovereignty the artist now attributes to his desires and their satisfaction (the ‘rights of genius’) and, consequently, his natural hatred for systems which limit each person’s liberty of action by that of others. And finally add the artist’s aversion from everything which is general, everything which is only the object of conception, not of sensation.[158] The determination of men of letters to pass judgment only in accordance with their artistic sensibility is only one aspect of their desire (since Romanticism) to exalt feeling at the expense of thought, a desire which itself is one among the thousand results of the decline of intellectual discipline among them. The new political attitude of the ‘clerks’ seems to me to be here the result of a serious modification of their state of mind.

This attitude also seems to me to result from the decline of the study of classical literature in the formation of their minds. The humanities, as the word implies, have always taught the cult of humanity in its universal aspect, at least since the time of the Portico.[159] The decline of Graeco-Roman culture in Barrès and his literary generation, in comparison with that of Taine, Renan, Hugo, Michelet, even Anatole France and Bourget, is undeniable. Still less will it be denied that this decline is considerably more noticeable in Barrès’s successors. However, this decline does not prevent these writers from extolling classical studies, but they do not do this with the idea of reviving the cult for what is human in its universal aspect, but on the contrary to strengthen the ‘French’ mind, or at least the ‘Latin’ mind, in the grasp of its own roots, in consciousness of itself as distinct from other minds. Notice that this decline of classical culture in the French writers coincides with the discovery of the great German realists, Hegel and especially Nietzsche, whose genius had the more effect on these Frenchmen because their lack of classical discipline deprived them of the one real barrier which can be opposed to that genius.[160]

Among the causes of this new attitude among men of letters I must point to their thirst for sensations, their need to experience things, which in recent times have grown stronger and have caused them to adopt a political attitude which gave them emotions and sensations. Belphegor is not the only star in the literary heavens. A French writer, who was taken seriously as a thinker as early as 1890, was reproached for having joined a party whose inconsistency will long be an amazement to History; and he replied, ‘I followed Boulangism, as a man follows a fanfare of trumpets.’ The same thinker gives us to understand that his chief motive in ‘seeking contact with national minds’ was to ‘throw more fuel under his sensibility, which was beginning to run down’.[161] I do not think I am mistaken when I say that numbers of our moralists who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter an opportunity for sensations.[162] You will recollect the remark of a young thinker, quoted by Agathon in 1913: ‘Why not a war? It will be amusing.’ I shall be told that this is the mere extravagant saying of a young man. But what of this remark from a man of fifty, and what is more, a scientist (R. Quinton), who saw the tragedy of 1914 coming, and exclaimed: ‘We shall picnic on the grass!’? This scientist was certainly a good soldier, but no more so than Fresnel and Lamarck, of whom I dare to say that they may have approved of war, but not because it satisfied their taste for the picturesque. All who frequented the author of _Reflexions sur la Violence_ know that one of the greatest attractions of any idea for him was that it was ‘amusing’ and likely to exasperate so-called reasonable people. There are many thinkers of the past fifty years whose ‘philosophy’ has one fundamental motive--the pleasure of throwing off irritating paradoxes; while they are only too happy if their rockets fall like swords and satisfy that need for cruelty which they profess as the sign of noble minds. This prodigious decline of morality, this sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism, is usually and quite openly accompanied by a huge contempt for the true ‘clerk’, whose joy comes from the exercise of thought and who disdains sensation, particularly the sensations of action. Here again the new political cult of the men of letters is the result of a modification in the most intimate part of their mind, the very same modification we have been discussing, i.e. a decline of intellectual discipline, which does not mean a decline in intelligence.[163]

On their own showing, many modern ‘clerks’ have adopted these realist doctrines because they want to have done with the moral disarray into which they are thrown by the spectacle of philosophies, ‘none of which bring certainty,’ and which all collapse upon each other as they cry to heaven their contradictory absolutes. There again the ‘clerk’s’ political attitude is the result of a great decline in his intellectual discipline, whether we consider that this decline is shown by his belief that any philosophy can bring certainty, or whether we think that it lies in his inability to stand upright on the ruins of the schools, devoting himself to reason, which is above all the schools, and is their judge.

I shall also admit as one other cause of realism in the modern ‘clerks’ the irritation produced in them by the teaching of some of their predecessors--I mean certain masters of the year 1848, with their visionary idealism, their belief that justice and love were suddenly about to become the essence of the soul of nations, an irritation greatly increased by seeing the dreadful contrast between these idyllic prophecies and the events which followed them. Nevertheless, the point to remember is that the modern ‘clerks’ replied to these errors by hurling anathemas at every sort of idealism, whether visionary or not, thereby showing incapacity to distinguish between species, inability to rise above passion to judgment. And this is but one other aspect of their loss of the good manners of the mind.

Let me recapitulate the causes for this change in the ‘clerks’: The imposition of political interests on all men without any exception; the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions; the desire and the possibility for men of letters to play a political part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play the game of a class which is daily becoming more anxious; the increasing tendency of the ‘clerks’ to become bourgeois and to take on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism; the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual discipline. It will be seen that these causes arise from certain phenomena which are most profoundly and generally characteristic of the present age. The political realism of the ‘clerks’, far from being a superficial fact due to the caprice of an order of men, seems to me bound up with the very essence of the modern world.