Romain Rolland

“ It is not afraid of the wind. It has braved other tempests than that of to-day. It grows under brambles and under dead leaves. Intellectuals of Germany, intellectuals of France, labour and sow on the fields of your own minds: respect those of others. Before organising the world you have enough to do to organise your own private world. Try for a moment to forget your ideas and behold yourselves. And above all, look at us. Champions of Kultur and of Civilisation, of the Germanic races and of Latinity, enemies, friends, let us look one another in the eyes. ”

“ The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the centre of the universe, but who looking around him sees, as in the sky the stream of the Milky Way, thousands of little flames which flow with his own ”

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

“ They merely disgust it. They wish to be believed. People are only too ready to believe them. The whole of Germany will be made responsible for the delirium of a few writers. Germany will one day realise she has had no more deadly enemy than her own intellectuals.
I write here without prejudice, for I am certainly not proud of our French intellectuals. The Idol of Race, or of Civilisation, or of Latinity, which they so greatly abuse, does not satisfy me, I do not like any Idol—not even that of Humanity. ”

“ In this hideous struggle, with which the conflicting peoples are rending Europe, let us at least preserve our flag, and rally round that. We must re-create European opinion. That is our first duty. Among these millions who are only conscious of being Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, Russians, English, etc., let us strive to be men who are men, and who, rising above the selfish aims of short-lived nations, do not lose sight of the interests of civilization as a whole—that civilization which each race mistakenly identifies with its own, as opposed to the other races. ”

“ It is because our fathers, obsessed by their narrow realism and by selfish fears, let the rights of the people of Eastern Europe be violated, that to-day the West is shattered, and the sword hangs over the small nations—over you, my friends, as over the country which is befriending me, Switzerland. Whoever harms one of us harms all the others. ”

“ While Ostwald and Haeckel see in militarism merely an arm or instrument of which Kultur makes use to secure victory, Thomas Mann affirms that Kultur and Militarism are brothers—their ideal is the same, their aim the same, their principle the same. Their enemy is peace, is spirit (Ja der Geist is zivil, ist buergerlich) . He finally dares to inscribe on his own and his country’s banner the words, “Law is the friend of the weak; it would reduce the world to a level. War brings out strength.” ”

“ Who shall break the idols? Who shall open the eyes of their fanatical followers? Who shall make them understand that no god of their minds, religious or secular, has the right to force himself on other human beings—even he who seems the most worthy—or to despise them. Admitting that your Kultur on German soil produces the sturdiest and most abundant human crop, who has entrusted to you the mission of cultivating other lands? Cultivate your own garden. We will cultivate ours. There is a sacred flower for which I would give all the products of your artificial culture. ”

“ I wish your noble country, which has always preserved its political and moral independence among the great surrounding states, could become the heart of this ideal Europe we believe in—the hearth round which shall gather all those who seek to rebuild her.
Everywhere there are men who think thus though they are unknown one to another. ”

“ Above all race questions, which are for the most part a mask behind which pride crouches and the interests of the financial or aristocratic classes dissemble, there is a law of humanity, eternal and universal, of which we are all the servants and guardians; it is that of the right of a people to rule themselves. ”

“ Did a powerful man ever submit himself to the crazy pretentions or to the judgment of a band of weaklings.”
What a testimony to the madness into which German intelligence has been precipitated by pride and struggle, and to the moral anarchy of this Empire, whose organisation is imposing only to the eyes of them who do not see further than the façade! Who cannot see the weakness of a government which gags its socialist press and yet tolerates such an insulting contradiction as this? Who does not see that such words defame Germany before the whole world for centuries to come. ”

“ The latest on the scene is that authentic product of German science, fraternally allied to the labours of industry, of commerce and of the firm of Krupp—the Idol of Kultur surrounded by its Levites, the thinkers of Germany.
The common feature of the cult of all Idols is the adaptation of an ideal to the evil instincts of mankind. Man cultivates the vices which are profitable to him, but feels the necessity of legitimising them; being unwilling to sacrifice them, he must idealise them. ”

“ Intelligence of the mind is nothing without that of the heart. It is nothing also without good sense and humour—good sense which shews to every people and to every being their place in the universe—and humour which is the critic of misguided reason, the soldier who following the chariot to the Capitol reminds Caesar in his hour of triumph that he is bald. ”

