From a French Pacifist
A VOICE of courage and determination, unsparing but full of hope, comes from France in L'Amour Roi [1] by Marcelle Capy. At the Conference of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, at Washington two years ago, Marcelle Capy was an outstanding figure among the French delegates. Both in speaking and in writing she has a clear realism, based on good understanding of political and economic life. When she writes on Love as King she gives a virile and common sense analysis of the power of intelligent active good will.
The pacifism is not passive. "If it were enough to have peaceful [page 2] souls in order to have peace, it would have been achieved long since. Most honest folk ask only that they may live undisturbed. ... But the taste for peace and for the Good are passive sentiments, sweetly amiable but barren. I do not care whether I offended peaceful souls for I expect nothing from an inert pacifism which loves peace as a child loves candy." "The modern man who truly wishes for Justice, fights in the name of Truth with the weapon of his conscience, the power of his sincerity, the force of his soul, determined to the point of sacrifice. ... If to desire peace meant to drift into softness and to be afraid, I would not be a pacifist. But I know that the only conflict where it is possible and necessary to practice the virile qualities that prove man's greatness, is the conflict of purpose against inertia, of living spirit against conventionality, of the human will against brute force, of creative power against destructive weakness, of vigor against passivity, of conscious ethics against unmorality, of Love against selfishness." "I count as Utopian not the man who has a great dream and marches towards it, but him who wishes to achieve an ideal, little or great, immediately and without effort."
Much of the writing is poetic and exquisite. The earlier pages of the book are filled with the mystical background of Marcelle Capy's philosophy and personal experience. The book gains in vigor as it proceeds. But the conception of the beauty of Life set forth in meditative and discursive fashion in the earlier parts of the book enriches and strengthens the more concrete argument. The hard common sense of the value of [cooperation] and the power of serene active goodness run through the whole, and readers who are repelled by the mystical would yet find the book practical and stimulating.
A. R.
[1] Published by Societé Mutuelle d'Edition (25, rue de Lille, Paris). 7 francs. Exact cost through The World Tomorrow Book Shop cannot be stated in advance.
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