[186] The same thing is to be found in Lamartine when he says of Byron: ‘There is more true, imperishable poetry in the tent at Missolonghi where he lies prostrate with fever, under arms, than in all his works.’ (_Commentaire de la 2e Meditation._) This is precisely the teaching adopted by Barrès, Suarès, Péguy (the last preached it by his example, however), which comes down to saying: ‘There is more poetry in a heroic death than in all the activities of the mind.’ Note that this position is by no means common to all the Romantics. Hugo, Vigny, Michelet, felt all the poetry of action, but they never appear to think it superior to the poetry of the lofty forms of intellectual life. Hugo never thought of sacrificing Homer or Galilei to Napoleon, or even to Hoche--to take a disinterested hero such as Lamartine praises in Byron. [187] Note that Ronsard is the very type of the man ‘bent over books’. [188] ‘Germany is the protector and the support of European civilization’ (Lamprecht.) ‘After the war Germany will again take up her historic task, which is to be the heart of Europe and to prepare European humanity.’ (Wilhelm II, _Temps_, 14th September, 1915.) [189] See Robert Dreyfus, _Souvenirs sur Marcel Proust_, page 336. _Transcriber’s Notes_ This transcription is based on the English edition of Aldington’s translation. Some corrections have been applied in consultation with both the French original (‘La trahison des clercs’, B. Grasset, 1927) and the American edition of the same translation (‘The treason of the intellectuals’, William Morrow & Company, 1928). Here are the main revisions. • A text comparison with the American edition incorporated these changes from that edition: • page 28, footnote 28: ‘more idealistic passion than national[+ist] passion’; • page 44: ‘One wonders whether [+there is] a single modern thinker’ (grammatically necessary); • the fourth section, ‘Summary--Predictions’, is now correctly numbered ‘IV’, not a duplicated ‘III’; • The following changes were made with reference to the original French: • numerous instances of unbalanced quotation marks have been fixed; • page 117: removed an unclosed parenthesis beginning ‘(those of’ in favor of parallel phrases with semi-colons, as in the original French; • page 173: added balanced em-dashes after ‘Apart from Erasmus’ as in the original, to clarify sentence structure; • page 176: ‘the chaos of the provincial assembles → assemblies’ (original: ‘le chaos des assemblées provinciales’); • page 181, note 179: ‘with contradicting → without contradicting’ (‘a abouti sans se déjuger à une doctrine de la moralité de la guerre’); • A simple table of contents has been added. • The book cover image accompanying some versions of this text is original and placed in the public domain.