CHAPTER I

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ROMAIN ROLLAND

[Illustration: Romain Rolland after a drawing by Granié (1909)]

ROMAIN ROLLAND

THE MAN AND HIS WORK

BY

STEFAN ZWEIG

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

BY

EDEN and CEDAR PAUL

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

THOMAS SELTZER

1921

Copyright, 1921, by

THOMAS SELTZER, INC.

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

Dedication

Not merely do I describe the work of a great European. Above all do I

pay tribute to a personality, that of one who for me and for many others

has loomed as the most impressive moral phenomenon of our age. Modelled

upon his own biographies of classical figures, endeavouring to portray

the greatness of an artist while never losing sight of the man or

forgetting his influence upon the world of moral endeavour, conceived in

this spirit, my book is likewise inspired with a sense of personal

gratitude, in that, amid these days forlorn, it has been vouchsafed to

me to know the miracle of so radiant an existence.

IN COMMEMORATION

of this uniqueness, I dedicate the book to those few who, in the hour of

fiery trial, remained faithful to

ROMAIN ROLLAND

AND TO OUR BELOVED HOME OF

EUROPE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

DEDICATION

PART ONE: BIOGRAPHICAL

I. INTRODUCTORY 1

II. EARLY CHILDHOOD 3

III. SCHOOL DAYS 8

IV. THE NORMAL SCHOOL 12

V. A MESSAGE FROM AFAR 18

VI. ROME 23

VII. THE CONSECRATION 29

VIII. YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP 32

IX. YEARS OF STRUGGLE 37

X. A DECADE OF SECLUSION 43

XI. A PORTRAIT 45

XII. RENOWN 48

XIII. ROLLAND AS THE EMBODIMENT OF THE EUROPEAN SPIRIT 52

PART TWO: EARLY WORK AS A DRAMATIST

I. THE WORK AND THE EPOCH 57

II. THE WILL TO GREATNESS 63

III. THE CREATIVE CYCLES 67

IV. THE UNKNOWN DRAMATIC CYCLE 71

V. THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH. SAINT LOUIS, AËRT, 1895-1898 76

VI. SAINT LOUIS. 1894 80

VII. AËRT, 1898 83

VIII. ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE 86

IX. AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE 90

X. THE PROGRAM 94

XI. THE CREATIVE ARTIST 98

XII. THE DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTION, 1898-1902 100

XIII. THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY, 1902 103

XIV. DANTON, 1900 106

XV. THE TRIUMPH OF REASON, 1899 110

XVI. THE WOLVES, 1898 113

XVII. THE CALL LOST IN THE VOID 117

XVIII. A DAY WILL COME, 1902 119

XIX. THE PLAYWRIGHT 123

PART THREE: THE HEROIC BIOGRAPHIES

I. DE PROFUNDIS 133

II. THE HEROES OF SUFFERING 137

III. BEETHOVEN 140

IV. MICHELANGELO 144

V. TOLSTOI 147

VI. THE UNWRITTEN BIOGRAPHIES 150

PART FOUR: JEAN CHRISTOPHE

I. SANCTUS CHRISTOPHORUS 157

II. RESURRECTION 160

III. THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK 162

IV. THE WORK WITHOUT A FORMULA 166

V. KEY TO THE CHARACTERS 172

VI. A HEROIC SYMPHONY 177

VII. THE ENIGMA OF CREATIVE WORK 181

VIII. JEAN CHRISTOPHE 188

IX. OLIVIER 195

X. GRAZIA 200

XI. JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND HIS FELLOW MEN 203

XII. JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND THE NATIONS 207

XIII. THE PICTURE OF FRANCE 211

XIV. THE PICTURE OF GERMANY 217

XV. THE PICTURE OF ITALY 221

XVI. THE JEWS 224

XVII. THE GENERATIONS 229

XVIII. DEPARTURE 235

PART FIVE: INTERMEZZO SCHERZO (COLAS BREUGNON)

I. TAKEN UNAWARES 241

II. THE BURGUNDIAN BROTHER 244

III. GAULOISERIES 249

IV. A FRUSTRATE MESSAGE 252

PART SIX: THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE

I. THE WARDEN OF THE INHERITANCE 257

II. FOREARMED 260

III. THE PLACE OF REFUGE 264

IV. THE SERVICE OF MAN 268

V. THE TRIBUNAL OF THE SPIRIT 271

VI. THE CONTROVERSY WITH GERHARDT HAUPTMANN 277

VII. THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERHAEREN 281

VIII. THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE 285

IX. THE MANIFESTOES 289

X. ABOVE THE BATTLE 293

XI. THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED 297

XII. OPPONENTS 304

XIII. FRIENDS 311

XIV. THE LETTERS 317

XV. THE COUNSELOR 320

XVI. THE SOLITARY 324

XVII. THE DIARY 327

XVIII. THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES 329

XIX. LILULI 335

XX. CLERAMBAULT 339

XXI. THE LAST APPEAL 348

XXII. DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND 351

XXIII. ENVOY 355

BIBLIOGRAPHY 357

INDEX 371

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Romain Rolland after a drawing by Granié (1909) _Frontispiece_

FACING

PAGE

Romain Rolland at the Normal School 12

Leo Tolstoi's Letter 20

Rolland's Transcript of Francesco Provenzale's Aria from

_Lo Schiavo di sua Moglie_ 34

Rolland's Transcript of a Melody by Paul Dupin, _L'Oncle

Gottfried_ 35

Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing _Beethoven_ 142

Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing _Jean Christophe_ 162

Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing _Above the Battle_ 294

Rolland's Mother 324

Original Manuscript of _The Declaration of the Independence

of the Mind_ 352

PART ONE

BIOGRAPHICAL

The surge of the Heart's energies would not break in a mist of

foam, nor be subtilized into Spirit, did not the rock of Fate, from

the beginning of days, stand ever silent in the way.

HÖLDERLIN.

ROMAIN ROLLAND

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The first fifty years of Romain Rolland's life were passed in

inconspicuous and almost solitary labors. Thenceforward, his name was to

become a storm center of European discussion. Until shortly before the

apocalyptic year, hardly an artist of our days worked in such complete

retirement, or received so little recognition.

Since that year, no artist has been the subject of so much controversy.

His fundamental ideas were not destined to make themselves generally

known until there was a world in arms bent upon destroying them.

Envious fate works ever thus, interweaving the lives of the great with

tragical threads. She tries her powers to the uttermost upon the strong,

sending events to run counter to their plans, permeating their lives

with strange allegories, imposing obstacles in their path--that they may

be guided more unmistakably in the right course. Fate plays with them,

plays a game with a sublime issue, for all experience is precious.

Think of the greatest among our contemporaries; think of Wagner,

Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Strindberg; in the case of each of

them, destiny has superadded to the creations of the artist's mind, the

drama of personal experience.

Notably do these considerations apply to the life of Romain Rolland. The

significance of his life's work becomes plain only when it is

contemplated as a whole. It was slowly produced, for it had to encounter

great dangers; it was a gradual revelation, tardily consummated. The

foundations of this splendid structure were deeply dug in the firm

ground of knowledge, and were laid upon the hidden masonry of years

spent in isolation. Thus tempered by the ordeal of a furnace seven times

heated, his work has the essential imprint of humanity. Precisely owing

to the strength of its foundations, to the solidity of its moral energy,

was Rolland's thought able to stand unshaken throughout the war storms

that have been ravaging Europe. While other monuments to which we had

looked up with veneration, cracking and crumbling, have been leveled

with the quaking earth, the monument he had builded stands firm "above

the battle," above the medley of opinions, a pillar of strength towards

which all free spirits can turn for consolation amid the tumult of the

world.

CHAPTER II

EARLY CHILDHOOD

Romain Rolland was born on January 29, 1866, a year of strife, the year

when Sadowa was fought. His native town was Clamecy, where another

imaginative writer, Claude Tillier, author of _Mon Oncle Benjamin_, was

likewise born. An ancient city, within the confines of old-time

Burgundy, Clamecy is a quiet place, where life is easy and uneventful.

The Rollands belong to a highly respected middle-class family. His

father, who was a lawyer, was one of the notables of the town. His

mother, a pious and serious-minded woman, devoted all her energies to

the upbringing of her two children; Romain, a delicate boy, and his

sister Madeleine, younger than he. As far as the environment of daily

life was concerned, the atmosphere was calm and untroubled; but in the

blood of the parents existed contrasts deriving from earlier days of

French history, contrasts not yet fully reconciled. On the father's

side, Rolland's ancestors were champions of the Convention, ardent

partisans of the Revolution, and some of them sealed their faith with

their blood. From his mother's family he inherited the Jansenist spirit,

the investigator's temperament of Port-Royal. He was thus endowed by

both parents with tendencies to fervent faith, but tendencies to faith

in contradictory ideals. In France this cleavage between love for

religion and passion for freedom, between faith and revolution, dates

from centuries back. Its seeds were destined to blossom in the artist.

His first years of childhood were passed in the shadow of the defeat of

1870. In _Antoinette_, Rolland sketches the tranquil life of just such a

provincial town as Clamecy. His home was an old house on the bank of a

canal. Not from this narrow world were to spring the first delights of

the boy who, despite his physical frailty, was so passionately sensitive

to enjoyment. A mighty impulse from afar, from the unfathomable past,

came to stir his pulses. Early did he discover music, the language of

languages, the first great message of the soul. His mother taught him

the piano. From its tones he learned to build for himself the infinite

world of feeling, thus transcending the limits imposed by nationality.

For while the pupil eagerly assimilated the easily understood music of

French classical composers, German music at the same time enthralled his

youthful soul. He has given an admirable description of the way in which

this revelation came to him: "We had a number of old German music books.

German? Did I know the meaning of the word? In our part of the world I

believe no one had ever seen a German ... I turned the leaves of the old

books, spelling out the notes on the piano, ... and these runnels,

these streamlets of melody, which watered my heart, sank into the

thirsty ground as the rain soaks into the earth. The bliss and the pain,

the desires and the dreams, of Mozart and Beethoven, have become flesh

of my flesh and bone of my bone. I am them, and they are me.... How much

do I owe them. When I was ill as a child, and death seemed near, a

melody of Mozart would watch over my pillow like a lover.... Later, in

crises of doubt and depression, the music of Beethoven would revive in

me the sparks of eternal life.... Whenever my spirit is weary, whenever

I am sick at heart, I turn to my piano and bathe in music."

Thus early did the child enter into communion with the wordless speech

of humanity; thus early had the all-embracing sympathy of the life of

feeling enabled him to pass beyond the narrows of town and of province,

of nation and of era. Music was his first prayer to the elemental forces

of life; a prayer daily repeated in countless forms; so that now, half a

century later, a week and even a day rarely elapses without his holding

converse with Beethoven. The other saint of his childhood's days,

Shakespeare, likewise belonged to a foreign land. With his first loves,

all unaware, the lad had already overstridden the confines of

nationality. Amid the dusty lumber in a loft he discovered an edition of

Shakespeare, which his grandfather (a student in Paris when Victor Hugo

was a young man and Shakespeare mania was rife) had bought and

forgotten. His childish interest was first awakened by a volume of faded

engravings entitled _Galerie des femmes de Shakespeare_. His fancy was

thrilled by the charming faces, by the magical names Perdita, Imogen,

and Miranda. But soon, reading the plays, he became immersed in the maze

of happenings and personalities. He would remain in the loft hour after

hour, disturbed by nothing beyond the occasional trampling of the horses

in the stable below or by the rattling of a chain on a passing barge.

Forgetting everything and forgotten by all he sat in a great armchair

with the beloved book, which like that of Prospero made all the spirits

of the universe his servants. He was encircled by a throng of unseen

auditors, by imaginary figures which formed a rampart between himself

and the world of realities.

As ever happens, we see a great life opening with great dreams. His

first enthusiasms were most powerfully aroused by Shakespeare and

Beethoven. The youth inherited from the child, the man from the youth,

this passionate admiration for greatness. One who has hearkened to such

a call, cannot easily confine his energies within a narrow circle. The

school in the petty provincial town had nothing more to teach this

aspiring boy. The parents could not bring themselves to send their

darling alone to the metropolis, so with heroic self-denial they decided

to sacrifice their own peaceful existence. The father resigned his

lucrative and independent position as notary, which made him a leading

figure in Clamecy society, in order to become one of the numberless

employees of a Parisian bank. The familiar home, the patriarchal life,

were thrown aside that the Rollands might watch over their boy's

schooling and upgrowing in the great city. The whole family looked to

Romain's interest, thus teaching him early what others do not usually

learn until full manhood--responsibility.

CHAPTER III

SCHOOL DAYS

The boy was still too young to feel the magic of Paris. To his dreamy

nature, the clamorous and brutal materialism of the city seemed strange

and almost hostile. Far on into life he was to retain from these hours a

hidden dread, a hidden shrinking from the fatuity and soullessness of

great towns, an inexplicable feeling that there was a lack of truth and

genuineness in the life of the capital. His parents sent him to the

Lyceum of Louis the Great, a celebrated high school in the heart of

Paris. Many of the ablest and most distinguished sons of France, have

been among the boys who, humming like a swarm of bees, emerge daily at

noon from the great hive of knowledge. He was introduced to the items of

French classical education, that he might become "un bon perroquet

Cornélien." His vital experiences, however, lay outside the domain of

this logical poesy or poetical logic; his enthusiasms drew him, as

heretofore, towards a poesy that was really alive, and towards music.

Nevertheless, it was at school that he found his first companion.

By the caprice of chance, for this friend likewise fame was to come only

after twenty years of silence. Romain Rolland and his intimate Paul

Claudel (author of _Annonce faite à Marie_), the two greatest

imaginative writers in contemporary France, who crossed the threshold of

school together, were almost simultaneously, twenty years later, to

secure a European reputation. During the last quarter of a century, the

two have followed very different paths in faith and spirit, have

cultivated widely divergent ideals. Claudel's steps have been directed

towards the mystic cathedral of the Catholic past; Rolland has moved

through France and beyond, towards the ideal of a free Europe. At that

time, however, in their daily walks to and from school, they enjoyed

endless conversations, exchanging thoughts upon the books they had read,

and mutually inflaming one another's youthful ardors. The bright

particular star of their heaven was Richard Wagner, who at that date was

casting a marvelous spell over the mind of French youth. In Rolland's

case it was not simply Wagner the artist who exercised this influence,

but Wagner the universal poietic personality.

School days passed quickly and somewhat joylessly. Too sudden had been

the transition from the romanticist home to the harshly realist Paris.

To the sensitive lad, the city could only show its teeth, display its

indifference, manifest the fierceness of its rhythm. These qualities,

this Maelstrom aspect, aroused in his mind something approaching to

alarm. He yearned for sympathy, cordiality, soaring aspirations; now as

before, art was his savior, "glorious art, in so many gray hours." His

chief joys were the rare afternoons spent at popular Sunday concerts,

when the pulse of music came to thrill his heart--how charmingly is not

this described in _Antoinette_! Nor had Shakespeare lost power in any

degree, now that his figures, seen on the stage, were able to arouse

mingled dread and ecstasy. The boy gave his whole soul to the dramatist.

"He took possession of me like a conqueror; I threw myself to him like a

flower. At the same time, the spirit of music flowed over me as water

floods a plain; Beethoven and Berlioz even more than Wagner. I had to

pay for these joys. I was, as it were, intoxicated for a year or two,

much as the earth becomes supersaturated in time of flood. In the

entrance examination to the Normal School I failed twice, thanks to my

preoccupation with Shakespeare and with music." Subsequently, he

discovered a third master, a liberator of his faith. This was Spinoza,

whose acquaintance he made during an evening spent alone at school, and

whose gentle intellectual light was henceforward to illumine Rolland's

soul throughout life. The greatest of mankind have ever been his

examples and companions.

When the time came for him to leave school, a conflict arose between

inclination and duty. Rolland's most ardent wish was to become an artist

after the manner of Wagner, to be at once musician and poet, to write

heroic musical dramas. Already there were floating through his mind

certain musical conceptions which, as a national contrast to those of

Wagner, were to deal with the French cycle of legends. One of these,

that of St. Louis, he was in later years indeed to transfigure, not in

music, but in winged words. His parents, however, considered such

wishes premature. They demanded more practical endeavors, and

recommended the Polytechnic School. Ultimately a happy compromise was

found between duty and inclination. A decision was made in favor of the

study of the mental and moral sciences. In 1886, at a third trial,

Rolland brilliantly passed the entrance examination to the Normal

School. This institution, with its peculiar characteristics and the

special historic form of its social life, was to stamp a decisive

imprint upon his thought and his destiny.

CHAPTER IV

THE NORMAL SCHOOL

Rolland's childhood was passed amid the rural landscapes of Burgundy.

His school life was spent in the roar of Paris. His student years

involved a still closer confinement in airless spaces, when he became a

boarder at the Normal School. To avoid all distraction, the pupils of

this institution are shut away from the world, kept remote from real

life, that they may understand historical life the better. Renan, in

_Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, has given a powerful description

of the isolation of budding theologians in the seminary. Embryo army

officers are segregated at St. Cyr. In like manner at the Normal School

a general staff for the intellectual world is trained in cloistral

seclusion. The "normaliens" are to be the teachers of the coming

generation. The spirit of tradition unites with stereotyped method, the

two breeding in-and-in with fruitful results; the ablest among the

scholars will become in turn teachers in the same institution. The

training is severe, demanding indefatigable diligence, for its goal is

to discipline the intellect. But since it aspires towards universality

of culture, the Normal School permits considerable freedom of

organization, and avoids the dangerous over-specialization

characteristic of Germany. Not by chance did the most universal spirits

of France emanate from the Normal School. We think of such men as Renan,

Jaurès, Michelet, Monod, and Rolland.

[Illustration: Romain Rolland at the Normal School]

Although during these years Rolland's chief interest was directed

towards philosophy, although he was a diligent student of the

pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, of the Cartesians, and of

Spinoza, nevertheless, during the second year of his course, he chose,

or was intelligently guided to choose, history and geography as his

principal subjects. The choice was a fortunate one, and was decisive for

the development of his artistic life. Here he first came to look upon

universal history as an eternal ebb and flow of epochs, wherein

yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow comprise but a single living entity. He

learned to take broad views. He acquired his pre-eminent capacity for

vitalizing history. On the other hand, he owes to this same strenuous

school of youth his power for contemplating the present from the

detachment of a higher cultural sphere. No other imaginative writer of

our time possesses anything like so solid a foundation in the form of

real and methodical knowledge in all domains. It may well be, moreover,

that his incomparable capacity for work was acquired during these years

of seclusion.

Here in the Prytaneum (Rolland's life is full of such mystical word

plays) the young man found a friend. He also was in the future to be one

of the leading spirits of France, one who, like Claudel and Rolland

himself, was not to attain widespread celebrity until the lapse of a

quarter of a century. We should err were we to consider it the outcome

of pure chance that the three greatest representatives of idealism, of

the new poetic faith in France, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, and Charles

Péguy, should in their formative years have been intimate friends of

Romain Rolland, and that after long years of obscurity they should

almost at the same hour have acquired extensive influence over the

French nation. In their mutual converse, in their mysterious and ardent

faith, were created the elements of a world which was not immediately to

become visible through the formless vapors of time. Though not one of

these friends had as yet a clear vision of his goal, and though their

respective energies were to lead them along widely divergent paths,

their mutual reactions strengthened the primary forces of passion and of

steadfast earnestness to become a sense of all-embracing world

community. They were inspired with an identical mission to devote their

lives, renouncing success and pecuniary reward, that by work and appeal

they might help to restore to their nation its lost faith. Each one of

these four comrades, Rolland, Suarès, Claudel, and Péguy, has from a

different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.

As in the case of Claudel at the Lyceum, so now with Suarès at the

Normal School, Rolland was drawn to his friend through the love which

they shared for music, and especially for the music of Wagner. A further

bond of union was the passion both had for Shakespeare. "This passion,"

Rolland has written, "was the first link in the long chain of our

friendship. Suarès was then, what he has again become to-day after

traversing the numerous phases of a rich and manifold nature, a man of

the Renaissance. He had the very soul, the stormy temperament, of that

epoch. With his long black hair, his pale face, and his burning eyes, he

looked like an Italian painted by Carpaccio or Ghirlandajo. As a school

exercise he penned an ode to Cesare Borgia. Shakespeare was his god, as

Shakespeare was mine; and we often fought side by side for Shakespeare

against our professors." But soon came a new passion which partially

replaced that for the great English dramatist. There ensued the

"Scythian invasion," an enthusiastic affection for Tolstoi, which was

likewise to be lifelong. These young idealists were repelled by the

trite naturalism of Zola and Maupassant. They were enthusiasts who

looked for life to be sustained at a level of heroic tension. They, like

Flaubert and Anatole France, could not rest content with a literature of

self gratification and amusement. Now, above these trivialities, was

revealed the figure of a messenger of God, of one prepared to devote his

life to the ideal. "Our sympathies went out to him. Our love for Tolstoi

was able to reconcile all our contradictions. Doubtless each one of us

loved him from different motives, for each one of us found himself in

the master. But for all of us alike he opened a gate into an infinite

universe; for all he was a revelation of life." As always since earliest

childhood, Rolland was wholly occupied in the search for ultimate

values, for the hero, for the universal artist.

During these years of hard work at the Normal School, Rolland devoured

book after book, writing after writing. His teachers, Brunetière, and

above all Gabriel Monod, already recognized his peculiar gift for

historical description. Rolland was especially enthralled by the branch

of knowledge which Jakob Burckhardt had in a sense invented not long

before, and to which he had given the name of "history of

civilization"--the spiritual picture of an entire era. As regards

special epochs, Rolland's interest was notably aroused by the wars of

religion, wherein the spiritual elements of faith were permeated with

the heroism of personal sacrifice. Thus early do the motifs of all his

creative work shape themselves! He drafted a whole series of studies,

and simultaneously planned a more ambitious work, a history of the

heroic epoch of Catherine de Medici. In the scientific field, too, our

student was boldly attacking ultimate problems, drinking in ideas

thirstily from all the streamlets and rivers of philosophy, natural

science, logic, music, and the history of art. But the burden of these

acquirements was no more able to crush the poet in him than the weight

of a tree is able to crush its roots. During stolen hours he made essays

in poetry and music, which, however, he has always kept hidden from the

world. In the year 1888, before leaving the Normal School to face the

experiences of actual life, he wrote _Credo quia verum_. This is a

remarkable document, a spiritual testament, a moral and philosophical

confession. It remains unpublished, but a friend of Rolland's youth

assures us that it contains the essential elements of his untrammeled

outlook on the world. Conceived in the Spinozist spirit, based not upon

"Cogito ergo sum" but upon "Cogito ergo est," it builds up the world,

and thereon establishes its god. For himself accountable to himself

alone, he is to be freed in future from the need for metaphysical

speculation. As if it were a sacred oath, duly sworn, he henceforward

bears this confession with him into the struggle; if he but remain true

to himself, he will be true to his vow. The foundations have been deeply

dug and firmly laid. It is time now to begin the superstructure.

Such were his activities during these years of study. But through them

there already looms a dream, the dream of a romance, the history of a

single-hearted artist who bruises himself against the rocks of life.

Here we have the larval stage of _Jean Christophe_, the first twilit

sketch of the work to come. But much weaving of destiny, many

encounters, and an abundance of ordeals will be requisite, ere the

multicolored and impressive imago will emerge from the obscurity of

these first intimations.

CHAPTER V

A MESSAGE FROM AFAR

School days were over. The old problem concerning the choice of

profession came up anew for discussion. Although science had proved

enriching, although it had aroused enthusiasm, it had by no means

fulfilled the young artist's cherished dream. More than ever his

longings turned towards imaginative literature and towards music. His

most ardent ambition was still to join the ranks of those whose words

and melodies unlock men's souls; he aspired to become a creator, a

consoler. But life seemed to demand orderly forms, discipline instead of

freedom, an occupation instead of a mission. The young man, now

two-and-twenty years of age, stood undecided at the parting of the ways.

Then came a message from afar, a message from the beloved hand of Leo

Tolstoi. The whole generation honored the Russian as a leader, looked up

to him as the embodied symbol of truth. In this year was published

Tolstoi's booklet _What is to be Done?_, containing a fierce indictment

of art. Contemptuously he shattered all that was dearest to Rolland.

Beethoven, to whom the young Frenchman daily addressed a fervent prayer,

was termed a seducer to sensuality. Shakespeare was a poet of the

fourth rank, a wastrel. The whole of modern art was swept away like

chaff from the threshing-floor; the heart's holy of holies was cast into

outer darkness. This tract, which rang through Europe, could be

dismissed with a smile by those of an older generation; but for the

young men who revered Tolstoi as their one hope in a lying and cowardly

age, it stormed through their consciences like a hurricane. The bitter

necessity was forced upon them of choosing between Beethoven and the

holy one of their hearts. Writing of this hour, Rolland says: "The

goodness, the sincerity, the absolute straightforwardness of this man

made of him for me an infallible guide in the prevailing moral anarchy.

But at the same time, from childhood's days, I had passionately loved

art. Music, in especial, was my daily food; I do not exaggerate in

saying that to me music was as much a necessary of life as bread." Yet

this very music was stigmatized by Tolstoi, the beloved teacher, the

most human of men; was decried as "an enjoyment that leads men to

neglect duty." Tolstoi contemned the Ariel of the soul as a seducer to

sensuality. What was to be done? The young man's heart was racked. Was

he to follow the sage of Yasnaya Polyana, to cut away from his life all

will to art; or was he to follow the innermost call which would lead him

to transfuse the whole of his life with music and poesy? He must

perforce be unfaithful, either to the most venerated among artists, or

to art itself; either to the most beloved among men or to the most

beloved among ideas.

In this state of mental cleavage, the student now formed an amazing

resolve. Sitting down one day in his little attic, he wrote a letter to

be sent into the remote distances of Russia, a letter describing to

Tolstoi the doubts that perplexed his conscience. He wrote as those who

despair pray to God, with no hope for a miracle, no expectation of an

answer, but merely to satisfy the burning need for confession. Weeks

elapsed, and Rolland had long since forgotten his hour of impulse. But

one evening, returning to his room, he found upon the table a small

packet. It was Tolstoi's answer to the unknown correspondent,

thirty-eight pages written in French, an entire treatise. This letter of

October 14, 1887, subsequently published by Péguy as No. 4 of the third

series of "_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," began with the affectionate

words, "Cher Frère." First was announced the profound impression

produced upon the great man, to whose heart this cry for help had

struck. "I have received your first letter. It has touched me to the

heart. I have read it with tears in my eyes." Tolstoi went on to expound

his ideas upon art. That alone is of value, he said, which binds men

together; the only artist who counts is the artist who makes a sacrifice

for his convictions. The precondition of every true calling must be, not

love for art, but love for mankind. Those only who are filled with such

a love can hope that they will ever be able, as artists, to do anything

worth doing.

[Illustration: Leo Tolstoi's Letter]

These words exercised a decisive influence upon the future of Romain

Rolland. But the doctrine summarized above has been expounded by Tolstoi

often enough, and expounded more clearly. What especially affected

our novice was the proof of the sage's readiness to give human help. Far

more than by the words was Rolland moved by the kindly deed of Tolstoi.

This man of world-wide fame, responding to the appeal of a nameless and

unknown youth, a student in a back street of Paris, had promptly laid

aside his own labors, had devoted a whole day, or perhaps two days, to

the task of answering and consoling his unknown brother. For Rolland

this was a vital experience, a deep and creative experience. The

remembrance of his own need, the remembrance of the help then received

from a foreign thinker, taught him to regard every crisis of conscience

as something sacred, and to look upon the rendering of aid as the

artist's primary moral duty. From the day he opened Tolstoi's letter, he

himself became the great helper, the brotherly adviser. His whole work,

his human authority, found its beginnings here. Never since then,

however pressing the demands upon his time, has he failed to bear in

mind the help he received. Never has he refused to render help to any

unknown person appealing out of a genuinely troubled conscience. From

Tolstoi's letter sprang countless Rollands, bringing aid and counsel

throughout the years. Henceforward, poesy was to him a sacred trust, one

which he has fulfilled in the name of his master. Rarely has history

borne more splendid witness to the fact that in the moral sphere no less

than in the physical, force never runs to waste. The hour when Tolstoi

wrote to his unknown correspondent has been revived in a thousand

letters from Rolland to a thousand unknowns. An infinite quantity of

seed is to-day wafted through the world, seed that has sprung from this

single grain of kindness.

CHAPTER VI

ROME

From every quarter, voices were calling: the French homeland, German

music, Tolstoi's exhortation, Shakespeare's ardent appeal, the will to

art, the need for earning a livelihood. While Rolland was still

hesitating, his decision had again to be postponed through the

intervention of chance, the eternal friend of artists.

Every year the Normal School provides traveling scholarships for some of

its best pupils. The term is two years. Archeologists are sent to

Greece, historians to Rome. Rolland had no strong desire for such a

mission; he was too eager to face the realities of life. But fate is apt

to stretch forth her hand to those who are coy. Two of his fellow

students had refused the Roman scholarship, and Rolland was chosen to

fill the vacancy almost against his will. To his inexperience, Rome

still seemed nothing more than dead past, a history in shreds and

patches, a dull record which he would have to piece together from

inscriptions and parchments. It was a school task; an imposition, not

life. Scanty were his expectations when he set forth on pilgrimage to

the eternal city.

The duty imposed on him was to arrange documents in the gloomy Farnese

Palace, to cull history from registers and books. For a brief space he

paid due tribute to this service, and in the archives of the Vatican he

compiled a memoir upon the nuncio Salviati and the sack of Rome. But ere

long his attention was concentrated upon the living alone. His mind was

flooded by the wonderfully clear light of the Campagna, which reduces

all things to a self-evident harmony, making life appear simple and

giving it the aspect of pure sensation. For many, the gentle grace of

the artist's promised land exercises an irresistible charm. The

memorials of the Renaissance issue to the wanderer a summons to

greatness. In Italy, more strongly than elsewhere, does it seem that art

is the meaning of human life, and that art must be man's heroic aim.

Throwing aside his theses, the young man of twenty, intoxicated with the

adventure of love and of life, wandered for months in blissful freedom

through the lesser cities of Italy and Sicily. Even Tolstoi was

forgotten, for in this region of sensuous presentation, in the dazzling

south, the voice from the Russian steppes, demanding renunciation, fell

upon deaf ears. Of a sudden, however, Shakespeare, friend and guide of

Rolland's childhood, resumed his sway. A cycle of the Shakespearean

dramas, presented by Ernesto Rossi, displayed to him the splendor of

elemental passion, and aroused an irresistible longing to transfigure,

like Shakespeare, history in poetic form. He was moving day by day among

the stone witnesses to the greatness of past centuries. He would recall

those centuries to life. The poet in him awakened. In cheerful

faithlessness to his mission, he penned a series of dramas, catching

them on the wing with that burning ecstacy which inspiration, coming

unawares, invariably arouses in the artist. Just as England is presented

in Shakespeare's historical plays, so was the whole Renaissance epoch to

be reflected in his own writings. Light of heart, in the intoxication of

composition he penned one play after another, without concerning himself

as to the earthly possibilities for staging them. Not one of these

romanticist dramas has, in fact, ever been performed. Not one of them is

to-day accessible to the public. The maturer critical sense of the

artist has made him hide them from the world. He has a fondness for the

faded manuscripts simply as memorials of the ardors of youth.

The most momentous experience of these years spent in Italy was the

formation of a new friendship. Rolland never sought people out. In

essence he is a solitary, one who loves best to live among his books.

Yet from the mystical and symbolical outlook it is characteristic of his

biography that each epoch of his youth brought him into contact with one

or other of the leading personalities of the day. In accordance with the

mysterious laws of attraction, he has been drawn ever and again into the

heroic sphere, has associated with the mighty ones of the earth.

Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven were the stars of his childhood.

During school life, Suarès and Claudel became his intimates. As a

student, in an hour when he was needing the help of sages, he followed

Renan; Spinoza freed his mind in matters of religion; from afar came

the brotherly greeting of Tolstoi. In Rome, through a letter of

introduction from Monod, he made the acquaintance of Malwida von

Meysenbug, whose whole life had been a contemplation of the heroic past.