“ We may well pause to marvel at this way of talking about human “culture” as though it were a question of asparagus and artichokes. Of this happiness, and these advantages, this maximal output, this market-garden culture, this liberty of artichokes subjected to a judicious forcing process Professor Ostwald does not wish to deprive the other peoples of Europe. As they are so unlightened as not to acquiesce with enthusiasm, " “War will make them participate in the form of this organisation in our higher civilisation.” ”

“ Yet all aspired to material dominion, and to secure for them that dominion the peoples of the world have poured out their best blood:—Idols of religions and of nationality: the Idol of liberty whose reign was established in Europe by the armies of the sans culotte at the point of the bayonet. The masters have changed, the slaves are still the same. Our century has made the acquaintance of two new species. ”

“ Since the whole of Europe is disorganized let us profit by it to spring-clean the untidy house! For a long time injustices have been accumulating. The moment of settling the general account will be an opportunity of rectifying them. The duty of all of us who feel for the brotherhood of mankind is to stand for the rights of the small nations. ”

“ And the events of to-day have proved me more in the right than I wished to be. The intellectual lives too often in the realm of shadows, of ideas. Ideas have no existence in themselves, but only through the hopes or experiences which can fill them. ”

“ Hence while we see that in the soldiers of all armies the fire of hate is rapidly dying down and that they already fraternise from trench to trench, the writers redouble their furious arguments. We can easily prophesy that when the remembrance of this senseless war has passed away among the people its bitterness will still be smouldering in the hearts of the intellectual. ”

“ Hence the intellectuals in the present crisis have not been overcome by the warlike contagion less than others, but they have themselves contributed to spreading it. I would add (for it is their punishment) that they are victims of the contagion for a longer period: for whilst simple folk constantly submit to the test of every-day action and of experience, and modify their ideas without conscious regret, the intellectual finds himself bound in the net of his own creation and every word that he writes draws the bonds tighter. ”

“ But these toilers in the spirit love careful work, and are repelled by popular modes of thought which perpetually break through the meshes of reasoning. They have to make a more closely woven net in which instinct and idea, cost what it may, combine to form a stouter tissue. ”

“ There is a saying of Emerson’s which is applicable to their failure: “Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.” Their acts and their writings have come to them from others, from outside, from public opinion, blind and menacing. I do not wish to condemn those who have been obliged to remain silent either because they are in the armies, or because the censorship which rules in countries involved in war has imposed silence upon them. ”

“ But the intelligent few cannot satisfy themselves with so little effort. Not that they are, as is often said, less readily swayed by passion. This is a grave error; the richer a life becomes the more does it offer for passion to devour, and history sufficiently shews the terrifying paroxysms to which the lives of religious leaders and revolutionaries have attained. ”

“ It is possible that the neutral countries of Europe and the United States of America may decide one day to interfere, and endeavour to put an end to a war which, if it continued indefinitely, would threaten to ruin them as well as the belligerents. ”

“ Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed in harmonising the twain. The love of God and the love of mankind have been invoked in order to burn, kill and pillage. The fraternity of 1793 was sister to the Holy Guillotine. We have in our time seen Churchmen seeking and finding in the Gospels the justification of Banking and of War. Since the outbreak of the War a clergyman of Wurtemburg established the fact that “neither Christ nor John the Baptist nor the apostles desired to suppress militarism.” [1] A clever intellectual is a conjuror in ideas. ”

“ The Idol of Race, at first the outcome of noble ideas, became in the laboratories of spectacled savants the Moloch which Germany hurled herself against France in 1870 and which her enemies now wish to use against the Germany of to-day. ”

“ If we waited to announce it until—the war being over—the congress of the Powers were assembled, we should be suspected of wishing to make justice serve the interest of the conquered. It is now, when the forces of the two sides are equal, that we must establish this primordial right which soars over all the armies. ”

“ The brute is loose; and the governments have succeeded so well spreading hatred and violence abroad that even if they wished they could not bring it back again into control. The damage is irreparable. ”

“ They are not aggressive, and, moreover, there remains even in the most fanatical of our intellectuals a basis of native common sense, of which the Germans of whom I have just spoken seem to have lost all trace. ”

“ That is why the problem at which he has never ceased to labour throughout the centuries has been to harmonise his ideals with his own mediocrity. He has always succeeded. The crowd has no difficulty here. ”