Page:Rolland - The Idols.pdf/12

 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 militated, 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 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. They are either summaries, or hypotheses; frames for what has been or what will be; convenient or necessary formulae. 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 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 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.