Chapter III: The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal (1)

_‘I created him to be spiritual in his flesh; and now he has become carnal even in the spirit.’_--(Bossuet, _Élévations_, VII, 3.)

In all that I have said hitherto I have been considering only masses, whether bourgeois or proletarian, kings, ministers, political leaders, all that portion of the human species which I shall call ‘the laymen’, whose whole function consists essentially in the pursuit of material interests, and who, by becoming more and more solely and systematically realist, have in fact only done what might be expected of them.

Side by side with this humanity whom the poet has described in a phrase--‘O curvae in terram animae et celestium inanes’--there existed until the last half century another, essentially distinct humanity, which to a certain extent acted as a check upon the former. I mean that class of men whom I shall designate ‘_the clerks_’, by which term I mean all those whose activity essentially is _not_ the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Indeed, throughout history, for more than two thousand years until modern times, I see an uninterrupted series of philosophers, men of religion, men of literature, artists, men of learning (one might say almost all during this period), whose influence, whose life, were in direct opposition to the realism of the multitudes. To come down specifically to the political passions--the ‘clerks’ were in opposition to them in two ways. They were either entirely indifferent to these passions, and, like Leonardo da Vinci, Malebranche, Goethe, set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence; or, gazing as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms, like Erasmus, Kant, Renan, they preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions. Although these ‘clerks’ founded the modern State to the extent that it dominates individual egotisms, their activity undoubtedly was chiefly theoretical, and they were unable to prevent the laymen from filling all history with the noise of their hatreds and their slaughters; _but the ‘clerks’ did prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities_. It may be said that, thanks to the ‘clerks’, humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good. This contradiction was an honour to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.

Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change occurred: _the ‘clerks’ began to play the game of political passions_. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators. This upheaval in the moral behaviour of humanity operated in several ways.

_First: The ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions_

First of all the ‘clerks’ have adopted political passions. No one will deny that throughout Europe to-day the immense majority of men of letters and artists, a considerable number of scholars, philosophers, and ‘ministers’ of the divine, share in the chorus of hatreds among races and political factions. Still less will it be denied that they adopt national passions. Doubtless, the names of Dante, Petrarch, d’Aubigné, certain apologists of Caboche or preachers of the Ligue will suffice to show that certain ‘clerks’ did not wait for our era to indulge in these passions with all the strength of their souls. But, upon the whole, these ‘clerks’ of the forum were exceptions, at least among the great ones. If, in addition to the great masters named above, I evoke the phalanx of Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Galilei, Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, Leibniz, Kepler, Huyghens, Newton, and even Voltaire, Buffon and Montesquieu (to mention only a few) I think I may repeat that until our own days the men of thought or the honest men remained strangers to political passions, and said with Goethe: ‘Let us leave politics to the diplomats and the soldiers.’ Or if, like Voltaire, they took these passions into account, they adopted a critical attitude towards them, did not espouse them as passions. Or if, like Rousseau, Maistre, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, even Michelet, they did take these passions to heart, they did so with a generalizing of feeling, a disdain for immediate results, which in fact make the word ‘passions’ incorrect. To-day, if we mention Mommsen, Treitschke, Ostwald, Brunetière, Barrès, Lemaître, Péguy, Maurras, d’Annunzio, Kipling, we have to admit that the ‘clerks’ now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion--the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern clerk is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and takes no interest in the passions of the State.[31] He is violently on the side of Michaelangelo crying shame upon Leonardo da Vinci for his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and against the master of the Last Supper when he replied that indeed the study of beauty occupied his whole heart. The time has long past by since Plato demanded that the philosopher should be bound in chains in order to compel him to take an interest in the State. To have as his function the pursuit of eternal things and yet to believe that he becomes greater by concerning himself with the State--that is the view of the modern ‘clerk’. It is as natural as it is evident that this adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to the passions of the laymen fortifies these passions in the hearts of the latter. In the first place, it abolishes the suggestive spectacle (which I mentioned above) of a race of men whose interests are set outside the practical world. And then especially, the ‘clerk’ by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.[32]

Before proceeding any further, I feel I ought to make myself clear on certain points:--

(_a_) I have been talking of the _whole_ of the men of thought anterior to our own age. When I say that the ‘clerks’ in the past opposed the realism of the laymen and that the ‘clerks’ of to-day are in its service, I am considering each of these groups as a whole; I am contrasting one general characteristic with another. This means that I shall not feel myself contradicted by a reader who takes pains to point out to me that so-and-so in the former group was a realist, and that so-and-so in the second is not, so long as this reader is obliged to admit that as a whole each of these groups does manifest the characteristic I have indicated. And also, when I speak of a single ‘clerk’, I am thinking of his work in its chief characteristic, i.e. in that part of his teaching which dominates all the rest, even if the remainder sometimes contradicts this dominant teaching. This means that I do not consider that I ought to refrain from looking upon Malebranche as a master of liberal thought because a few lines of his ‘Morale’ seem to be a justification of slavery, or upon Nietzsche as a moralist of war because the end of ‘Zarathustra’ is a manifesto of fraternity which outdoes the Gospels. And I see the less reason for doing so, since Malebranche as a defender of slavery and Nietzsche as a humanitarian have had no influence at all, and my subject is the influence which the ‘clerks’ have had in the world, and not what they were in themselves.

(_b_) Some will object to me: ‘How can you treat men like Barrès and Péguy as “clerks” and blame them for lacking the true spirit of “clerks” when they are so openly men of action, with whom political thought is obviously occupied solely with the needs of the present hour, solely spurred on by the events of the day, while the former scarcely ever gave expression to his political thought except in newspaper articles?’ I reply, that this thought, which in truth is practically nothing but a form of immediate action, is given out by its authors as the fruits of the highest speculative intellectual activity, the result of the most truly philosophical meditation. Barrès and Péguy would never have consented to be looked upon as mere polemical writers, even in their polemical works.[33] These men, who indeed are not ‘clerks’, gave themselves out to be ‘clerks’ and were considered as such, (Barrès gave himself out to be a thinker who condescended to the arena), and it is precisely as such that they enjoy a particular prestige among men of action. In this study my subject is not the ‘clerk’ such as he is, but the ‘clerk’ such as he is considered to be and as he acts upon the world in that capacity.

I shall make the same answer with regard to M. Maurras and the other instructors of the _Action Française_, of whom it will be said even more truly that they are men of action and that it is indefensible to cite them as ‘clerks’. These men claim to carry out their action by virtue of a doctrine derived from a wholly objective study of history, from the exercise of the most purely scientific spirit. And they owe the special attention with which they are listened to by men of action entirely to this claim that they are _men of learning_, men who are fighting for a truth discovered in the austerity of the laboratory. They owe it to their pose as combative ‘clerks’, but essentially _as ‘clerks’_.

(_c_) Finally I should like to define my views on another point and to say that when the ‘clerk’ descends to the market place I only consider that he is failing to perform his functions when he does so, like those I have mentioned, for the purpose of securing the triumph of a realist passion, whether of class, race or nation. When Gerson entered the pulpit of Notre Dame to denounce the murderers of Louis d’Orléans; when Spinoza, at the peril of his life, went and wrote the words ‘Ultimi barbarorum’ on the gate of those who had murdered the de Witts; when Voltaire fought for the Calas family; when Zola and Duclaux came forward to take part in a celebrated lawsuit (Dreyfus affair); all these ‘clerks’ were carrying out their functions as ‘clerks’ in the fullest and noblest manner. They were the officiants of abstract justice and were sullied with no passion for a worldly object.[34] Moreover, there exists a certain criterion by which we may know whether the ‘clerk’ who takes public action does so in conformity with his true functions; and that is, that he is immediately reviled by the laymen, whose interests he thwarts (Socrates, Jesus). We may say beforehand that the ‘clerk’ who is praised by the laymen is a traitor to his office.

But let us return to the modern ‘clerk’s’ adhesion to political passions.