Wagner, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Herzen, and Kossuth were her perennial

intimates. For this free spirit, the barriers of nationality and

language did not exist. No revolution in art or politics could affright

her. "A human magnet," she exercised an irresistible appeal upon great

natures. When Rolland met her she was already an old woman, a lucid

intelligence, untroubled by disillusionment, still an idealist as in

youth. From the height of her seventy years, she looked down over the

past, serene and wise. A wealth of knowledge and experience streamed

from her mind to that of the learner. Rolland found in her the same

gentle illumination, the same sublime repose after passion, which had

endeared the Italian landscape to his mind. Just as from the monuments

and pictures of Italy he could reconstruct the figures of the

Renaissance heroes, so from Malwida's confidential talk could he

reconstruct the tragedy in the lives of the artists she had known. In

Rome he learned a just and loving appreciation for the genius of the

present. His new friend taught him what in truth he had long ere this

learned unawares from within, that there is a lofty level of thought and

sensation where nations and languages become as one in the universal

tongue of art. During a walk on the Janiculum, a vision came to him of

the work of European scope he was one day to write, the vision of _Jean

Christophe_.

Wonderful was the friendship between the old German woman and the

Frenchman of twenty-three. Soon it became difficult for either of them

to say which was more indebted to the other. Romain owed so much to

Malwida, in that she had enabled him to form juster views of some of her

great contemporaries; while Malwida valued Romain, because in this

enthusiastic young artist she discerned new possibilities of greatness.

The same idealism animated both, tried and chastened in the

many-wintered woman, fiery and impetuous in the youth. Every day Rolland

came to visit his venerable friend in the Via della Polveriera, playing

to her on the piano the works of his favorite masters. She, in turn,

introduced him to Roman society. Gently guiding his restless nature, she

led him towards spiritual freedom. In his essay _To the Undying

Antigone_, Rolland tells us that to two women, his mother, a sincere

Christian, and Malwida von Meysenbug, a pure idealist, he owes his

awakening to the full significance of art and of life. Malwida, writing

in _Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin_ a quarter of a century before

Rolland had attained celebrity, expressed her confident belief in his

coming fame. We cannot fail to be moved when we read to-day the

description of Rolland in youth: "My friendship with this young man was

a great pleasure to me in other respects besides that of music. For

those advanced in years, there can be no loftier gratification than to

rediscover in the young the same impulse towards idealism, the same

striving towards the highest aims, the same contempt for all that is

vulgar or trivial, the same courage in the struggle for freedom of

individuality.... For two years I enjoyed the intellectual companionship

of young Rolland.... Let me repeat, it was not from his musical talent

alone that my pleasure was derived, though here he was able to fill what

had long been a gap in my life. In other intellectual fields I found him

likewise congenial. He aspired to the fullest possible development of

his faculties; whilst I myself, in his stimulating presence, was able to

revive youthfulness of thought, to rediscover an intense interest in the

whole world of imaginative beauty. As far as poesy is concerned, I

gradually became aware of the greatness of my young friend's endowments,

to be finally convinced of the fact by the reading of one of his

dramatic poems." Speaking of this early work, she prophetically declared

that the writer's moral energy might well be expected to bring about a

regeneration of French imaginative literature. In a poem, finely

conceived but a trifle sentimental, she expressed her thankfulness for

the experience of these two years. Malwida had recognized Romain as her

European brother, just as Tolstoi had recognized a disciple. Twenty

years before the world had heard of Rolland, his life was moving on

heroic paths. Greatness cannot be hid. When any one is born to

greatness, the past and the present send him images and figures to serve

as exhortation and example. From every country and from every race of

Europe, voices rise to greet the man who is one day to speak for them

all.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONSECRATION

The two years in Italy, a time of free receptivity and creative

enjoyment, were over. A summons now came from Paris; the Normal School,

which Rolland had left as pupil, required his services as teacher. The

parting was a wrench, and Malwida von Meysenbug's farewell was designed

to convey a symbolical meaning. She invited her young friend to

accompany her to Bayreuth, the chief sphere of the activities of the man

who, with Tolstoi, had been the leading inspiration of Rolland during

early youth, the man whose image had been endowed with more vigorous

life by Malwida's memories of his personality. Rolland wandered on foot

across Umbria, to meet his friend in Venice. Together they visited the

palace in which Wagner had died, and thence journeyed northward to the

scene of his life's work. "My aim," writes Malwida in her characteristic

style, which seldom attains strong emotional force, but is none the less

moving, "was that Romain should have these sublime impressions to close

his years in Italy and the fecund epoch of youth. I likewise wished the

experience to be a consecration upon the threshold of manhood, with its

prospective labors and its inevitable struggles and disillusionments."

Olivier had entered the country of Jean Christophe! On the first morning

of their arrival, before introducing her friend at Wahnfried, Malwida

took him into the garden to see the master's grave. Rolland uncovered as

if in church, and the two stood for a while in silence meditating on the

hero, to one of them a friend, to the other a leader. In the evening

they went to hear Wagner's posthumous work _Parsifal_. This composition,

which, like the visit to Bayreuth, is strangely interconnected with the

genesis of _Jean Christophe_, is as it were a consecrational prelude to

Rolland's future. For life was now to call him from these great dreams.

Malwida gives a moving description of their good-by. "My friends had

kindly placed their box at my disposal. Once more I went to hear

_Parsifal_ with Rolland, who was about to return to France in order to

play an active part in the work of life. It was a matter of deep regret

to me that this gifted friend was not free to lift himself to 'higher

spheres,' that he could not ripen from youth to manhood while wholly

devoted to the unfolding of his artistic impulses. But I knew that none

the less he would work at the roaring loom of time, weaving the living

garment of divinity. The tears with which his eyes were filled at the

close of the opera made me feel once more that my faith in him would be

justified. Thus I bade him farewell with heartfelt thanks for the time

filled with poesy which his talents had bestowed on me. I dismissed him

with the blessing that age gives to youth entering upon life."

Although an epoch that had been rich for both was now closed, their

friendship was by no means over. For years to come, down to the end of

her life, Rolland wrote to Malwida once a week. These letters, which

were returned to him after her death, contain a biography of his early

manhood perhaps fuller than that which is available in the case of any

other notable personality. Inestimable was the value of what he had

learned from this encounter. He had now acquired an extensive knowledge

of reality and an unlimited sense of human continuity. Whereas he had

gone to Rome to study the art of the dead past, he had found the living

Germany, and could enjoy the companionship of her undying heroes. The

triad of poesy, music, and science, harmonizes unconsciously with that

other triad, France, Germany, and Italy. Once and for all, Rolland had

acquired the European spirit. Before he had written a line of _Jean

Christophe_, that great epic was already living in his blood.

CHAPTER VIII

YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP

The form of Rolland's career, no less than the substance of his inner

life, was decisively fashioned by these two years in Italy. As happened

in Goethe's case, so in that with which we are now concerned, the

conflict of the will was harmonized amid the sublime clarity of the

southern landscape. Rolland had gone to Rome with his mind still

undecided. By genius, he was a musician; by inclination, a poet; by

necessity, a historian. Little by little, a magical union had been

effected between music and poesy. In his first dramas, the phrasing is

permeated with lyrical melody. Simultaneously, behind the winged words,

his historic sense had built up a mighty scene out of the rich hues of

the past. After the success of his thesis _Les origines du théâtre

lyrique moderns_ (_Histoire de l'opéra en Europe avant Lully et

Scarlatti_), he became professor of the history of music, first at the

Normal School, and from 1903 onwards at the Sorbonne. The aim he set

before himself was to display "_l'éternelle floraison_," the sempiternal

blossoming, of music as an endless series through the ages, while each

age none the less puts forth its own characteristic shoots. Discovering

for the first time what was to be henceforward his favorite theme, he

showed how, in this apparently abstract sphere, the nations cultivate

their individual characteristics, while never ceasing to develop

unawares the higher unity wherein time and national differences are

unknown. A great power for understanding others, in association with the

faculty for writing so as to be readily understood, constitutes the

essence of his activities. Here, moreover, in the element with which he

was most familiar, his emotional force was singularly effective. More

than any teacher before him did he make the science he had to convey, a

living thing. Dealing with the invisible entity of music, he showed that

the greatness of mankind is never concentrated in a single age, nor

exclusively allotted to a single nation, but is transmitted from age to

age and from nation to nation. Thus like a torch does it pass from one

master to another, a torch that will never be extinguished while human

beings continue to draw the breath of inspiration. There are no

contradictions, there is no cleavage, in art. "History must take for its

object the living unity of the human spirit. Consequently, history is

compelled to maintain the tie between all the thoughts of the human

spirit."

Many of those who heard Rolland's lectures at the School of Social

Science and at the Sorbonne, still speak of them to-day with

undiminished gratitude. Only in a formal sense was history the topic of

these discourses, and science was merely their foundation. It is true

that Rolland, side by side with his universal reputation, has a

reputation among specialists in musical research for having discovered

the manuscript of Luigi Rossi's _Orfeo_, and for having been the first

to do justice to the forgotten Francesco Provenzale (the teacher of

Alessandro Scarlatti who founded the Neapolitan school). But their broad

humanist scope, their encyclopedic outlook, makes his lectures on _The

Beginnings of Opera_ frescoes of whilom civilizations. In interludes of

speaking, he would give music voice, playing on the piano long-lost

airs, so that in the very Paris where they first blossomed three hundred

years before, their silvery tones were now reawakened from dust and

parchment. At this date, while Rolland was still quite young, he began

to exercise upon his fellows that clarifying, guiding, inspiring, and

formative influence, which since then, increasingly reinforced by the

power of his imaginative writings and spread by these into ever widening

circles, has become immeasurable in its extent. Nevertheless, throughout

its expansion, this force has remained true to its primary aim. From

first to last, Rolland's leading thought has been to display, amid all

the forms of man's past and man's present, the things that are really

great in human personality, and the unity of all single-hearted

endeavor.

[Illustration: Rolland's transcript of Francesco Provenzale's Aria from

_Lo Schiaro di sua Moglie_]

[Illustration: Rolland's transcript of a melody by Paul Dupin, _L'Oncle

Gottfried_]

It is obvious that Romain Rolland's passion for music could not be

restricted within the confines of history. He could never become a

specialist. The limitations involved in the career of such experts are

utterly uncongenial to his synthetic temperament. For him the past is

but a preparation for the present; what has been merely provides the

possibility for increasing comprehension of the future. Thus side by

side with his learned theses and with his volumes _Musiciens

d'autrefois_, _Haendel_, _Histoire de l'Opéra_, etc., we have his

_Musiciens d'aujourd'hui_, a collection of essays which were first

published in the "_Revue de Paris_" and the "_Revue de l'art

dramatique_," essays penned by Rolland as champion of the modern and the

unknown. This collection contains the first portrait of Hugo Wolf ever

published in France, together with striking presentations of Richard

Strauss and Debussy. He was never weary of looking for new creative

forces in European music; he went to the Strasburg musical festival to

hear Gustav Mahler, and visited Bonn to attend the Beethoven festival.

Nothing seemed alien to his eager pursuit of knowledge; his sense of

justice was all-embracing. From Catalonia to Scandinavia he listened for

every new wave in the ocean of music. He was no less at home with the

spirit of the present than with the spirit of the past.

During these years of activity as teacher, he learned much from life.

New circles were opened to him in the Paris which hitherto he had known

little of except from the window of his lonely study. His position at

the university and his marriage brought the man who had hitherto

associated only with a few intimates and with distant heroes, into

contact with intellectual and social life. In the house of his

father-in-law, the distinguished philologist Michel Bréal, he became

acquainted with the leading lights of the Sorbonne. Elsewhere, in the

drawing-rooms, he moved among financiers, bourgeois, officials, persons

drawn from all strata of city life, including the cosmopolitans who are

always to be found in Paris. Involuntarily, during these years, Rolland

the romanticist became an observer. His idealism, without forfeiting

intensity, gained critical strength. The experiences garnered (it might

be better to say, the disillusionments sustained) in these contacts, all

this medley of commonplace life, were to form the basis of his

subsequent descriptions of the Parisian world in _La foire sur la place_

and _Dans la maison_. Occasional journeys to Germany, Switzerland,

Austria, and his beloved Italy, gave him opportunities for comparison,

and provided fresh knowledge. More and more, the growing horizon of

modern culture came to occupy his thoughts, thus displacing the science

of history. The wanderer returned from Europe had discovered his home,

had discovered Paris; the historian had found the most important epoch

for living men and women--the present.

CHAPTER IX

YEARS OF STRUGGLE

Rolland was now a man of thirty, with his energies at their prime. He

was inspired with a restrained passion for activity. In all times and

scenes, alike in the past and in the present, his inspiration discerned

greatness. The impulse now grew strong within him to give his imaginings

life.

But this will to greatness encountered a season of petty things. At the

date when Rolland began his life work, the mighty figures of French

literature had already passed from the stage: Victor Hugo, with his

indefatigable summons to idealism; Flaubert, the heroic worker; Renan,

the sage. The stars of the neighboring heaven, Richard Wagner and

Friedrich Nietzsche, had set or become obscured. Extant art, even the

serious art of a Zola or a Maupassant, was devoted to the commonplace;

it created only in the image of a corrupt and enfeebled generation.

Political life had become paltry and supine. Philosophy was stereotyped

and abstract. There was no longer any common bond to unite the elements

of the nation, for its faith had been shattered for decades to come by

the defeat of 1870. Rolland aspired to bold ventures, but his world

would have none of them. He was a fighter, but his world desired an

easy life. He wanted fellowship, but all that his world wanted was

enjoyment.

Suddenly a storm burst over the country. France was stirred to the

depths. The entire nation became engrossed in an intellectual and moral

problem. Rolland, a bold swimmer, was one of the first to leap into the

turbulent flood. Betwixt night and morning, the Dreyfus affair rent

France in twain. There were no abstentionists; there was no calm

contemplation. The finest among Frenchmen were the hottest partisans.

For two years the country was severed as by a knife blade into two

camps, that of those whose verdict was "guilty," and that of those whose

verdict was "not guilty." In _Jean Christophe_ and in Péguy's

reminiscences, we learn how the section cut pitilessly athwart families,

dividing brother from brother, father from son, friend from friend.

To-day we find it difficult to understand how this accusation of

espionage brought against an artillery captain could involve all France

in a crisis. The passions aroused transcended the immediate cause to

invade the whole sphere of mental life. Every Frenchman was faced by a

problem of conscience, was compelled to make a decision between

fatherland and justice. Thus with explosive energy the moral forces

were, for all right-thinking minds, dragged into the vortex. Rolland was

among the few who from the very outset insisted that Dreyfus was

innocent The apparent hopelessness of these early endeavors to secure

justice were for Rolland a spur to conscience. Whereas Péguy was

enthralled by the mystical power of the problem, which would he hoped

bring about a moral purification of his country, and while in

conjunction with Bernard Lazare he wrote propagandist pamphlets

calculated to add fuel to the flames, Rolland's energies were devoted to

the consideration of the immanent problem of justice. Under the

pseudonym Saint-Just he published a dramatic parable, _Les loups_,

wherein he lifted the problem from the realm of time into the realm of

the eternal. This was played to an enthusiastic audience, among which

were Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, and Picquart. The more definitely political

the trial became, the more evident was it that the freemasons, the

anti-clericalists, and the socialists were using the affair to secure

their own ends; and the more the question of material success replaced

the question of the ideal, the more did Rolland withdraw from active

participation. His enthusiasm is devoted only to spiritual matters, to

problems, to lost causes. In the Dreyfus affair, just as later, it was

his glory to have been one of the first to take up arms, and to have

been a solitary champion in a historic moment.

Simultaneously, Rolland was working shoulder to shoulder with Péguy, and

with Suarès the friend of his adolescence, in a new campaign. This

differed from the championship of Dreyfus in that it was not stormy and

clamorous, but involved a tranquil heroism which made it resemble rather

the way of the cross. The friends were painfully aware of the corruption

and triviality of the literature then dominant in Paris. To attempt a

direct attack would have been fruitless, for this hydra had the whole

periodical press at its service. Nowhere was it possible to inflict a

mortal blow upon the many-headed and thousand-armed entity. They

resolved, therefore, to work against it, not with its own means, not by

imitating its own noisy activities, but by the force of moral example,

by quiet sacrifice and invincible patience. For fifteen years they wrote

and edited the "_Cahiers de la quinzaine_." Not a centime was spent on

advertising it, and it was rarely to be found on sale at any of the

usual agents. It was read by students and by a few men of letters, by a

small circle growing imperceptibly. Throughout an entire decade, all

Rolland's works appeared in its pages, the whole of _Jean Christophe_,

_Beethoven_, _Michel-Ange_, and the plays. Though during this epoch the

author's financial position was far from easy, he received nothing for

any of these writings--the case is perhaps unexampled in modern

literature. To fortify their idealism, to set an example to others,

these heroic figures renounced the chance of publicity, circulation, and

remuneration for their writings; they renounced the holy trinity of the

literary faith. And when at length, through Rolland's, Péguy's, and

Suarès' tardily achieved fame, the "Cahiers" had come into its own, its

publication was discontinued. But it remains an imperishable monument of

French idealism and artistic comradeship.

A third time Rolland's intellectual ardor led him to try his mettle in

the field of action. A third time, for a space, did he enter into a

comradeship that he might fashion life out of life. A group of young men

had come to recognize the futility and harmfulness of the French

boulevard drama, whose central topic is the eternal recurrence of

adultery issuing from the tedium of bourgeois existence. They determined

upon an attempt to restore the drama to the people, to the proletariat,

and thus to furnish it with new energies. Impetuously Rolland threw

himself into the scheme, writing essays, manifestoes, an entire book.

Above all, he contributed a series of plays conceived in the spirit of

the French revolution and composed for its glorification. Jaurès

delivered a speech introducing _Danton_ to the French workers. The other

plays were likewise staged. But the daily press, obviously scenting a

hostile force, did its utmost to chill the enthusiasm. The other

participators soon lost their zeal, so that ere long the fine impetus of

the young group was spent. Rolland was left alone, richer in experience

and disillusionment, but not poorer in faith.

Although by sentiment Rolland is attached to all great movements, the

inner man has ever remained free from ties. He gives his energies to

help others' efforts, but never follows blindly in others' footsteps.

Whatever creative work he has attempted in common with others has been a

disappointment; the fellowship has been clouded by the universality of

human frailty. The Dreyfus case was subordinated to political scheming;

the People's Theater was wrecked by jealousies; Rolland's plays, written

for the workers, were staged but for a night; his wedded life came to a

sudden and disastrous end--but nothing could shatter his idealism. When

contemporary existence could not be controlled by the forces of the

spirit, he still retained his faith in the spirit. In hours of

disillusionment he called up the images of the great ones of the earth,

who conquered mourning by action, who conquered life by art. He left the

theater, he renounced the professorial chair, he retired from the world.

Since life repudiated his single-hearted endeavors he would transfigure

life in gracious pictures. His disillusionments had but been further

experience. During the ensuing ten years of solitude he wrote _Jean

Christophe_, a work which in the ethical sense is more truly real than

reality itself, a work which embodies the living faith of his

generation.

CHAPTER X

A DECADE OF SECLUSION

For a brief season the Parisian public was familiar with Romain

Rolland's name as that of a musical expert and a promising dramatist.

Thereafter for years he disappeared from view, for the capital of France

excels all others in its faculty for merciless forgetfulness. He was

never spoken of even in literary circles, although poets and other men

of letters might be expected to be the best judges of the values in

which they deal. If the curious reader should care to turn over the

reviews and anthologies of the period, to examine the histories of

literature, he will find not a word of the man who had already written a

dozen plays, had composed wonderful biographies, and had published six

volumes of _Jean Christophe_. The "_Cahiers de la quinzaine_" were at

once the birthplace and the tomb of his writings. He was a stranger in

the city at the very time when he was describing its mental life with a

picturesqueness and comprehensiveness which has never been equaled. At

forty years of age, he had won neither fame nor pecuniary reward; he

seemed to possess no influence; he was not a living force. At the

opening of the twentieth century, like Charles Louis Philippe, like

Verhaeren, like Claudel, and like Suarès, in truth the strongest writers

of the time, Rolland remained unrecognized when he was at the zenith of

his creative powers. In his own person he experienced the fate which he

has depicted in such moving terms, the tragedy of French idealism.

A period of seclusion is, however, needful as a preliminary to labors of

such concentration. Force must develop in solitude before it can capture

the world. Only a man prepared to ignore the public, only a man animated

with heroic indifference to success, could venture upon the forlorn hope

of planning a romance in ten volumes; a French romance which, in an

epoch of exacerbated nationalism, was to have a German for its hero. In

such detachment alone could this universality of knowledge shape itself

into a literary creation. Nowhere but amid tranquillity undisturbed by

the noise of the crowd could a work of such vast scope be brought to

fruition.

For a decade Rolland seemed to have vanished from the French literary

world. Mystery enveloped him, the mystery of toil. Through all these

long years his cloistered labors represented the hidden stage of the

chrysalis, from which the imago is to issue in winged glory. It was a

period of much suffering, a period of silence, a period characterized by

knowledge of the world--the knowledge of a man whom the world did not

yet know.

CHAPTER XI

A PORTRAIT

Two tiny little rooms, attic rooms in the heart of Paris, on the fifth

story, reached by a winding wooden stair. From below comes the muffled

roar, as of a distant storm, rising from the Boulevard Montparnasse.

Often a glass shakes on the table as a heavy motor omnibus thunders by.

The windows command a view across less lofty houses into an old convent

garden. In springtime the perfume of flowers is wafted through the open

window. No neighbors on this story; no service. Nothing beyond the help

of the concierge, an old woman who protects the hermit from untimely

visitors.

The workroom is full of books. They climb up the walls, and are piled in

heaps on the floor; they spread like creepers over the window seat, over

the chairs and the table. Interspersed are manuscripts. The walls are

adorned with a few engravings. We see photographs of friends, and a bust

of Beethoven. The deal table stands near the window; two chairs, a small

stove. Nothing costly in the narrow cell; nothing which could tempt to

repose; nothing to encourage sociability. A student's den; a little

prison of labor.

Amid the books sits the gentle monk of this cell, soberly clad like a

clergyman. He is slim, tall, delicate looking; his complexion is sallow,

like that of one who is rarely in the open. His face is lined,

suggesting that here is a worker who spends few hours in sleep. His

whole aspect is somewhat fragile--the sharply-cut profile which no

photograph seems to reproduce perfectly; the small hands, his hair

silvering already behind the lofty brow; his moustache falling softly

like a shadow over the thin lips. Everything about him is gentle: his

voice in its rare utterances; his figure which, even in repose, shows

the traces of his sedentary life; his gestures, which are always

restrained; his slow gait. His whole personality radiates gentleness.

The casual observer might derive the impression that the man is

debilitated or extremely fatigued, were it not for the way in which the

eyes flash ever and again from beneath the slightly reddened eyelids, to

relapse always into their customary expression of kindliness. The eyes

have a blue tint as of deep waters of exceptional purity. That is why no

photograph can convey a just impression of one in whose eyes the whole

force of his soul seems to be concentrated. The face is inspired with

life by the glance, just as the small and frail body radiates the

mysterious energy of work.

This work, the unceasing labor of a spirit imprisoned in a body,

imprisoned within narrow walls during all these years, who can measure

it? The written books are but a fraction of it. The ardor of our recluse

is all-embracing, reaching forth to include the cultures of every

tongue, the history, philosophy, poesy, and music of every nation. He is

in touch with all endeavors. He receives sketches, letters, and reviews

concerning everything. He is one who thinks as he writes, speaking to

himself and to others while his pen moves over the paper. With his

small, upright handwriting in which all the letters are clearly and

powerfully formed, he permanently fixes the thoughts that pass through

his mind, whether spontaneously arising or coming from without; he

records the airs of past and recent times, noting them down in

manuscript books; he makes extracts from newspapers, drafts plans for

future work; his thriftily collected hoard of these autographic

intellectual goods is enormous. The flame of his labor burns

unceasingly. Rarely does he take more than five hours' sleep; seldom

does he go for a stroll in the adjoining Luxembourg; infrequently does a

friend climb the five nights of winding stair for an hour's quiet talk;

even such journeys as he undertakes are mostly for purposes of research.

Repose signifies for him a change of occupation; to write letters

instead of books, to read philosophy instead of poetry. His solitude is

an active communing with the world. His free hours are his only holiday,

stolen from the long days when he sits in the twilight at the piano,

holding converse with the great masters of music, drawing melodies from

other worlds into this confined space which is itself a world of the

creative spirit.

CHAPTER XII

RENOWN

We are in the year 1910. A motor is tearing along the Champs Elysées,

outrunning the belated warnings of its own hooter. There is a cry, and a

man who was incautiously crossing the street lies beneath the wheels. He

is borne away wounded and with broken limbs, to be nursed back to life.

Nothing can better exemplify the slenderness, as yet, of Romain

Rolland's fame, than the reflection how little his death at this

juncture would have signified to the literary world. There would have

been a paragraph or two in the newspapers informing the public that the

sometime professor of musical history at the Sorbonne had succumbed

after being run over by a motor. A few, perhaps, would have remembered

that fifteen years earlier this man Rolland had written promising

dramas, and books on musical topics. Among the innumerable inhabitants

of Paris, scarce a handful would have known anything of the deceased

author. Thus ignored was Romain Rolland two years before he obtained a

European reputation; thus nameless was he when he had finished most of

the works which were to make him a leader of our generation--the dozen

or so dramas, the biographies of the heroes, and the first eight volumes

of _Jean Christophe_.

A wonderful thing is fame, wonderful its eternal multiplicity. Every

reputation has peculiar characteristics, independent of the man to whom

it attaches, and yet appertaining to him as his destiny. Fame may be

wise and it may be foolish; it may be deserved and it may be undeserved.

On the one hand it may be easily attained and brief, flashing

transiently like a meteor; on the other hand it may be tardy, slow in

blossoming, following reluctantly in the footsteps of the works.

Sometimes fame is malicious, ghoulish, arriving too late, and battening

upon corpses.

Strange is the relationship between Rolland and fame. From early youth

he was allured by its magic; but charmed by the thought of the only

reputation that counts, the reputation that is based upon moral strength

and ethical authority, he proudly and steadfastly renounced the ordinary

amenities of cliquism and conventional intercourse. He knew the dangers

and temptations of power; he knew that fussy activity could grasp

nothing but a cold shadow, and was impotent to seize the radiant light.

Never, therefore, did he take any deliberate step towards fame, never

did he reach out his hand to fame, near to him as fame had been more

than once in his life. Indeed, he deliberately repelled the oncoming

footsteps by the publication of his scathing _La foire sur la place_,

through which he permanently forfeited the favor of the Parisian press.

What he writes of Jean Christophe applies perfectly to himself: "Le

succès n'était pas son but; son but était la foi." [Not success, but

faith was his goal.]

Fame loved Rolland, who loved fame from afar, unobtrusively. "It were

pity," fame seemed to say, "to disturb this man's work. The seeds must

lie for a while in the darkness, enduring patiently, until the time

comes for germination." Reputation and the work were growing in two

different worlds, awaiting contact. A small community of admirers had

formed after the publication of _Beethoven_. They followed Jean

Christophe in his pilgrimage. The faithful of the "_Cahiers de la

quinzaine_" won new friends. Without any help from the press, through

the unseen influence of responsive sympathies, the circulation of his

works grew. Translations were published. Paul Seippel, the distinguished

Swiss author, penned a comprehensive biography. Rolland had found many

devoted admirers before the newspapers had begun to print his name. The

crowning of his completed work by the Academy was nothing more than the

sound of a trumpet summoning the armies of his admirers to a review. All

at once accounts of Rolland broke upon the world like a flood, shortly

before he had attained his fiftieth year. In 1912 he was still unknown;

in 1914 he had a wide reputation. With a cry of astonishment, a

generation recognized its leader, and Europe became aware of the first

product of the new universal European spirit.

There is a mystical significance in Romain Rolland's rise to fame, just

as in every event of his life. Fame came late to this man whom fame had

passed by during the bitter years of mental distress and material need.

Nevertheless it came at the right hour, since it came before the war.

Rolland's renown put a sword into his hand. At the decisive moment he

had power and a voice to speak for Europe. He stood on a pedestal, so

that he was visible above the medley. In truth fame was granted at a

fitting time, when through suffering and knowledge Rolland had grown

ripe for his highest function, to assume his European responsibility.

Reputation, and the power that reputation gives, came at a moment when

the world of the courageous needed a man who should proclaim against the

world itself the world's eternal message of brotherhood.

CHAPTER XIII

ROLLAND AS THE EMBODIMENT OF THE EUROPEAN SPIRIT

Thus does Rolland's life pass from obscurity into the light of day.

Progress is slow, but the impulsion comes from powerful energies. The

movement towards the goal is not always obvious, and yet his life is

associated as is none other with the disastrously impending destiny of

Europe. Regarded from the outlook of fulfillment, we discern that all

the ostensibly counteracting influences, the years of inconspicuous and

apparently vain struggle, have been necessary; we see that every

incident has been symbolic. The career develops like a work of art,

building itself up in a wise ordination of will and chance. We should

take too mean a view of destiny, were we to think it the outcome of pure

sport that this man hitherto unknown should become a moral force in the

world during the very years when, as never before, there was need for

one who would champion the things of the spirit.

The year 1914 marks the close of Romain Rolland's private life.

Henceforth his career belongs to the world; his biography becomes part

of history; his personal experiences can no longer be detached from his

public activities. The solitary has been forced out of his workroom to

accomplish his task in the world. The man whose existence has been so

retired, must now live with doors and windows open. His every essay, his

every letter, is a manifesto. His life from now onward shapes itself

like a heroic drama. From the hour when his most cherished ideal, the

unity of Europe, seemed bent on its own destruction, he emerged from his

retirement to become a vital element of his time, an impersonal force, a

chapter in the history of the European spirit. Just as little as

Tolstoi's life can be detached from his propagandist activities, just so

little is there justification in this case for an attempt to distinguish

between the man and his influence. Since 1914, Romain Rolland has been

one with his ideal and one with the struggle for its realization. No

longer is he author, poet, or artist; no longer does he belong to

himself. He is the voice of Europe in the season of its most poignant

agony. He has become the conscience of the world.

PART TWO

EARLY WORK AS A DRAMATIST

Son but n'était pas le succès; son but était la foi.

JEAN CHRISTOPHE, "_La Révolte_."

CHAPTER I

THE WORK AND THE EPOCH

Romain Rolland's work cannot be understood without an understanding of

the epoch in which that work came into being. For here we have a passion

that springs from the weariness of an entire country, a faith that

springs from the disillusionment of a humiliated nation. The shadow of

1870 was cast across the youth of the French author. The significance

and greatness of his work taken as a whole depend upon the way in which

it constitutes a spiritual bridge between one great war and the next. It

arises from a blood-stained earth and a storm-tossed horizon on one

side, reaching across on the other to the new struggle and the new

spirit.

It originates in gloom. A land defeated in war is like a man who has

lost his god. Divine ecstasy is suddenly replaced by dull exhaustion; a

fire that blazed in millions is extinguished, so that nothing but ash

and cinder remain. There is a sudden collapse of all values. Enthusiasm

has become meaningless; death is purposeless; the deeds, which but

yesterday were deemed heroic, are now looked upon as follies; faith is a

fraud; belief in oneself, a pitiful illusion. The impulse to fellowship

fades; every one fights for his own hand, evades responsibility that he

may throw it upon his neighbor, thinks only of profit, utility, and

personal advantage. Lofty aspirations are killed by an infinite

weariness. Nothing is so utterly destructive to the moral energy of the

masses as a defeat; nothing else degrades and weakens to the same extent

the whole spiritual poise of a nation.

Such was the condition of France after 1870; the country was mentally

tired; it had become a land without a leader. The best among its

imaginative writers could give no help. They staggered for a while, as

if stunned by the bludgeoning of the disaster. Then, as the first

effects passed off, they reëntered their old paths which led them into a

purely literary field, remote and ever remoter from the destinies of

their nation. It is not within the power of men already mature to make

headway against a national catastrophe. Zola, Flaubert, Anatole France,

and Maupassant, needed all their strength to keep themselves erect on

their own feet. They could give no support to their nation. Their

experiences had made them skeptical; they no longer possessed sufficient

faith to give a new faith to the French people. But the younger writers,

those who had no personal memories of the disaster, those who had not

witnessed the actual struggle and had merely grown up amid the spiritual

corpses left upon the battlefield, those who looked upon the ravaged and

tormented soul of France, could not succumb to the influences of this

weariness. The young cannot live without faith, cannot breathe in the

moral stagnation of a materialistic world. For them, life and creation

mean the lighting up of faith, that mystically burning faith which

glows unquenchably in every new generation, glows even among the tombs

of the generation which has passed away. To the newcomers, the defeat is

no more than one of the primary factors of their experience, the most

urgent of the problems their art must take into account. They feel that

they are naught unless they prove able to restore this France, torn and

bleeding after the struggle. It is their mission to provide a new faith

for this skeptically resigned people. Such is the task for their robust

energies, such the goal of their aspiration. Not by chance do we find

that among the best in defeated nations a new idealism invariably

springs to life; that the poets of such peoples have but one aim, to

bring solace to their nation that the sense of defeat may be assuaged.

