[Woolf was an English essayist and critic best known for his leading role in the Bloomsbury Group of artists and thinkers in early twentieth-century London. Woolf and his wife, the renowned writer Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. The Woolfs and other members of the Bloomsbury Group contributed greatly to the Modernist movement in literature and art. In the following review of the first English-language translation of La trahison des clercs, Woolf challenges Benda's thesis that the "treason of the intellectuals" is a strictly modern, or even widespread, phenomenon.]

Last year intelligent people in France were reading and discussing M. Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs, indeed, my copy of the book has sixteenth edition on it (though that does not mean quite the same as it would here). It has now been translated by Mr. Aldington and published under the title The Great Betrayal, by Julien Benda. The book is clever and original, and its thesis, if true, is important. M. Benda means by "clercs" the thinkers, artists, and writers, and he defines them as "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages, and hence in a certain manner say: 'My kingdom is not of this world.'" M. Benda maintains that in recent times, by which he apparently means the last fifty years or so, something has happened to the clerks that never before in the world's history happened to them as a body. They have collectively betrayed their trust; they have consistently gone over to the side of unreason, passion, and prejudice; instead of standing up before the world and testifying to truth, justice, and humanity, they have justified the world in its follies and cruelties. No modern clerk would drink the hemlock with Socrates or face the axe with Gentilis, or go to the stake with Servetus; if he were asked: "Art not thou also one of truth's disciples?" he would stand warming himself at the fire and reply: "I am not." The heathens had their Socrates, the Renaissance its Erasmus, the eighteenth century its Voltaire; our age has its Nietzsches and its Treitschkes, its Barrés, and its Kiplings. They are a solid company of lost leaders who have left us for the handful of silver or the riband to stick in their coats.

M. Benda not only asserts the truth of these facts; he also offers some explanation of the phenomenon. The nineteenth century undoubtedly effected a revolution in the communal psychology of groups. The racial, national, and social group attained a cohesion new to history. The perfecting of communications, the herding of the population into towns, universal education, and the modern printing machine made this cohesion possible. The most effective material for binding the groups together was political passion, national passion, or class passion. Before the nineteenth century the nation or the class was a very loosely knit group, and the number of people affected by political events or moved by political passions was always very small. A war, for instance, was the business of kings, statesmen, and soldiers, and ordinary people were hardly concerned with it, even though it were a world war. They had time to cultivate their gardens, and that is what they did rather than maintain the bourgeois or proletariat front in the class war or hate the Germans. But to-day the nation and the class are everybody's business, and political passions are broadcast and standardized. Patriotism becomes one kind of standardized hatred, and bourgeoisism or proletarianism another. The clerk, who stands for reason and truth, ought to testify against the unreason and hatred thus let loose over the world. But the modern clerk betrays his trust. The herd is too strong for him. He has not the courage to stand out against the canalized and standardized volume of public opinion, and what is, perhaps, more important, he cannot resist the enormous temptation of the silver and ribands which await the modern clerk who will put in his pen at the service of political passions.

This is what I take to be M. Benda's thesis. Obviously there is some truth in it. The cohesion and canalization of political passion, in nations and in classes, are facts. The Nietzschean glorification of force and the dissemination of political and social hatred are recognized symptoms of twentieth-century civilization. It is, I think, also true that the modern clerk for the most part cuts a sorry figure. M. Benda's book is full of instances, chiefly German and French, of clerks—clerical clerks in the Church and lay intellectuals—who, instead of speaking for reason, freedom, humanity, and peace, have become the champions and lackeys of patriotic passion, national and class hatred, reaction, barbarism, and war. M. Barrés in France and Mr. Kipling in England are not unique, they are only better known and more successful than their followers. Mr. Shaw's defence of Fascism is a typical instance of the modern clerk's worship of success and "efficiency." The record of the Churches during the war and the attitude of the clergy in all countries towards nationalist passions support M. Benda's thesis.

But there is one point, and an important one, on which I am not sure that M. Benda proves his case. It is impossible, as one reads his book, not to be in doubt occasionally whether this betrayal of reason and humanity by the clerks is after all a modern phenomenon. Of course, there were Socrates, Erasmus, Voltaire, but history can also show a very large number of intellectuals who, in the confessional, would have had to say that in theory they had followed Reason, but in practice had betrayed her. If Servetus was a clerk who was burnt for his opinions, Calvin, who hunted him to the stake, was also a clerk. And it should be remembered that the judicial murder of Servetus, which, to quote Hallam, "had perhaps as many circumstances of aggravation as any execution for heresy that ever took place," was applauded by practically all the clerks of the time. Indeed, it is said that only one eminent man of learning opposed or protested against it, and his reward has been oblivion, for I do not suppose that one person in a million has ever heard the name of Castellio. The political passions which M. Benda deplores to-day hardly existed before the nineteenth century, but their place was, admirably filled by religious passions. And before the eighteenth century nearly all the clerks found reasons for applauding persecution and intolerance, Erasmus almost alone speaks for reason and humanity. Coming down to later times, it is possible to say of Burke and Wordsworth exactly what M. Benda says of the modern clerk, while Zola and Mr. Bertrand Russell and Einstein have shown that even today the betrayal is not universal. I think therefore, that M. Benda rather exaggerates the standard of reason and humanity in the clerks of previous generations. There always have been lost leaders; indeed, for a leader to live over the age of forty usually means that he is lost. It is the result, I believe, of what the doctors call scleroma.