It is concerning national passions that this adhesion seems to me particularly novel and big with results. Once again, of course humanity did not have to wait for the present age to see the ‘clerks’ indulge in this passion. Without mentioning the poets, whose tender hearts have always sighed ‘Nescio qua natale dulcedine solum cunctos Ducit’; and, as regards the philosophers, without going back to antiquity when all, previous to the Stoics, were ardent patriots; we may yet observe in history (since the coming of Christianity and long before our own days) writers, men of learning, artists, moralists, even ministers of the ‘Universal’ Church, who more or less explicitly displayed a special attachment for the group to which they belonged. But this affection among these men was based on reason; it showed itself capable of judging its object, of denouncing its errors when they believed such errors had been committed. Need I recall how Fénelon and Massillon denounced certain wars of Louis XIV? How Voltaire condemned the destruction of the Palatinate? How Renan denounced the violences of Napoleon? Buckle, the intolerance of England towards the French Revolution? And, in our own times, Nietzsche, the brutalities of Germany towards France?[35] It was reserved for our own time to see men of thought, or men giving themselves out as such, professing openly that they would not submit their patriotism to any check on the part of their judgment, proclaiming (like Barrès) that ‘even if the country is wrong, we must think it in the right’, denouncing as ‘traitors to the nation’ those of their compatriots who retain their liberty of mind, or at least of speech, in regard to their country. In France we have not forgotten how, during the last war, so many ‘thinkers’ attacked Renan for the liberty of his judgments on the history of his country.[36] Nor have we forgotten how, a little before that, a whole set of young men (who claimed to share in the life of the spirit) bristled up against one of their masters (Jacob) who tried to teach them a patriotism which did not exclude all right of criticism. After the violation of Belgium and other excesses of the Germans, in October, 1914, a German teacher said: ‘There is nothing for which we need make excuses.’[37] Now, if their own countries had been in a similar position, the same thing would have been said by most of the spiritual leaders of that time; by Barrès in France, by d’Annunzio in Italy, by Kipling in England, if we may judge by his conduct during the attack of his nation upon the Boers, and by William James in the United States, if we recall his attitude when his compatriots seized the island of Cuba.[38] I am quite ready to agree that this sort of blind patriotism makes powerful nations, and that the patriotism of Fénelon or of Renan is not the sort which secures empires. It remains to determine whether the function of ‘clerks’ is to secure empires.

This adhesion of the ‘clerks’ to national passion is particularly remarkable among those whom I shall call ‘pre-eminently clerks’; I mean the Churchmen. In all European countries during the past fifty years, the immense majority of these men have not only given their adhesion to the national feeling[39] and therefore have ceased to provide the world with the spectacle of hearts solely occupied with God--but they seem to have adopted this feeling with the same passion as that I have pointed out as existing among men of letters, and they too appear to be ready to support their own countries in the most flagrant injustices. During the last war this could be most clearly seen in the German clergy, from whom no one could drag the shadow of a protest against the excesses committed by their nation, and whose silence does not appear to have been caused solely by prudence.[40] In contrast to this attitude I refer the reader to that of the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century, to men like Bartholomew de las Casas and Vittoria, earnestly denouncing the cruelties committed by their compatriots in the conquest of America. I do not claim that similar behaviour was then the rule among Churchmen, but I should like to ask whether there is a single country to-day where they would do likewise, or where they would even wish to be permitted to do so?[41]

I shall point out another characteristic of patriotism in the modern ‘clerk’: xenophobia. The hatred of man for ‘the man from outside’ (the _horsain_), his rejection of and scorn for everything which is not ‘from his own home’, all these impulses, so constant among peoples and apparently necessary to their existence, have been adopted in our days by the so-called men of thought, and adopted with a seriousness of application, _an absence of simple-mindedness_, which go far towards making this adoption worthy of notice. We know how systematically the mass of German teachers in the past fifty years have announced the decline of every civilization but that of their own race, and how in France the admirers of Nietzsche or Wagner, even of Kant or Goethe, were treated by Frenchmen who claimed to share in the life of the spirit.[42] You may estimate how curiously new this form of patriotism is among the men of thought in France by thinking of Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Proudhon, Renan, to name only patriotic ‘clerks’ in the age immediately preceding that we are considering. Is it necessary to say once again how much the ‘clerks’ have stimulated the passion of the laymen by adopting this xenophobia?