How can a vanquished nation be solaced? How can the sting of defeat be

soothed? The writer must be competent to divert his readers' thoughts

from the present; he must fashion a dialectic of defeat which shall

replace despair by hope. These young authors endeavored to bring help in

two different ways. Some pointed towards the future, saying: "Cherish

hatred; last time we were beaten, next time we shall conquer." This was

the argument of the nationalists, and there is significance in the fact

that it was predominantly voiced by the sometime companions of Rolland,

by Maurice Barrès, Paul Claudel, and Péguy. For thirty years, with the

hammers of verse and prose, they fashioned the wounded pride of the

French nation that it might become a weapon to strike the hated foe to

the heart. For thirty years they talked of nothing but yesterday's

defeat and to-morrow's triumph. Ever afresh did they tear open the old

wound. Again and again, when the young were inclining towards

reconciliation, did these writers inflame their minds anew with

exhortations in the heroic vein. From hand to hand they passed the

unquenchable torch of revenge, ready and eager to fling it into Europe's

powder barrel.

The other type of idealism, that of Rolland, less clamant and long

ignored, looked in a very different direction for solace, turning its

gaze not towards the immediate future but towards eternity. It did not

promise a new victory, but showed that false values had been used in

estimating defeat. For writers of this school, for the pupils of

Tolstoi, force is no argument for the spirit, the externals of success

provide no criterion of value for the soul. In their view, the

individual does not conquer when the generals of his nation march to

victory through a hundred provinces; the individual is not vanquished

when the army loses a thousand pieces of artillery. The individual gains

the victory, only when he is free from illusion, and when he has no part

in any wrong committed by his nation. In their isolation, those who hold

such views have continually endeavored to induce France, not indeed to

forget her defeat, but to make of that defeat a source of moral

greatness, to recognize the worth of the spiritual seed which has

germinated on the blood-drenched battlefields. Of such a character, in

_Jean Christophe_, are the words of Olivier, the spokesman of all young

Frenchmen of this way of thinking. Speaking to his German friend, he

says: "Fortunate the defeat, blessed the disaster! Not for us to disavow

it, for we are its children.... It is you, my dear Christopher, who have

refashioned us.... The defeat, little as you may have wished it, has

done us more good than evil. You have rekindled the torch of our

idealism, have given a fresh impetus to our science, and have reanimated

our faith.... We owe to you the reawakening of our racial conscience....

Picture the young Frenchmen who were born in houses of mourning under

the shadow of defeat; who were nourished on gloomy thoughts; who were

trained to be the instruments of a bloody, inevitable, and perhaps

useless revenge. Such was the lesson impressed upon their minds from

their earliest years: they were taught that there is no justice in this

world; that might crushes right. A revelation of this character will

either degrade a child's soul for ever, or will permanently uplift it."

And Rolland continues: "Defeat refashions the elite of a nation,

segregating the single-minded and the strong, and making them more

single-minded and stronger than before; but the others are hastened by

defeat down the path leading to destruction. Thus are the masses of the

people ... separated from the elite, leaving these free to continue

their forward march."

For Rolland this elite, reconciling France with the world, will in days

to come fulfil the mission of his nation. In ultimate analysis, his

thirty years' work may be regarded as one continuous attempt to prevent

a new war--to hinder the revival of the horrible cleavage between

victory and defeat. His aim has been, not to teach a new national pride,

but to inculcate a new heroism of self-conquest, a new faith in justice.

Thus from the same source, from the darkness of defeat, there have

flowed two different streams of idealism. In speech and writing, an

invisible struggle has been waged for the soul of the new generation.

The facts of history turned the scale in favor of Maurice Barrès. The

year 1914 marked the defeat of the ideas of Romain Rolland. Thus defeat

was not merely an experience imposed on him in youth, for defeat has

likewise been the tragic substance of his years of mature manhood. But

it has always been his peculiar talent to create out of defeat the

strongest of his works, to draw from resignation new ardors, to derive

from disillusionment a passionate faith. He has ever been the poet of

the vanquished, the consoler of the despairing, the dauntless guide

towards that world where suffering is transmuted into positive values

and where misfortune becomes a source of strength. That which was born

out of a tragical time, the experience of a nation under the heel of

destiny, Rolland has made available for all times and all nations.

CHAPTER II

THE WILL TO GREATNESS

Rolland realized his mission early in his career. The hero of one of his

first writings, the Girondist Hugot in _Le triomphe de la raison_,

discloses the author's own ardent faith when he declares: "Our first

duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on earth."

This will to greatness lies hidden at the heart of all personal

greatness. What distinguishes Romain Rolland from others, what

distinguishes the beginner of those days and the fighter of the thirty

years that have since elapsed, is that in art he never creates anything

isolated, anything with a purely literary or casual scope. Invariably

his efforts are directed towards the loftiest moral aims; he aspires

towards eternal forms; strives to fashion the monumental. His goal is to

produce a fresco, to paint a comprehensive picture, to achieve an epic

completeness. He does not choose his literary colleagues as models, but

takes as examples the heroes of the ages. He tears his gaze away from

Paris, from the movement of contemporary life, which he regards as

trivial. Tolstoi, the only modern who seems to him poietic, as the great

men of an earlier day were poietic, is his teacher and master. Despite

his humility, he cannot but feel that his own creative impulse makes him

more closely akin to Shakespeare's historical plays, to Tolstoi's _War

and Peace_, to Goethe's universality, to Balzac's wealth of imagination,

to Wagner's promethean art, than he is akin to the activities of his

contemporaries, whose energies are concentrated upon material success.

He studies his exemplars' lives, to draw courage from their courage; he

examines their works, in order that, using their measure, he may lift

his own achievements above the commonplace and the relative. His zeal

for the absolute is almost a religion. Without venturing to compare

himself with them, he thinks always of the incomparably great, of the

meteors that have fallen out of eternity into our own day. He dreams of

creating a Sistine of symphonies, dramas like Shakespeare's histories,

an epic like _War and Peace_; not of writing a new _Madame Bovary_ or

tales like those of Maupassant. The timeless is his true world; it is

the star towards which his creative will modestly and yet passionately

aspires. Among latter-day Frenchmen none but Victor Hugo and Balzac have

had this glorious fervor for the monumental; among the Germans none has

had it since Richard Wagner; among contemporary Englishmen, none perhaps

but Thomas Hardy.

Neither talent nor diligence suffices unaided to inspire such an urge

towards the transcendent. A moral force must be the lever to shake a

spiritual world to its foundations. The moral force which Rolland

possesses is a courage unexampled in the history of modern literature.

The quality that first made his attitude on the war manifest to the

world, the heroism which led him to take his stand alone against the

sentiments of an entire epoch, had, to the discerning, already been made

apparent in the writings of the inconspicuous beginner a quarter of a

century earlier. A man of an easy-going and conciliatory nature is not

suddenly transformed into a hero. Courage, like every other power of the

soul, must be steeled and tempered by many trials. Among all those of

his generation, Rolland had long been signalized as the boldest by his

preoccupation with mighty designs. Not merely did he dream, like

ambitious schoolboys, of Iliads and pentalogies; he actually created

them in the fevered world of to-day, working in isolation, with the

dauntless spirit of past centuries. Not one of his plays had been

staged, not a publisher had accepted any of his books, when he began a

dramatic cycle as comprehensive as Shakespeare's histories. He had as

yet no public, no name, when he began his colossal romance, _Jean

Christophe_. He embroiled himself with the theaters, when in his

manifesto _Le théâtre du peuple_ he censured the triteness and

commercialism of the contemporary drama. He likewise embroiled himself

with the critics, when, in _La foire sur la place_, he pilloried the

cheapjackery of Parisian journalism and French dilettantism with a

severity which had been unknown westward of the Rhine since the

publication of Balzac's _Les illusions perdues_. This young man whose

financial position was precarious, who had no powerful associates, who

had found no favor with newspaper editors, publishers, or theatrical

managers, proposed to remold the spirit of his generation, simply by his

own will and the power of his own deeds. Instead of aiming at a

neighboring goal, he always worked for a distant future, worked with

that religious faith in greatness which was displayed by the medieval

architects--men who planned cathedrals for the honor of God, recking

little whether they themselves would survive to see the completion of

their designs. This courage, which draws its strength from the religious

elements of his nature, is his sole helper. The watchword of his life

may be said to have been the phrase of William the Silent, prefixed by

Rolland as motto to _Aërt_: "I have no need of approval to give me hope;

nor of success, to brace me to perseverance."

CHAPTER III

THE CREATIVE CYCLES

The will to greatness involuntarily finds expression in characteristic

forms. Rarely does Rolland attempt to deal with any isolated topic, and

he never concerns himself about a mere episode in feeling or in history.

His creative imagination is attracted solely by elemental phenomena, by

the great "courants de foi," whereby with mystical energy a single idea

is suddenly carried into the minds of millions of individuals; whereby a

country, an epoch, a generation, will become kindled like a firebrand,

and will shed light over the environing darkness. He lights his own

poetic flame at the great beacons of mankind, be they individuals of

genius or inspired epochs, Beethoven or the Renaissance, Tolstoi or the

Revolution, Michelangelo or the Crusades. Yet for the artistic control

of such phenomena, widely ranging, deeply rooted in the cosmos,

overshadowing entire eras, more is requisite than the raw ambition and

fitful enthusiasm of an adolescent. If a mental state of this nature is

to fashion anything that shall endure, it must do so in boldly conceived

forms. The cultural history of inspired and heroic periods, cannot be

limned in fugitive sketches; careful grounding is indispensable. Above

all does this apply to monumental architecture. Here we must have a

spacious site for the display of the structures, and terraces from which

a general view can be secured.

That is why, in all his works, Rolland needs so much room. He desires to

be just to every epoch as to every individual. He never wishes to

display a chance section, but would fain exhibit the entire cycle of

happenings. He would fain depict, not episodes of the French revolution,

but the Revolution as a whole; not the history of Jean Christophe

Krafft, the individual modern musician, but the history of contemporary

Europe. He aims at presenting, not only the central force of an era, but

likewise the manifold counterforces; not the action alone, but the

reaction as well. For Rolland, breadth of scope is a moral necessity

rather than an artistic. Since he would be just in his enthusiasm, since

in the parliament of his work he would give every idea its spokesman, he

is compelled to write many-voiced choruses. That he may exhibit the

Revolution in all its aspects, its rise, its troubles, its political

activities, its decline, and its fall, he plans a cycle of ten dramas.

The Renaissance needs a treatment hardly less extensive. _Jean

Christophe_ must have three thousand pages. To Rolland, the intermediate

form, the variety, seems no less important than the generic type. He is

aware of the danger of dealing exclusively with types. What would _Jean

Christophe_ be worth to us, if with the figure of the hero there were

merely contrasted that of Olivier as a typical Frenchman; if we did not

find subsidiary figures, good and evil, grouped in numberless

variations around the symbolic dominants. If we are to secure a

genuinely objective view, many witnesses must be summoned; if we are to

form a just judgment, the whole wealth of facts must be taken into

consideration. It is this ethical demand for justice to the small no

less than to the great which makes spacious forms essential to Rolland.

This is why his creative artistry demands an all-embracing outlook, a

cyclic method of presentation. Each individual work in these cycles,

however circumscribed it may appear at the first glance, is no more than

a segment, whose full significance becomes apparent only when we grasp

its relationship to the focal thought, to justice as the moral center of

gravity, as a point whence all ideas, words, and actions appear

equidistant from the center of universal humanity. The circle, the

cycle, which unrestingly environs all its wealth of content, wherein

discords are harmoniously resolved--to Rolland, ever the musician, this

symbol of sensory justice is the favorite and wellnigh exclusive form.

The work of Romain Rolland during the last thirty years comprises five

such creative cycles. Too extended in their scope, they have not all

been completed. The first, a dramatic cycle, which in the spirit of

Shakespeare was to represent the Renaissance as an integral unit much as

Gobineau desired to represent it, remained a fragment. Even the

individual dramas have been cast aside by Rolland as inadequate. The

_Tragédies de la foi_ form the second cycle; the _Théâtre de la

révolution_ forms the third. Both are unfinished, but the fragments are

of imperishable value. The fourth cycle, the _Vie des hommes illustres_,

a cycle of biographies planned to form as it were a frieze round the

temple of the invisible God, is likewise incomplete. The ten volumes of

_Jean Christophe_ alone succeed in rounding off the full circle of a

generation, uniting grandeur and justice in the foreshadowed concord.

Above these five creative cycles there looms another and later cycle,

recognizable as yet only in its beginning and its end, its origination

and its recurrence. It will express the harmonious connection of a

manifold existence with a lofty and universal life-cycle in Goethe's

sense, a cycle wherein life and poesy, word and writing, character and

action, themselves become works of art. But this cycle still glows in

the process of fashioning. We feel its vital heat radiating into our

mortal world.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNKNOWN DRAMATIC CYCLE. 1890-1895

The young man of twenty-two, just liberated from the walls of the

Parisian seminary, fired with the genius of music and with that of

Shakespeare's enthralling plays, had in Italy his first experience of

the world as a sphere of freedom. He had learned history from documents

and syllabuses. Now history looked at him with living eyes out of

statues and figures; the Italian cities, the centuries, seemed to move

as if on a stage under his impassioned gaze. Give them but speech, these

sublime memories, and history would become poesy, the past would grow

into a peopled tragedy. During his first hours in the south he was in a

sublime intoxication. Not as historian but as poet did he first see Rome

and Florence.

"Here," he said to himself in youthful fervor, "here is the greatness

for which I have yearned. Here, at least, it used to be, in the days of

the Renaissance, when these cathedrals grew heavenward amid the storms

of battle, and when Michelangelo and Raphael were adorning the walls of

the Vatican, what time the popes were no less mighty in spirit than the

masters of art--for in that epoch, after centuries of interment with the

antique statues, the heroic spirit of ancient Greece had been revived

in a new Europe." His imagination conjured up the superhuman figures of

that earlier day; and of a sudden, Shakespeare, the friend of his first

youth, filled his mind once more. Simultaneously, as I have already

recounted, witnessing a number of performances by Ernesto Rossi, he came

to realize his own dramatic talent. Not now, as of old, in the Clamecy

loft, was he chiefly allured by the gentle feminine figures. The

strongest appeal, to his early manhood, was exercised by the fierceness

of the more powerful characters, by the penetrating truth of a knowledge

of mankind, by the stormy tumult of the soul. In France, Shakespeare is

hardly known at all by stage presentation, and but very little in prose

translation. Rolland, however, now attained as intimate an

acquaintanceship with Shakespeare as had been possessed a hundred years

earlier, almost at the same age, by Goethe when he conceived his

_Oration on Shakespeare_. This new inspiration showed itself in a

vigorous creative impulse. Rolland penned a series of dramas dealing

with the great figures of the past, working with the fervor of the

beginner, and with that sense of newly acquired mastery which was felt

by the Germans of the Sturm und Drang era.

These plays remained unpublished, at first owing to the disfavor of

circumstances, but subsequently because the author's ripening critical

faculty made him withhold them from the world. The first, entitled

_Orsino_, was written at Rome in 1890. Next, in the halcyon clime of

Sicily, he composed _Empedocles_, uninfluenced by Hölderlin's ambitious

draft, of which Rolland heard first from Malwida von Meysenbug. In the

same year, 1891, he wrote _Gli Baglioni_. His return to Paris did not

interrupt this outpouring, for in 1892 he wrote two plays, _Caligula_,

and _Niobé_. From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he

returned with a new Renaissance drama, _Le siège de Mantoue_. This is

the only one of the early plays which the author acknowledges to-day,

though by an unfortunate mischance the manuscript has been lost. At

length turning his attention to French history, he wrote _Saint Louis_

(1893), the first of his _Tragédies de la foi_. Next came _Jeanne de

Piennes_ (1894), which remains unpublished.... _Aërt_ (1895), the second

of the _Tragédies de la foi_, was the first of Rolland's plays to be

staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the _Théâtre

de la révolution_. In 1900 he wrote _La Montespan_ and _Les trois

amoureuses_.

Thus before the era of the more important works there were composed no

less than twelve dramas, equaling in bulk the entire dramatic output of

Schiller, Kleist, or Hebbel. The first eight of these were never either

printed or staged. Except for the appreciation by his confidant Malwida

von Meysenbug in _Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin_ (a connoisseur's

tribute to their artistic merits), not a word has ever been said about

them.

With a single exception. One of the plays was read on a classical

occasion by one of the greatest French actors of the day, but the

reminiscence is a painful one. Gabriel Monod, who from being Rolland's

teacher had become his friend, noting Malwida von Meysenbug's

enthusiasm, gave three of Rolland's pieces to Mounet-Sully, who was

delighted with them. The actor submitted them to the Comédie Française,

and in the reading committee he fought desperately on behalf of the

unknown, whose dramatic talent was more obvious to him, the comedian,

than it was to the men of letters. _Orsino_ and _Gli Baglioni_ were

ruthlessly rejected, but _Niobé_ was read to the committee. This was a

momentous incident in Rolland's life; for the first time, fame seemed

close at hand. Mounet-Sully read the play. Rolland was present. The

reading took two hours, and for a further two minutes the young author's

fate hung in the balance. Not yet, however, was celebrity to come. The

drama was refused, to relapse into oblivion. It was not even accorded

the lesser grace of print; and of the dozen or so dramatic works which

the dauntless author penned during the next decade, not one found its

way on to the boards of the national theater.

We know no more than the names of these early works, and are unable to

judge their worth. But when we study the later plays we may deduce the

conclusion that in the earlier ones a premature flame, raging too hotly,

burned itself out. If the dramas which first appeared in the press charm

us by their maturity and concentration, they depend for these qualities

upon the fate which left their predecessors unknown. Their calm is built

upon the passion of those which were sacrificed unborn; they owe their

orderly structure to the heroic zeal of their martyred brethren. All

true creation grows out of the dark humus of rejected creations. Of none

is it more true than of Romain Rolland that his work blossoms upon the

soil of renunciation.

CHAPTER V

THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH

_Saint Louis. Aërt. 1895-1898_

Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten

dramas of his youth under the title _Les tragédies de la foi_ (1913),

Rolland alluded in the preface to the tragical melancholy of the epoch

in which they were composed. "At that time," he writes, "we were much

further from our goal, and far more isolated." The elder brothers of

Jean Christophe and Olivier, "less robust though not less fervent in the

faith," had found it harder to defend their beliefs, to maintain their

idealism at its lofty level, than did the youth of the new day; living

in a stronger France, a freer Europe. Twenty years earlier, the shadow

of defeat still lay athwart the land. These heroes of the French spirit

had been compelled, even within themselves, to fight the evil genius of

the race, to combat doubts as to the high destinies of their nation, to

struggle against the lassitude of the vanquished. Then was to be heard

the cry of a petty era lamenting its vanished greatness; it aroused no

echo from the stage or from the people; it wasted itself in the

unresponsive skies--and yet it was the expression of an undying faith

in life.

Closely akin to this ardor is the faith voiced by Rolland's dramatic

cycle, though the plays deal with such different epochs, and are so

diverse in the range of their ideas. He wishes to depict the "courants

de foi," the mysterious streams of faith, at a time when a flame of

spiritual enthusiasm is spreading through an entire nation, when an idea

is flashing from mind to mind, involving unnumbered thousands in the

storm of an illusion; when the calm of the soul is suddenly ruffled by

heroic tumult; when the word, the faith, the ideal, though ever

invisible and unattainable, transfuses the inert world and lifts it

towards the stars. It matters nothing in ultimate analysis what idea

fires the souls of men; whether the idea be that of Saint Louis for the

holy sepulcher and Christ's realm, or that of Aërt for the fatherland,

or that of the Girondists for freedom. The ostensible goal is a minor

matter; the essence of such movements is the wonder-working faith; it is

this which assembles a people for crusades into the east, which summons

thousands to death for the nation, which makes leaders throw themselves

willingly under the guillotine. "Toute la vie est dans l'essor," the

reality of life is found in its impetus, as Verhaeren says; that alone

is beautiful which is created in the enthusiasm of faith. We are not to

infer that these early heroes, born out of due time, must have succumbed

to discouragement since they failed to reach their goal; one and all

they had to bow their souls to the influences of a petty time. That is

why Saint Louis died without seeing Jerusalem; why Aërt, fleeing from

bondage, found only the eternal freedom of death; why the Girondists

were trampled beneath the heels of the mob. These men had the true

faith, that faith which does not demand realization in this world. In

widely separated centuries, and against different storms of time, they

were the banner bearers of the same ideal, whether they carried the

cross or held the sword, whether they wore the cap of liberty or the

visored helm. They were animated with the same enthusiasm for the

unseen; they had the same enemy, call it cowardice, call it poverty of

spirit, call it the supineness of a weary age. When destiny refused them

the externals of greatness, they created greatness in their own souls.

Amid unheroic environments they displayed the perennial heroism of the

undaunted will; the triumph of the spirit which, when animated with

faith, can prove victorious over time.

The significance, the lofty aim, of these early plays, was their

intention to recall to the minds of contemporaries the memory of

forgotten brothers in the faith, to arouse for the service of the spirit

and not for the ends of brute force that idealism which ever burgeons

from the imperishable seed of youth. Already we discern the entire moral

purport of Rolland's later work, the endeavor to change the world by the

force of inspiration. "Tout est bien qui exalte la vie." Everything

which exalts life is good. This is Rolland's confession of faith, as it

is that of his own Olivier. Ardor alone can create vital realities.

There is no defeat over which the will cannot triumph; there is no

sorrow above which a free spirit cannot soar. Who wills the

unattainable, is stronger than destiny; even his destruction in this

mortal world is none the less a mastery of fate. The tragedy of his

heroism kindles fresh enthusiasm, which seizes the standard as it slips

from his grasp, to raise it anew and bear it onward through the ages.

CHAPTER VI

SAINT LOUIS

1894

This epic of King Louis IX is a drama of religious exaltation, born of

the spirit of music, an adaptation of the Wagnerian idea of elucidating

ancestral sagas in works of art. It was originally designed as an opera.

Rolland actually composed an overture to the work; but this, like his

other musical compositions, remains unpublished. Subsequently he was

satisfied with lyrical treatment in place of music. We find no touch of

Shakespearean passion in these gentle pictures. It is a heroic legend of

the saints, in dramatic form. The scenes remind us of a phrase of

Flaubert's in _La légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, in that they

are "written as they appear in the stained-glass windows of our

churches." The tints are delicate, like those of the frescoes in the

Panthéon, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte

Geneviève watching over Paris. The soft moonlight playing on the saint's

figure in the frescoes is identical with the light which in Rolland's

drama shines like a halo of goodness round the head of the pious king of

France.

The music of _Parsifal_ seems to sound faintly through the work. We

trace the lineaments of Parsifal himself in this monarch, to whom

knowledge comes not through sympathy but through goodness, and who finds

the aptest phrase to explain his own title to fame, saying: "Pour

comprendre les autres, il ne faut qu'aimer"--To understand others, we

need only love. His leading quality is gentleness, but he has so much of

it that the strong grow weak before him; he has nothing but his faith,

but this faith builds mountains of action. He neither can nor will lead

his people to victory; but he makes his subjects transcend themselves,

transcend their own inertia and the apparently futile venture of the

crusade, to attain faith. Thereby he gives the whole nation the

greatness which ever springs from self-sacrifice. In Saint Louis,

Rolland for the first time presents his favorite type, that of the

vanquished victor. The king never reaches his goal, but "plus qu'il est

écrasé par les choses plus il semble les dominer davantage"--the more he

seems to be crushed by things, the more does he dominate them. When,

like Moses, he is forbidden to set eyes on the promised land, when it

proves to be his destiny "de mourir vaincu," to die conquered, as he

draws his last breath on the mountain slope his soldiers at the summit,

catching sight of the city which is the goal of their aspirations, raise

an exultant shout. Louis knows that to one who strives for the

unattainable the world can never give victory, but "il est beau lutter

pour l'impossible quand l'impossible est Dieu"--it is glorious to fight

for the unattainable when the unattainable is God. For the vanquished

in such a struggle, the highest triumph is reserved. He has stirred up

the weak in soul to do a deed whose rapture is denied to himself; from

his own faith he has created faith in others; from his own spirit has

issued the eternal spirit.

Rolland's first published work exhales the atmosphere of Christianity.

Humility conquers force, faith conquers the world, love conquers hatred;

these eternal truths which have been incorporated in countless sayings

and writings from those of the primitive Christians down to those of

Tolstoi, are repeated once again by Rolland in the form of a legend of

the saints. In his later works, however, with a freer touch, he shows

that the power of faith is not tied to any particular creed. The

symbolical world, which is here used as a romanticist vehicle in which

to enwrap his own idealism, is replaced by the environment of modern

days. Thus we are taught that from Saint Louis and the crusades it is

but a step to our own soul, if it desire "to be great and to defend

greatness on earth."

CHAPTER VII

AËRT

1898

_Aërt_ was written a year later than _Saint Louis_; more explicitly than

the pious epic does it aim at restoring faith and idealism to the

disheartened nation. _Saint Louis_ is a heroic legend, a tender

reminiscence of former greatness; _Aërt_ is the tragedy of the

vanquished, and a passionate appeal to them to awaken. The stage

directions express this aim clearly: "The scene is cast in an imaginary

Holland of the seventeenth century. We see a people broken by defeat

and, which is much worse, debased thereby. The future presents itself as

a period of slow decadence, whose anticipation definitively annuls the

already exhausted energies.... The moral and political humiliations of

recent years are the foundation of the troubles still in store."

Such is the environment in which Rolland places Aërt, the young prince,

heir to vanished greatness. This Holland is, of course, symbolical of

the Third Republic. Fruitless attempts are made, by the temptations of

loose living, by various artifices, by the instilling of doubt, to break

the captive's faith in greatness, to undermine the one power that still

sustains the debile body and the suffering soul. The hypocrites of his

entourage do their utmost, with luxury, frivolity, and lies, to wean him

from what he considers his high calling, which is to prove himself

worthy heir of a glorious past. He remains unshaken. His tutor, Maître

Trojanus (a forerunner of Anatole France), all of whose qualities,

kindliness, skepticism, energy, and wisdom, are but lukewarm, would like

to make a Marcus Aurelius of his ardent pupil, one who thinks and

renounces rather than one who acts. The lad proudly answers: "I pay due

reverence to ideas, but I recognize something higher than they, moral

grandeur." In a laodicean age, he yearns for action.

But action is force, struggle is blood. His gentle spirit desires peace;

his moral will craves for the right. The youth has within him both a

Hamlet and a Saint-Just, both a vacillator and a zealot. He is a

wraithlike double of Olivier, already able to reckon up all values. The

goal of Aërt's youthful passion is still indeterminate; this passion is

nothing but a flame which wastes itself in words and aspirations. He

does not make the deed come at his beckoning; but the deed takes

possession of him, dragging the weakling down with it into the depths

whence there is no other issue than by death. From degradation he finds

a last rescue, a path to moral greatness, his own deed, done for the

sake of all. Surrounded by the scornful victors, calling to him "Too

late," he answers proudly, "Not too late to be free," and plunges

headlong out of life.

This romanticist play is a piece of tragical symbolism. It reminds us a

little of another youthful composition, the work of a poet who has now

attained fame. I refer to Fritz von Unruh's _Die Offiziere_, in which

the torment of enforced inactivity and repressed heroic will gives rise

to warlike impulses as a means of spiritual enfranchisement. Like

Unruh's hero, Aërt in his outcry proclaims the torpor of his companions,

voices his oppression amid the sultry and stagnant atmosphere of a time

devoid of faith. Encompassed by a gray materialism, during the years

when Zola and Mirbeau were at the zenith of their fame, the lonely

Rolland was hoisting the flag of the ideal over a humiliated land.

CHAPTER VIII

ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE

With whole-souled faith the young poet uttered his first dramatic

appeals in the heroic form, being mindful of Schiller's saying that

fortunate epochs could devote themselves to the service of beauty,

whereas in times of weakness it was necessary to lean upon the examples

of past heroism. Rolland had issued to his nation a summons to

greatness. There was no answer. His conviction that a new impetus was

indispensable remaining unshaken, Rolland looked for the cause of this

lack of response. He rightly discerned it, not in his own work, but in

the refractoriness of the age. Tolstoi, in his books and in the

wonderful letter to Rolland, had been the first to make the young man

realize the sterility of bourgeois art. Above all in the drama, its most

sensual form of expression, that art had lost touch with the moral and

emotional forces of life. A clique of busy playwrights had monopolized

the Parisian stage. Their eternal theme was adultery, in its manifold

variations. They depicted petty erotic conflicts, but never dealt with a

universally human ethical problem. The audiences, badly counseled by the

press, which deliberately fostered the public's intellectual lethargy,

did not ask to be morally awakened, but merely to be amused and pleased.

The theater was anything in the world other than "the moral institution"

demanded by Schiller and championed by d'Alembert. No breath of passion

found its way from such dramatic art as this into the heart of the

nation; there was nothing but spindrift scattered over the surface by

the breeze. A great gulf was fixed between this witty and sensuous

amusement, and the genuinely creative and receptive energies of France.

Rolland, led by Tolstoi and accompanied by enthusiastic friends,

realized the moral dangers of the situation. He perceived that dramatic

art is worthless and destructive when it lives a life remote from the

people. Unconsciously in _Aërt_ he had heralded what he now formulated

as a definite principle, that the people will be the first to understand

genuinely heroic problems. The simple craftsman Claes in that play is

the only member of the captive prince's circle who revolts against tepid

submission, who burns at the disgrace inflicted on his fatherland. In

other artistic forms than the drama, the titanic forces surging up from

the depths of the people had already been recognized. Zola and the

naturalists had depicted the tragical beauty of the proletariat; Millet

and Meunier had given pictorial and sculptural representations of

proletarians; socialism had unleashed the religious might of the

collective consciousness. The theater alone, vehicle for the most direct

working of art upon the common people, had been captured by the

bourgeoisie, its tremendous possibilities for promoting a moral

renascence being thereby cut off. Unceasingly did the drama practice the

in-and-in breeding of sexual problems. In its pursuit of erotic trifles,

it had over-looked the new social ideas, the most fundamental of modern

times. It was in danger of decay because it no longer thrust its roots

into the permanent subsoil of the nation. The anæmia of dramatic art, as

Rolland recognized, could be cured only by intimate association with the

life of the people. The effeminateness of the French drama must be

replaced by virility through vital contact with the masses. "Seul la

sève populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la santé." If the theater

aspires to be national, it must not merely minister to the luxury of the

upper ten thousand. It must become the moral nutriment of the common

people, and must draw fertility from the folk-soul.

Rolland's work during the next few years was an endeavor to provide such

a theater for the people. A few young men without influence or

authority, strong only in the ardor and sincerity of their youthfulness,

tried to bring this lofty idea to fruition, despite the utter

indifference of the metropolis, and in defiance of the veiled hostility

of the press. In their "_Revue dramatique_" they published manifestoes.

They sought for actors, stages, and helpers. They wrote plays, formed

committees, sent dispatches to ministers of state. In their endeavor to

bridge the chasm between the bourgeois theater and the nation, they

wrought with the fanatical zeal of the leaders of forlorn hopes. Rolland

was their chief. His manifesto, _Le théâtre du peuple_, and his _Théâtre

de la révolution_, are enduring monuments of an attempt which

temporarily ended in defeat, but which, like all his defeats, has been

transmuted, humanly and artistically, into a moral triumph.

CHAPTER IX

AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

"The old era is finished; the new era is beginning." Rolland, writing in

the "Revue dramatique" in 1900, opened his appeal with these words by

Schiller. The summons was twofold, to the writers and to the people,

that they should constitute a new unity, should form a people's theater.

The stage and the plays were to belong to the people. Since the forces

of the people are eternal and unalterable, art must accommodate itself

to the people, not the people to art. This union must be perfected in

the creative depths. It must not be a casual intimacy, but a permeation,

a genetic wedding of souls. The people requires its own art, its own

drama. As Tolstoi phrased it, the people must be the ultimate touchstone

of all values. Its powerful, mystical, eternally religious energy of

inspiration, must become more affirmative and stronger, so that art,

which in its bourgeois associations has grown morbid and wan, can draw

new vigor from the vigor of the people.

