Here, as elsewhere, the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children. The sons of your University were constrained, like their forbears, so to use themselves in matters of conscience as they should answer to their Maker. All earth has witnessed that they answered as befitted their ancestry; that they endured as the strong influences about their youth had taught them to endure. They willingly and wittingly left the purpose of their lives unachieved in order that all life should not be wrenched from its purpose; and without fear they turned from these gates of learning to those of the grave. This is their glory and also that of their severe but beloved Mother who, while she gave them learning, dowered them also with that Wisdom lacking which all Learning is folly.
* * *
The Virtue of France
I ASK your forgiveness if I speak in English to acknowledge the very great and signal honour you have bestowed upon me, an Englishman.
Your Rector has delivered a eulogium of my work which would demand more than all that quality of imagination he attributes to me, could I convince myself that the half of it were deserved. But far be it from me to qualify any ruling of the Sorbonne, domus magistrorum pauperrima. So I will not confess (what must be evident to my literary confreres here) how much in my art I have learned and applied both consciously and unconsciously from the masters of that art in your country. It is an influence to which I was submitted almost from my childhood when, as a boy of twelve, I first made acquaintance with a France that was renewing herself after the FrancoPrussian War. It was an influence that strengthened itself again and again in my youth and through my manhood, as one saw and, at last, began to comprehend a little, what the genius and the existence of France signified in a world that moved without fear, since it was without knowledge, towards the catastrophe predicted by the unregarded prophets of ‘70.
And when that catastrophe arrived, mankind beheld with what passion of virtue and faith in her women and men France moved to confront it; with what endurance she supported — with what hardihood she overcame — her triple burden of butchery, torture, and devastation; and with what ingrained sanity she set herself to repair her inconceivable losses with almost inconceivable labour.
These are not qualities born full-grown in any nation, nor produced by sudden pressure of necessity, however terrible. Their genesis lies in the national past. They are built up through multiplied experiences and agonies. They are tempered alike in the fires of war and the little daily fires of a million small hearths. They are reflected, also, step by step, through the generations, in the literature of the land whose instincts have developed them and whose sure defences they are.
It is for that reason, Masters, Doctors, my brothers, that I thank you, very humbly but very proudly, that you should have associated my name even for my moment, with the august succession of frank, joyous, and wise writers who, ever since the Sorbonne introduced here the art of printing, have revealed and glorified the undefeated soul of your race.
* * *
A Thesis
WILL you permit me to speak in my dual capacity as a Doctor of your University and as a mere teller of stories? I cannot maintain arguments for the space of six weeks against all the learned Regents of the Sorbonne, as did the illustrious Pantagruel; but I venture to submit for your consideration this thèse Sorbonnique: That the nations of the world betray their essential characteristics and ideals more intimately and more precisely in the folk-tales which they tell to their children, than through any other medium. In public assemblies, man makes use of the lie proper to the occasion; but beside his own hearth, among his own family, he reveals unconsciously the absolute truth concerning all that he desires or fears. The folk-tales of a race never lie.
Now the ancient and immemorial fairy-tales of France and of England are of a charming simplicity. There is always a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune. On the road he is kind to a beggar, an old woman, or, perhaps a cat. This, though he knows it not, is a good investment. Very soon, he falls into the hands of giants or sorcerers. He is cast into prison, or compelled to perform impossible tasks. At that moment, the beggar, the old woman, or the cat whom he had befriended, comes to his rescue, tells him the magic word, that opens the prison door and achieves the impossible task; or gives him the magic sword which destroys the giants at one blow. In consequence, the youth possesses himself of all their treasure and, equally, he marries a Princess — that Princess which exists always in the dreams of youth. He becomes the Head of a Kingdom, and, in due course, the head of a family.
You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy-tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul? Thus: —
There was a young man, who through lucky investments, became a wealthy rentier, consolidated his social position by a desirable alliance, and founded a family. You may say that the ideal is bourgeois, but on the pursuit of that ideal, as our youth has pursued it eternally, is based an enormous proportion of the progress and the continuity of our civilisation. Therefore, in France and in England, which together compose the twin fortresses of European civilisation of to-day, our folk-tales prefigure our racial temperaments.
Every race betrays itself thus in the tales it tells to its own children. Let us examine elsewhere. From the earliest ages comes down to us from out of the North, inhabited by the tribes of the Teuton and the Tartar, a mass of legend and story, almost a literature in itself, which deals with the Wehr-Wolf — the beast that can at pleasure or for profit change itself into the likeness of a man and for pleasure or profit become again the Wolf. In these tales, a villager meets a traveller who asks him the way; a family sitting round their hearth by night hear at the door a woman seeking shelter from the storm. The traveller is guided, the woman is admitted into the house. Confidence is established. The traveller rests and works in the village; the woman, perhaps, marries there and bears children; but in time — in due time — these creatures out of the darkness and the night of the North, practise, furtively or openly, the rituals and sabbats of the pack to which they belong. There are mysterious attacks on men, women, and little children in the village. For a while no suspicion is aroused. Men do not suspect men of the outrages of beasts. Then arrives, by chance, the sudden discovery of the Wehr-Wolf in its proper shape, its fangs in the victim’s throat. It runs off through the forest and the snow, wounded, howling, but looking over its shoulder. The village resumes its life. In due time the cycle of treachery and terror is repeated in that village. The traveller reappears more abject, and the woman more in need of help than before. They are received by human beings as human beings. They wait their time; they kill and again depart. You in France have reason to know these stories.
I confess that when I first read them I was fascinated by the cold tenacity and the ruthlessness of the Wehr-Wolves, as much as I despised the stupidity of their victims. For in those days I believed, with the rest of the world, that such tales came out of the twilight of primitive savagery. I did not know then, as you and I know now, that they were the dawn and the forecast of a modern philosophy of Absolute Evil which has since been made plain in the face of all mankind. I did not think then, as I think now, that if our leaders had accepted the folk-tales in their children’s storybooks for a guide our world, to-day desolated, would have prepared against the Wolves before they came down from the North, and would have made sure also that the cycle of suspense, treachery, and terror would never repeat itself.
To-day, we have not that security. You in France are exposed still to the direct ravages of the wolves who are men. We in England, to the indirect, but therefore more dangerous, attacks of the men who are wolves. Both our nations know this in our hearts because both have suffered, but this knowledge is not yet the basis of our common actions. Why?
I am, by your grace, a Doctor of Letters; but were I a Doctor of Medicine, I would venture the theory that the very continuance and pressure of the agony through which mankind is passing, has driven many minds to create and invent, as a relief to t
heir nerves, grandiose, meticulously regulated, but none the less nebulous, organisations, and ceremonials of Utopian administrations in the sincere belief that by virtue of the intensity of thought bestowed upon them, these fantasies will achieve the peace of which the world still seeks. It is a state of mind which, in my calling, produces what is known as the Literature of Escape — that is to say, when an artist, recoiling from the harsh face of life as it is takes refuge in depicting a life that never was.
But I hold that, precisely as this mood passes from the individual so also will it pass away from the nations. In England at the present moment situations and opinions are controlled by those who not having foreseen war are perhaps the less capable to complete peace. But behind them are the men who stand upon the threshold of the councils of the nation; whose education to that end commenced seven years ago by the side of your own sons. These men desire for the future, above all, that elementary justice and reasoned safety against the wolves from the North for which they gave themselves in the past on the field of battle. Remember the association there of France and of England was no easy and unbroken progress towards overwhelming triumph. Such dreams exist only in the minds of races who have always exploited but never begotten a civilisation. With us it was otherwise. There was no anxiety, no humiliation, no compromise, no defeat, no catastrophe, and no splendour of recovery which the sons of France and England did not experience together from the first to the last days of the Gehenna through which they came.
And in that mutual realisation of the best and the worst, that sacred brotherhood of common life, shared by all the manhood of each race lies our strength for the future — a strength which neither our own weakness nor the devices of the enemy to work upon our weaknesses can ultimately shake.
For the present, France and England are still wandering in the confusion of the No Man’s Land that lies between the old world and the new. The Commands there are still sending out patrols in all directions which naturally impede each other. The very ground, on which we meet for our conference, is cicatrised with old trenches and sown with the traps and mines left by the enemy. But have patience. Though it be a heavier burden even than war — have patience!
For thirty generations, France and England in secular but fruitful conflict have engendered and sustained a civilisation which has been attacked by an immense and highly organised barbarism. It is threatened now not only by a recrudescence of that barbarism, impenitent and energetic as ever, but by the world-weakening reaction that has overtaken us after our prodigious battle. For that we, who know each other, must make allowance. One cannot resume a broken world as easily as one can resume a broken sentence. But before long, our sons who have spent themselves in suffering and toiling to abolish the menace of barbarism, will recover also from the menace of moral lassitude; and will re-establish together the foundations of the peace of the world, not on pious dreams or amiable hopes, but on those ancient virtues of logic, sanity and laboriousness with which her history and her own indomitable genius have dowered France.
* * *
A Return to Civilisation
I PRAY your patience and forbearance, Masters and Doctors, if I acknowledge in my own tongue the high honour you have bestowed upon me. But you will observe that I do not ask your permission to do this. That is because at the free University of Strasbourg there is now no tongue forbidden to any man within the confraternity of civilised nations. In this you have returned to the custom, momentarily interrupted, of your long and illustrious past. The price paid for this resumption was not small; but it is one in which all the civilised world has shared.
Upon you of this University has been imposed additionally the burden of an oppression, willed and designed in the past, of which the object was, first to enslave, that later it might brutalise, the most sacred springs and sources of man’s intellect. It was a burden of peculiar atrocity, since its external manifestations were camouflaged beneath the apparatus and the verbiage of an elaborated civilisation. All that was lacking to the perfection of its perversion was any understanding of men’s minds — any comprehension of man’s soul. Therefore, the intolerable thing perished, after a time, short, indeed, as the lives of nations are reckoned, but which, to those who suffered and whose sons suffered under it, was a veritable eternity.
That night has passed, but the memory of it remains in your mind; as the knowledge of it remains in the minds of all men who are concerned that, henceforward, communication between man and fellow-man shall be open, direct and uncoerced.
It is that knowledge which makes doubly precious the gifts you chose to bestow, since one receives them, as I do mine to-night, not merely from an ancient and world-renowned citadel of learning, but directly from the hands of those men who suffered and endured in its defence.
* * *
The Trees and the Wall
IN thanking you for the warmth and good-will of your welcome to-night, I would point out that this is not even the second time that I have set foot in Alsace. The first was when I visited Thann in the autumn of ‘15. But then, for reasons now happily removed, it was difficult for me to advance more than half way up the main street of that beautiful town. The second occasion was when I came through Alsace, for too short a time, in April of this present year, and saw the first crops pushing through in the superbly cultivated fields.
I have been told recently, what I learned long ago from the books of your Erckmann-Chatrian, that it is his devotion to his native soil which he cultivates which gives the Alsatian his historical hardihood and independence of character. That may well be. The soil is the best and wisest of teachers. But we know also that when a people, free by instinct and origin, have been forced to act and suffer for their liberty as Alsace has been forced, their character is developed exactly as the strength and quality of a forest is developed by the very storms that seek to remove it.
Remember what your Jaures says about a certain forest. “You may build a wall through the heart of the forest if you please; but the roots of the trees will touch each other beneath it. The branches of the trees will meet and join overhead. The forest has only one soul.”
Alsace is that Forest, and that Wall, as we know, was built very cleverly and very strongly by a people whose ambition was, and is, to build a wall around all mankind. But the slow, irresistible strength of the trees undermined and upheaved it. The Forest defeated the Wall yet again, and for ever.
It is so with all forests. It is so with all races. Listen a little while I speak to you of my own race, for there are foolish people who would try to build a wall between France and England.
Your attachment to your land is because you have lived in it and suffered for it, as your fathers did before you. Your dead of your old wars are scattered all along its frontiers. They lie in all parts of France, and beyond. Have you forgotten where they lie? Wissembourg, Reichshoffen, Gravelotte, St. Privat? The mere names of their resting-places are to you part of your national, your individual life and history and pride. Come with me now to the west of your great country — to those giant bastions of our war that stretch, one after the other from Calais to Rheims. We English have left there, a larger army than Napoleon led into Russia — four hundred thousand of the bodies of our own sons, beside a multitude of whom no trace remains. They died with your sons. Have we forgotten where they died? Ask any man or woman in any English street or field. They will give you at once the name of some little demolished French village of which, perhaps, even you have never heard. They will tell you the very turn of the road to it, the very hedge beside the orchard where their man fell. They will tell you too of the hundreds of kindly, patient French villages behind the lines where your people were so good to our people, not for a little time, but devotedly and continuously, through all those terrible years when yours and ours suffered and toiled together. And more than that! Every square kilometre, indeed almost every square metre, of that France which we know so well, is to us, nationally and individually, a background lit with every human p
assion; represents to us some intense and burning focus of effort in the days when the English and French came to know the very fibre of each other’s souls.
Do we forget those experiences of the living — those memories of the dead? They have been burned into us for ever. So, you see, that living and dead, it must always be the same between our peoples. Our roots meet beneath the soil. Our branches join and touch each other overhead. The forest has only one soul.
All we have to do is to guard against the people who would try to build a wall across the heart of our forest. We must look to it that they do not find even the chance to make a preliminary reconnaissance for this work. They are very clever. They are utterly without scruple, since it is vital to their attack upon our civilisation that that wall should be made. And they will try to commence it in the name of Civilisation!
* * *
Waking From Dreams
I FIND it difficult to thank you for the welcome that you have given me here, or for the kindness with which you have spoken of the very little that I have been fortunate enough to accomplish towards the ends which we have at heart.
We here all know that the ends of France and of England are in essence the same; even as our physical and intellectual frontiers against our enemies should be the same, not only for a term of years but as far as human prevision can extend. Our differences, serious as they may appear in our newspapers, are political and passing. Our necessities are immutable and identical; and on our unity henceforward depends the individual future of each country. And that, believe me, is being realised in England to-day. Wherever one looks or listens one feels this.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 959