I shall be told that during the past fifty years, and especially during the twenty years before the war, the attitude of foreigners to France was such that the most violent national partiality was forced upon all Frenchmen who wished to safeguard the nation, and that the only true patriots were those who consented to this fanaticism. I say nothing to the contrary; I only say that the ‘clerks’ who indulged in this fanaticism betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set up a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth, in opposition to the peoples and the injustice to which they are condemned by their religions of this earth. It is true indeed that these new ‘clerks’ declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other ‘metaphysical fogs’, that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances. All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time.

It must be admitted that the German ‘clerks’ led the way in this adhesion of the modern ‘clerk’ to patriotic fanaticism. The French ‘clerks’ were, and long remained, animated with the most perfect spirit of justice towards foreign cultures (think of the cosmopolitanism of the Romantics!), when already Lessing, Schlegel, Fichte, Goerres were organizing in their hearts a violent adoration for ‘everything German’, and a scorn for everything not German. The nationalist ‘clerk’ is essentially a German invention. This, moreover, is a theme which will frequently recur in this book, i.e. that most of the moral and political attitudes adopted by the ‘clerks’ of Europe in the past fifty years are of German origin, and that in the world of spiritual things the victory of Germany is now complete.

It may be said that Germany, by creating for herself the nationalist ‘clerk’ and thereby acquiring the additional strength we know she has acquired, made this species of ‘clerk’ necessary to all other countries. It is undeniable that from the moment when Germany had a Mommsen, France especially was bound to have a Barrès, under penalty of finding herself in a position of great inferiority in nationalist fanaticism, and of seeing her existence seriously menaced. Every Frenchman attached to the continuance of his nation must rejoice that in the last half century France has possessed a fanatically nationalist literature. Yet one would like this Frenchman to rise for a moment superior to his interest, and, faithful in this to the honour of his race, to think it sad that the course of events in the world should force him to rejoice in such a thing.

More generally, it may be admitted that a realist attitude has been imposed on the modern ‘clerks’, chiefly the French ‘clerks’, by exterior and interior political conditions which have arisen in their nations. However serious this may be, it would be much less serious if we found that the ‘clerks’ deplored it while they submitted to it, if they felt how much their own value is diminished by it, how greatly civilization is menaced by it, to what an extent the universe is rendered ugly by it. But this is exactly what we do not see. On the contrary, we see them joyfully carrying out this realism; we see them believing that they are rendered greater by their nationalist fury, that it is a service to civilization, an embellishment to humanity. Then one feels that one is confronted by something different from a function thwarted by the events of the moment, and faced with a cataclysm of moral notions in those who educate the world.

I should like to point out two other characteristics in the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’ which seem new to me, the second of which has not failed to stimulate this passion greatly among the peoples.

The first can best be brought out by contrast with the lines written by an author of the fifteenth century, lines which are the more remarkable since he who wrote them proved by his deeds how deep was his love for his native country. ‘All cities,’ says Guicciardini, ‘all States, all Kingdoms, are mortal; everything comes to an end, either by accident or by the course of nature. That is why a citizen who witnesses the end of his country cannot feel so distressed at her misfortune with so much reason as he would lament his own ruin. His country has met the fate which in every way she was bound to meet; the misfortune is wholly for him whose unhappy lot has caused him to be born in a time when such a disaster had to occur.’ One wonders whether there is a single modern thinker, attached to his country as the author of that passage was to his, who would dare to form, still less to express, a judgment of her so extraordinarily free in its melancholy. And here we come upon one of the great impieties of the moderns: The refusal to believe that above their nations there exists a development of a superior kind, by which they will be swept away like all other things. The ancients, so completely the adorers of their States, nevertheless placed them beneath Fate. The ancient City was under divine protection, but in no wise believed that she herself was divine and necessarily eternal. All the literature of the ancients shows us that, in their opinion, the duration of their institutions was a precarious thing, solely due to the favour of the Gods, who at any time might withdraw that favour.[43] We have Thucydides contemplating the image of a world in which Athens should have ceased to exist; we have Polybius showing us the conqueror of Carthage meditating over the burning town: ‘And Rome too shall meet her fatal hour.’ We have Virgil praising the peasant of the fields for whom ‘res romanae et peritura regna’ are of no value.

