Page:Rolland - The Idols.pdf/8

 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. 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. 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. It sets side by side its virtues and its vices, its heroism and its meanness. The force of its passions and the rapid course of the days which carry it along cause it to forget its lack of logic.

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. 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. They thus achieve monstrous chef d'oeuvres. 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.” A clever intellectual is a conjuror in ideas. “Nothing in my hands—nothing up my sleeves.” The great trick is to extract