To this end it is essential that the people should no longer be a chance

audience, transiently patronized by friendly managers and actors. The

popular performances of the great theaters, such as have been customary

in Paris since the issue of Napoleon's decree on the subject, do not

suffice. Valueless also, in Rolland's view, are the attempts made from

time to time by the Comédie Française to present to the workers the

plays of such court poets as Corneille and Racine. The people do not

want caviare, but wholesome fare. For the nourishment of their

indestructible idealism they need an art of their own, a theater of

their own, and, above all, works adapted to their sensibilities and to

their intellectual tastes. When they come to the theater, they must not

be made to feel that they are tolerated guests in a world of unfamiliar

ideas. In the art that is presented to them they must be able to

recognize the mainspring of their own energies.

More appropriate, in Rolland's opinion, are the attempts which have been

made by isolated individuals like Maurice Pottecher in Bussang (Vosges)

to provide a "théâtre du peuple," presenting to restricted audiences

pieces easily understood. But such endeavors touch small circles only.

The chasm in the gigantic metropolis between the stage and the real

population remains unbridged. With the best will in the world, the

twenty or thirty special representations are witnessed by no more than

an infinitesimal proportion of the population. They do not signify a

spiritual union, or promote a new moral impetus. Dramatic art has no

permanent influence on the masses; and the masses, in their turn, have

no influence on dramatic art. Though, in another literary sphere, Zola,

Charles Louis Philippe, and Maupassant, began long ago to draw fertile

inspiration from proletarian idealism, the drama has remained sterile

and antipopular.

The people, therefore, must have its own theater. When this has been

achieved, what shall we offer to the popular audiences? Rolland makes a

brief survey of world literature. The result is appalling. What can the

workers care for the classical pieces of the French drama? Corneille and

Racine, with their decorous emotion, are alien to him; the subtleties of

Molière are barely comprehensible. The tragedies of classical antiquity,

the writings of the Greek dramatists, would bore the workers; Hugo's

romanticism would repel, despite the author's healthy instinct for

reality. Shakespeare, the universally human, is more akin to the

folk-mind, but his plays must be adapted to fit them for popular

presentation, and thereby they are falsified. Schiller, with _Die

Räuber_ and _Wilhelm Tell_, might be expected to arouse enthusiasm; but

Schiller, like Kleist with _Der Prinz von Homburg_, is, for nationalist

reasons, somewhat uncongenial to the Parisians. Tolstoi's _The Dominion

of Darkness_ and Hauptmann's _Die Weber_ would be comprehensible enough,

but their matter would prove somewhat depressing. While well calculated

to stir the consciences of the guilty, among the people they would

arouse feelings of despair rather than of hope. Anzengruber, a genuine

folk-poet, is too distinctively Viennese in his topics. Wagner, whose

_Die Meistersinger_ Rolland regards as the climax of universally

comprehensible and elevating art, cannot be presented without the aid of

music.

However far he looks back into the past, Rolland can find no answer to

his question. But he is not easily discouraged. To him disappointment is

but a spur to fresh effort. If there are as yet no plays for the

people's theater, it is the sacred duty of the new generation to provide

what is lacking. The manifesto ends with a jubilant appeal: "Tout est à

dire! Tout est à faire! A l'oeuvre!" In the beginning was the deed.

CHAPTER X

THE PROGRAM

What kind of plays do the people want? It wants "good" plays, in the

sense in which the word "good" is used by Tolstoi when he speaks of

"good books." It wants plays which are easy to understand without being

commonplace; those which stimulate faith without leading the spirit

astray; those which appeal, not to sensuality, not to the love of

sight-seeing, but to the powerful idealistic instincts of the masses.

These plays must not treat of minor conflicts; but, in the spirit of the

antique tragedies, they must display man in the struggle with elemental

forces, man as subject to heroic destiny. "Let us away with complicated

psychologies, with subtle innuendoes, with obscure symbolisms, with the

art of drawing-rooms and alcoves." Art for the people must be

monumental. Though the people desires truth, it must not be delivered

over to naturalism, for art which makes the masses aware of their own

misery will never kindle the sacred flame of enthusiasm, but only the

insensate passion of anger. If, next day, the workers are to resume

their daily tasks with a heightened and more cheerful confidence, they

need a tonic. Thus the evening must have been a source of energy, but

must at the same time have sharpened the intelligence. Undoubtedly the

drama should display the people to the people, not however in the

proletarian dullness of narrow dwellings, but on the pinnacles of the

past. Rolland therefore opines, following to a large extent in

Schiller's footsteps, that the people's theater must be historical in

scope. The populace must not merely make its own acquaintance on the

stage, but must be brought to admire its own past. Here we see the motif

to which Rolland continually returns, the need for arousing a passionate

aspiration towards greatness. In its suffering, the people must learn to

regain delight in its own self.

With marvelous vividness does the imaginative historian display the epic

significance of history. The forces of the past are sacred by reason of

the spiritual energy which is part of every great movement. Reasoning

persons can hardly fail to be revolted when they observe the unwarranted

amount of space allotted to anecdotes, accessories, the trifles of

history, at the expense of its living soul. The power of the past must

be awakened; the will to action must be steeled. Those who live to-day

must learn greatness from their fathers and forefathers. "History can

teach people to get outside themselves, to read in the souls of others.

We discern ourselves in the past, in a mingling of like characters and

differing lineaments, with errors and vices which we can avoid. But

precisely because history depicts the mutable, does it give us a better

knowledge of the unchanging."

What, he goes on to ask, have French dramatists hitherto brought the

people out of the past? The burlesque figure of Cyrano; the gracefully

sentimental personality of the duke of Reichstadt; the artificial

conception of Madame Sans-Gène! "Tout est à faire! Tout est à dire!" The

land of dramatic art still lies fallow. "For France, national epopee is

quite a new thing. Our playwrights have neglected the drama of the

French people, although that people has been perhaps, since the days of

Rome, the most heroic in the world. Europe's heart was beating in the

kings, the thinkers, the revolutionists of France. And great as this

nation has been in all domains of the spirit, its greatness has been

shown above all in the field of action. Herein lay its most sublime

creation; here was its poem, its drama, its epos. France did what others

dreamed of doing. France wrote no Iliads, but lived a dozen. The heroes

of France wrought more splendidly than the poets. No Shakespeare sang

their deeds; but Danton on the scaffold was the spirit of Shakespeare

personified. The life of France has touched the loftiest summits of joy;

it has plumbed the deepest abysses of sorrow. It has been a wonderful

'comédie humaine,' a series of dramas; each of its epochs a new poem."

This past must be recalled to life; French historical drama must restore

it to the French people. "The spirit which soars above the centuries,

will thus soar for centuries to come. If we would engender strong souls,

we must nourish them with the energies of the world." Rolland now

expands the French ode into a European ode. "The world must be our

theme, for a nation is too small." One hundred and twenty years earlier,

Schiller had said: "I write as a citizen of the world. Early did I

exchange my fatherland for mankind." Rolland is fired by Goethe's words:

"National literature now means very little; the epoch of world

literature is at hand." He utters the following appeal: "Let us make

Goethe's prophesy a living reality! It is our task to teach the French

to look upon their national history as a wellspring of popular art; but

on no account should we exclude the sagas of other nations. Though it is

doubtless our first duty to make the most of the treasures we have

ourselves inherited, we must none the less find room on our stage for

the great deeds of all races. Just as Anacharsis Cloots and Thomas Paine

were chosen members of the Convention; just as Schiller, Klopstock,

Washington, Priestley, Bentham, Pestalozzi, and Kosciuszko, are the

heroes of our world; so should we inaugurate in Paris the epopee of the

European people!"

Thus did Rolland's manifesto, passing far beyond the limits of the

stage, become at its close his first appeal to Europe. Uttered by a

solitary voice, it remained for the time unheeded and void of effect.

Nevertheless the confession of faith had been spoken; it was

indestructible; it could never pass away. Jean Christophe had proclaimed

his message to the world.

CHAPTER XI

THE CREATIVE ARTIST

The task is set. Who shall accomplish it? Romain Rolland answers by

putting his hand to the work. The hero in him shrinks from no defeat;

the youth in him dreads no difficulty. An epic of the French people is

to be written. He does not hesitate to lay the foundations, though

environed by the silence and indifference of the metropolis. As always,

the impetus that drives him is moral rather than artistic. He has a

sense of personal responsibility for an entire nation. By such

productive, by such heroic idealism, alone, and not by a purely

theoretical idealism, can idealism be engendered.

The theme is easy to find. Rolland turns to the greatest moment of

French history, to the Revolution. He responds to the appeal of his

revolutionary forefathers. On the 27th of Floréal, 1794, the Committee

of Public Safety issued an invocation to authors "to glorify the chief

happenings of the French revolution; to compose republican dramas; to

hand down to posterity the great epochs of the French renascence; to

inspire history with the firmness of character appropriate to the annals

of a great nation defending its freedom against the onslaught of all

the tyrants of Europe." On the 11th of Messidor, the Committee asked

young authors "boldly to recognize the whole magnitude of the

undertaking, and to avoid the easy and well-trodden paths of

mediocrity." The signatories of these decrees, Danton, Robespierre,

Carnot, and Couthon, have now become national figures, legendary heroes,

monuments in public places. Where restrictions were imposed on poetic

inspiration by undue proximity to the subject, there is now room for the

imagination to expand, seeing that this history of the period is remote

enough to give free play to the tragic muse. The documents just quoted

issue a summons to the poet and the historian in Rolland; but the same

challenge rings from within as a personal heritage. Boniard, one of his

great-grandfathers on the paternal side, took part in the revolutionary

struggle as "an apostle of liberty," and described in his diary the

storming of the Bastille. More than half a century later, another

relative was fatally stabbed in Clamecy during a rising against the coup

d'état. The blood of revolutionary zealots runs in Rolland's veins, no

less than the blood of religious devotees. A century after 1792, in the

fervor of commemoration, he reconstructed the great figures of that

glorious past. The theater in which the "French Iliads" were to be

staged did not yet exist; no one had hitherto recognized Rolland as a

literary force; actors and audience were alike lacking. Of all the

requisites for the new creation, there existed solely his own faith and

his own will. Building upon faith alone, he began to write _Le théâtre

de la révolution_.

CHAPTER XII

THE DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTION

1898-1902

Planning this "Iliad of the French People" for the people's theater,

Rolland designed it as a decalogy, as a time sequence of ten dramas

somewhat after the manner of Shakespeare's histories. "I wished," he

writes in the 1909 preface to _Le théâtre de la révolution_, "in the

totality of this work to exhibit as it were the drama of a convulsion of

nature, to depict a social storm from the moment when the first waves

began to rise above the surface of the ocean down to the moment when

calm spread once more over the face of the waters." No by-play, no

anecdotal trifling, was to mitigate the mighty rhythm of the primitive

forces. "My leading aim was to purify the course of events, as far as

might be, from all romanticist intrigue, which would serve only to

encumber and belittle the movement. Above all I desired to throw light

upon the great political and social interests on behalf of which mankind

has been fighting for a hundred years." It is obvious that the work of

Schiller is closely akin to the idealistic style of this people's

theater. Comparing Rolland's technique with Schiller's, we may say that

Rolland was thinking of a _Don Carlos_ without the Eboli episodes, of a

_Wallenstein_ without the Thekla sentimentalities. He wished to show the

people the sublimities of history, not to entertain the audience with

anecdotes of popular heroes.

Thus conceived as a dramatic cycle, it was simultaneously, from the

musician's outlook, to be a symphony, an "Eroica." A prelude was to

introduce the whole, a pastoral in the style of the "fêtes galantes." We

are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien

régime; we are shown powdered and patched ladies, amorous cavaliers,

dallying and chattering. The storm is approaching, but no one heeds it.

Once again the age of gallantry smiles; the setting sun of the Grand

Monarque seems to shine once more on the fading tints in the garden of

Versailles.

_Le 14 Juillet_ is the flourish of trumpets; it marks the opening of the

storm. _Danton_ is the critical climax; in the hour of victory comes the

beginning of moral defeat, the fratricidal struggle. A _Robespierre_ was

to introduce the declining phase. _Le triomphe de la raison_ shows the

disintegration of the Revolution in the provinces; _Les loups_ depicts a

like decomposition in the army. Between two of the heroic plays, the

author proposed to insert a love drama, describing the fate of Louvet,

the Girondist. Wishing to visit his beloved in Paris, he leaves his

hiding-place in Gascony, and is the only one to escape the death that

overtakes his friends, who are all guillotined or torn to pieces by the

wolves as they flee. The figures of Marat, Saint-Just, and Adam Lux,

which are merely touched on in the extant plays, were to receive

detailed treatment in the dramas that remain unwritten. Doubtless, too,

the figure of Napoleon would have towered above the dying Revolution.

Opening with a musical and lyrical prelude, this symphonic composition

was to end with a postlude. After the great storm, castaways from the

shipwreck were to foregather in Switzerland, near Soleure. Royalists and

regicides, Girondists and Montagnards, were to exchange reminiscences; a

love episode between two of their children was to lend an idyllic touch

to the aftermath of the European storm. Fragments only of this great

design have been carried to completion, comprising the four dramas, _Le

14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les loups_, and _Le triomphe de la raison_. When

these plays had been written, Rolland abandoned the scheme, to which the

people, like the literary world and the stage, had given no

encouragement. For more than a decade these tragedies have been

forgotten. To-day, perchance, the awakening impulses of an age becoming

aware of its own lineaments in the prophetic image of a world

convulsion, may arouse in the author an impulse to complete what was so

magnificently begun.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY

1902

Of the four completed revolutionary dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_ stands first

in point of historic time. Here we see the Revolution as one of the

elements of nature. No conscious thought has formed it; no leader has

guided it. Like thunder from a clear sky comes the aimless discharge of

the tensions that have accumulated among the people. The thunderbolt

strikes the Bastille; the lightning flash illumines the soul of the

entire nation. This piece has no heroes, for the hero of the play is the

multitude. "Individuals are merged in the ocean of the people," writes

Rolland in the preface. "He who limns a storm at sea, need not paint the

details of every wave; he must show the unchained forces of the ocean.

Meticulous precision is a minor matter compared with the impassioned

truth of the whole." In actual fact, this drama is all tumultuous

movement; individuals rush across the stage like figures on the

cinematographic screen; the storming of the Bastille is not the outcome

of a reasoned purpose, but of an overwhelming, an ecstatic impulse.

_Le 14 Juillet_, therefore, is not properly speaking a drama, and does

not really seek to be anything of the kind. Consciously or

unconsciously, Rolland aimed at creating one of those "fêtes populaires"

which the Convention had encouraged, a people's festival with music and

dancing, an epinikion, a triumphal ode. His work, therefore, is not

suitable for the artificial environment of the boards, and should rather

be played under the free heaven. Opening symphonically, it closes in

exultant choruses for which the author gives definite directions to the

composer. "The music must be, as it were, the background of a fresco. It

must make manifest the heroical significance of the festival; it must

fill in pauses as they can never be adequately filled in by a crowd of

supernumeraries, for these, however much noise they make, fail to

sustain the illusion of real life. This music should be inspired by that

of Beethoven, which more powerfully than any other reflects the

enthusiasms of the Revolution. Above all, it must breathe an ardent

faith. No composer will effect anything great in this vein unless he be

personally inspired by the soul of the people, unless he himself feel

the burning passion that is here portrayed."

Rolland wishes to create an atmosphere of ecstatic rapture. Not by

dramatic excitement, but by its opposite. The theater is to be

forgotten; the multitude in the audience is to become spiritually at one

with its image on the stage. In the last scene, when the phrases are

directly addressed to the audience, when the stormers of the Bastille

appeal to their hearers on behalf of the imperishable victory which

leads men to break the yoke of oppression and to win brotherhood, this

idea must not be a mere echo from the members of the audience, but must

surge up spontaneously in their own hearts. The cry "tous frères" must

be a double chorus of actors and spectators, for the latter, part of the

"courant de foi," must share the intoxication of joy. The spark from

their own past must rekindle in the hearts of to-day. It is manifest

that words alone will not suffice to produce this effect. Hence Rolland

wishes to superadd the higher spell of music, the undying goddess of

pure ecstasy.

The audience of which he dreamed was not forthcoming; nor until twenty

years had elapsed was he to find Doyen, the musician who was almost

competent to fulfill his demands. The representation in the Gemier

Theater on March 21, 1902, wasted itself in the void. His message never

reached the people to whose ear it had been so vehemently addressed.

Without an echo, almost pitifully, was this ode of joy drowned in the

roar of the great city, which had forgotten the deeds of the past, and

which failed to understand its own kinship to Rolland, the man who was

recalling those deeds to memory.

CHAPTER XIV

DANTON

1900

_Danton_ deals with a decisive moment of the Revolution, the

waterparting between the ascent and the decline. What the masses had

created as elemental forces, were now being turned to personal advantage

by individuals, by ambitious leaders. Every spiritual movement, and

above all every revolution or reformation, knows this tragical instant

of victory, when power passes into the hands of the few; when moral

unity is broken in sunder by the conflict between political aims; when

the masses, who in an impetuous onrush have secured freedom, blindly

follow demagogues inspired solely by self-interest. It seems to be an

inevitable sequel of success in such cases, that the nobler should stand

aside in disillusionment, that the idealists should hold aloof while the

self-seeking triumph. At that very time, in the Dreyfus affair, Rolland

had witnessed similar happenings. He realized that the genuine strength

of an idea subsists only during its non-fulfilment. Its true power is in

the hands of those who are not victorious; those to whom the ideal is

everything, success nothing. Victory brings power, and power is just to

itself alone.

The play, therefore, is no longer a drama of the Revolution; it is the

drama of the great revolutionist. Mystical power crystallizes in the

form of human characters. Resoluteness becomes contentiousness. In the

very intoxication of victory, in the queasy atmosphere of the

blood-stained field, begins the new struggle among the pretorians for

the empire they have conquered. There is struggle between ideas;

struggle between personalities; struggle between temperaments; struggle

between persons of different social origin. Now that they are no longer

united as comrades by the compulsion of imminent danger, they recognize

their mutual incompatibilities. The revolutionary crisis comes in the

hour of triumph. The hostile armies have been defeated; the royalists

and the Girondists have been crushed and scattered. Now there arises in

the Convention a battle of all against all. The characters are admirably

delineated. Danton is the good giant, sanguine, warm, and human, a

hurricane in his passions but with no love of fighting for fighting's

sake. He has dreamed of the Revolution as bringing joy to mankind, and

now sees that it has culminated in a new tyranny. He is sickened by

bloodshed, and he detests the butcher's work of the guillotine, just as

Christ would have loathed the Inquisition claiming to represent the

spirit of his teaching. He is filled with horror at his fellows. "Je

suis soûle des hommes. Je les vomis."--I am surfeited with men. I spue

them out of my mouth.--He longs for a frank naturalness, for an

unsophisticated natural life. Now that the danger to the republic is

over, his passion has cooled; his love goes out to woman, to the people,

to happiness; he wishes others to love him. His revolutionary fervor has

been the outcome of an impulse towards freedom and justice; hence he is

beloved by the masses, who recognize in him the instinct which led them

to storm the Bastille, the same scorn of consequence, the same marrow as

their own. Robespierre is uncongenial to them. He is too frigid, he is

too much the lawyer, to enlist their sympathies. But his doctrinaire

fanaticism, his far from ignoble ambition, give him a terrible power

which makes him forge his way onwards when Danton with his cheerful love

of life has ceased to strive. Whilst Danton becomes every day more and

more nauseated by politics, the concentrated energy of Robespierre's

frigid temperament strikes ever closer towards the centralized control

of power. Like his friend Saint-Just--the zealot of virtue, the

blood-thirsty apostle of justice, the stubborn papist or

calvinist--Robespierre can no longer see human beings, who for him are

now hidden behind the theories, the laws, and the dogmas of the new

religion. Not for him, as for Danton, the goal of a happy and free

humanity. What he desires is that men shall be virtuous as the slaves of

prescribed formulas. The collision between Danton and Robespierre upon

the topmost summit of victory is in ultimate analysis the collision

between freedom and law, between the elasticity of life and the rigidity

of concepts. Danton is overthrown. He is too indolent, too heedless, too

human in his defense. But even as he falls it is plain that he will

drag his opponent after him adown the precipice.

In the composition of this tragedy Rolland shows himself to be wholly

the dramatist. Lyricism has disappeared; emotion has vanished amid the

rush of events; the conflict arises from the liberation of human energy,

from the clash of feelings and of personalities. In _Le 14 Juillet_ the

masses had played the principal part, but in this new phase of the

Revolution they have become mere spectators once more. Their will, which

had been concentrated during a brief hour of enthusiasm, has been broken

into fragments, so that they are blown before every breath of oratory.

The ardors of the Revolution are dissipated in intrigues. It is not the

heroic instinct of the people which now dominates the situation, but the

authoritarian and yet indecisive spirit of the intellectuals. Whilst in

_Le 14 Juillet Rolland_ exhibits to his nation the greatness of its

powers; in _Danton_ he depicts the danger of its all too prompt relapse

into passivity, the peril that ever follows hard upon the heels of

victory. From this outlook, therefore, _Danton_ likewise is a call to

action, an energizing elixir. Thus did Jaurès characterize it, Jaurès

who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the

work when it was staged at the Théâtre Civique on December 20, 1900--a

performance forgotten in twenty-four hours, like all Rolland's early

efforts.

CHAPTER XV

THE TRIUMPH OF REASON

1899

_Le triomphe de la raison_ is no more than a fragment of the great

fresco. But it is inspired with the central thought round which

Rolland's ideas turn. In it for the first time there is a complete

exposition of the dialectic of defeat--the passionate advocacy of the

vanquished, the transformation of actual overthrow into spiritual

triumph. This thought, first conceived in his childhood and reinforced

by all his experience, forms the kernel of the author's moral

sensibility. The Girondists have been defeated, and are defending

themselves in a fortress against the sansculottes. The royalists, aided

by the English, wish to rescue them. Their ideal, the freedom of the

spirit and the freedom of the fatherland, has been destroyed by the

Revolution; their foes are Frenchmen. But the royalists who would help

them are likewise their enemies; the English are their country's foes.

Hence arises a conflict of conscience which is powerfully portrayed. Are

they to be faithless to their ideal, or to betray their country? Are

they to be citizens of the spirit or citizens of France? Are they to be

true to themselves or true to the nation? Such is the fateful decision

with which they are confronted. They choose death, for they know that

their ideal is immortal, that the freedom of a nation is but the

reflection of an inner freedom which no foe can destroy.

For the first time, in this play, Rolland proclaims his hostility to

victory. Faber proudly declares: "We have saved our faith from a victory

which would have disgraced us, from one wherein the conqueror is the

first victim. In our unsullied defeat, that faith looms more richly and

gloriously than before." Lux, the German revolutionist, proclaims the

gospel of inner freedom in the words: "All victory is evil, whereas all

defeat is good in so far as it is the outcome of free choice." Hugot

says: "I have outstripped victory, and that is my victory." These men of

noble mind who perish, know that they die alone; they do not look

towards a future success; they put no trust in the masses, for they are

aware that in the higher sense of the term freedom it is a thing which

the multitude can never understand, that the people always misconceives

the best. "The people always dreads those who form an elite, for these

bear torches. Would that the fire might scorch the people!" In the end,

the only home of these Girondists is the ideal; their domain is an ideal

freedom; their world is the future. They have saved their country from

the despots; now they had to defend it once again against the mob

lusting for dominion and revenge, against those who care no more for

freedom than the despots cared. Designedly, the rigid nationalists,

those who demand that a man shall sacrifice everything for his country,

shall sacrifice his convictions, liberty, reason itself, designedly I

say are these monomaniacs of patriotism typified in the plebeian figure

of Haubourdin. This sansculotte knows only two kinds of men, "traitors"

and "patriots," thus rending the world in twain in his bigotry. It is

true that the vigor of his brutal partisanship brings victory. But the

very force that makes it possible to save a people against a world in

arms, is at the same time a force which destroys that people's most

gracious blossoms.

The drama is the opening of an ode to the free man, to the hero of the

spirit, the only hero whose heroism Rolland acknowledges. The

conception, which had been merely outlined in _Aërt_, begins here to

take more definite shape. Adam Lux, a member of the Mainz revolutionary

club, who, animated by the fire of enthusiasm, has made his way to

France that he may live for freedom (and that he may be led in pursuit

of freedom to the guillotine), this first martyr to idealism, is the

first messenger from the land of Jean Christophe. The struggle of the

free man for the undying fatherland which is above and beyond the land

of his birth, has begun. This is the struggle wherein the vanquished is

ever the victor, and wherein he is the strongest who fights alone.

CHAPTER XVI

THE WOLVES

1898

In _Le triomphe de la raison_, men to whom conscience is supreme were

confronted with a vital decision. They had to choose between their

country and freedom, between the interests of the nation and those of

the supranational spirit. _Les loups_ embodies a variation of the same

theme. Here the choice has to be made between the fatherland and

justice.

The subject has already been mooted in _Danton_. Robespierre and his

henchmen decide upon the execution of Danton. They demand his immediate

arrest and condemnation. Saint-Just, passionately opposed to Danton,

makes no objection to the prosecution, but insists that all must be done

in due form of law. Robespierre, aware that delay will give the victory

to Danton, wishes the law to be infringed. His country is worth more to

him than the law. "Vaincre à tout prix"--conquer at any cost--calls one.

"When the country is in danger, it matters nothing that one man should

be illegally condemned," cries another. Saint-Just bows before the

argument, sacrificing honor to expediency, the law to his fatherland.

In _Les loups_, we have the obverse of the same tragedy. Here is

depicted a man who would rather sacrifice himself than the law. One who

holds with Faber in _Le triomphe de la raison_ that a single injustice

makes the whole world unjust; one to whom, as to Hugot, the other hero

in the same play, it seems indifferent whether justice be victorious or

be defeated, so long as justice does not give up the struggle. Teulier,

the man of learning, knows that his enemy d'Oyron has been unjustly

accused of treachery. Though he realizes that the case is hopeless and

that he is wasting his pains, he undertakes to defend d'Oyron against

the patriotic savagery of the revolutionary soldiers, to whom victory is

the only argument. Adopting as his motto the old saying, "fiat justitia,

pereat mundus," facing open-eyed all the dangers this involves, he would

rather repudiate life than the leadings of the spirit "A soul which has

seen truth and seeks to deny truth, destroys itself." But the others are

of tougher fiber, and think only of success in arms. "Let my name be

besmirched, provided only my country is saved," is Quesnel's answer to

Teulier. Patriotism, the faith of the masses, triumphs over the heroism

of faith in the invisible justice.

This tragedy of a conflict recurring throughout the ages, one which

every individual has forced upon him in wartime through the need for

choosing between his responsibilities as a free moral agent and as an

obedient citizen of the state, was the reflection of the actual

happenings during the days when it was written. In _Les loups_, the

Dreyfus affair is emblematically presented in masterly fashion. Dreyfus

the Jew is typified by an aristocrat, the member of a suspect and

detested social stratum. Picquart, the defender of Dreyfus, is Teulier.

The aristocrat's enemies represent the French general headquarters

staff, who would rather perpetuate an injustice once committed than

allow the honor of the army to be tarnished or confidence in the army to

be undermined. Upon a narrow stage, and yet with effective pictorial

force, in this tragedy of army life was compressed the whole of the

history which was agitating France from the presidential palace down to

the humblest working-class dwelling. The performance at the Théâtre de

l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political

demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Péguy, and Picquart, the

defenders of the innocent man, all the chief figures in the world-famous

trial, were for two hours spectators of the dramatic symbolization of

their own deeds. Rolland had grasped and extracted the moral essence of

the Dreyfus affair, which had in fact become a purifying process for the

whole French nation. Leaving history, the author had made his first

venture into the field of contemporary actuality. But he had done this

only, in accordance with the method he has followed ever since, that he

might disclose the eternal elements in the temporal, and defend freedom

of opinion against mob infatuation. He was on this occasion what he has

always remained, the advocate of that heroism which knows one authority

only, neither fatherland nor victory, neither success nor expediency,

nothing but the supreme authority of conscience.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CALL LOST IN THE VOID

The ears of the people were deaf. Rolland's work seemed to have been

fruitless. Not one of the dramas was played for more than a few nights.

Most of them were buried after a single performance, slain by the

hostility of the critics and the indifference of the crowd. Futile, too,

had been the struggles of Rolland and his friends on behalf of the

people's theater. The government to which they had addressed an appeal

for the founding of a popular theater in Paris, paid little attention.

M. Adrien Bernheim was dispatched to Berlin to make inquiries. He

reported. Further reports were made. The matter was discussed for a

while, but was ultimately shelved. Rostand and Bernstein continued to

triumph in the boulevards; the great call to idealism had remained

unheard.

Where could the author look for help in the completion of his splendid

program? To what nation could he turn when his own made no response, _Le

théâtre de la révolution_ remained a fragment. A _Robespierre_, which

was to be the spiritual counterpart of _Danton_, already sketched in

broad outline, was left unfinished. The other segments of the great

dramatic cycle have never been touched. Bundles of studies, newspaper

cuttings, loose leaves, manuscript books, waste paper, are the vestiges

of an edifice which was planned as a pantheon for the French people, a

theater which was to reflect the heroic achievements of the French

spirit. Rolland may well have shared the feelings of Goethe who,

mournfully recalling his earlier dramatic dreams, said on one occasion

to Eckermann: "Formerly I fancied it would be possible to create a

German theater. I cherished the illusion that I could myself contribute

to the foundations of such a building.... But there was no stir in

response to my efforts, and everything remains as of old. Had I been

able to exert an influence, had I secured approval, I should have

written a dozen plays like _Iphigenia_ and _Tasso_. There was no

scarcity of material. But, as I have told you, we lack actors to play

such pieces with spirit, and we lack a public to form an appreciative

audience."

The call was lost in the void. "There was no stir in response to my

efforts, and everything remains as of old." But Rolland, likewise,

remains as of old, inspired with the same faith, whether he has

succeeded or whether he has failed. He is ever willing to begin work

over again, marching stoutly across the land of lost endeavor towards a

new and more distant goal. We may apply to him Rilke's fine phrase, and

say that, if he needs must be vanquished, he aspires "to be vanquished

always in a greater and yet greater cause."

CHAPTER XVIII

A DAY WILL COME

1902

Once only has Rolland been tempted to resume dramatic composition.

(Parenthetically I may mention a minor play of the same period, _La

Montespan_, which does not belong to the series of his greater works.)

As in the case of the Dreyfus affair, he endeavored to extract the moral

essence from political occurrences, to show how a spiritual conflict was

typified in one of the great happenings of the time. The Boer War is no

more than a vehicle; just as, for the plays we have been studying, the

Revolution was merely a stage. The new drama deals in actual fact with

the only authority Rolland recognizes, conscience. The conscience of the

individual and the conscience of the world.

_Le temps viendra_ is the third, the most impressive variation upon the

earlier theme, depicting the cleavage between conviction and duty,

citizenship and humanity, the national man and the free man. A war drama

of the conscience staged amid a war in the material world. In _Le

triomphe de la raison_, the problem was one of freedom versus the

fatherland; in _Les loups_ it was one of justice versus the fatherland.

Here we have a yet loftier variation of the theme; the conflict of

conscience, of eternal truth, versus the fatherland. The chief figure,

though not spiritually the hero of the piece, is Clifford, leader of the

invading army. He is waging an unjust war--and what war is just? But he

wages it with a strategist's brain; his heart is not in the work. He

knows "how much rottenness there is in war"; he knows that war cannot be

effectively waged without hatred for the enemy; but he is too cultured

to hate. He knows that it is impossible to carry on war without

falsehood; impossible to kill without infringing the principles of

humanity; impossible to create military justice, since the whole aim of

war is unjust. He knows this with one part of his being, which is the

real Clifford; but he has to repudiate the knowledge with the other part

of his being, the professional soldier. He is confined within an iron

ring of contradictions. "Obéir à ma patrie? Obéir à ma conscience?" It

is impossible to gain the victory without doing wrong, yet who can

command an army if he lack the will to conquer? Clifford must serve that

will, even while he despises the force which his duty compels him to

use. He cannot be a man unless he thinks, and yet he cannot remain a

soldier while preserving his humanity. Vainly does he seek to mitigate

the brutalities of his task; fruitlessly does he endeavor to do good

amid the bloodshed which issues from his orders. He is aware that "there

are gradations in crime, but every one of these gradations remains a

crime." Other notable figures in the play are: the cynic, whose only

aim is the profit of his own country; the army sportsman; those who

blindly obey; the sentimentalist, who shuts his eyes to all that is

painful, contemplating as a puppet-show what is tragedy to those who

have to endure it. The background to these figures is the lying spirit

of contemporary civilization, with its neat phrases to justify every

outrage, and its factories built upon tombs. To our civilization applies

the charge inscribed upon the opening page, raising the drama into the

sphere of universal humanity: "This play has not been written to condemn

a single nation, but to condemn Europe."