It was reserved for the moderns to make of their City a tower which defies the heavens, and to do it with the aid of their ‘clerks’.

The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’ is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the _national_ mind, which they naturally brandish against other national forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in the name of _French_ science, of _German_ science. We know how acridly so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with _French_ sensibility, _French_ intelligence, _French_ philosophy. Some declare that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him. Here it is not a question of inquiring whether the form of mind of a scholar or an artist is the signature of his nationality or his race and to what extent, but of noting the desire of the modern ‘clerks’ that it should be so, and noting how new a thing this is. Racine and La Bruyère never dreamed of setting up their works before themselves and before the world as manifestation of the French mind, nor did Goethe and Wincklemann relate theirs to the genius of Germany.[44] Here, chiefly among the artists, is a very remarkable fact. It is very remarkable to see men whose activity consists, one might say professionally, in the assertion of individuality, men who became so violently conscious of this truth a century ago with the Romantic movement, now (as it were) abdicating this sort of consciousness and trying to feel themselves as the expression of some general existence, a manifestation of a collective mind. It is true that this abdication of the individual in favour of ‘a great impersonal and eternal Whole’ satisfies another sort of Romanticism. It is true that this impulse of the artist may also be explained by the desire (which Barrès does not conceal) to increase the enjoyment of himself by himself, since the consciousness of the individual ego is doubled in profundity by consciousness of the national ego, while at the same time the artist finds new lyrical themes in this second consciousness. It may also be admitted that the artist is not blind to his own interest in calling himself the expression of the genius of his nation, thereby inviting the whole race to applaud itself in the work he put before it.[45] Whatever their motives may have been, the great minds or the minds reputed such, by relating the whole of their value so noisily to their nation, have laboured in a direction contrary to that expected of them; they have flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its neighbours.[46]

I cannot better bring out all the novelty of this attitude of the ‘clerk’ than by quoting the remark of Renan, which would be signed by all men of thought from Socrates onwards: ‘Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is a free being, that is, a moral being.’ To this Barrès replies, amid the applause of his compeers: ‘To be moral is _not to wish to be free from one’s race_.’ Here, obviously, is an exaltation of the gregarious spirit which the nations had heard little of before from the priests of the spirit.

The modern ‘clerks’ do better still. They declare that their thought cannot be good, that it cannot bear good fruit, unless they remain on their native soil, unless they are not ‘uprooted’ (‘_déracinés_’). They congratulate A on working in _his_ Bearn, B in _his_ Berry, C in _his_ Brittany. And they not only proclaim this law for the poets, but for critics, moralists, philosophers, the servants of purely intellectual activity. To declare the mind good to the extent of its refusal to liberate itself from the earth is something which will make the modern ‘clerks’ certain of a conspicuous place in the annals of the spiritual life. Obviously, the feelings of this class of men has changed since Plutarch taught: ‘Man is not a plant created to be immobile and to have his roots fixed in the soil where he was born,’ and since Antisthenes replied to his colleagues who boasted that they were native to the soil, that ‘they shared this honour with the slugs and grasshoppers’.

