If there are any to-day for whom modesty is befitting, it is the intellectuals. The part they have played in this war has been abominable, unpardonable. Not merely did they do nothing to lessen the mutual lack of understanding, to limit the spread of hatred; with rare exceptions, they did everything in their power to disseminate hatred and to envenom it. To a considerable extent, this war was their war. Thousands of brains were poisoned by their murderous ideologies. Overweeningly self-confident, proud, implacable, they sacrificed millions of young lives to the triumph of the phantoms of their imagination. History will not forget.
Gerhard Gran expresses the fear that personal cooperation between intellectuals of the belligerent lands may prove impossible for many years. If he is thinking of the generation of those who are over fifty, of those who stayed at home and waged a war of words in the learned societies, the universities, and the editorial offices, I fancy that the Norwegian writer is not mistaken. There is little chance that these intellectuals will ever join hands. I should say that none of them will do so, were I not familiar with the brain's astounding faculty for forgetting, were I not familiar with this pitiful and yet salutary weakness, by which the mind is not deceived, but which is essential to its continued existence. But in the present case, oblivion will be difficult. The intellectuals have burned their boats. At the outset of the war it was still possible to hope that some of those who had been carried away by the blind passion of the opening days, would be able within a few months frankly to admit their mistake. They would not do so. Not one of them has done so on either side of the frontier. It was even possible to note that in proportion as the disastrous consequences to European civilisation became apparent, those whose mission it was to act as guardians of that civilisation, those upon whose shoulders part of the responsibility weighed, instead of admitting their mistake, did all they could to increase their own infatuation. How, then, can we hope, when the war is over, and when the disasters to which it will have led will have become unmistakable, that the intellectuals will curb their pride and will constrain themselves to say, "We were wrong"?—To ask this would be to ask too much. The older generation, I fear, will have to endure to the last its sickness of mind and its obstinacy. On this side there is little hope. We can only wait until the older generation has died out.
Those who wish to reknit the relations among the peoples, must turn their hopes towards the other generation, that of those who bleed in the armies. May they be preserved! They have been ruthlessly thinned out by the sickle of war. They might even be annihilated if the war should be prolonged and extended, as may happen, for all things are possible. Mankind stands, like Hercules, at the parting of the ways. One of these ways leads (if Asia takes a hand in the game, and accentuates yet further the characteristics of hideous destruction in which Germany has set an example inevitably followed by the other combatants) to the suicide of Europe.—But at the present hour we have still the right to hope that the young men of Europe, now enrolled in the armies, will survive in sufficient numbers to fulfil the mission that will devolve on them after the war, the mission of reconciling the thoughts of the enemy nations. In either camp, I know a number of independent spirits, who look forward, when peace is signed, to realising this intellectual communion. They propose to except from this communion none but those who, be it in their own or be it in the other camp, have prostituted thought to the work of hatred. When I reflect on these young men, I am firmly convinced (and herein I differ from Gerhard Gran) that after the war the minds of all lands will inter-penetrate one another far more effectively than they have ever done before. The nations which knew nothing of one another, or which saw one another only in the form of contemptuous caricatures, have learned during the last four years, in the mud of the trenches, and at grips with death, that they are the same suffering flesh. All are enduring the same ordeal, and in it they become brothers. This sentiment continues to grow. For when we attempt to foresee the changes which, after the war, will occur in the relationships between the nations, we do not sufficiently realise the extent to which the war will lead to other upheavals, which may well modify the very essence of the nations. Whatever may be the immediate upshot of happenings in Russia, the example of the New Russia will not fail to have its influence upon the other peoples. An intimate unity is becoming established in the soul of the peoples. It is as if they were connected by gigantic roots, spreading underground regardless of frontiers.—As for the intellectuals who, sitting apart from the common people, are not directly swept along by this social current, they none the less feel its influence by intuition and sympathy. Notwithstanding the efforts which, during these four years, have been made to break off all contact between the writers in the two camps, I know that in both, on the morrow of the peace, international magazines and other publications will be founded. I have first-hand information concerning such schemes, initiated by young writers, soldiers at the front, men permeated with the European spirit. Among those of my own generation, there are a few who will give wholehearted assistance to their younger brethren. In our view, we shall in this way serve, not merely the cause of mankind, but the cause of our own land, far better than that cause will be served by the evil counsellors who preach armed isolation. Every country which shuts itself apart pronounces its own death-sentence. Gone for ever are the days when the young and tumultuous energies of the European nations needed, for their clarification, to be surrounded by partition walls.—Let me quote a few words uttered by Jean Christophe in his riper age:
"I neither admire nor dread the nationalism of the present time. It will pass away with the present time; it is passing, it has already passed. It is but a rung in the ladder. Climb to the top.... Every nation felt [before the war] the imperious necessity of gathering its forces and making up its balance-sheet. For the last hundred years all the nations have been transformed by their mutual intercourse and the immense contributions of all the brains of the universe, building up new morality, new knowledge, new faith. Every man must examine his conscience, and know exactly what he is and what he has, before he can enter with the rest into the new age. A new age is coming. Humanity is on the point of signing a new lease of life. Society is on the point of springing into vigour with new laws. It is Sunday to-morrow. We are all balancing our accounts for the week, setting our houses in order, making them clean and tidy, so that, joining together, we may go into the presence of our common God and enter into a new covenant with Him."
The war will prove (even against our will) to have been the anvil upon which will have been forged the unity of the European soul.
It is my hope that this intellectual communion will not be restricted to the European peninsula, but will extend to Asia, to the two Americas, and to the great islets of civilisation spread over the rest of the globe. It is absurd that the nations of western Europe should pride themselves upon the discovery of profound differences, at the very time when they have never resembled one another more closely in merits and defects; at a time when their thought and their literature are least notable for distinctive characteristics; when everywhere there becomes sensible a monotonous levelling of intelligence; when on all hands we discern individualities that are dishevelled, threadbare, limp. I will venture to say that all of them, with their united efforts, are incompetent to give us the hope of that mental renovation to which the world is entitled after this formidable convulsion. We must go to Russia, which has doors thrown wide open towards the eastern world, for there only will our faces be freshened by the new currents which are blowing in every department of thought.
Let us widen the concept of humanism, dear to our forefathers, though its meaning has been narrowed down to the signification of Greek and Latin manuals. In every age, states, universities, academies, all the conservative forces of the mind, have endeavoured to make humanism in this narrower sense a dike against the onslaughts of the new spirit, in philosophy, in morals, in aesthetics. The dike has burst. The framework of a privileged culture has been broken. To-day we have to accept humanism in its widest signification, embracing all the spiritual forces of the whole world. What we need is, panhumanism.
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It is our hope that this ideal, formulated here and there by a few leading minds, or heralded by the foundation while the war is yet in progress of centres for the study of universal civilisation,[85] shall be boldly adopted as its ensign by the international academy, in the foundation of which I hope (with Gerhard Gran) that Norway will take the initiative.
I note that Gerhard Gran seems, like Professor Fredrik Stang, to limit his ambitions to the foundation of an institute for scientific research, for in his view science is in its essence more international than art and letters. He writes: