INVECTIVE

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 113, 12 May 1917, Page 16

INVECTIVE

"THE GODS IN BATTLE "

PAUL HYACINTHE LOYSON'S

LETTERS.

The "letters" hereunder are written by M. Paul Hyacinthe Loyson, son of the famous preacher, Pere Hyacinth, who when in the pulpit held spellbound vast congregations in Notre Dame. The letters are published by Hodder and Stoughton, and have been translated by Lady Frazer. Mr. H. G. Wells has written their introduction.

Before the war M. Loyson was known, says M. Jean Finot, ac one of the most ardent and esteemed pacifists, editor of a large weekly journal, author of plays that had great success in foreign countries ; he was looked upon by the younger generation as one of,'the foremost standard-bearers of French pacificism and of reconciliation with Germany. Before the war, too, ho was often in Germany, superintending the production of his plays, and was even the secretary of the Committee for the Intellectual Reconciliation of France and Germany, whose motto was "To know each other better."

To Professor Haeckel, of Jena, M. Loyson writes criticising an article in an American magazine, on "England's Bloodguiltiness in the World "War," in which Haeckel said : "Serious as this war would have been for us (against Russia and France), we should none the less have had great hopes of victory. But by England's declaration of war against us on 4th August, the political and strategic situation was altogether changed." M. Loyson comments thus : " A war which, without the intervention of England, only set fighting a wretched twenty millions of men—Germans, Russians, Austrians, French, Belgians, Serbs, and Montenegrins, to the presumed advantage of Germany—that wae only ' small beer,' seeing that Germany tossed off the whole glassful. The abomination only began with the unseemly action of John Bull, who came and dashed the glass from her lips." To Maximilian Harden, the editor of Die Zukunft, M, loyson in 1910 went to "put a stop to the perpetual clash of pens which was inciting the clash of steel between our two countries," and then in August, 1915, he writes to Harden this bitter letter: —

"Two months and a-half before the German war you declared that the results of our General Election proved that republican France, wished to live at peace with Germany, and you exhorted the whole of your pack of barking hounds 'to keep their tongues between their teeth.' You held your own tongue only so as to dart it out farther and yelp louder. The prey was not yet, to your mind, within, your reach, for you had not yet become what you were to be.

Two months from then we had the ultimatum to Servia, which Austria, as you say, 'planned in concert' with Germany. For that confession—Maximilian the case-HARDENed—on the day when your sans-culottes, made bold .by a sound drubbing, do you the honour of the guillotine, let me wreathe the scaffold in foses.

"You had the gimlet eye of a master brigand when you. watched the clock which was to chime out the exact hour of your crime. ... By Heaven, Maximilian ! you will remain the archtype of the German; intellectual. „ . Bismarck has bequeathed to you his virile vigour, under the sharp hairless edge of your lips you have also H.he fangs of Bismarck's mastiffs. "But beware! Methinks I see a red line round your throat." Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, in explanation of his silence at the time when Germany violated all Belgium, wrote: — "If I were obliged to draw, up protestations every time there, happens in the world an event of which 1 disapprove I should have nothing else to do." To thia M. Loyson replies: "One trembles at the idea of the immense sacrifice of precious time which might have been exacted from you by one protestation on behalf of Belgium! ... The massacre of thousands of innocents, the razing of the ground of hundreds of villages—the workmanlike burning of some ten art cities, protected all of them by a proper warrant of neutrality —all this, sir, is suitably included by you in the commonplace category of the daily 'News in Brief which you have not time to write down. ... The cock of the walk does not concern himself with flea-bites 'Tor yourself you recognise the infamous crime, but your time is too limited to condemn it." Here is a castigation of Bjorn Bjornson, the son of the great Norwegian novelist: "If I had been your guest I should abstain from writing these lines to you ; but I was the guest of your noble father, when by an irony of fate you and I were at his table. I had an affection for your father, and he for me. I also knew and discussed with him on many occasions his Germanophile illusions. But so surely as he was the national bard of his country, the chief of the ■ Liberals of Norway. ... so surely, Monsieur, would he blush to-day to see his name prostituted in the service of barbarism.

"There are such things as spiritual bastards.

"He, the poet; you, the stage-man-ager, the impresario of the Dance of Death. He, the great Scandinavian bear, standing sentinel on the iceberg, kindling with his prophetic eyes all the obscure auroras of the soul to, burst forth with their brightest fires into an effulgent justice: thoa! 'licked cub,' yet unlicked by Bernhardi, in Hagenbeck's wild beast show."