Need I say that I am only denouncing this desire of the ‘clerk’ to feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a nationalist provocation. The best way for me to define this is by quoting this hymn of a modern ‘clerk’ to ‘his soil and his dead’, a hymn completely void of political passion:

‘And the old oak under which I am sitting speaks in its turn, and says to me:

‘“Read, read in my shadow those Gothic songs whose refrains I heard in the past mingle with the rustling of my leaves. The souls of your ancestors are in these songs that are older than I am. Learn to know those humble ancestors, share their past joys and sorrows. Thus, O transitory creature, shalt thou live long ages in a few years. Be pious, venerate the soil of your country. Never take up a handful in your hand without remembering that it is sacred. Love all those far-off relatives whose dust mingled with earth has fed me for centuries, whose minds have passed into you, their Benjamin, the child of better days. Reproach not your ancestors with their ignorance, nor with the feebleness of their thought, nor even with the illusions of fear which sometimes rendered them cruel. As well reproach yourself for having been a child. Remember that they laboured, that they suffered, that they hoped for you, and that you owe everything to them!”’[47]

_Second: They bring their political passions into their activities as ‘clerks’._

The ‘clerks’ have not been content simply to adopt political passions, if by this one means that they have made a place for these passions side by side with the activities they are bound to carry on as ‘clerks’. They have introduced these passions into those activities. They permit, they desire them to be mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers, to colour the essence of their work and to mark all its productions. And indeed never were there so many political works among those which ought to be the mirror of the disinterested intelligence.

You may refuse to be surprised by this in the case of poetry. We must not ask the poets to separate their works from their passions. The latter are the substance of the former, and the only question to ask is whether they write poems to express their passions or whether they hunt for passions in order to write poems. In either case one does not see why they should exclude national passion or the spirit of party from their vibrant material. Our political poets, who are not numerous however, have only followed the example of Virgil, Claudian, Lucan, Dante, d’Aubigné, Ronsard, and Hugo. Yet we cannot deny that political passion, as it is expressed by Claudel or d’Annunzio, a conscious and organized passion _lacking all simplicity_, coldly scornful of its adversary, a passion which in the second of these poets displays itself as so precisely political, so cunningly adapted to the profound cupidity of his compatriots and the exact point of weakness in the foreigner--we cannot deny, I say, that this political passion is something different from the eloquent generalities of the ‘Tragiques of the Année Terrible.’ A work like _La Nave_, with its national plan as exact and practical as that of a Bismarck, wherein the lyric gift is used to extol this practical character, seems to me something new in the history of poetry, even of political poetry. The result of this new departure on the minds of laymen may be judged by the present state of mind of the Italian people.[48] But in our day the most remarkable example of the poets’ applying their art to the service of political passions is that literary form which may be called ‘lyrical philosophy’, the most brilliant symbol of which is the work of Barrès. It begins by taking as its centres of vibration certain truly philosophical states of mind (such as pantheism, a loftily sceptical intellectualism) and then entirely devotes itself to serving racial passion and national feeling. Here the action of the lyric spirit is doubled by the prestige of the spirit of abstract thought (Barrès admirably caught the appearance of that spirit--he stole the tool, a philosopher has said of him), and in France as elsewhere the ‘clerks’ have thereby stimulated political passions among the laymen, at least in that very important section of them who read and believe they think. Moreover, in regard to poets and especially the poet I have just named, it is difficult to know whether the lyrical impulse lends its aid to a genuine and pre-existing political passion, or whether on the contrary this passion puts itself at the service of a lyrical impulse which is seeking inspiration. Alius judex erit.