The true hero of the piece is not General Clifford, the conqueror of

South Africa, but the free spirit, as typified in the Italian volunteer,

a citizen of the world who threw himself into the fray that he might

defend freedom, and in the Scottish peasant who lays aside his rifle

with the words, "I will kill no longer." These men have no other

fatherland than conscience, no other home than their own humanity. The

only fate they acknowledge is that which the free man creates for

himself. Rolland is with them, the vanquished, as he is ever with those

who voluntarily accept defeat. It is from his soul that rises the cry of

the Italian volunteer, "Ma patrie est partout où la liberté est

menacée." Aërt, Saint Louis, Hugot, the Girondists, Teulier, the martyrs

in _Les loups_, are the author's spiritual brethren, the children of his

belief that the individual's will is stronger than his secular

environment. This faith grows ever greater, takes on an ever wider

oscillation, as the years pass. In his first plays he was still speaking

to France. His last work written for the stage addresses a wider

audience; it is his confession of world citizenship.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PLAYWRIGHT

We have seen that Rolland's plays form a whole, which for

comprehensiveness may compared with the work of Shakespeare, Schiller,

or Hebbel. Recent stage performances in Germany have shown that in

places, at least, they possess great dramatic force. The historical fact

that work of such magnitude and power should remain for twenty years

practically unknown, must have some deeper cause than chance. The effect

of a literary composition is always in large part dependent upon the

atmosphere of the time. Sometimes this atmosphere may so operate as to

make it seem that a spark has fallen into a powder-barrel heaped full of

accumulated sensibilities. Sometimes the influence of the atmosphere may

be repressive in manifold ways. A work, therefore, taken alone, can

never reflect an epoch. Such reflection can only be secured when the

work is harmonious to the epoch in which it originates.

We infer that the innermost essence of Rolland's plays must in one way

or another have conflicted with the age in which they were written. In

actual fact, these dramas were penned in deliberate opposition to the

dominant literary mode. Naturalism, the representation of reality,

simultaneously mastered and oppressed the time, leading back with intent

into the narrows, the trivialities, of everyday life. Rolland, on the

other hand, aspired towards greatness, wishing to raise the dynamic of

undying ideals high above the transiencies of fact; he aimed at a

soaring flight, at a winged freedom of sentiment, at exuberant energy;

he was a romanticist and an idealist. Not for him to describe the forces

of life, its distresses, its powers, and its passions; his purpose was

ever to depict the spirit that overcomes these things; the idea through

which to-day is merged into eternity. Whilst other writers were

endeavoring to portray everyday occurrences with the utmost fidelity,

his aim was to represent the rare, the sublime, the heroic, the seeds of

eternity that fall from heaven to germinate on earth. He was not allured

by life as it is, but by life freely inter-penetrated with spirit and

with will.

All his dramas, therefore, are problem plays, wherein the characters are

but the expression of theses and antitheses in dialectical struggle. The

idea, not the living figure, is the primary thing. When the persons of

the drama are in conflict, above them, like the gods in the Iliad, hover

unseen the ideas that lead the human protagonists, the ideas between

which the struggle is really waged. Rolland's heroes are not impelled to

action by the force of circumstances, but are lured to action by the

fascination of their own thoughts; the circumstances are merely the

friction-surfaces upon which their ardor is struck into flame. When to

the eye of the realist they are vanquished, when Aërt plunges into

death, when Saint Louis is consumed by fever, when the heroes of the

Revolution stride to the guillotine, when Clifford and Owen fall victims

to violence, the tragedy of their mortal lives is transfigured by the

heroism of their martyrdom, by the unity and purity of realized ideals.

Rolland has openly proclaimed the name of the intellectual father of his

tragedies. Shakespeare was no more than the burning bush, the first

herald, the stimulus, the inimitable model. To Shakespeare, Rolland owes

his impetus, his ardor, and in part his dialectical power. But as far as

spiritual form is concerned, he has picked up the mantle of another

master, one whose work as dramatist still remains almost unknown. I

refer to Ernest Renan, and to the _Drames philosophiques_, among which

_L'abbesse de Jouarre_ and _Le prêtre de Nemi_ exercised a decisive

influence upon the younger playwright. The art of discussing spiritual

problems in actual drama instead of in essays or in such dialogues as

those of Plato, was a legacy from Renan, who gave kindly help and

instruction to the aspiring student. From Renan, too, came the inner

calm of justice, together with the clarity which never failed to lift

the writer above the conflicts he was describing. But whereas the sage

of Tréguier, in his serene aloofness, regarded all human activities as a

perpetually renewed illusion, so that his works voiced a somewhat

ironical and even malicious skepticism, in Rolland we find a new

element, the flame of an idealism that is still undimmed to-day. Strange

indeed is the paradox, that one who of all modern writers is the most

fervent in his faith, should borrow the artistic forms he employs from

the master of cautious doubt. Hence what in Renan had a retarding and

cooling influence, becomes in Rolland a cause of vigorous and

enthusiastic action. Whilst Renan stripped all the legends, even the

most sacred of legends, bare, in his search for a wise but tepid truth,

Rolland is led by his revolutionary temperament to create a new legend,

a new heroism, a new emotional spur to action.

This ideological scaffolding is unmistakable in every one of Rolland's

dramas. The scenic variations, the motley changes in the cultural

environments, cannot prevent our realizing that the problems revealed to

our eyes emanate, not from feelings and not from personalities, but from

intelligences and from ideas. Even the historical figures, those of

Robespierre, Danton, Saint-Just, and Desmoulins, are schemata rather

than portraits. Nevertheless, the prolonged estrangement between his

dramas and the age in which they were written, was not so much due to

the playwright's method of treatment as to the nature of the problems

with which he chose to deal. Ibsen, who at that time dominated the

drama, likewise wrote plays with a purpose. Ibsen, far more even than

Rolland, had definite ends in view. Like Strindberg, Ibsen did not

merely wish to present comparisons between elemental forces, but in

addition to present their formulation. These northern writers

intellectualized much more than Rolland, inasmuch as they were

propagandists, whereas Rolland merely endeavored to show ideas in the

act of unfolding their own contradictions. Ibsen and Strindberg desired

to make converts; Rolland's aim was to display the inner energy that

animates every idea. Whilst the northerners hoped to produce a specific

effect, Rolland was in search of a general effect, the arousing of

enthusiasm. For Ibsen, as for the contemporary French dramatists, the

conflict between man and woman living in the bourgeois environment

always occupies the center of the stage. Strindberg's work is animated

by the myth of sexual polarity. The lie against which both these writers

are campaigning is a conventional, a social, lie. The dramatic interest

remains the same. The spiritual arena is still that of bourgeois life.

This applies even to the mathematical sobriety of Ibsen and to the

remorseless analysis of Strindberg. Despite the vituperation of the

critics, the world of Ibsen and Strindberg was still the critics' world.

On the other hand, the problems with which Rolland's plays were

concerned could never awaken the interest of a bourgeois public, for

they were political, ideal, heroic, revolutionary problems. The surge of

his more comprehensive feelings engulfed the lesser tensions of sex.

Rolland's dramas leave the erotic problem untouched, and this damns them

for a modern audience. He presents a new type, political drama in the

sense phrased by Napoleon, conversing with Goethe at Erfurt. "La

politique, voilà la fatalité moderne." The tragic dramatist always

displays human beings in conflict with forces. Man becomes great through

his resistance to these forces. In Greek tragedy the powers of fate

assumed mythical forms: the wrath of the gods, the disfavor of evil

spirits, disastrous oracles. We see this in the figures of Oedipus,

Prometheus, and Philoctetes. For us moderns, it is the overwhelming

power of the state, organized political force, massed destiny, against

which as individuals we stand weaponless; it is the great spiritual

storms, "les courants de foi," which inexorably sweep us away like

straws before the wind. No less incalculably than did the fabled gods of

antiquity, no less overwhelmingly and pitilessly, does the world-destiny

make us its sport. War is the most powerful of these mass influences,

and, for this reason, nearly all Rolland's plays take war as their

theme. Their moral force consists in the way wherein again and again

they show how the individual, a Prometheus in conflict with the gods, is

able in the spiritual sphere to break the unseen yoke; how the

individual idea remains stronger than the mass idea, the idea of the

fatherland--though the latter can still destroy a hardy rebel with the

thunderbolts of Jupiter.

The Greeks first knew the gods when the gods were angry. Our gloomy

divinity, the fatherland, blood-thirsty as the gods of old, first

becomes fully known to us in time of war. Unless fate lowers, man rarely

thinks of these hostile forces; he despises them or forgets them, while

they lurk in the darkness, awaiting the advent of their day. A peaceful,

a laodicean era had no interest in tragedies foreshadowing the

opposition of the forces which were twenty years later to engage in

deadly struggle in the blood-stained European arena. What should those

care who strayed into the theater from the Parisian boulevards, members

of an audience skilled in the geometry of adultery, what should they

care about such problems as those in Rolland's plays: whether it is

better to serve the fatherland or to serve justice; whether in war time

soldiers must obey orders or follow the call of conscience? The

questions seemed at best but idle trifling, remote from reality,

charades, the untimely musings of a cloistered moralist; problems in the

fourth dimension. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?"--though in

truth it would have been well to heed Cassandra's warning. The tragedy

and the greatness of Rolland's plays lies in this, that they came a

generation before their day. They seem to have been written for the time

we have just had to live through. They seem to foretell in lofty symbols

the spiritual content of to-day's political happenings. The outburst of

a revolution, the concentration of its energies into individual

personalities, the decline of passion into brutality and into suicidal

chaos, as typified in the figures of Kerensky, Lenin, Liebknecht, is the

anticipatory theme of Rolland's plays. The anguish of Aërt, the

struggles of the Girondists who had likewise to defend themselves upon

two fronts, against the brutality of war and against the brutality of

the Revolution--have we not all of late realized these things with the

vividness of personal experience? Since 1914, what question has been

more pressing than that of the conflict between the free-spirited

internationalist and the mass frenzy of his fellow countrymen? Where,

during recent decades, has there been produced any other drama which can

present these soul-searching problems so vividly and with so much human

understanding as do the tragedies which lay for years in obscurity, and

were then overshadowed by the fame of their late-born brother, _Jean

Christophe_? These dramas, parerga as it seemed, were aimed, in an hour

when peace still ruled the world, at the center of our contemporary

consciousness, which was then still unwoven by the looms of time. The

stone which the builders of the stage contemptuously rejected, will

perhaps become the foundation of a new theater, grandly conceived,

contemporary and yet heroical, the theater of the free European

brotherhood, for whose sake it was fashioned in solitude decades ago by

the lonely creator.

PART THREE

THE HEROIC BIOGRAPHIES

I prepare myself by the study of history and the practice of

writing. So doing, I welcome always in my soul the memory of the

best and most renowned of men. For whenever the enforced

associations of daily life arouse worthless, evil, or ignoble

feelings, I am able to repel these feelings and to keep them at a

distance, by dispassionately turning my thoughts to contemplate the

brightest examples.

PLUTARCH, _Preamble to the Life of Timoleon_.

CHAPTER I

DE PROFUNDIS

At twenty years of age, and again at thirty years of age, in his early

works, Rolland had wished to depict enthusiasm as the highest power of

the individual and as the creative soul of an entire people. For him,

that man alone is truly alive whose spirit is consumed with longing for

the ideal, that nation alone is inspired which collects its forces in an

ardent faith. The dream of his youth was to arouse a weary and

vanquished generation, infirm of will; to stimulate its faith; to bring

salvation to the world through enthusiasm.

Vain had been the attempt. Ten years, fifteen years--how easily the

phrase is spoken, but how long the time may seem to a sad heart--had

been spent in fruitless endeavor. Disillusionment had followed upon

disillusionment. _Le théâtre du peuple_ had come to nothing; the Dreyfus

affair had been merged in political intrigue; the dramas were waste

paper. There had been no stir in response to his efforts. His friends

were scattered. Whilst the companions of his youth had already attained

to fame, Rolland was still the beginner. It almost seemed as if the more

he did, the more his work was ignored. None of his aims had been

fulfilled. Public life was lukewarm and torpid as of old. The world was

in search of profit instead of faith and spiritual force.

His private life likewise lay in ruins. His marriage, entered into with

high hopes, was one more disappointment. During these years Rolland had

individual experience of a tragedy whose cruelty his work leaves

unnoticed, for his writings never touch upon the narrower troubles of

his own life. Wounded to the heart, ship-wrecked in all his

undertakings, he withdrew into solitude. His workroom, small and simple

as a monastic cell, became his world; work his consolation. He had now

to fight the hardest fight on behalf of the faith of his youth, that he

might not lose it in the darkness of despair.

In his solitude he read the literature of the day. And since in all

voices man hears the echo of his own, Rolland found everywhere pain and

loneliness. He studied the lives of the artists, and having done so he

wrote: "The further we penetrate into the existence of great creators,

the more strongly are we impressed by the magnitude of the unhappiness

by which their lives were enveloped. I do not merely mean that, being

subject to the ordinary trials and disappointments of mankind, their

higher emotional susceptibility rendered these smarts exceptionally

keen. I mean that their genius, placing them in advance of their

contemporaries by twenty, thirty, fifty, nay often a hundred years, and

thus making of them wanderers in the desert, condemned them to the most

desperate exertions if they were but to live, to say nothing of winning

to victory." Thus these great ones among mankind, those towards whom

posterity looks back with veneration, those who will for all time bring

consolation to the lonely in spirit, were themselves "pauvres vaincus,

les vainqueurs du monde"--the conquerors of the world, but themselves

beaten in the fray. An endless chain of perpetually repeated and

unmeaning torments binds their successive destinies into a tragical

unity. "Never," as Tolstoi pointed out in the oft-mentioned letter, "do

true artists share the common man's power of contented enjoyment." The

greater their natures, the greater their suffering. And conversely, the

greater their suffering the fuller the development of their own

greatness.

Rolland thus recognizes that there is another greatness, a profounder

greatness, than that of action, the greatness of suffering. Unthinkable

would be a Rolland who did not draw fresh faith from all experience,

however painful; unthinkable one who failed, in his own suffering, to be

mindful of the sufferings of others. As a sufferer, he extends a

greeting to all sufferers on earth. Instead of a fellowship of

enthusiasm, he now looks for a brotherhood of the lonely ones of the

world, as he shows them the meaning and the grandeur of all sorrow. In

this new circle, the nethermost of fate, he turns to noble examples.

"Life is hard. It is a continuous struggle for all those who cannot come

to terms with mediocrity. For the most part it is a painful struggle,

lacking sublimity, lacking happiness, fought in solitude and silence.

Oppressed by poverty, by domestic cares, by crushing and gloomy tasks

demanding an aimless expenditure of energy, joyless and hopeless, most

people work in isolation, without even the comfort of being able to

stretch forth a hand to their brothers in misfortune." To build these

bridges between man and man, between suffering and suffering, is now

Rolland's task. To the nameless sufferers, he wishes to show those in

whom personal sorrow was transmuted to become gain for millions yet to

come. He would, as Carlyle phrased it, "make manifest ... the divine

relation ... which at all times unites a Great Man to other men." The

million solitaries have a fellowship; it is that of the great martyrs of

suffering, those who, though stretched on the rack of destiny, never

foreswore their faith in life, those whose very sufferings helped to

make life richer for others. "Let them not complain too piteously, the

unhappy ones, for the best of men share their lot. It is for us to grow

strong with their strength. If we feel our weakness, let us rest on

their knees. They will give solace. From their spirits radiate energy

and goodness. Even if we did not study their works, even if we did not

hearken to their voices, from the light of their countenances, from the

fact that they have lived, we should know that life is never greater,

never more fruitful--never happier--than in suffering."

It was in this spirit, for his own good, and for the consolation of his

unknown brothers in sorrow, that Rolland undertook the composition of

the heroic biographies.

CHAPTER II

THE HEROES OF SUFFERING

Like the revolutionary dramas, the new creative cycle was preluded by a

manifesto, a new call to greatness. The preface to _Beethoven_

proclaims: "The air is fetid. Old Europe is suffocating in a sultry and

unclean atmosphere. Our thoughts are weighed down by a petty

materialism.... The world sickens in a cunning and cowardly egoism. We

are stifling. Throw the windows wide; let in the free air of heaven. We

must breathe the souls of the heroes." What does Rolland mean by a hero?

He does not think of those who lead the masses, wage victorious wars,

kindle revolutions; he does not refer to men of action, or to those

whose thoughts engender action. The nullity of united action has become

plain to him. Unconsciously in his dramas he has depicted the tragedy of

the idea as something which cannot be divided among men like bread, as

something which in each individual's brain and blood undergoes prompt

transformation into a new form, often into its very opposite. True

greatness is for him to be found only in solitude, in struggle waged by

the individual against the unseen. "I do not give the name of heroes to

those who have triumphed, whether by ideas or by physical force. By

heroes I mean those who were great through the power of the heart. As

one of the greatest (Tolstoi) has said, 'I recognize no other sign of

superiority than goodness. Where the character is not great, there is

neither a great artist nor a great man of action; there is nothing but

one of the idols of the crowd; time will shatter them together.... What

matters, is to be great, not to seem great.'"

A hero does not fight for the petty achievements of life, for success,

for an idea in which all can participate; he fights for the whole, for

life itself. Whoever turns his back on the struggle because he dreads to

be alone, is a weakling who shrinks from suffering; he is one who with a

mask of artificial beauty would conceal from himself the tragedy of

mortal life; he is a liar. True heroism is that which faces realities.

Rolland fiercely exclaims: "I loathe the cowardly idealism of those who

refuse to see the tragedies of life and the weaknesses of the soul. To a

nation that is prone to the deceitful illusions of resounding words, to

such a nation above all, is it necessary to say that the heroic

falsehood is a form of cowardice. There is but one heroism on earth--to

know life and yet to love it."

Suffering is not the great man's goal. But it is his ordeal; the needful

filter to effect purification; "the swiftest beast of burden bearing us

towards perfection," as Meister Eckhart said. "In suffering alone do we

rightly understand art; through sorrow alone do we learn those things

which outlast the centuries, and are stronger than death." Thus for the

great man, the painful experiences of life are transmuted into

knowledge, and this knowledge is further transmuted into the power of

love. Suffering does not suffice by itself to produce greatness; we need

to have achieved a triumph over suffering. He who is broken by the

distresses of life, and still more he who shirks the troubles of life,

is stamped with the imprint of defeat, and even his noblest work will

bear the marks of this overthrow. None but he who rises from the depths,

can bring a message to the heights of the spirit; paradise must be

reached by a path that leads through purgatory. Each must discover this

path for himself; but the one who strides along it with head erect is a

leader, and can lift others into his own world. "Great souls are like

mountain peaks. Storms lash them; clouds envelop them; but on the peaks

we breathe more freely than elsewhere. In that pure atmosphere, the

wounds of the heart are cleansed; and when the cloudbanks part, we gain

a view of all mankind."

To such lofty outlooks Rolland wishes to lead the sufferers who are

still in the darkness of torment. He desires to show them the heights

where suffering grows one with nature and where struggle becomes heroic.

"Sursum corda," he sings, chanting a song of praise as he reveals the

sublime pictures of creative sorrow.

CHAPTER III

BEETHOVEN

Beethoven, the master of masters, is the first figure sculptured on the

heroic frieze of the invisible temple. From Rolland's earliest years,

since his beloved mother had initiated him into the magic world of

music, Beethoven had been his teacher, had been at once his monitor and

consoler. Though fickle to other childish loves, to this love he had

ever remained faithful. "During the crises of doubt and depression which

I experienced in youth, one of Beethoven's melodies, one which still

runs in my head, would reawaken in me the spark of eternal life." By

degrees the admiring pupil came to feel a desire for closer acquaintance

with the earthly existence of the object of his veneration. Journeying

to Vienna, he saw there the room in the House of the Black Spaniard,

since demolished, where the great musician passed away during a storm.

At Mainz, in 1901, he attended the Beethoven festival. In Bonn he saw

the garret in which the messiah of the language without words was born.

It was a shock to him to find in what narrow straits this universal

genius had passed his days. He perused letters and other documents

conveying the cruel history of Beethoven's daily life, the life from

which the musician, stricken with deafness, took refuge in the music of

the inner, the imperishable universe. Shudderingly Rolland came to

realize the greatness of this "tragic Dionysus," cribbed in our somber

and unfeeling world.

After the visit to Bonn, Rolland wrote an article for the "_Revue de

Paris_," entitled _Les fêtes de Beethoven_. His muse, however, desired

to sing without restraint, freed from the trammels imposed by critical

contemplation. Rolland wished, not once again to expound the musician to

musicians, but to reveal the hero to humanity at large; not to recount

the pleasure experienced on hearing Beethoven's music, but to give

utterance to the poignancy of his own feelings. He desired to show forth

Beethoven the hero, as the man who, after infinite suffering, composed

the greatest hymn of mankind, the divine exultation of the Ninth

Symphony.

"Beloved Beethoven," thus the enthusiast opens. "Enough ... many have

extolled his greatness as an artist, but he is far more than the first

of all musicians. He is the heroic energy of modern art, the greatest

and best friend of all who suffer and struggle. When we mourn over the

sorrows of the world, he comes to our solace. It is as if he seated

himself at the piano in the room of a bereaved mother, comforting her

with the wordless song of resignation. When we are wearied by the

unending and fruitless struggle against mediocrity in vice and in

virtue, what an unspeakable delight is it to plunge once more into this

ocean of will and faith. He radiates the contagion of courage, the joy

of combat, the intoxication of spirit which God himself feels.... What

victory is comparable to this? What conquest of Napoleon's? What sun of

Austerlitz can compare in refulgence with this superhuman effort, this

triumph of the spirit, achieved by a poor and unhappy man, by a lonely

invalid, by one who, though he was sorrow incarnate, though life denied

him joy, was able to create joy that he might bestow it on the world. As

he himself proudly phrases it, he forges joy out of his own

misfortunes.... The device of every heroic soul must be: Out of

suffering cometh joy."

Thus does Rolland apostrophize the unknown. Finally he lets the master

speak from his own life. He opens the Heiligenstadt "Testament," in

which the retiring man confided to posterity the profound grief which he

concealed from his contemporaries. He recounts the confession of faith

of the sublime pagan. He quotes letters showing the kindliness which the

great musician vainly endeavored to hide behind an assumed acerbity.

Never before had the universal humanity in Beethoven been brought so

near to the sight of our generation, never before had the heroism of

this lonely life been so magnificently displayed for the encouragement

of countless observers, as in this little book, with its appeal to

enthusiasm, the greatest and most neglected of human qualities.

The brethren of sorrow to whom the message was addressed, scattered here

and there throughout the world, gave ear to the call. The book was not a

literary triumph; the newspapers were silent; the critics ignored it.

But unknown strangers won happiness from its pages; they passed it from

hand to hand; a mystical sense of gratitude for the first time formed a

bond of union among persons reverencing the name of Rolland. The unhappy

have an ear delicately attuned to the notes of consolation. While they

would have been repelled by a superficial optimism, they were receptive

to the passionate sympathy which they found in the pages of Rolland's

_Beethoven_. The book did not bring its author success; but it brought

something better, a public which henceforward paid close attention to

his work, and accompanied _Jean Christophe_ in the first steps toward

celebrity. Simultaneously, there was an improvement in the fortunes of

"_Les cahiers de la quinzaine_." The obscure periodical began to

circulate more freely. For the first time, a second edition was called

for. Charles Péguy describes in moving terms how the reissue of this

number solaced the last hours of Bernard Lazare. At length Romain

Rolland's idealism was beginning to come into its own.

Rolland is no longer lonely. Unseen brothers touch his hand in the dark,

eagerly await the sound of his voice. Only those who suffer, wish to

hear of suffering--but sufferers are many. To them he now wishes to make

known other figures, the figures of those who suffered no less keenly,

and were no less great in their conquest of suffering. From the distance

of the centuries, the mighty contemplate him. Reverently he draws near

to them and enters into their lives.

CHAPTER IV

MICHELANGELO

Beethoven is for Rolland the most typical of the controllers of sorrow.

Born to enjoy the fullness of life, it seemed to be his mission to

reveal its beauties. Then destiny, ruining the senseorgan of music,

incarcerated him in the prison of deafness. But his spirit discovered a

new language; in the darkness he made a great light, composing the Ode

to Joy whose strains he was unable to hear. Bodily affliction, however,

is but one of the many forms of suffering which the heroism of the will

can conquer. "Suffering is infinite, and displays itself in myriad ways.

Sometimes it arises from the blind things of tyranny, coming as poverty,

sickness, the injustice of fate, or the wickedness of men; sometimes its

deepest cause lies in the sufferer's own nature. This is no less

lamentable, no less disastrous; for we do not choose our own

dispositions, we have not asked for life as it is given us, we have not

wished to become what we are."

Such was the tragedy of Michelangelo. His trouble was not a sudden

stroke of misfortune in the flower of his days. The affliction was

inborn. From the first dawning of his consciousness, the worm of

discontent was gnawing at his heart, the worm which grew with his

growth throughout the eighty years of his life. All his feeling was

tinged with melancholy. Never do we hear from him, as we so often hear

from Beethoven, the golden call of joy. But his greatness lay in this,

that he bore his sorrows like a cross, a second Christ carrying the

burden of his destiny to the Golgotha of his daily work, eternally weary

of existence, and yet not weary of activity. Or we may compare him with

Sisyphus; but whereas Sisyphus for ever rolled the stone, it was

Michelangelo's fate, chiseling in rage and bitterness, to fashion the

patient stone into works of art. For Rolland, Michelangelo was the

genius of a great and vanished age; he was the Christian, unhappy but

patient, whereas Beethoven was the pagan, the great god Pan in the

forest of music. Michelangelo shares the blame for his own suffering,

the blame that attaches to weakness, the blame of those damned souls in

Dante's first circle "who voluntarily gave themselves up to sadness." We

must show him compassion as a man, but as we show compassion to one

mentally diseased, for he is the paradox of "a heroic genius with an

unheroic will." Beethoven is the hero as artist, and still more the hero

as man; Michelangelo is only the hero as artist. As man, Michelangelo is

the vanquished, unloved because he does not give himself up to love,

unsatisfied because he has no longing for joy. He is the saturnine man,

born under a gloomy star, one who does not struggle against melancholy,

but rather cherishes it, toying with his own depression. "La mia

allegrezza è la malincolia"--melancholy is my delight. He frankly

acknowledges that "a thousand joys are not worth as much as a single

sorrow." From the beginning to the end of his life he seems to be hewing

his way, cutting an interminable dark gallery leading towards the light.

This way is his greatness, leading us all nearer towards eternity.

Rolland feels that Michelangelo's life embraces a great heroism, but

cannot give direct consolation to those who suffer. In this case, the

one who lacks is not able to come to terms with destiny by his own

strength, for he needs a mediator beyond this life. He needs God, "the

refuge of all those who do not make a success of life here below! Faith

which is apt to be nothing other than lack of faith in life, in the

future, in oneself; a lack of courage; a lack of joy. We know upon how

many defeats this painful victory is upbuilded." Rolland here admires a

work, and a sublime melancholy; but he does so with sorrowful

compassion, and not with the intoxicating ardor inspired in him by the

triumph of Beethoven. Michelangelo is chosen merely as an example of the

amount of pain that may have to be endured in our mortal lot. His

example displays greatness, but greatness that conveys a warning. Who

conquers pain in producing such work, is in truth a victor. Yet only

half a victor; for it does not suffice to endure life. We must, this is

the highest heroism, "know life, and yet love it."

CHAPTER V

TOLSTOI

The biographies of Beethoven and Michelangelo were fashioned out of the

superabundance of life. They were calls to heroism, odes to energy. The

biography of Tolstoi, written some years later, is a requiem, a dirge.

Rolland had been near to death from the accident in the Champs Elysées.

On his recovery, the news of his beloved master's end came to him with

profound significance and as a sublime exhortation.

Tolstoi typifies for Rolland a third form of heroic suffering.

Beethoven's infirmity came as a stroke of fate in mid career.

Michelangelo's sad destiny was inborn. Tolstoi deliberately chose his

own lot. All the externals of happiness promised enjoyment. He was in

good health, rich, independent, famous; he had home, wife, and children.

But the heroism of the man without cares lies in this, that he makes

cares for himself, through doubt as to the best way to live. What

plagued Tolstoi was his conscience, his inexorable demand for truth. He

thrust aside the freedom from care, the low aims, the petty joys, of

insincere beings. Like a fakir, he pierced his own breast with the

thorns of doubt. Amid the torment, he blessed doubt, saying: "We must

thank God if we be discontented with ourselves. A cleavage between life

and the form in which it has to be lived, is the genuine sign of a true

life, the precondition of all that is good. The only bad thing is to be

contented with oneself."

For Rolland, this apparent cleavage is the true Tolstoi, just as for

Rolland the man who struggles is the only man truly alive. Whilst

Michelangelo believes himself to see a divine life above this human

life, Tolstoi sees a genuine life behind the casual life of everyday,

and to attain to the former he destroys the latter. The most celebrated

artist in Europe throws away his art, like a knight throwing away his

sword, to walk bare-headed along the penitent's path; he breaks family

ties; he undermines his days and his nights with fanatical questions.

Down to the last hour of his life he is at war with himself, as he seeks

to make peace with his conscience; he is a fighter for the invisible,

that invisible which means so much more than happiness, joy, and God; a

fighter for the ultimate truth which he can share with no one.

This heroic struggle is waged, like that of Beethoven and Michelangelo,

in terrible isolation, is waged like theirs in airless spaces. His wife,

his children, his friends, his enemies, all fail to understand him. They

consider him a Don Quixote, for they cannot see the opponent with whom

he wrestles, the opponent who is himself. None can bring him solace;

none can help him. Merely that he may die at peace, he has to flee from

his comfortable home on a bitter night in winter, to perish like a

beggar by the wayside. Always at this supreme altitude to which mankind

looks yearningly up, the atmosphere is ice-bound and lonely. Those who

create for all must do so in solitude, each one of them a savior nailed

to the cross, each suffering for a different faith; and yet suffering

every one of them for all mankind.

CHAPTER VI

THE UNWRITTEN BIOGRAPHIES

On the cover of the _Beethoven_, the first of Rolland's biographies, was

an announcement of the lives of a number of heroic personalities. There

was to be a life of Mazzini. With the aid of Malwida von Meysenbug, who

had known the great revolutionist, Rolland had been collecting relevant

documents for years. Among other biographies, there was to be one of

General Hoche; and one of the great utopist, Thomas Paine. The original

scheme embraced lives of many other spiritual heroes. Not a few of the

biographies had already been outlined in the author's mind. Above all,

in his riper years, Rolland designed at one time to give a picture of

the restful world in which Goethe moved; to pay a tribute of thanks to

Shakespeare; and to discharge the debt of friendship to one little known

to the world, Malwida von Meysenbug.

These "vies des hommes illustres" have remained unwritten. The only

biographical studies produced by Rolland during the ensuing years were

those of a more scientific character, dealing with Handel and Millet,

and the minor biographies of Hugo Wolf and Berlioz. Thus the third

grandly conceived creative cycle likewise remained a fragment. But on

this occasion the discontinuance of the work was not due to the disfavor

of circumstances or to the indifference of readers. The abandonment of

the scheme was the outcome of the author's own moral conviction. The

historian in him had come to recognize that his most intimate energy,

truth, was not reconcilable with the desire to create enthusiasm. In the

single instance of Beethoven it had been possible to preserve historical

accuracy and still to bring solace, for here the soul had been lifted

towards joy by the very spirit of music. In Michelangelo's case a

certain strain had been felt in the attempt to present as a conqueror of

the world this man who was a prey to inborn melancholy, who, working in

stone, was himself petrified to marble. Even Tolstoi was a herald rather

of true life, than of rich and enthralling life, life worth living.

When, finally, Rolland came to deal with Mazzini, he realized, as he

sympathetically studied the embitterment of the forgotten patriot in old

age, that it would either be necessary to falsify the record if

edification were to be derived from this biography, or else, by

recording the truth, to provide readers with further grounds for

depression. He recognized that there are truths which love for mankind

must lead us to conceal. Of a sudden he has personal experience of the

conflict, of the tragical dilemma, which Tolstoi had had to face. He

became aware of "the dissonance between his pitiless vision which

enabled him to see all the horror of reality, and his compassionate

heart which made him desire to veil these horrors and retain his

readers' affection. We have all experienced this tragical struggle. How

often has the artist been filled with distress when contemplating a

truth which he will have to describe. For this same healthy and virile

truth, which for some is as natural as the air they breathe, is

absolutely insupportable to others, who are weak through the tenor of

their lives or through simple kindliness. What are we to do? Are we to

suppress this deadly truth, or to utter it unsparingly? Continually does

the dilemma force itself upon us, Truth or Love?"

Such was the overwhelming experience which came upon Rolland in mid

career. It is impossible to write the history of great men, both as

historian recording truth, and as lover of mankind who desires to lead

his fellows upwards towards perfection. To Rolland, the enthusiast, the

historian's function now seemed the less important of the two. For what

is the truth about a man? "It is so difficult to describe a personality.

Every man is a riddle, not for others alone, but for himself likewise.

It is presumptuous to claim a knowledge of one who is not known even by

himself. Yet we cannot help passing judgments on character, for to do so

is a necessary part of life. Not one of those we believe ourselves to

know, not one of our friends, not one of those we love, is as we see

him. In many cases he is utterly different from our picture. We wander

amid the phantoms we create. Yet we have to judge; we have to act."

Justice to himself, justice to those whose names he honored, veneration

for the truth, compassion for his fellows--all these combined to arrest

his half-completed design. Rolland laid aside the heroic biographies. He

would rather be silent than surrender to that cowardly idealism which

touches up lest it should have to repudiate. He halted on a road which

he had recognized to be impassable, but he did not forget his aim "to

defend greatness on earth." Since these historic figures would not serve

the ends of his faith, his faith created a figure for itself. Since

history refused to supply him with the image of the consoler, he had

recourse to art, fashioning amid contemporary life the hero he desired,

creating out of truth and fiction his own and our own Jean Christophe.

PART IV

JEAN CHRISTOPHE

It is really astonishing to note how the epic and the philosophical

are here compressed within the same work. In respect of form we

have so beautiful a whole. Reaching outwards, the work touches the

infinite, touches both art and life. In fact we may say of this

romance, that it is in no respects limited except in point of

æsthetic form, and that where it transcends form it comes into

contact with the infinite. I might compare it to a beautiful island

lying between two seas.

SCHILLER TO GOETHE CONCERNING _Wilhelm Meister_.

October 19, 1796.

CHAPTER I

SANCTUS CHRISTOPHORUS

Upon the last page of his great work, Rolland relates the well-known

legend of St. Christopher. The ferryman was roused at night by a little

boy who wished to be carried across the stream. With a smile the

good-natured giant shouldered the light burden. But as he strode through

the water the weight he was carrying grew heavy and heavier, until he

felt he was about to sink in the river. Mustering all his strength, he

continued on his way. When he reached the other shore, gasping for

breath, the man recognized that he had been carrying the entire meaning

of the world. Hence his name, Christophorus.

Rolland has known this long night of labor. When he assumed the fateful

burden, when he took the work upon his shoulders, he meant to recount

but a single life. As he proceeded, what had been light grew heavy. He

found that he was carrying the whole destiny of his generation, the

meaning of the entire world, the message of love, the primal secret of

creation. We who saw him making his way alone through the night, without

recognition, without helpers, without a word of cheer, without a

friendly light winking at him from the further shore, imagined that he

must succumb. From the hither bank the unbelievers followed him with

shouts of scornful laughter. But he pressed manfully forward during

these ten years, what time the stream of life swirled ever more fiercely

around him; and he fought his way in the end to the unknown shore of

completion. With bowed back, but with the radiance in his eyes undimmed,

did he finish fording the river. Long and heavy night of travail,

wherein he walked alone! Dear burden, which he carried for the sake of

those who are to come afterwards, bearing it from our shore to the still

untrodden shore of the new world. Now the crossing had been safely made.

When the good ferryman raised his eyes, the night seemed to be over, the

darkness vanished. Eastward the heaven was all aglow. Joyfully he

welcomed the dawn of the coming day towards which he had carried this

emblem of the day that was done.

Yet what was reddening there was naught but the bloody cloud-bank of

war, the flame of burning Europe, the flame that was to consume the

spirit of the elder world. Nothing remained of our sacred heritage

beyond this, that faith had bravely struggled from the shore of

yesterday to reach our again distracted world. The conflagration has

burned itself out; once more night has lowered. But our thanks speed

towards you, ferryman, pious wanderer, for the path you have trodden

through the darkness. We thank you for your labors, which have brought

the world a message of hope. For the sake of us all have you marched on

through the murky night. The flame of hatred will yet be extinguished;

the spirit of friendship will again unite people with people. It will

dawn, that new day.

CHAPTER II

RESURRECTION

Romain Rolland was now in his fortieth year. His life seemed to be a

field of ruins. The banners of his faith, the manifestoes to the French

people and to humanity, had been torn to rags by the storms of reality.

His dramas had been buried on a single evening. The figures of the

heroes, which were designed to form a stately series of historic

bronzes, stood neglected, three as isolated statues, while the others

were but rough-casts prematurely destroyed.

Yet the sacred flame still burned within him. With heroic determination

he threw the figures once more into the fiery crucible of his heart,

melting the metal that it might be recast in new forms. Since his

feeling for truth made it impossible for him to find the supreme

consoler in any actual historical figure, he resolved to create a genius

of the spirit, who should combine and typify what the great ones of all

times had suffered, a hero who should not belong to one nation but to

all peoples. No longer confining himself to historical truth, he looked

for a higher harmony in the new configuration of truth and fiction. He

fashioned the epic of an imaginary personality.

As if by miracle, all that he had lost was now regained. The vanished

fancies of his school days, the boy artist's dream of a great artist who

should stand erect against the world, the young man's vision on the

Janiculum, surged up anew. The figures of his dramas, Aërt and the

Girondists, arose in a fresh embodiment; the images of Beethoven,

Michelangelo, and Tolstoi, emerging from the rigidity of history, took

their places among our contemporaries. Rolland's disillusionments had

been but precious experiences; his trials, but a ladder to higher

things. What had seemed like an end became the true beginning, that of

his masterwork, _Jean Christophe_.

CHAPTER III

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK

Jean Christophe had long been beckoning the poet from a distance. The

first message had come to the lad in the Normal School. During those

years, young Rolland had planned the writing of a romance, the history

of a single-hearted artist shattered on the rocks of the world. The

outlines were vague; the only definite idea was that the hero was to be

a musician whose contemporaries failed to understand him. The dream came

to nothing, like so many of the dreams of youth.

But the vision returned in Rome, when Rolland's poetic fervor, long pent

by the restrictions of school life, broke forth with elemental energy.

Malwida von Meysenbug had told him much concerning the tragical

struggles of her intimate friends Wagner and Nietzsche. Rolland came to

realize that heroic figures, though they may be obscured by the tumult

and dust of the hour, belong in truth to every age. Involuntarily he

learned to associate the unhappy experiences of these recent heroes with

those of the figures in his vision. In Parsifal, the guileless Fool, by

pity enlightened, he recognized an emblem of the artist whose intuition

guides him through the world, and who comes to know the world through

experience. One evening, as Rolland walked on the Janiculum, the vision

of Jean Christophe grew suddenly clear. His hero was to be a

pure-hearted musician, a German, visiting other lands, finding his god

in Life; a free mortal spirit, inspired with a faith in greatness, and

with faith even in mankind, though mankind rejected him.

The happy days of freedom in Rome were followed by many years of arduous

labor, during which the duties of daily life thrust the image into the

background. Rolland had for a season become a man of action, and had no

time for dreams. Then came new experiences to reawaken the slumbering

vision. I have told of his visit to Beethoven's house in Bonn, and of

the effect produced on his mind by the realization of the tragedy of the

great composer's life. This gave a new direction to his thoughts. His

hero was to be a Beethoven redivivus, a German, a lonely fighter, but a

conqueror. Whereas the immature youth had idealized defeat, imagining

that to fail was to be vanquished, the man of riper years perceived that

true heroism lay in this, "to know life, and yet to love it." Thus

splendidly did the new horizon open as setting for the long cherished

figure, the dawn of eternal victory in our earthly struggle. The

conception of Jean Christophe was complete.

Rolland now knew his hero. But it was necessary that he should learn to

describe that hero's counterpart, that hero's eternal enemy, life,

reality. Whoever wishes to delineate a combat fairly, must know both

champions. Rolland became intimately acquainted with Jean Christophe's

opponent through the experiences of these years of disillusionment,

through his study of literature, through his realization of the

falseness of society and of the indifference of the crowd. It was

necessary for him to pass through the purgatorial fires of the years in

Paris before he could begin the work of description. At twenty, Rolland

had made acquaintance only with himself, and was therefore competent to

describe no more than his own heroic will to purity. At thirty he had

become able to depict likewise the forces of resistance. All the hopes

he had cherished and all the disappointments he had suffered jostled one

another in the channel of this new existence. The innumerable newspaper

cuttings, collected for years, almost without a definite aim, magically

arranged themselves as material for the growing work. Personal griefs

were seen to have been valuable experience; the boy's dream swelled to

the proportions of a life history.

During the year 1895 the broad lines were finished. As prelude, Rolland

gave a few scenes from Jean Christophe's youth. During 1897, in a remote

Swiss hamlet, the first chapters were penned, those in which the music

begins as it were spontaneously. Then (so definitely was the whole

design now shaping itself in his mind) he wrote some of the chapters for

the fifth and ninth volumes. Like a musical composer, Rolland followed

up particular themes as his mood directed, themes which his artistry was

to weave harmoniously into the great symphony. Order came from within,

and was not imposed from without. The work was not done in any strictly

serial succession. The chapters seemed to come into being as chance

might direct. Often they were inspired by the landscape, and were

colored by outward events. Seippel, for instance, shows that Jean

Christophe's flight into the forest was suggested by the last journey of

Rolland's beloved teacher Tolstoi. With appropriate symbolism, this work

of European scope was composed in various parts of Europe; the opening

scenes, as we have said, in a Swiss hamlet; _L'adolescent_ in Zurich and

by the shores of Lake Zug; much in Paris; much in Italy; _Antoinette_ in

Oxford; while, after nearly fifteen years' labor, the work was completed

in Baveno.

In February, 1902, the first volume, _L'aube_, was published in "_Les

cahiers de la quinzaine_," and the last serial number was issued on

October 20, 1912. When the fifth serial issue, _La foire sur la place_,

appeared, a publisher, Ollendorff, was found willing to produce the

whole romance in book form. Before the French original was completed,

English, Spanish, and German translations were in course of publication,

and Seippel's valuable biography had also appeared. Thus when the work

was crowned by the Academy in 1913, its reputation was already

established. In the fifth decade of his life, Rolland had at length

become famous. His messenger Jean Christophe was a living contemporary

figure, on pilgrimage through the world.

CHAPTER IV

THE WORK WITHOUT A FORMULA

What, then, is _Jean Christophe_? Can it be properly spoken of as a

romance? This book, which is as comprehensive as the world, an orbis

pictus of our generation, cannot be described by a single all-embracing

term. Rolland once said: "Any work which can be circumscribed by a

definition is a dead work." Most applicable to _Jean Christophe_ is the

refusal to permit so living a creation to be hidebound by the

restrictions of a name. _Jean Christophe_ is an attempt to create a

totality, to write a book that is universal and encyclopedic, not merely

narrative; a book which continually returns to the central problem of

the world-all. It combines insight into the soul with an outlook into

the age. It is the portrait of an entire generation, and simultaneously

it is the biography of an imaginary individual. Grautoff has termed it

"a cross-section of our society"; but it is likewise the religious

confession of its author. It is critical, but at the same time

productive; at once a criticism of reality, and a creative analysis of

the unconscious; it is a symphony in words, and a fresco of contemporary

ideas. It is an ode to solitude, and likewise an Eroica of the great

European fellowship. But whatever definition we attempt, can deal with a

part only, for the whole eludes definition. In the field of literary

endeavor, the nature of a moral or ethical act cannot be precisely

specified. Rolland's sculptural energies enable him to shape the inner

humanity of what he is describing; his idealism is a force that

strengthens faith, a tonic of vitality. His _Jean Christophe_ is an

attempt towards justice, an attempt to understand life. It is also an

attempt towards faith, an attempt to love life. These coalesce in his

moral demand (the only one he has ever formulated for the free human

being), "to know life, and yet to love it."

The essential aim of the book is explained by its hero when he refers to

the disparateness of contemporary life, to the manner in which its art

has been severed into a thousand fragments. "The Europe of to-day no

longer possesses a common book; it has no poem, no prayer, no act of

faith which is the common heritage of all. This lack is fatal to the art

of our time. There is no one who has written for all; no one who has

fought for all." Rolland hoped to remedy the evil. He wished to write

for all nations, and not for his fatherland alone. Not artists and men

of letters merely, but all who are eager to learn about life and about

their own age, were to be supplied with a picture of the environment in

which they were living. Jean Christophe gives expression to his

creator's will, saying: "Display everyday life to everyday people--the

life that is deeper and wider than the ocean. The least among us bears

infinity within him.... Describe the simple life of one of these simple

men; ... describe it simply, as it actually happens. Do not trouble

about phrasing; do not dissipate your energies, as do so many

contemporary writers, in straining for artistic effects. You wish to

speak to the many, and you must therefore speak their language.... Throw

yourself into what you create; think your own thoughts; feel your own

feelings. Let your heart set the rhythm to the words. Style is soul."

_Jean Christophe_ was designed to be, and actually is, a work of life,

and not a work of art; it was to be, and is, a book as comprehensive as

humanity; for "l'art est la vie domptée"; art is life broken in. The

book differs from the majority of the imaginative writings of our day in

that it does not make the erotic problem its central feature. But it has

no central feature. It attempts to comprehend all problems, all those

which are a part of reality, to contemplate them from within, "from the

spectrum of an individual" as Grautoff expresses it. The center is the

inner life of the individual human being. The primary motif of the

romance is to expound how this individual sees life, or rather, how he

learns to see it. The book may therefore be described as an educational

romance in the sense in which that term applies to _Wilhelm Meister_.

The educational romance aims at showing how, in years of apprenticeship

and years of travel, a human being makes acquaintance with the lives of

others, and thus acquires mastery over his own life; how experience

teaches him to transform into individual views the concepts he has had

transmitted to him by others, many of which are erroneous; how he

becomes enabled to transmute the world so that it ceases to be an

outward phenomenon and becomes an inward reality. The educational

romance traces the change from curiosity to knowledge, from emotional

prejudice to justice.

But this educational romance is simultaneously a historical romance, a

"comédie humaine" in Balzac's sense; an "histoire contemporaine" in

Anatole France's sense; and in many respects also it is a political

romance. But Rolland, with his more catholic method of treatment, does

not merely depict the history of his generation, but discusses the

cultural history of the age, exhibiting the radiations of the time

spirit, concerning himself with poesy and with socialism, with music and

with the fine arts, with the woman's question and with racial problems.

Jean Christophe the man is a whole man, and _Jean Christophe_ the book

embraces all that is human in the spiritual cosmos. This romance ignores

no questions; it seeks to overcome all obstacles; it has a universal

life, beyond the frontiers of nations, occupations, and creeds.

It is a romance of art, a romance of music, as well as a historical

romance. Its hero is not a saunterer through life, like the heroes of

Goethe, Novalis, and Stendhal, but a creator. As with Gottfried Keller's

_Der grüne Heinrich_, in this book the path through the externals of

life leads simultaneously to the inner world, to art, to completion. The

birth of music, the growth of genius, is individually and yet typically

presented. In his portrayal of experience, the author does not merely

aim at giving an analysis of the world; he desires also to expound the

mystery of creation, the primal secret of life.

Furthermore, the book furnishes an outlook on the universe, thus

becoming a philosophic, a religious romance. The struggle for the

totality of life, signifies for Rolland the struggle to understand its

significance and origin, the struggle for God, for one's own personal

God. The rhythm of the individual existence is in search of an ultimate

harmony between itself and the rhythm of the universal existence. From

this earthly sphere, the Idea flows back into the infinite in an

exultant canticle.

Such a wealth of design and execution was unprecedented. In one work

alone, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, had Rolland encountered a similar

conjuncture of a historical picture of the world with a process of inner

purification and a state of religious ecstasy. Here only had he

discerned the like passionate sense of responsibility towards truth. But

Rolland diverged from this splendid example by placing his tragedy in

the temporal environment of the life of to-day, instead of amid the wars

of Napoleonic times; and by endowing his hero with the heroism, not of

arms, but of the invisible struggles which the artist is constrained to

fight. Here, as always, the most human of artists was his model, the man

to whom art was not an end in itself, but was ever subordinate to an

ethical purpose. In accordance with the spirit of Tolstoi's teaching,

_Jean Christophe_ was not to be a literary work, but a deed. For this

reason, Rolland's great symphony cannot be subjected to the

restrictions of a convenient formula. The book ignores all the ordinary

canons, and is none the less a characteristic product of its time.

Standing outside literature, it is an overwhelmingly powerful literary

manifestation. Often enough it ignores the rules of art, and is yet a

most perfect expression of art. It is not a book, but a message; it is

not a history, but is nevertheless a record of our time. More than a

book, it is the daily miracle of revelation of a man who lives the

truth, whose whole life is truth.

CHAPTER V

KEY TO THE CHARACTERS

As a romance, _Jean Christophe_ has no prototype in literature; but the

characters in the book have prototypes in real life. Rolland the

historian does not hesitate to borrow some of the lineaments of his

heroes from the biographies of great men. In many cases, too, the

figures he portrays recall personalities in contemporary life. In a

manner peculiar to himself, by a process of which he was the originator,

he combines the imaginative with the historical, fusing individual

qualities in a new synthesis. His delineations tend to be mosaics,

rather than entirely new imaginative creations. In ultimate analysis,

his method of literary composition invariably recalls the work of a

musical composer; he paraphrases thematic reminiscences, without

imitating too closely. The reader of _Jean Christophe_ often fancies

that, as in a key-novel, he has recognized some public personality; but

ere long he finds that the characteristics of another figure intrude.

Thus each portrait is freshly constructed out of a hundred diverse

elements.

Jean Christophe seems at first to be Beethoven. Seippel has aptly

described _La vie de Beethoven_ as a preface to _Jean Christophe_. In

truth the opening volumes of the novel show us a Jean Christophe whose

image is modeled after that of the great master. But it becomes plain in

due course that we are being shown something more than one single

musician, that Jean Christophe is the quintessence of all great

musicians. The figures in the pantheon of musical history are presented

in a composite portrait; or, to use a musical analogy, Beethoven, the

master musician, is the root of the chord. Jean Christophe grew up in

the Rhineland, Beethoven's home; Jean Christophe, like Beethoven, had

Flemish blood in his veins; his mother, too, was of peasant origin, his

father a drunkard. Nevertheless, Jean Christophe exhibits numerous

traits proper to Friedemann Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Again,

the letter which young Beethoven redivivus is made to write to the grand

duke is modeled on the historical document; the episode of his

acquaintanceship with Frau von Kerich recalls Beethoven and Frau von

Breuning. But many incidents, like the scene in the castle, remind the

reader of Mozart's youth; and Mozart's little love episode with Rose

Cannabich is transferred to the life of Jean Christophe. The older Jean

Christophe grows, the less does his personality recall that of

Beethoven. In external characteristics he grows rather to resemble Gluck

and Handel. Of the latter, Rolland writes elsewhere that "his formidable

bluntness alarmed every one." Word for word we can apply to Jean

Christophe, Rolland's description of Handel: "He was independent and

irritable, and could never adapt himself to the conventions of social

life. He insisted on calling a spade a spade, and twenty times a day he

aroused annoyance in all who had to associate with him." The life

history of Wagner had much influence upon the delineation of Jean

Christophe. The rebellious flight to Paris, a flight originating, as

Nietzsche phrases it, "from the depths of instinct"; the hack-work done

for minor publishers; the sordid details of daily life--all these things

have been transposed almost verbatim into _Jean Christophe_ from

Wagner's autobiographical sketches _Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris_.

Ernst Decsey's life of Hugo Wolf was, however, decisive in its influence

upon the configuration of the leading character in Rolland's book, upon

the almost violent departure from the picture of Beethoven. Not merely

do we find individual incidents taken from Decsey's book, such as the

hatred for Brahms, the visit paid to Hassler (Wagner), the musical

criticism published in "_Dionysos_" ("_Wiener Salonblatt_"), the

tragi-comedy of the unsuccessful overture to _Penthesilea_, and the

memorable visit to Professor Schulz (Emil Kaufmann). Furthermore, Wolf's

whole character, his method of musical creation, is transplanted into

the soul of Jean Christophe. His primitive force of production, the

volcanic eruptions flooding the world with melody, shooting forth into

eternity four songs in the space of a day, with subsequent months of

inactivity, the brusque transition from the joyful activity of creation

to the gloomy brooding of inertia--this form of genius which was native

to Hugo Wolf becomes part of the tragical equipment of Jean Christophe.

Whereas his physical characteristics remind us of Handel, Beethoven, and

Gluck, his mental type is assimilated rather in its convulsive energy to

that of the great song-writer. With this difference, that to Jean

Christophe, in his more brilliant hours, there is superadded the

cheerful serenity, the childlike joy, of Schubert. He has a dual nature.

Jean Christophe is the classical type and the modern type of musician

combined into a single personality, so that he contains even many of the

characteristics of Gustav Mahler and César Frank. He is not an

individual musician, the figure of one living in a particular

generation; he is the sublimation of music as a whole.

Nevertheless, in Jean Christophe's life we find incidents deriving from

the adventures of those who were not musicians. From Goethe's _Wahrheit

und Dichtung_ comes the encounter with the French players; I have

already said that the story of Tolstoi's last days was represented in

Jean Christophe's flight into the forest (though in this latter case,

from the figure of a benighted traveler, Nietzsche's countenance glances

at us for a moment). Grazia typifies the well-beloved who never dies;

Antoinette is a picture of Renan's sister Henriette; Françoise Oudon,

the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds

us of Suzanne Deprès. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are

purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles

Louis Philippe and Charles Péguy; among the minor figures, lightly

sketched, we seem to see Debussy, Verhaeren, and Moreas. When _La foire

sur la place_ was published, the figures of Roussin the deputy,

Lévy-Coeur, the critic, Gamache the newspaper proprietor, and Hecht the

music seller, hurt the feelings of not a few persons against whom no

shafts had been aimed by Rolland. The portraits had been painted from

studies of the commonplace, and typified the incessantly recurring

mediocrities which are eternally real no less than are figures of

exquisite rarity.

One portrait, however, that of Olivier, would seem to have been purely

fictive. For this very reason, Olivier is felt to be the most living of

all the characters, precisely because we cannot but feel that in many

respects we have before us the artist's own picture, displaying not so

much the circumstantial destiny as the human essence of Romain Rolland.

Like the classical painters, he has, almost unmarked, introduced himself

slightly disguised amid the historical scenario. The description is that

of his own figure, slender, refined, slightly stooping; here we see his

own energy, inwardly directed, and consuming itself in idealism;

Rolland's enthusiasm is displayed in Olivier's lucid sense of justice,

in his resignation as far as his personal lot is concerned, though he

never resigns himself to the abandonment of his cause. It is true that

in the novel this gentle spirit, the pupil of Tolstoi and Renan, leaves

the field of action to his friend, and vanishes, the symbol of a past

world. But Jean Christophe was merely a dream, the longing for energy

sometimes felt by the man of gentle disposition. Olivier-Rolland limns

this dream of his youth, designing upon his literary canvas the picture

of his own life.

CHAPTER VI

A HEROIC SYMPHONY

An abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of

contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In _Jean Christophe_,

music is the form as well as the content. For the sake of simplicity we

have to call the work a romance or a novel. But nowhere can it be said

to attach to the epic tradition of any previous writers of romance:

whether to that of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, who aimed at analyzing

society into its chemical elements; or to that of Goethe, Gottfried

Keller, and Stendhal, who sought to secure a crystallization of the

soul. Rolland is neither a narrator, nor what may be termed a poetical

romancer; he is a musician who weaves everything into harmony. In

ultimate analysis, _Jean Christophe_ is a symphony born out of the

spirit of music, just as in Nietzsche's view classical tragedy was born

out of that spirit; its laws are not those of the narrative, of the

lecture, but those of controlled emotion. Rolland is a musician, not an

epic poet.

Even qua narrator, Rolland does not possess what we term style. He does

not write a classical French; he has no stable architechtonic in his

sentences, no definite rhythm, no typical hue in his wording, no

diction peculiar to himself. His personality does not obtrude itself,

since he does not form the matter but is formed thereby. He possesses an

inspired power of adaptation to the rhythm of the events he is

describing, to the mood of the situation. The writer's mind acts as a

resonator. In the opening lines the tempo is set. Then the rhythm surges

on through the scene, carrying with it the episodes, which often seem

like individual brief poems each sustained by its own melody--songs and

airs which appear and pass, rapidly giving place to new movements. Some

of the preludes in _Jean Christophe_ are examples of pure song-craft,

delicate arabesques and capriccios, islands of tone amid the roaring

sea; then come other moods, gloomy ballads, nocturnes breathing

elemental energy and sadness. When Rolland's writing is the outcome of

musical inspiration, he shows himself one of the masters of language. At

times, however, he speaks to us as historian, as critical student of the

age. Then the splendor fades. Such historical and critical passages are

like the periods of cold recitative in musical drama, periods which are

requisite in order to give continuity to the story, and which thus

fulfill an intellectual need, however much our aroused feelings may make

us regret their interpolation. The ancient conflict between the musician

and the historian persists unreconciled in Rolland's work.

Only through the spirit of music can the architectonic of _Jean

Christophe_ be understood. However plastic the elaboration of the

characters, their effective force is displayed solely in so far as they

are thematically interwoven into the resounding tide of life's

modulations. The essential matter is always the rhythm which these

characters emit, and which issues most powerfully of all from Jean

Christophe, the master of music. The structure, the inner architectural

conception of the work, cannot be understood by those who merely

contemplate its obvious subdivision into ten volumes. This is dictated

by the exigencies of book production. The essential caesuras are those

between the lesser sections, each of which is written in a different

key. Only a trained musician, one familiar with the great symphonies,

can follow in detail the way in which the epic poem _Jean Christophe_ is

constructed as a symphony, an Eroica; only a musician can realize how in

this work the most comprehensive type of musical composition is

transposed into the world of speech.

Let the reader recall the chorale-like undertone, the booming note of

the Rhine. We seem to be listening to some primal energy, to the stream

of life in its roaring progress through eternity. A little melody rises

above the general roar. Jean Christophe, the child, has been born out of

the great music of the universe, to fuse in turn with the endless stream

of sound. The first figures make a dramatic entry; the mystical chorale

gradually subsides; the mortal drama of childhood begins. By degrees the

stage is filled with personalities, with melodies; voices answer the

lisping syllables of Jean Christophe; until, finally, the virile tones

of Jean Christophe and the gentler voice of Olivier come to dominate

the theme. Meanwhile, all the forms of life and music are unfolded in

concords and discords. Thus we have the tragical outbreaks of a

melancholy like that of Beethoven; fugues upon the themes of art;

vigorous dance scenes, as in _Le buisson ardent_; odes to the infinite

and songs to nature, pure like those of Schubert. Wonderful is the

interconnection of the whole, and marvelous is the way in which the tide

of sound ebbs once more. The dramatic tumult subsides; the last discords

are resolved into the great harmony. In the final scene, the opening

melody recurs, to the accompaniment of invisible choirs; the roaring

river flows out into the limitless sea.

Thus _Jean Christophe_, the Eroica, ends in a chorale to the infinite

powers of life, ends in the undying ocean of music. Rolland wished to

convey the notion of these eternal forces of life symbolically through

the imagery of the element which for us mortals brings us into closest

contact with the infinite; he wished to typify these forces in the art

which is timeless, which is free, which knows nothing of national

limitations, which is eternal. Thus music is at once the form and the

content of the work, "simultaneously its kernel and its shell," as

Goethe said of nature. Nature is ever the law of laws for art.

CHAPTER VII

THE ENIGMA OF CREATIVE WORK

_Jean Christophe_ took the form of a book of life rather than that of a

romance of art, for Rolland does not make a specific distinction between

poietic types of men and those devoid of creative genius, but inclines

rather to see in the artist the most human among men. Just as for

Goethe, true life was identical with activity; so for Rolland, true life

is identical with production. One who shuts himself away, who has no

surplus being, who fails to radiate energy that shall flow beyond the

narrow limits of his individuality to become part of the vital energy of

the future, is doubtless still a human being, but is not genuinely

alive. There may occur a death of the soul before the death of the body,

just as there is a life that outlasts one's own life. The real boundary

across which we pass from life to extinction is not constituted by

physical death but the cessation of effective influence. Creation alone

is life. "There is only one delight, that of creation. Other joys are

but shadows, alien to the world though they hover over the world. Desire

is creative desire; for love, for genius, for action. One and all are

born out of ardor. It matters not whether we are creating in the sphere

of the body or in the sphere of the spirit. Ever, in creation, we are

seeking to escape from the prison of the body, to throw ourselves into

the storm of life, to be as gods. To create is to slay death."

Creation, therefore, is the meaning of life, its secret, its innermost

kernel. While Rolland almost always chooses an artist for his hero, he

does not make this choice in the arrogance of the romance writer who

likes to contrast the melancholy genius with the dull crowd. His aim is

to draw nearer to the primal problems of existence. In the work of art,

transcending time and space, the eternal miracle of generation out of

nothing (or out of the all) is made manifest to the senses, while

simultaneously its mystery is made plain to the intelligence. For

Rolland, artistic creation is the problem of problems precisely because

the artist is the most human of men. Everywhere Rolland threads his way

through the obscure labyrinth of creative work, that he may draw near to

the burning moment of spiritual receptivity, to the painful act of

giving birth. He watches Michelangelo shaping pain in stone; Beethoven

bursting forth in melody; Tolstoi listening to the heart-beat of doubt

in his own laden breast. To each, Jacob's angel is revealed in a

different form, but for all alike the ecstatic force of the divine

struggle continues to burn. Throughout the years, Rolland's sole

endeavor has been to discover this ultimate type of artist, this

primitive element of creation, much as Goethe was in search of the

archetypal plant. Rolland wishes to discover the essential creator, the

essential act of creation, for he knows that in this mystery are

comprised the root and the blossoms of the whole of life's enigma.

As historian he had depicted the birth of art in humanity. Now, as poet,

he was approaching the same problem in a different form, and was

endeavoring to depict the birth of art in one individual. In his

_Histoire de l'opéra avant Lully et Scarlatti_, and in his _Musiciens

d'autrefois_, he had shown how music, "blossoming throughout the ages,"

begins to form its buds; and how, grafted upon different racial stems

and upon different periods, it grows in new forms. But here begins the

mystery of creation. Every beginning is wrapped in obscurity; and since

the path of all mankind is symbolically indicated in each individual,

the mystery recurs in each individual's experience. Rolland is aware

that the intellect can never unravel this ultimate mystery. He does not

share the views of the monists, for whom creation has become trivialized

to a mechanical effect which they would explain by talking of primitive

gases and by similar verbiage. He knows that nature is modest, and that

in her secret hours of generation she would fain elude observation; he

knows that we are unable to watch her at work in those moments when

crystal is joining to crystal, and when flowers are springing out of the

buds. Nothing does she hide more jealously than her inmost magic,

everlasting procreation, the very secret of infinity.

Creation, therefore, the life of life, is for Rolland a mystic power,

far transcending human will and human intelligence. In every soul there

lives, side by side with the conscious individuality, a stranger as

guest. "Man's chief endeavor since he became man has been to build up

dams that shall control this inner sea by the powers of reason and

religion. But when a storm comes (and those most plenteously endowed are

peculiarly subject to such storms), the elemental powers are set free."

Hot waves flood the soul, streaming forth out of the unconscious; not

out of the will, but against the will; out of a super-will. This

"dualism of the soul and its daimon" cannot be overcome by the clear

light of reason. The energy of the creative spirit surges from the

depths of the blood, often from parents and remoter progenitors, not

entering through the doors and windows of the normal waking

consciousness, but permeating the whole being as atmospheric spirits may

be conceived to do. Of a sudden the artist is seized as by intoxication,

inspired by a will independent of the will, subjected to the power "of

the ineffable riddle of the world and of life," as Goethe terms the

daimonic. The divine breaks upon him like a hurricane; or opens before

him like an abyss, "dieu abime," into which he hurls himself

unreflectingly. In Rolland's sense, we must not say that the true artist

has his art, but that the art has the artist. Art is the hunter, the

artist is the quarry; art is the victor, whereas the artist is happy in

that he is again and again and forever the vanquished. Thus before

creation we must have the creator. Genius is predestined. At work in the

channels of the blood, while the senses still slumber, this power from

without prepares the great magic for the child. Wonderful is Rolland's

description of the way in which Jean Christophe's soul was already

filled with music before he had heard the first notes. The daimon is

there within the youthful breast, awaiting but a sign before stirring,

before making himself known to the kindred spirit within the dual soul.

When the boy, holding his grandfather's hand, enters the church and is

greeted by an outburst of music from the organ, the genius within

acclaims the work of the distant brother and the child is filled with

joy. Again, driving in a carriage, and listening to the melodious rhythm

of the horse's hoofs, his heart goes out in unconscious brotherhood to

the kindred element. Then comes one of the most beautiful passages in

the book, probably the most beautiful of those treating of music. The

little Jean Christophe clambers on to the music stool in front of the

black chest filled with magic, and for the first time thrusts his

fingers into the unending thicket of concords and discords, where each

note that he strikes seems to answer yes or no to the unconscious

questions of the stranger's voice within him. Soon he learns to produce

the tones he desires to hear. At first the airs had sought him out, but

now he can seek them out. His soul which, thirsting for music, has long

been eagerly drinking in its strains, now flows forth creatively over

the barriers into the world.

This inborn daimon in the artist grows with the child, ripens with the

man, and ages as the man grows old. Like a vampire it is nourished by

all the experiences of its host, drinking his joys and his sorrows,

gradually sucking up all the life into itself, so that for the creative

human being nothing more remains but the eternal thirst and the torment

of creation. In Rolland's sense the artist does not will to create, but

must create. For him, production is not (as Nordau and Nordau's

congeners fancy in their simplicity) a morbid outgrowth, an abnormality

of life, but the only true health; unproductivity is disease. Never has

the torment of the lack of inspiration been more splendidly described

than in _Jean Christophe_. The soul in such cases is like a parched land

under a torrid sun, and its need is worse than death. No breath of wind

brings coolness; everything withers; joy and energy fade; the will is

utterly relaxed. Suddenly comes a storm out of the swiftly overcast

heavens, the thunder of the burgeoning power, the lightning of

inspiration; the stream wells up from inexhaustible springs, carrying

the soul along with it in eternal desire; the artist has become the

whole world, has become God, the creator of all the elements. Whatever

he encounters, he sweeps along with him in his rush; "tout lui est

prétexte à sa fécondité intarissable"; everything is material for his

inexhaustible fertility. He transforms the whole of life into art; like

Jean Christophe he transforms his death into a symphony.

In order to grasp life in its entirety, Rolland has endeavored to

describe the profoundest mystery of life; to describe creation, the

origin of the all, the development of art in an artist. He has furnished

a vivid description of the tie between creation and life, which

weaklings are so eager to avoid. Jean Christophe is simultaneously the

working genius and the suffering man; he suffers through creation, and

creates through suffering. For the very reason that Rolland is himself a

creator, the imaginary figure of Jean Christophe, the artist, is

transcendently alive.

CHAPTER VIII

JEAN CHRISTOPHE

Art has many forms, but its highest form is always that which is most

intimately akin to nature in its laws and its manifestations. True

genius works elementally, works naturally, is wide as the world and

manifold as mankind. It creates out of its own abundance, not out of

weakness. Its perennial effect, therefore, is to create more strength,

to glorify nature, and to raise life above its temporal confines into

infinity.

Jean Christophe is inspired with such genius. His name is symbolical.

Jean Christophe Krafft is himself energy (Kraft), the indefatigable

energy that springs from peasant ancestry. It is the energy which is

hurled into life like a projectile, the energy that forcibly overcomes

every obstacle. Now, as long as we identify the concept of life with

quiescent being, with inactive existence, with things as they are, this

force of nature must be ever at war with life. For Rolland, however,

life is not the quiescent, but the struggle against quiescence; it is

creation, poiesis, the eternal, upward and onward impulse against the

inertia of "the perpetual as-you-were." Among artists, one who is a

fighter, an innovator, must necessarily be such a genius. Around him

stand other artists engaged in comparatively peaceful activities, the

contemplators, the sage observers of that which is, the completers of

the extant, the imperturbable organizers of accomplished facts. They,

the heirs of the past, have repose; he, the precursor, has storm. It is

his lot to transform life into a work of art; he cannot enjoy life as a

work of art; first he must create life as he would have it, create its

form, its tradition, its ideal, its truth, its god. Nothing for him is

ready-made; he has eternally to begin. Life does not welcome him into a

warm house, where he can forthwith make himself at home. For him, life

is but plastic material for a new edifice, wherein those who come after

will live. Such a man, therefore, knows nothing of repose. "Work

unrestingly," says his god to him; "you must fight ceaselessly."

Obedient to the injunction, from boyhood to the day of his death he

follows this path, fighting without truce, the flaming sword of the will

in his hand. Often he grows weary, wondering whether struggle must

indeed be unending, asking himself with Job whether his days be not

"like the days of an hireling." But soon, shaking off lethargy, he

recognizes that "we cannot be truly alive while we continue to ask why

we live; we must live life for its own sake." He knows that labor is its

own reward. In an hour of illumination he sums up his destiny in the

splendid phrase: "I do not seek peace; I seek life."

But struggle implies the use of force. Despite his natural kindliness of

disposition, Jean Christophe is an apostle of force. We discern in him

something barbaric and elemental, the power of a storm or of a torrent

which, obeying not its own will but the unknown laws of nature, rushes

down from the heights into the lower levels of life. His outward aspect

is that of a fighter. He is tall and massive, almost uncouth, with large

hands and brawny arms. He has the sanguine temperament, and is liable to

outbursts of turbulent passion. His footfall is heavy; his gait is

awkward, though he knows nothing of fatigue. These characteristics

derive from the crude energy of his peasant forefathers on the maternal

side; their pristine strength gives him steadfastness in the most

arduous crises of existence. "Well is it with him who amid the mishaps

of life is sustained by the power of a sturdy stock, so that the feet of

father and grandfathers may carry forward the son when he grows weary,

so that the vigorous growth of more robust forebears may relift the

crushed soul." The power of resilence against the oppression of

existence is given by such physical energy. Still more helpful is Jean

Christophe's trust in the future, his healthy and unyielding optimism,

his invincible confidence in victory. "I have centuries to look forward

to," he cries exultantly in an hour of disillusionment. "Hail to life!

Hail to joy!" From the German race he inherits Siegfried's confidence in

success, and for this reason he is ever a fighter. He knows, "le génie

veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le génie"--genius desires obstacles,

for obstacles create genius.

Force, however, is always wilful Young Jean Christophe, while his

energies have not yet been spiritually enlightened, have not yet been

ethically tamed, can see no one but himself. He is unjust towards

others, deaf and blind to remonstrance, indifferent as to whether his

actions may please or displease. Like a woodcutter, ax in hand, he

hastes stormfully through the forest, striking right and left, simply to

secure light and space for himself. He despises German art without

understanding it, and scorns French art without knowing anything about

it. He is endowed with "the marvelous impudence of opinionated youth";

that of the undergraduate who says, "the world did not exist till I

created it." His strength has its fling in contentiousness; for only

when struggling does he feel that he is himself, then only can he enjoy

his passion for life.

These struggles of Jean Christophe continue throughout the years, for

his maladroitness is no less conspicuous than his strength. He does not

understand his opponents. He is slow to learn the lessons of life; and

it is precisely because the lessons are learned so slowly, piece by

piece, each stage besprinkled with blood and watered with tears, that

the novel is so impressive and so full of help. Nothing comes easily to

him; no ripe fruit ever falls into his hands. He is simple like

Parsifal, naive, somewhat boisterous and provincial. Instead of rubbing

off his angularities upon the grindstones of social life, he bruises

himself by his clumsy movements. He is an intuitive genius, not a

psychologist; he foresees nothing, but must endure all things before he

can know. "He had not the hawklike glance of Frenchmen and Jews, who

discern the most trifling characteristics of all that they see. He

silently absorbed everything he came in contact with, as a sponge

absorbs. Not until days or hours had elapsed would he become fully aware

of what had now become a part of himself." Nothing was real to him so

long as it remained objective. To be of use, every experience must be,

as it were, digested and worked up into his blood. He could not exchange

ideas and concepts one for another as people exchange bank notes. After

prolonged nausea, he was able to free himself from all the conventional

lies and trivial notions which had been instilled into him in youth, and

was then at length enabled to absorb fresh nutriment. Before he could

know France, he had to strip away all her masks one after another;

before he could reach Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies," he had

to make his way through less lofty adventures. Before he could discover

himself and before he could discover his god, he had to live the whole

of his life through. Not until he reaches the other shore does

Christophorus recognize that his burden has been a message.

He knows that "it is good to suffer when one is strong," and he

therefore loves to encounter hindrances. "Everything great is good, and

the extremity of pain borders on enfranchisement. The only thing that

crushes irremediably, the only thing that destroys the soul, is

mediocrity of pain and joy." He gradually learns to recognize his enemy,

his own impetuosity; he learns to be just; he begins to understand

himself and the world. The nature of passion becomes clear to him. He

realizes that the hostility he encounters is aimed, not at him

personally, but at the eternal powers goading him on; he learns to love

his enemies because they have helped him to find himself, and because

they march towards the same goal by other roads. The years of

apprenticeship have come to an end. As Schiller admirably puts it in the

above-quoted letter to Goethe: "Years of apprenticeship are a relative

concept. They imply their correlative, which is mastery. The idea of

mastery is presupposed to elucidate and ground the idea of

apprenticeship." Jean Christophe, in riper years, begins to see that

through all his transformations he has by degrees become more truly

himself. Preconceptions have been cast aside; he has been freed from

beliefs and illusions, freed from the prejudices of race and

nationality. He is free and yet pious, now that he grasps the meaning of

the path he has to tread. In the frank and noisy optimism of youth, he

had exclaimed, "What is life? A tragedy. Hurrah!" Now, "transfiguré par

la foi," this optimism has been transformed into a gentle, all-embracing

wisdom. His freethinker's confessions runs: "To serve God and to love

God, signifies to serve life and to love life." He hears the footsteps

of coming generations. Even in those who are hostile to him he salutes

the undying spirit of life. He sees his fame growing like a great

cathedral, and feels it be to something remote from himself. He who was

an aimless stormer, is now a leader; but his own goal does not become

clear to him until the sonorous waves of death encompass him, and he

floats away into the vast ocean of music, into eternal peace.

What makes Jean Christophe's struggle supremely heroic is that he

aspires solely towards the greatest, towards life as a whole. This

striving man has to upbuild everything for himself; his art, his

freedom, his faith, his God, his truth. He has to fight himself free

from everything which others have taught him; from all the fellowships

of art, nationality, race, and creed. His ardor never wrestles for any

personal end, for success or for pleasure. "Il n'y a aucun rapport entre

la passion et le plaisir." Jean Christophe's loneliness makes this

struggle tragical. It is not on his own behalf that he troubles to

attain to truth, for he knows that every man has his own truth. When,

nevertheless, he becomes a helper of mankind, this is not by words, but

by his own essential nature, which exercises a marvelously harmonizing

influence in virtue of his vigorous goodness. Whoever comes into contact

with him--the imaginary personalities in the book, and no less the real

human beings who read the book--is the better for having known him. The

power through which he conquers is that of the life which we all share.

And inasmuch as we love him, we grow enabled to cherish an ardent love

for the world of mankind.

CHAPTER IX

OLIVIER

Jean Christophe is the portrait of an artist. But every form and every

formula of art and the artist must necessarily be one-sided. Rolland,

therefore, introduces to Christophe in mid career, "nel mezzo del

cammin," a counterpart, a Frenchman as foil to the German, a hero of

thought as contrast to the hero of action. Jean Christophe and Olivier

are complementary figures, attracting one another in virtue of the law

of polarity. "They were very different each from the other, and they

loved one another on account of this difference, being of the same

species"--the noblest. Olivier is the essence of spiritual France, just

as Jean Christophe is the offspring of the best energies of Germany;

they are ideals, alike fashioned in the form of the highest ideal;

alternating like major and minor, they transpose the theme of art and

life into the most wonderful variations.

In externals the contrast between them is marked, both in respect of

physical characteristics and social origins. Olivier is slightly built,

pale and delicate. Whereas Jean Christophe springs from working folk,

Olivier derives from an old and somewhat effete bourgeois stock, and

despite all his ardor he has an aristocratic aloofness from vulgar

things. His vitality does not come like that of his robust comrade from

excess of bodily energy, from muscles and blood, but from nerves and

brain, from will and passion. He is receptive rather than productive.

"He was ivy, a gentle soul which must always love and be loved." Art is

for him a refuge from reality, whereas Jean Christophe flings himself

upon art to find in it life many times multiplied. In Schiller's sense

of the terms, Olivier is the sentimental artist, whilst his German

brother is the naive genius. Olivier represents the beauty of a

civilization; he is symbolic of "la vaste culture et le génie

psychologique de la France"; Jean Christophe is the very luxuriance of

nature. The Frenchman represents contemplation; the German, action. The

former reflects by many facets; the latter has the genius which shines

by its own light. Olivier "transfers to the sphere of thought all the

energies that he has drawn from action," producing ideas where

Christophe radiates vitality, and wishing to improve, not the world, but

himself. It suffices him to fight out within himself the eternal

struggle of responsibility. He contemplates unmoved the play of secular

forces, looking on with the skeptical smile of his teacher Renan, as one

who knows in advance that the perpetual return of evil is inevitable,

that nothing can avert the eternal victory of injustice and wrong. His

love, therefore, goes out to humanity, the abstract idea, and not to

actual men, the unsatisfactory realizations of that idea.

At first we incline to regard him as a weakling, as timid and inactive.

Such is the view taken at the outset by his forceful friend, who says

almost angrily: "Are you incapable of feeling hatred?" Olivier answers

with a smile: "I hate hatred. It is repulsive to me that I should

struggle with people whom I despise." He does not enter into treaties

with reality; his strength lies in isolation. No defeat can daunt him,

and no victory can persuade him: he knows that force rules the world,

but he refuses to recognize the victor. Jean Christophe, fired by

Teutonic pagan wrath, rushes at obstacles and stamps them underfoot;

Olivier knows that next day the weeds that have been trodden to the

earth will spring up again. He does not love struggle for its own sake.

When he avoids struggle, this is not because he fears defeat, but

because victory is indifferent to him. A freethinker, he is in truth

animated by the spirit of Christianity. "I should run the risk of

disturbing my soul's peace, which is more precious to me than any

victory. I refuse to hate. I desire to be just even to my enemies. Amid

the storms of passion I wish to retain clarity of vision, that I may

understand everything and love everything."

Jean Christophe soon comes to recognize that Olivier is his spiritual

brother, learning that the heroism of thought is just as great as the

heroism of action, that his friend's idealistic anarchism is no less

courageous than his own primitive revolt. In this apparent weakling, he

venerates a soul of steel. Nothing can shake Olivier, nothing can

confuse his serene intelligence. Superior force is no argument against

him. "He had an independence of judgment which nothing could overcome.

When he loved anything, he loved it in defiance of the world." Justice

is the only pole towards which the needle of his will points unerringly;

justice is his sole form of fanaticism. Like Aërt, his weaker prototype,

he has "la faim de justice." Every injustice, even the injustices of a

remote past, seem to him a disturbance of the world order. He belongs,

therefore, to no party; he is unfailingly the advocate on behalf of all

the unhappy and all the oppressed; his place is ever "with the

vanquished"; he does not wish to help the masses socially, but to help

individual souls, whereas Jean Christophe desires to conquer for all

mankind every paradise of art and freedom. For Olivier there is but one

true freedom, that which comes from within, the freedom which a man must

win for himself. The illusion of the crowd, its eternal class struggles

and national struggles for power, distress him, but do not arouse his

sympathy. Standing quite alone, he maintains his mental poise when war

between Germany and France is imminent, when all are shaken in their

convictions, and when even Jean Christophe feels that he must return

home to fight for his fatherland. "I love my country," says the

Frenchman to his German brother. "I love it just as you love yours. But

am I for this reason to betray my conscience, to kill my soul? This

would signify the betrayal of my country. I belong to the army of the

spirit, not to the army of force." But brute force takes its revenge

upon the man who despises force, and he is killed in a chance medley.

Only his ideals, which were his true life, survive him, to renew for

those of a later generation the mystic idealism of his faith.

Marvelously delineated is the answer made by the advocate of mental

force to the advocate of physical force, by the genius of the spirit to

the genius of action. The two heroes are profoundly united in their love

for art, in their passion for freedom, in their need for spiritual

purity. Each is "pious and free" in his own sense; they are brothers in

that ultimate domain which Rolland finely terms "the music of the

soul"--in goodness. But Jean Christophe's goodness is that of instinct;

it is elemental, therefore, and liable to be interrupted by passionate

relapses into hate. Olivier's goodness, on the other hand, is

intellectual and wise, and is tinged merely at times by ironical

skepticism. But it is this contrast between them, it is the fact that

their aspirations towards goodness are complementary, which draws them

together. Christophe's robust faith revives joy in life for the lonely

Olivier. Christophe, in turn, learns justice from Olivier. The sage is

uplifted by the strong, who is himself enlightened by the sage's

clarity. This mutual exchange of benefits symbolizes the relationship

between their nations. The friendship between the two individuals is

designed to be the prototype of a spiritual alliance between the brother

peoples. France and Germany are "the two pinions of the west." The

European spirit is to soar freely above the blood-drenched fields of the

past.

CHAPTER X

GRAZIA

Jean Christophe is creative action; Olivier is creative thought; a third

form is requisite to complete the cycle of existence, that of Grazia,

creative being, who secures fulfillment merely through her beauty and

refulgence. In her case likewise the name is symbolic. Jean Christophe

Krafft, the embodiment of virile energy, reëncounters, comparatively

late in life, Grazia, who now embodies the calm beauty of womanhood.

Thus his impetuous spirit is helped to realize the final harmony.

Hitherto, in his long march towards peace, Jean Christophe has

encountered only fellow-soldiers and enemies. In Grazia he comes for the

first time into contact with a human being who is free from nervous

tension, with one characterized by that serene concord which in his

music he has unconsciously been seeking for many years. Grazia is not a

flaming personality from whom he himself catches fire. The warmth of her

senses has long ere this been cooled, through a certain weariness of

life, a gentle inertia. But in her, too, sounds that "music of the

soul"; she too is inspired with that goodness which is needed to attract

Jean Christophe's liking. She does not incite him to further action.

Already, owing to the many stresses of his life, the hair on his temples

has been whitened. She leads him to repose, shows him "the smile of the

Italian skies," where his unrest, tending as ever to recur, vanishes at

length like a cloud in the evening air. The untamed amativeness which in

the past has convulsed his whole being, the need for love which has

flamed up with elemental force in _Le buisson ardent_, threatening to

destroy his very existence, is clarified here to become the

"suprasensual marriage" with Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies."

Through Olivier, Jean Christophe is made lucid; through Grazia, he is

made gentle. Olivier reconciled him with the world; Grazia, with

himself. Olivier had been Virgil, guiding him through purgatorial fires;

Grazia is Beatrice, pointing towards the heaven of the great harmony.

Never was there a nobler symbolization of the European triad; the

restrained fierceness of Germany; the clarity of France; the gentle

beauty of the Italian spirit. Jean Christophe's life melody is resolved

in this triad; he has now been granted the citizenship of the world, is

at home in all feelings, lands, and tongues, and can face death in the

ultimate unity of life.

Grazia, "la linda" (the limpid), is one of the most tranquil figures in

the book. We seem barely aware of her passage through the agitated

worlds, but her soft Mona Lisa smile streams like a beam of light

athwart the animated space. Had she been absent, there would have been

lacking to the work and to the man the magic of "the eternal feminine,"

the solution of the ultimate riddle. When she vanishes, her radiance

still lingers, filling this book of exuberance and struggle with a soft

lyrical melancholy, and transfusing it with a new beauty, that of

peace.

CHAPTER XI

JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND HIS FELLOW MEN

Notwithstanding the intimate relationships described in the previous

chapters, the path of Jean Christophe the artist is a lonely one. He

walks by himself, pursuing an isolated course that leads deeper and

deeper into the labyrinth of his own being. The blood of his fathers

drives him along, out of an infinite of confused origins, towards that

other infinite of creation. Those whom he encounters in his life's

journey are no more than shadows and intimations, milestones of

experience, steps of ascent and descent, episodes and adventures. But

what is knowledge other than a sum of experiences; what is life beyond a

sum of encounters? Other human beings are not Jean Christophe's destiny,

but they are material for his creative work. They are elements of the

infinite, to which he feels himself akin. Since he wishes to live life

as a whole, he must accept the bitterest part of life, mankind.

All he meets are a help to him. His friends help him much; but his

enemies help him still more, increasing his vitality and stimulating his

energy. Thus even those who wish to hinder his work, further it; and

what is the true artist other than the work upon which he is engaged?

In the great symphony of his passion, his fellow beings are high and low

voices inextricably interwoven into the swelling rhythm. Many an

individual theme he dismisses after a while with indifference, but many

another he pursues to the end. Into his childhood's days comes

Gottfried, the kindly old man, deriving more or less from the spirit of

Tolstoi. He appears quite incidentally, never for more than a night,

shouldering his pack, the undying Ahasuerus, but cheerful and kindly,

never mutinous, never complaining, bowed but splendidly unflinching, as

he wends his way Godward. Only in passing does he touch Christophe's

life, but this transient contact suffices to set the creative spirit in

movement. Consider, again, Hassler, the composer. His face flashes upon

Jean Christophe, a lightning glimpse, at the beginning of the young

man's work; but, in this instant, Jean Christophe recognizes the danger

that he may come to resemble Hassler through indolence, and he collects

his forces. Intimations, appeals, signs--such are other men to him.

Every one acts as a stimulus, some through love, some through hatred.

Old Schulz, with sympathetic understanding, helps him in a moment of

despair. The family pride of Frau von Kerich and the stupidity of the

Gothamites drive him anew to despair, which culminates this time in

flight, and thus proves his salvation. Poison and antidote have a

terrible resemblance. But to his creative spirit nothing is unmeaning,

for he stamps his own significance upon all, sweeping into the current

of his life the very things which were imposing themselves as hindrances

to the stream. Suffering is needful to him for the knowledge it brings.

He draws his best forces out of sadness, out of the shocks of life.

Designedly does Rolland make Jean Christophe conceive the most beautiful

of his imaginative works during the times of his profoundest spiritual

distresses, during the days after the death of Olivier, and during those

which followed the departure of Grazia. Opposition and affliction, the

foes of the ordinary man, are friends to the artist, just as much as is

every experience in his career. Precisely for his profoundest creative

solitude, he requires the influences which emanate from his fellows.

It is true that he takes long to learn this lesson, judging men falsely

at first because he sees them temperamently, not knowledgeably. To begin

with, Jean Christophe colors all human beings with his own overflowing

enthusiasm, fancying them to be as upright and good-natured as he is

himself, to speak no less frankly and spontaneously than he himself

speaks. Then, after the first disillusionments, his views are falsified

in the opposite direction by bitterness and mistrust. But gradually he

learns to hold just measure between overvaluation and its opposite.

Helped towards justice by Olivier, guided to gentleness by Grazia,

gathering experience from life, he comes to understand, not himself

alone, but his foes likewise. Almost at the end of the book we find a

little scene which may seem at first sight insignificant. Jean

Christophe comes across his sometime enemy, Lévy-Coeur, and

spontaneously offers his hand. This reconciliation implies something

more than transient sympathy. It expresses the meaning of the long

pilgrimage. It leads us to his last confession, which runs as follows,

with a slight alteration from his old description of true heroism: "To

know men, and yet to love them."

CHAPTER XII

JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND THE NATIONS

Young Headstrong, looking upon his fellow men with passion and

prejudice, fails to understand their natures; at first he contemplates

the families of mankind, the nations, with like passion and prejudice.

It is a part of our inevitable destiny that to begin with, and for many

of us throughout life, we know our own land from within only, foreign

lands only from without. Not until we have learned to see our own

country from without, and to understand foreign countries from within as

the natives of these countries understand them, can we acquire a

European outlook, can we realize that these various countries are

complementary parts of a single whole. Jean Christophe fights for life

in its entirety. For this reason he must pursue the path by which the

nationalist becomes a citizen of the world and acquires a "European

soul."

As must happen, Jean Christophe begins with prejudice. At first he

overvalues France. Ideas have been impressed upon his mind concerning

the artistic, cheerful, liberal-spirited French, and he regards his own

Germany as a land full of restriction. His first sight of Paris brings

disillusionment; he can see nothing but lies, clamor, and cheating. By

degrees, however, he discovers that the soul of a nation is not an

obvious and superficial thing, like a paving-stone in the street, but

that the observer of a foreign people must dig his way to that soul

through a thick stratum of illusion and falsehood. Ere long he weans

himself of the habit which leads people to talk of the French, the

Italians, the Jews, the Germans, as if members of these respective

nations or races were all of a piece, to be classified and docketed in

so simple a fashion. Each people has its own measure, its own form,

customs, failings, and lies; just as each has its own climate, history,

skies, and race; and these things cannot be easily summarized in a

phrase or two. As with all experience, our experiences of a country must

be built up from within. With words alone we can build nothing but a

house of cards. "Truth is the same to all nations, but each nation has

its own lies which it speaks of as its idealism. Every member of each

nation inhales the appropriate atmosphere of lying idealism from the

cradle to the grave, until it becomes the very breath of his life. None

but isolated geniuses can free themselves by heroic struggle, during

which they stand alone in the free universe of their own thought." We

must free ourselves from prejudice if we are to judge freely. There is

no other formula; there are no other psychological prescriptions. As

with all creative work, we must permeate the material with which we have

to deal, must yield ourselves without reserve. In the case of nations as

in the case of individual men, he who would know them will find that

there is but one science, that of the heart and not of books.

Nothing but such mutual understanding passing from soul to soul can weld

the nations together. What keeps them asunder is misunderstanding, the

way those of each nation hold their own beliefs to be the only right

ones, look upon their own natures as the only good ones. The mischief

lies in the arrogance of persons who believe that all others are wrong.

Nation is estranged from nation by the collective conceit of the members

of each nation, by the "great European plague of national pride" which

Nietzsche termed "the malady of the century." They stand like trees in a

forest, each stem priding itself on its isolation, though the roots

interlace underground and the summits touch overhead. The common people,

the proletariat, living in the depths, universally human in its

feelings, know naught of national contrasts. Jean Christophe, making the

acquaintance of Sidonie, the Breton maidservant, recognizes with

astonishment "how closely she resembles respectable folk in Germany."

Look again at the summits, at the elite. Olivier and Grazia have long

been living in that lofty sphere known to Goethe "in which we feel the

fate of foreign nations just as we feel our own." Fellowship is a truth;

mutual hatred is a falsehood; justice is the only real tie linking men

and linking nations. "All of us, all nations, are debtors one to

another. Let us, then, pay our debts and do our duty together." Jean

Christophe has suffered at the hands of every nation, and has received

gifts from every nation; disillusioned by all, he has also been

benefited by all. To the citizen of the world, at the end of his

pilgrimage, all nations are alike. In each his soul can make itself at

home. The musician in him dreams of a sublime work, of the great

European symphony, wherein the voices of the peoples, resolving

discords, will rise in the last and highest harmony, the harmony of

mankind.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PICTURE OF FRANCE

The picture of France in the great romance is notable because we are

here shown a country from a twofold outlook, from without and from

within, from the perspective of a German and with the eyes of a

Frenchman. It is likewise notable because Christophe's judgment is not

merely that of one who sees, but that of one who learns in seeing.

In every respect, the German's thought process is intentionally

presented in a typical form. In his little native town he had never

known a Frenchman. His feelings towards the French, of whom he had no

concrete experience whatever, took the form of a genial, but somewhat

contemptuous, sympathy. "The French are good fellows, but rather a slack

lot," would seem to sum up his German prejudice. They are a nation of

spineless artists, bad soldiers, corrupt politicians, women of easy

virtue; but they are clever, amusing, and liberal-minded. Amid the order

and sobriety of German life, he feels a certain yearning towards the

democratic freedom of France. His first encounter with a French actress,

Corinne, akin to Goethe's Philine, seems to confirm this facile

judgment; but soon, when he meets Antoinette, he comes to realize the

existence of another France. "You are so serious," he says with

astonishment to the demure, tongue-tied girl, who in this foreign land

is hard at work as a teacher in a pretentious, parvenu household. Her

characteristics are not in keeping with his traditional prejudices. A

Frenchwoman ought to be trivial, saucy, and wanton. For the first time

France presents to him "the riddle of its twofold nature." This initial

appeal from the distance exercises a mysterious lure. He begins to

realize the infinite multiplicity of these foreign worlds. Like Gluck,

Wagner, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach, he takes refuge from the narrowness of

German provincial life, and flees to Paris, the fabled home of universal

art.

His feeling on arrival is one of disorder, and this impression never

leaves him. The first and last impression, the strongest impression, to

which the German in him continually returns, is that powerful energies

are being squandered through lack of discipline. His first guide in the

fair is one of those spurious "real Parisians," one of the immigrants

who are more Parisian in their manners than those who are Parisian by

birth, a Jew of German extraction named Sylvain Kohn, who here passes by

the name of Hamilton, and in whose hands all the threads of the trade in

art are centered. He shows Jean Christophe the painters, the musicians,

the politicians, the journalists; and Jean Christophe turns away

disheartened. It seems to him that all their works exhale an unpleasant

"odor femininus," an oppressive atmosphere laden with scent. He sees

praises showered upon second-rate persons, hears a clamor of

appreciation, without discovering a single genuine work of art. There is

indeed art of a kind amid the medley, but it is over-refined and

decadent; the work of taste and not of power; lacking integration

through excess of irony; an Alexandrian-Greek literature and music; the

breath of a moribund nation; the hothouse blossom of a perishing

civilization. He sees an end, but no beginning. The German in him

already hears "the rumbling of the cannon" which will destroy this

enfeebled Greece.

He learns to know good men and bad; many of them are vain and stupid,

dull and soulless; not one does he meet, in his experience of social

life in Paris, who gives him confidence in France. The first messenger

comes from a distance; this is Sidonie, the peasant girl who tends him

during his illness. He learns, all at once, how calm and inviolable, how

fertile and strong, is the earth, the humus, out of which the Parisian

exotics suck their energies. He becomes acquainted with the people, the

robust and serious-minded French people, which tills the land, caring

naught for the noise of the great fair, the people which has made

revolutions with the might of its wrath and has waged the Napoleonic

wars with its enthusiasm. From this moment he feels there must be a real

France still unknown to him. In conversation with Sylvain Kohn, he asks,

"Where can I find France?" Kohn answers grandiloquently, "We are

France!" Jean Christophe smiles bitterly, knowing well that he will have

a long search. Those among whom he is now moving have hidden France.

At length comes the rencounter which is a turning-point in his fate; he

meets Olivier, Antoinette's brother, the true Frenchman. Just as Dante,

guided by Virgil, wanders through new and ever new circles of knowledge,

so Jean Christophe, led by Olivier, learns with astonishment that behind

this veil of noise, behind this clamorous façade, an elite is quietly

laboring. He sees the work of persons whose names are never printed in

the newspapers; sees the people, those who, remote from the hurly-burly,

tranquilly pursue their daily round. He learns to know the new idealism

of the France whose soul has been strengthened by defeat. At first this

discovery fills him with rage. "I cannot understand you all," he cries

to the gentle Olivier. "You live in the most beautiful of countries, are

marvelously gifted, are endowed with the highest human sensibilities,

and yet you fail to turn these advantages to account. You allow

yourselves to be dominated and to be trampled upon by a handful of

rascals. Rouse yourselves; get together; sweep your house clean!" The

first and most natural thought of the German is for organization, for

the drawing together of the good elements; the first thought of the

strong man is to fight. Yet the best in France insist on holding aloof,

some of them content with a mysterious clarity of vision, and others

giving themselves up to a facile resignation. With that tincture of

pessimism in their sagacity to which Renan has given such lucid

expression, they shrink from the struggle. Action is uncongenial to

them, and the hardest thing of all is to combine them for joint action.

"They are over cautious, and visualize defeat before the battle

begins." Lacking the optimism of the Germans, they remain isolated

individuals, some from prudence, others from pride. They seem to be

affected with a spirit of exclusiveness, the operation of which Jean

Christophe is able to study in his own dwelling. On each story there

live excellent persons who could combine well, but they will have

nothing to do with one another. For twenty years they pass on the

staircase without becoming acquainted, without the least concern about

one another's lives. Thus the best among the artists remain strangers.

