Above the Battle

by Romain Rolland

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 unheard-of weakness with which the leaders of thought have everywhere abdicated to the collective madness has certainly proved their lack of character.

Certain somewhat paradoxical passages in my own writings have caused me at times to be styled an anti-intellectual; an absurd charge to bring against one who has given his life to the worship of thought. But it is true that Intellectualism has often appeared to me as a mere caricature of Thought—Thought mutilated, deformed, and petrified, powerless, not only to dominate the drama of life, but even to understand it. And the events of to-day have proved me more in the right than I wished to be. The intellectual lives too much in the[{118}] realm of shadows, of ideas. Ideas have no existence in themselves, but only through the hopes or experiences which can fill them. They are either summaries, or hypotheses; frames for what has been or will be; convenient or necessary formulæ. One cannot live and act without them, but the evil is that people make them into oppressive realities. No one contributes more to this than the intellectual, whose trade it is to handle them, who, biased by his profession, is always tempted to subordinate reality to them. Let there supervene a collective passion which completes his blindness, and it will be cast in the form of the idea which can best serve its purpose: it transfers its life-blood to that idea, and the idea magnifies and glorifies it in turn. Nothing is more long-lived in a man than a phantom which his own mind has created, a phantom in which are combined the madness of his heart and the madness of his head. 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[{119}] 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. Hence while we see that in the soldiers of all armies the fire of hate is rapidly dying down and that they already fraternize 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 intellectuals....

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. It is the wild violet of Liberty. You do not care about it. You tread it under foot. But it will not die. It will live longer than your masterpieces of barrack[{120}] and hot-house. It is not afraid of the wind. It has braved other tempests than that of today. It grows under brambles and under dead leaves. Intellectuals of Germany, intellectuals of France, labor and sow on the fields of your own minds: respect those of others. Before organizing the world you have enough to do to organize 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 Civilization, of the Germanic races and of Latinity, enemies, friends, let us look one another in the eyes. My brother, do you not see there a heart similar to your own, with the same hopes, the same egoism, and the same heroism and power of dream which forever refashions its gossamer web? Vois-tu pas que tu es moi? said the old Hugo to one of his enemies....

The true man of culture is not he who makes of himself and his ideal the center 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; and who seeks neither to absorb them nor to impose upon them his own course, but to give himself the religious persuasion of their value and of the common source of the fire by which all alike are fed. Intelligence of the mind[{121}] is nothing without that of the heart. It is nothing also without good sense and humor—good sense which shows to every people and to every being their place in the universe—and humor which is the critic of misguided reason, the soldier who, following the chariot to the Capitol, reminds Cæsar in his hour of triumph that he is bald.

Journal de Genève, December 4, 1914.[{122}]

IX. FOR EUROPE: MANIFESTO OF THE WRITERS AND THINKERS OF CATALONIA

National passions are triumphant. For five months they have rent our Europe. They think they will soon have compassed its destruction and effaced its image in the hearts of the last of these who remain faithful to it. But they are mistaken. They have renewed the faith that we had in it. They have made us recognize its value and our love. And from one country to another we have discovered our unknown brothers, sons of the same mother, who in the hour when she is denied, consecrate themselves to her defence.

Today, it is from Spain that the voice reaches us, from the thinkers of Catalonia. Let us pass on their appeal which comes to us from the shores of the Mediterranean, like the sound of a Christmas bell. Another day the bells of Northern Europe will be heard in their turn. And soon all will ring[{123}] together in unison. The test is good. Let us be thankful. Those who desired to separate us have joined our hands.

R. R.

December 31, 1914.