But there are other ‘clerks’ who introduce political passion into their works with a remarkable consciousness of what they are doing, in whom this derogation seems more worthy of notice than in the poets. I mean the novelists and dramatists, i.e. ‘clerks’ whose function is to portray in as objective a manner as possible the emotions of the human soul and their conflicts--a function which, as Shakespeare, Molière, and Balzac have proved, may be carried out with all the purity I have here assigned to it. One may show how this function has been more than ever perverted by its subjection to political ends by the example of many contemporary novelists, not because they scatter ‘tendencious’ reflections throughout their narratives (Balzac constantly does so), but because instead of making their heroes feel and act in conformity with a true observation of human nature, they make them do so as the passion of the authors requires. Shall I cite those novels where the traditionalist, whatever his errors, always finally displays a noble soul, whereas the character without religion inevitably, and in spite of all his efforts, is capable of none but vile actions?[49] Or the other novels where the man of the people possesses every virtue and vileness is the exclusive portion of the bourgeois?[50] Or the novels where the author displays his compatriots in contact with foreigners and, more or less frankly, gives all moral superiority to his own people?[51] There is a two-fold evil in this proceeding; not only does it considerably inflame political passion in the breast of the reader, but it deprives him of one of the most eminently civilizing effects of all works of art, i.e. that self-examination to which every spectator is impelled by a representation of human beings which he feels to be true and solely pre-occupied with truth.[52] From the point of view of the artist and of the value of his activity alone, this partiality indicates a great degradation. The value of the artist, the thing which makes him the world’s high ornament, is that he _plays_ human passions instead of living them, and that he discovers in this ‘play’ emotion the same source of desires, joys and sufferings as ordinary men find in the pursuit of real things. Now, if this accomplished type of exuberant activity places itself at the service of the nation or of a class, if this fine flower of disinterestedness becomes utilitarian, then I say with the poet of the ‘Vierge aux Rochers’ when the author of _Siegfried_ exhales his last sigh: ‘The world has lost its import.’

I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as ‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking, ‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians. Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history, through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan, Fustel de Coulanges.[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of ‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’. Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag behind. Recently one of them, the author of a _History of France_, which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.[54] By his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function, if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which, coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment.

Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of disinterestedness.[55]

I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists, would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party, of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it with the pen. We are _the spiritual militia of the material_.’

Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using literary criticism in support of the social system in which they believed.[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.[57]

But the most remarkable thing about the modern ‘clerk’ in his desire to bring political passion into his work, is that he has done so in philosophy, more precisely, in metaphysics. It may be said that until the nineteenth century metaphysics remained the inviolate citadel of disinterested speculation. Among all forms of spiritual labour metaphysics best deserved the admirable tribute which a mathematician rendered the theory of numbers above all branches of mathematics, when he said: ‘This is the really pure branch of our science, by which I mean that it is unsullied by any contact with practical application.’ In fact thinkers free from any sort of earthly preference, like Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and even thinkers strongly imbued with the superiority of their class or nation (like Plato and Aristotle), never thought of directing their transcendental speculations towards a demonstration of this superiority or the necessity of this adoption by the whole world. It has been said that the morality of the Greeks was national, but their metaphysics were universal. The Church itself, so often favourable to class or national interests in its morality, thinks only of God and Man in its metaphysics. It was reserved for our own age to see metaphysicians of the greatest eminence turning their speculations to the exaltation of their own countries and to the depreciation of other countries, fortifying the will to power of their compatriots with all the power of abstractive genius. Fichte and Hegel made the triumph of the German world the supreme and necessary end of the development of Being, and history has showed whether the action of these ‘clerks’ had an effect on the hearts of their laymen. Let me hasten to add that this spectacle of patriotic metaphysics is provided by Germany alone. In France, even in this age of nationalist ‘clerks’, we have not yet seen any philosopher (at least one who is taken seriously) build up a metaphysical system to the glory of France. Neither Auguste Comte nor Renouvier nor Bergson ever thought of making a French hegemony the necessary result of the world’s development. Need I add what a degradation this has been for metaphysics, as it has been for art? It will be the eternal shame of the German philosophers to have transformed the patrician virgin who honoured the Gods into a harpy engaged in shrieking the glory of her children.

_Third: The ‘clerks’ have played the game of political passions by their doctrines_

But where the ‘clerks’ have most violently broken with their tradition and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favour of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a consciousness which will stupify history) to the task of making these passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues, while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the principal aspects of this phenomenon.

_A. The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal_

In the first place, the ‘clerks’ have set out to exalt the will of men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in a universal. With the exception of certain authors like Tolstoi and Anatole France, whose teaching moreover is now looked on with contempt by most of their colleagues, all the influential moralists of Europe during the past fifty years, Bourget, Barrès, Maurras, Péguy, d’Annunzio, Kipling, the immense majority of German thinkers, have praised the efforts of men to feel conscious of themselves in their nation and race, to the extent that this distinguishes them from others and opposes them to others, and have made them ashamed of every aspiration to feel conscious of themselves as men in the general sense and in the sense of rising above ethnical aims. Those whose activity since the time of the Stoics had been devoted to preaching the extinction of national egotism in the interest of an abstract and eternal entity, set out to denounce every feeling of this kind and to proclaim the lofty morality of that egotism. In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism as a moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks’.

I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbours. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists in periods when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished minds, who discover two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is ‘the patriotic bore’ and the other ‘the universal embrace’.[58]

The humanitarianism which holds in honour the abstract quality of what is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men. Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man, _more or less_ the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.[59]

Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain category of men--labourers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those interests.[60]

In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from all moral dogmatism.[61] But let us come back to this movement of the ‘clerks’ exhorting the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them distinct from others.

What will especially amaze history in this movement of the ‘clerks’ is the perfection with which they have carried it out. They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in what makes them _the most distinct_ from others, in their poets rather than in their scientists, in their legends rather than in their philosophies, since poetry (as they perfectly well perceived) is infinitely more national, more separating than the products of pure intelligence.[62] They have exhorted the peoples to honour their poets’ characteristics insofar as they are peculiar to them and are not universal. Recently a young Italian writer praised his language because it is only used in Italy, and poured scorn on French because it is employed universally.[63] They have exhorted the peoples to feel conscious of themselves in _everything_ which makes them distinct from others, not only in their language, art, and literature, but in their dress, houses, furniture, and food. During the past half century it has been a common experience to see serious writers (to go no further than France) exhorting their compatriots to remain faithful to French fashions, French hair-dressing, French dining rooms, French cooking, French cars. They have exhorted the peoples to feel themselves distinct even in their vices. The German historians, says Fustel de Coulanges, urge their nation to be intoxicated with its personality, even to its barbarity. The French moralist does not lag behind and desires his compatriots to accept their ‘national determinism’ in its ‘indivisible totality’, with its injustices as well as its wisdom, with its fanaticism as well as its enlightenment, its pettiness as well as its grandeur. Another, (Maurras) declares: ‘Good or bad, our tastes are ours and it is always permissible to take ourselves as the sole judges and models of our lives’. Once again, the remarkable thing here is not that such things should be said, but that they should be said by the ‘clerks’, by a class of men whose purpose hitherto has been to urge their fellow-citizens to feel conscious of themselves in what is common to all men, that they should be said in France by the descendants of Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, and Renan.

This glorifying of national particularism, so unexpected among all ‘clerks’ is especially so among those whom I described as ‘pre-eminently clerks’--the Churchmen. Those who for centuries have exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences in order to take cognizance of each other in the divine essence which brings all men together, have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul’, for ‘the immutability of their German consciousness’, for the ‘fervour of their Italian hearts’.[64] The sight is indeed surprising and remarkable! What would be thought by him who, by the mouth of his apostle, declared: ‘There is neither Greek nor Jew nor barbarian, but Christ is in all things,’ if to-day he entered one of his churches and saw offered to the veneration of his faithful, a national heroine with a sword on her thigh and a flag in her hand?[65]

This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the history of the Church. It is not necessary to go back as far as Saint Augustine, who preached the extinction of all patriotisms in the embrace of ‘the City of God’; nor even to Bossuet, who shows us the indignation of Jesus at observing ‘that because we are separated by a few rivers or mountains, we seem to have forgotten that we are all of one nature’. So recently as 1849 a lofty assembly of prelates asserted that ‘this movement of nationalities is a relic of paganism, differences of language are a consequence of sin and the fall of man’. Certainly this declaration was an interested one, since it was provoked by the Most Catholic Francis Joseph to check the separatist tendencies among the peoples of his Empire; but I dare to assert that the Church would no longer make such a declaration, even for motives of interest. I shall be told that even if the Church wished to do so, she could only do it under penalty of delivering up her ministers to a terrible unpopularity among their respective peoples. As if the ‘clerk’s’ function were not to tell the laymen truths which are displeasing to them, and to pay the price at the expense of his own peace!