Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/146

 ramway, married, with children, and honourably discharged from the army, who killed himself on account of the insults and persecutions of the women of Middlesex. In all countries, poor wretches like him have been pursued, crazed, driven to death, by these war-maddened Bacchantes. This ought not to surprise us; if we have not foreseen this madness, it is because we, like Clerambault hitherto, have lived on comfortable accepted opinions and idealisations. In spite of the efforts of woman to approximate the fallacious ideal imagined by man for his pleasure and tranquillity, the woman of the present day, weak, cut-off, trimmed into shape as she is, comes much closer than man to the primitive earth. She is at the source of our instincts, and more richly endowed with forces, which are neither moral nor immoral but simply animal. If love is her chief function, it is not the passion sublimated by reason but love in the raw state, splendidly blind, mingling selfishness and sacrifice, equally irresponsible, and both subservient to the deep purposes of the race. The tender, flowery embellishments with which the couple always try to veil the forces that affright them, are like arches of tropical vines over a rushing stream; their object is to deceive. Man could not bear life if his feeble soul saw the great forces, as they are, that carry him along.

His ingenious cowardice strives to adapt them mentally to his weakness; he lies about love, about hatred, about his gods, and above all he is false about woman and about Country. If the naked truth were shown to him, he would fear to fall into convulsions, and so he substitutes the pale chromos of his idealism. The war had broken through the thin disguise, and Clerambault saw the cruel beast without the mantle of feline courtesy in which civilisation drapes itself.

Among Clerambault's former friends, the most tolerant were those belonging to the political world. Deputies, Ministers,