Jean Christophe suddenly comes to realize with all its merits and

defects the essential characteristic of the French people, the desire

for liberty. Each one wishes to be free for himself, free from ties.

They waste enormous quantities of energy because each tries to wage the

time struggle unaided, because they will not permit themselves to be

organized, because they refuse to pull together in harness. Although

their activities are thus paralyzed by their reason, their minds

nevertheless remain free. Consequently they are enabled to permeate

every revolutionary movement with the religious fervor of the solitary,

and they can perpetually renew their own revolutionary faith. These

things are their salvation, preserving them from an order which would be

unduly rigid, from a mechanical system which would impose excessive

uniformity. Jean Christophe at length understands that the noisy fair

exists only to attract the unthinking, and to preserve a creative

solitude for the really active spirits. He sees that for the French

temperament this clamor is indispensable, is a means by which the

French fire one another to labor; he sees that the apparent

inconsequence of their thoughts is a rhythmical form of continuous

renewal. His first impression, like that of so many Germans, had been

that the French are effete. But after twenty years he realizes that in

truth they are always ready for new beginnings, that amid the apparent

contradictions of their spirit a hidden order reigns, a different order

from that known to the Germans, just as their freedom is a different

freedom. The citizen of the world, who no longer desires to impose upon

any other nation the characteristics of his own, now contemplates with

delight the eternal diversity of the races. As the light of the world is

composed of the seven colors of the spectrum, so from this racial

diversity arises that wonderful multiplicity in unity, the fellowship of

all mankind.

CHAPTER XIV

THE PICTURE OF GERMANY

In this romance, Germany likewise is viewed in a twofold aspect; but

whereas France is seen first from without, with the eyes of a German,

and then from within, with the eyes of a Frenchman, Germany is first

viewed from within and then regarded from abroad. Moreover, just as

happened in the case of France, two worlds are imperceptibly

superimposed one upon the other; a clamant civilization and a silent

one, a false culture and a true. We see respectively the old Germany,

which sought its heroism in the things of the spirit, discovered its

profundity in truth; and the new Germany, intoxicated with its own

strength, grasping at the powers of the reason which as a philosophical

discipline had transformed the world, and perverting them to the uses of

business efficiency. It is not suggested that German idealism had become

extinct; that there no longer existed the belief in a purer and more

beautiful world freed from the compromises of our earthly lot. The

trouble rather was that this idealism had been too widely diffused, had

been generalized until it had grown thin and superficial. The German

faith in God, turning practical, and now directed towards mundane ends,

had been transformed into grandiose ideas of the national future. In

art, it had been sentimentalized. In its new manifestations, it was

signally displayed in the cheap optimism of Emperor William. The defeat

which had spiritualized French idealism, had, from the German side, as a

victory, materialized German idealism. "What has victorious Germany

given to the world?" asks Jean Christophe. He answers his own question

by saying: "The flashing of bayonets; vigor without magnanimity; brutal

realism; force conjoined with greed for profit; Mars as commercial

traveler." He is grieved to recognize that Germany has been harmed by

victory. He suffers; for "one expects more of one's own country than of

another, and is hurt more by the faults of one's own land." Ever the

revolutionist, Christophe detests noisy self-assertion, militarist

arrogance, the churlishness of caste feeling. In his conflict with

militarized Germany, in his quarrel with the sergeant at the dance in

the Alsatian village inn, we have an elemental eruption of the hatred

for discipline felt by the artist, the lover of freedom; we have his

protest against the brutalization of thought. He is compelled to shake

the dust of Germany off his feet.

When he reaches France, however, he begins to realize Germany's

greatness. "In a foreign environment his judgment was freed"; this

statement applies to him as to all of us. Amid the disorder of France he

learned to value the active orderliness of Germany; the skeptical

resignation of the French made him esteem the vigorous optimism of the

Germans; he was impressed by the contrast between a witty nation and a

thoughtful one. Yet he was under no illusions about the optimism of the

new Germany, perceiving that it is often spurious. He became aware that

the idealism often took the form of idealizing a dictatorial will. Even

in the great masters, he saw, to quote Goethe's wonderful phrase, "how

readily in the Germans the ideal waxes sentimental." His passionate

sincerity, grown pitiless in the atmosphere of French clarity, revolts

against this hazy idealism, which compromises between truth and desire,

which justifies abuses of power with the plea of civilization, and which

considers that might is sufficient warrant for victory. In France he

becomes aware of the faults of France, in Germany he realizes the faults

of Germany, loving both countries because they are so different. Each

suffers from the defective distribution of its merits. In France,

liberty is too widely diffused and engenders chaos, while a few

individuals comprising the elite keep their idealism intact. In Germany,

idealism, permeating the masses, has been sugared into sentimentalism

and watered into a mercantile optimism; and here a still smaller elite

preserves complete freedom aloof from the crowd. Each suffers from an

excessive development of national peculiarities. Nationalism, as

Nietzsche says, "has in France corrupted character, and in Germany has

corrupted spirit and taste." Could but the two peoples draw together and

impress their best qualities upon one another, they would rejoice to

find, as Christophe himself had found, that "the richer he was in German

dreams, the more precious to him became the clarity of the Latin mind."

Olivier and Christophe, forming a pact of friendship, hope for the day

when their personal sentiments will be perpetuated in an alliance

between their respective peoples. In a sad hour of international

dissension, the Frenchman calls to the German in words still

unfulfilled: "We hold out our hands to you. Despite lies and hatred, we

cannot be kept apart. We have mutual need of one another, for the

greatness of our spirit and of our race. We are the two pinions of the

west. Should one be broken, the other is useless for flight. Even if war

should come, this will not unclasp our hands, nor will it prevent us

from soaring upwards together."

CHAPTER XV

THE PICTURE OF ITALY

Jean Christophe is growing old and weary when he comes to know the third

country that will form part of the future European synthesis. He had

never felt drawn towards Italy. As had happened many years earlier in

the case of France, so likewise in the case of Italy, his sympathies had

been chilled by his acceptance of the disastrous and prejudiced formulas

by which the nations impose barriers between themselves while each

extols its own peculiarities as peculiarly right and phenomenally

strong. Yet hardly has he been an hour in Italy when these prejudices

are shaken off and are replaced by enthusiastic admiration. He is fired

by the unfamiliar light of the Italian landscape. He becomes aware of a

new rhythm of life. He does not see fierce energy, as in Germany, or

nervous mobility as in France; but the sweetness of these "centuries of

ancient culture and civilization" makes a strong appeal to the northern

barbarian. Hitherto his gaze has always been turned towards the future,

but now he becomes aware of the charms of the past. Whereas the Germans

are still in search of the best form of self-expression; and whereas the

French refresh and renew themselves through incessant change; here he

finds a nation with a clear sequence of tradition, a nation which need

merely be true to its own past and to its own landscape, in order to

fulfill the most perfect blossoming of its nature, in order to realize

beauty.

It is true that Christophe misses the element which to him is the breath

of life; he misses struggle. A gentle drowsiness seems universally

prevalent, a pleasant fatigue which is debilitating and dangerous. "Rome

is too full of tombs, and the city exhales death." The fire kindled by

Mazzini and Garibaldi, the flame in which United Italy was forged, still

glows in isolated Italian souls. Here, too, there is idealism. But it

differs from the German and from the French idealism; it is not yet

directed towards the citizenship of the world, but remains purely

national; "Italian idealism is concerned solely with itself, with

Italian desires, with the Italian race, with Italian renown." In the

calm southern atmosphere, this flame does not burn so fiercely as to

radiate a light through Europe; but it burns brightly and beautifully in

these young souls, which are apt for all passions, though the moment has

not yet come for the intensest ardors.

But as soon as Jean Christophe begins to love Italy, he grows afraid of

this love. He realizes that Italy is also essential to him, in order

that in his music and in his life the impetuosity of the senses shall be

clarified to a perfect harmony. He understands how necessary the

southern world is to the northern, and is now aware that only in the

trio of Germany, France, and Italy does the full meaning of each voice

become clear. In Italy, there is less illusion and more reality; but the

land is too beautiful, tempting to enjoyment and killing the impulse

towards action. Just as Germany finds a danger in her own idealism,

because that idealism is too widely disseminated and becomes spurious in

the average man; just as to France her liberty proves disastrous because

it encourages in the individual an idea of absolute independence which

estranges him from the community; so for Italy is her beauty a danger,

since it makes her indolent, pliable, and self-satisfied. To every

nation, as to every individual, the most personal of characteristics,

the very things that commend the nation or the individual to others, are

dangerous. It would seem, therefore, that nations and individuals must

seek salvation by combining as far as possible with their own opposites.

Thus will they draw nearer to the highest ideal, that of European unity,

that of universal humanity. In Italy, as aforetime in France and in

Germany, Jean Christophe redreams the dream which Rolland at

two-and-twenty had first dreamed on the Janiculum. He foresees the

European symphony, which hitherto poets alone have created in works

transcending nationality, but which the nations as yet have failed to

realize for themselves.

CHAPTER XVI

THE JEWS

In the three diversified nations, by each of which Christophe is now

attracted, now repelled, he finds a unifying element, adapted to each

nation, but not completely merged therein--the Jews. "Do you notice," he

says on one occasion to Olivier, "that we are always running up against

Jews? It might be thought that we draw them as by a spell, for we

continually find them in our path, sometimes as enemies and sometimes as

allies." It is true that he encounters Jews wherever he goes. In his

native town, the first people to give him a helping hand (for their own

ends, of course) were the wealthy Jews who ran "Dionysos"; in Paris,

Sylvain Kohn had been his mentor, Lévy-Coeur his bitterest foe, Weil and

Mooch his most helpful friends. In like manner, Olivier and Antoinette

frequently hold converse with Jews, either on terms of friendship or on

terms of enmity. At every cross-roads to which the artist comes, they

stand like signposts pointing the way, now towards good and now towards

evil.

Christophe's first feeling is one of hostility. Although he is too

open-minded to entertain a sentiment of hatred for Jews, he has imbibed

from his pious mother a certain aversion; and sharp-sighted though they

are, he questions their capacity for the real understanding of his work.

But again and again it becomes apparent to him that they are the only

persons really concerned about his work at all, the only ones who value

innovation for its own sake.

Olivier, the clearer-minded of the two, is able to explain matters to

Christophe, showing that the Jews, cut off from tradition, are

unconsciously the pioneers of every innovation which attacks tradition;

these people without a country are the best assistants in the campaign

against nationalism. "In France, the Jews are almost the only persons

with whom a free man can discuss something novel, something that is

really alive. The others take their stand upon the past, are firmly

rooted in dead things. Of enormous importance is it that this

traditional past does not exist for the Jews; or that in so far as it

exists, it is a different past from ours. The result is that we can talk

to Jews about to-day, whereas with those of our own race we can speak

only of yesterday ... I do not wish to imply that I invariably find

their doings agreeable. Often enough, I consider these doings actually

repulsive. But at least they live, and know how to value what is

alive.... In modern Europe, the Jews are the principal agents alike of

good and of evil. Unwittingly they favor the germination of the seed of

thought. Is it not among Jews that you have found your worst enemies and

your best friends?"

Christophe agrees, saying: "It is perfectly true that they have

encouraged me and helped me; that they have uttered words which

invigorated me for the struggle, showing me that I was understood.

Nevertheless, these friends are my friends no longer; their friendship

was but a fire of straw. No matter! A passing sheen is welcome in the

night. You are right, we must not be ungrateful."

He finds a place for them, these folk without a country, in his picture

of the fatherlands. He does not fail to see the faults of the Jews. He

realizes that for European civilization they do not form a productive

element in the highest sense of the term; he perceives that in essence

their work tends to promote analysis and decomposition. But this work of

decomposition seems to him important, for the Jews undermine tradition,

the hereditary foe of all that is new. Their freedom from the ties of

country is the gadfly which plagues the "mangy beast of nationalism"

until it loses its intellectual bearings. The decomposition they effect

helps us to rid ourselves of the dead past, of the "eternal yesterday";

detachment from national ties favors the growth of a new spirit which it

is itself incompetent to produce. These Jews without a country are the

best assistants of the "good Europeans" of the future. In many respects

Christophe is repelled by them. As a man cherishing faith in life, he

dislikes their skepticism; to his cheerful disposition, their irony is

uncongenial; himself striving towards invisible goals, he detests their

materialism, their canon that success must be tangible. Even the clever

Judith Mannheim, with her "passion for intelligence," understands only

his work, and not the faith upon which that work is based.

Nevertheless, the strong will of the Jews appeals to his own strength,

their vitality to his vigorous life. He sees in them "the ferment of

action, the yeast of life." A homeless man, he finds himself most

intimately and most quickly understood by these "sanspatries."

Furthermore, as a free citizen of the world, he is competent to

understand on his side the tragedy of their lives, cut adrift from

everything, even from themselves. He recognizes that they are useful as

means to an end, although not themselves an end. He sees that, like all

nations and races, the Jews must be harnessed to their contrast. "These

neurotic beings ... must be subjected to a law that will give them

stability.... Jews are like women, splendid when ridden on the curb,

though it would be intolerable to be ruled either by Jews or by women."

Just as little as the French spirit or the German spirit, is the Jewish

spirit adapted for universal application. But Christophe does not wish

the Jews to be different from what they are. Every race is necessary,

for its peculiar characteristics are requisite for the enrichment of

multiplicity, and for the consequent enlargement of life. Jean

Christophe, now in his later years making peace with the world, finds

that everything has its appointed place in the whole scheme. Each strong

tone contributes to the great harmony. What may arouse hostility in

isolation, serves to bind the whole together. Nay more, it is necessary

to pull down the old buildings and to clear the ground before we can

begin to build anew; the analytic spirit is the precondition of the

synthetic. In all countries Christophe acclaims the folk without a

country as helpers towards the foundation of the universal fatherland.

He accepts them all into his dream of the New Europe, whose still

distant rhythm stirs his responsive yearnings.

CHAPTER XVII

THE GENERATIONS

Thus the entire human herd is penned within ring after ring of hurdles,

which the life-force must break down if it would win to freedom. We have

the hurdle of the fatherland, which shuts us away from other nations;

the hurdle of language, which imposes its constraint upon our thought;

the hurdle of religion, which makes us unable to understand alien

creeds; the hurdle of our own natures, barring the way to reality by

prejudice and false learning. Terrible are the resulting isolations. The

peoples fail to understand one another; the races, the creeds,

individual human beings, fail to understand one another; they are

segregated; each group or each individual has experience of no more than

a part of life, a part of truth, a part of reality, each mistaking his

part for the whole.

Even the free man, "freed from the illusion of fatherland, creed, and

race," even he, who seems to have escaped from all the pens, is still

enclosed within an ultimate ring of hurdles. He is confined within the

limits of his own generation, for generations are the steps of the

stairway by which humanity ascends. Every generation builds on the

achievements of those that have gone before; here there is no

possibility of retracing our footsteps; each generation has its own

laws, its own form, its own ethic, its own inner meaning. And the

tragedy of such compulsory fellowship arises out of this, that a

generation does not in friendly fashion accept the achievements of its

predecessors, does not gladly undertake the development of their

acquisitions. Like individual human beings, like nations, the

generations are animated with hostile prejudices against their

neighbors. Here, likewise, struggle and mistrust are the abiding law.

The second generation rejects what the first has done; the deeds of the

first generation do not secure approval until the third or the fourth

generation. All evolution takes place according to what Goethe termed "a

spiral recurrence." As we rise, we revolve on narrowing circles round

the same axis. Thus the struggle between generation and generation is

unceasing.

Each generation is perforce unjust towards its predecessors. "As the

generations succeed one another, they become more strongly aware of the

things which divide them than they are of the things which unite. They

feel impelled to affirm the indispensability, the importance, of their

own existence, even at the cost of injustice or falsehood to

themselves." Like individual human beings, they have "an age when one

must be unjust if one is to be able to live." They have to live out

their own lives vigorously, asserting their own peculiarities in respect

of ideas, forms, and civilization. It is just as little possible to them

to be considerate towards later generations, as it has been for earlier

generations to be considerate towards them. There prevails in this

self-assertion the eternal law of the forest, where the young trees tend

to push the earth away from the roots of the older trees, and to sap

their strength, so that the living march over the corpses of the dead.

The generations are at war, and each individual is unwittingly a

champion on behalf of his own era, even though he may feel himself out

of sympathy with that era.

Jean Christophe, the young solitary in revolt against his time, was

without knowing it the representative of a fellowship. In and through

him, his generation declared war against the dying generation, was

unjust in his injustice, young in his youth, passionate in his passion.

He grew old with his generation, seeing new waves rising to overwhelm

him and his work. Now, having gained wisdom, he refused to be wroth with

those who were wroth with him. He saw that his enemies were displaying

the injustice and the impetuosity which he had himself displayed of

yore. Where he had fancied a mechanical destiny to prevail, life had now

taught him to see a living flux. Those who in his youth had been fellow

revolutionists, now grown conservative, were fighting against the new

youth as they themselves in youth had fought against the old. Only the

fighters were new; the struggle was unchanged. For his part, Jean

Christophe had a friendly smile for the new, since he loved life more

than he loved himself. Vainly does his friend Emmanuel urge him to

defend himself, to pronounce a moral judgment upon a generation which

declared valueless all the things which they of an earlier day had

acclaimed as true with the sacrifice of their whole existence.

Christophe answers: "What is true? We must not measure the ethic of a

generation with the yardstick of an earlier time." Emmanuel retorts:

"Why, then, did we seek a measure for life, if we were not to make it a

law for others?" Christophe refers him to the perpetual flux, saying:

"They have learned from us, and they are ungrateful; such is the

inevitable succession of events. Enriched by our efforts, they advance

further than we were able to advance, realizing the conquests which we

struggled to achieve. If any of the freshness of youth yet lingers in

us, let us learn from them, and seek to rejuvenate ourselves. If this is

beyond our powers, if we are too old to do so, let us at least rejoice

that they are young."

Generations must grow and die as men grow and die. Everything on earth

is subject to nature's laws, and the man strong in faith, the pious

freethinker, bows himself to the law. But he does not fail to recognize

(and herein we see one of the profoundest cultural acquirements of the

book) that this very flux, this transvaluation of values, has its own

secular rhythm. In former times, an epoch, a style, a faith, a

philosophy, endured for a century; now such phases do not outlast a

generation, endure barely for a decade. The struggle has become fiercer

and more impatient. Mankind marches to a quicker measure, digests ideas

more rapidly than of old. "The development of European thought is

proceeding at a livelier pace, much as if its acceleration were

concomitant with the advance in our powers of mechanical locomotion....

The stores of prejudices and hopes which in former times would have

nourished mankind for twenty years, are exhausted now in a lustrum. In

intellectual matters the generations gallop one after another, and

sometimes outpace one another." The rhythm of these spiritual

transformations is the epopee of _Jean Christophe_. When the hero

returns to Germany from Paris, he can hardly recognize his native land.

When from Italy he revisits Paris, the city seems strange to him. Here

and there he still finds the old "foire sur la place," but its affairs

are transacted in a new currency; it is animated with a new faith; new

ideas are exchanged in the market place; only the clamor rises as of

old. Between Olivier and his son Georges lies an abyss like that which

separates two worlds, and Olivier is delighted that his son should

regard him with contempt. The abyss is an abyss of twenty years.

Life must eternally express itself in new forms; it refuses to allow

itself to be dammed up by outworn thoughts, to be hemmed in by the

philosophies and religions of the past; in its headstrong progress it

sweeps accepted notions out of its way. Each generation can understand

itself alone; it transmits a legacy to unknown heirs who will interpret

and fulfill as seems best to them. As the heritage from his tragical and

solitary generation, Rolland offers his great picture of a free soul. He

offers it "to the free souls of all nations; to those who suffer,

struggle, and will conquer." He offers it with the words:

"I have written the tragedy of a vanishing generation. I have made no

attempt to conceal either its vices or its virtues, to hide its load of

sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, its struggles beneath

the overwhelming burden of a superhuman task--the task of remaking an

entire world, an ethic, an æsthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were

we in our generation.

"Men of to-day, young men, your turn has come. March forward over our

bodies. Be greater and happier than we have been.

"For my part, I say farewell to my former soul. I cast it behind me like

an empty shell. Life is a series of deaths and resurrections. Let us

die, Christophe, that we may be reborn."

CHAPTER XVIII

DEPARTURE

Jean Christophe has reached the further shore. He has stridden across

the river of life, encircled by roaring waves of music. Safely carried

across seems the heritage which he has borne on his shoulders through

storm and flood--the meaning of the world, faith in life.

Once more he looks back towards his fellows in the land he has left. All

has grown strange to him. He can no longer understand those who are

laboring and suffering amid the ardors of illusion. He sees a new

generation, young in a different way from his own, more energetic, more

brutal, more impatient, inspired with a different heroism. The children

of the new days have fortified their bodies with physical training, have

steeled their courage in aerial flights. "They are proud of their

muscles and their broad chests." They are proud of their country, their

religion, their civilization, of all that they believe to be their own

peculiar appanage; and from each of these prides they forge themselves a

weapon. "They would rather act than understand." They wish to show their

strength and test their powers. The dying man realizes with alarm that

this new generation, which has never known war, wants war.

He looks shudderingly around: "The fire which had been smouldering in

the European forest was now breaking forth into flame. Extinguished in

one place, it promptly began to rage in another. Amid whirlwinds of

smoke and a rain of sparks, it leaped from point to point, while the

parched undergrowth kindled. Outpost skirmishes in the east had already

begun, as preludes to the great war of the nations. The whole of Europe,

that Europe which was still skeptical and apathetic like a dead forest,

was fuel for the conflagration. The fighting spirit was universal. From

moment to moment, war seemed imminent. Stifled, it was continually

reborn. The most trifling pretext served to feed its strength. The world

felt itself to be at the mercy of chance, which would initiate the

terrible struggle. It was waiting. A feeling of inexorable necessity

weighed upon all, even upon the most pacific. The ideologues, sheltering

in the shade of Proudhon the titan, hailed war as man's most splendid

claim to nobility.

"It was for this, then, that there had been effected a physical and

moral resurrection of the races of the west! It was towards these

butcheries that the streams of action and passionate faith had been

hastening! None but a Napoleonic genius could have directed these blind

impulses to a foreseen and deliberately chosen end. But nowhere in

Europe was there any one endowed with the genius for action. It seemed

as if the world had singled out the most commonplace among its sons to

be governors. The forces of the human spirit were coursing in other

channels."

Christophe recalls those earlier days when he and Olivier had been

concerned about the prospect of war. At that time there were but distant

rumblings of the storm. Now the storm clouds covered all the skies of

Europe. Fruitless had been the call to unity; vain had been the pointing

out of the path through the darkness. Mournfully the seer contemplates

in the distance the horsemen of the Apocalypse, the heralds of

fratricidal strife.

But beside the dying man is the Child, smiling and full of knowledge;

the Child who is Eternal Life.

PART FIVE

INTERMEZZO SCHERZOSO

(Colas Breugnon)

"Brugnon, mauvais garçon, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"--"Que veux

tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'empêche pas de

souffrir; mais souffrir n'empêchera jamais un bon Français de rire.

Et qu'il rie ou larmoie, il faut d'abord qu'il voie."

COLAS BREUGNON.

CHAPTER I

TAKEN UNAWARES

At length, in this arduous career, came a period of repose. The great

ten-volume novel had been finished; the work of European scope had been

completed. For the first time Romain Rolland could exist outside his

work, free for new words, new configurations, new labors. His disciple

Jean Christophe, "the livest man of our acquaintance," as Ellen Key

phrased it, had gone out into the world; Christophe was collecting a

circle of friends around him, a quiet but continually enlarging

community. For Rolland, nevertheless, Jean Christophe's message was

already a thing of the past. The author was in search of a new

messenger, for a new message.

Romain Rolland returned to Switzerland, a land he loved, lying between

the three countries to which his affection had been chiefly given. The

Swiss environment had been favorable to so much of his work. _Jean

Christophe_ had been begun in Switzerland. A calm and beautiful summer

enabled Rolland to recruit his energies. There was a certain relaxation

of tension. Almost idly, he turned over various plans. He had already

begun to collect materials for a new novel, a dramatic romance

belonging to the same intellectual and cultural category as Jean

Christophe.

Now of a sudden, as had happened twenty-five years earlier when the

vision of _Jean Christophe_ had come to him on the Janiculum, in the

course of sleepless nights he was visited by a strange and yet familiar

figure, that of a countryman from ancestral days whose expansive

personality thrust all other plans aside. Shortly before, Rolland had

revisited Clamecy. The old town had awakened memories of his childhood.

Almost unawares, home influences were at work, and his native province

had begun to insist that its son, who had described so many distant

scenes, should depict the land of his birth. The Frenchman who had so

vigorously and passionately transformed himself into a European, the man

who had borne his testimony as European before the world, was seized

with a desire to be, for a creative hour, wholly French, wholly

Burgundian, wholly Nivernais. The musician accustomed to unite all

voices in his symphonies, to combine in them the deepest expressions of

feeling, was now longing to discover a new rhythm, and after prolonged

tension to relax into a merry mood. For ten years he had been dominated

by a sense of strenuous responsibility; the equipment of Jean Christophe

had been, as it were, a burden which his soul had had to bear. Now it

would be a pleasure to pen a scherzo, free and light, a work unconcerned

with the stresses of politics, ethics, and contemporary history. It

should be divinely irresponsible, an escape from the exactions of the

time spirit.

During the day following the first night on which the idea came to him,

he had exultantly dismissed other plans. The rippling current of his

thoughts was effortless in its flow. Thus, to his own astonishment,

during the summer months of 1913, Rolland was able to complete his

light-hearted novel _Colas Breugnon_, the French intermezzo in the

European symphony.

CHAPTER II

THE BURGUNDIAN BROTHER

It seemed at first to Rolland as if a stranger, though one from his

native province and of his own blood, had come cranking into his life.

He felt as though, out of the clear French sky, the book had burst like

a meteor upon his ken. True, the melody is new; different are the tempo,

the key, the epoch. But those who have acquired a clear understanding of

the author's inner life cannot fail to realize that this amusing book

does not constitute an essential modification of his work. It is but a

variation, in an archaic setting, upon Romain Rolland's leit-motif of

faith in life. Prince Aërt and King Louis were forefathers and brothers

of Olivier. In like manner Colas Breugnon, the jovial Burgundian, the

lusty wood-carver, the practical joker always fond of his glass, the

droll fellow, is, despite his old-world costume, a brother of Jean

Christophe looking at us adown the centuries.

As ever, we find the same theme underlying the novel. The author shows

us how a creative human being (those who are not creative, hardly count

for Rolland) comes to terms with life, and above all with the tragedy of

his own life. _Colas Breugnon_, like _Jean Christophe_, is the romance

of an artist's life. But the Burgundian is an artist of a vanished type,

such as could not without anachronism have been introduced into _Jean

Christophe_. Colas Breugnon is an artist only through fidelity,

diligence, and fervor. In so far as he is an artist, it is in the

faithful performance of his daily task. What raises him to the higher

levels of art is not inspiration, but his broad humanity, his

earnestness, and his vigorous simplicity. For Rolland, he was typical of

the nameless artists who carved the stone figures that adorn French

cathedrals, the artist-craftsmen to whom we owe the beautiful gateways,

the splendid castles, the glorious wrought ironwork of the middle ages.

These artificers did not fashion their own vanity into stone, did not

carve their own names upon their work; but they put something into that

work which has grown rare to-day, the joy of creation. In _Jean

Christophe_, on one occasion, Romain Rolland had indited an ode to the

civic life of the old masters who were wholly immersed in the quiet

artistry of their daily occupations. He had drawn attention to the life

of Sebastian Bach and his congeners. In like manner, he now wished to

display anew what he had depicted in so many portraits of the artists,

in the studies of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Tolstoi, and Handel. Like

these sublime figures, Colas Breugnon took delight in his creative work.

The magnificent inspiration that animated them was lacking to the

Burgundian, but Breugnon had a genius for straightforwardness and for

sensual harmony. Without aspiring to bring salvation to the world, not

attempting to wrestle with the problems of passion and the spiritual

life, he was content to strive for that supreme simplicity of

craftsmanship which has a perfection of its own and thus brings the

craftsman into touch with the eternal. The primitive artist-artisan is

contrasted with the comparatively artificialized artist of modern days;

Hephaistos, the divine smith, is contrasted with the Pythian Apollo and

with Dionysos. The simpler artist's sphere is perforce narrower, but it

is enough that an artist should be competent to fill the sphere for

which he is pre-ordained.

Nevertheless, Colas Breugnon would not have been the typical artist of

Rolland's creation, had not struggle been a conspicuous feature of his

life, and had we not been shown through him that the real man is always

stronger than his destiny. Even the cheerful Colas experiences a full

measure of tragedy. His house is burned down, and the work of thirty

years perishes in the flames; his wife dies; war devastates the country;

envy and malice prevent the success of his last artistic creations; in

the end, illness elbows him out of active life. The only defenses left

him against his troubles, against age, poverty, and gout, are "the souls

he has made," his children, his apprentice, and one friend. Yet this

man, sprung from the Burgundian peasantry, has an armor to protect him

from the bludgeonings of fate, armor no less effectual than was the

invincible German optimism of Jean Christophe or the inviolable faith of

Olivier. Breugnon has his imperturbable cheerfulness. "Sorrows never

prevent my laughing; and when I laugh, I can always weep at the same

time." Epicure, gormandizer, deep drinker, ever ready to leave work for

play, he is none the less a stoic when misfortune comes, an

uncomplaining hero in adversity. When his house burns, he exclaims: "The

less I have, the more I am." The Burgundian craftsman is a man of lesser

stature than his brother of the Rhineland, but the Burgundian's feet are

no less firmly planted on the beloved earth. Whereas Christophe's daimon

breaks forth in storms of rage and frenzy, Colas reacts against the

visitations of destiny with the serene mockery of a healthy Gallic

temperament. His whimsical humor helps him to face disaster and death.

Assuredly this mental quality is one of the most valuable forms of

spiritual freedom.

Freedom, however, is the least important among the characteristics of

Rolland's heroes. His primary aim is always to show us a typical example

of a man armed against his doom and against his god, a man who will not

allow himself to be defeated by the forces of life. In the work we are

now considering, it amuses him to present the struggle as a comedy,

instead of portraying it in a more serious dramatic vein. But the comedy

is always transfigured by a deeper meaning. Despite the lighter touches,

as when the forlorn old Colas is unwilling to take refuge in his

daughter's house, or as when he boastfully feigns indifference after the

destruction of his home (lest his soul should be vexed by having to

accept the sympathy of his fellow men), still amid this tragi-comedy he

is animated by the unalloyed desire to stand by his own strength.

Before everything, Colas Breugnon is a free man. That he is a Frenchman,

that he is a burgher, are secondary considerations. He loves his king,

but only so long as the king leaves him his liberty; he loves his wife,

but follows his own bent; he is on excellent terms with the priest of a

neighboring parish, but never goes to church; he idolizes his children,

but his vigorous individuality makes him unwilling to live with them. He

is friendly with all, but subject to none; he is freer than the king; he

has that sense of humor characteristic of the free spirit to whom the

whole world belongs. Among all nations and in all ages, that being alone

is truly alive who is stronger than fate, who breaks through the seine

of men and things as he swims freely down the great stream of life. We

have seen how Christophe, the Rhinelander, exclaimed: "What is life? A

tragedy! Hurrah!" From his Burgundian brother comes the response:

"Struggle is hard, but struggle is a delight." Across the barriers of

epoch and language, the two look on one another with sympathetic

understanding. We realize that free men form a spiritual kinship

independent of the limitations imposed by race and time.

CHAPTER III

GAULOISERIES

Romain Rolland had looked upon _Colas Breugnon_ as an intermezzo, as an

easy occupation, which should, for a change, enable him to enjoy the

delights of irresponsible creation. But there is no irresponsibility in

art. A thing arduously conceived is often heavy in execution, whereas

that which is lightly undertaken may prove exceptionally beautiful.

From the artistic point of view, _Colas Breugnon_ may perhaps be

regarded as Rolland's most successful work. This is because it is woven

in one piece, because it flows with a continuous rhythm, because its

progress is never arrested by the discussion of thorny problems. _Jean

Christophe_ was a book of responsibility and balance. It was to discuss

all the phenomena of the day; to show how they looked from every side,

in action and reaction. Each country in turn made its demand for full

consideration. The encyclopedic picture of the world, the deliberate

comprehensiveness of the design, necessitated the forcible introduction

of many elements which transcended the powers of harmonious composition.

But _Colas Breugnon_ is written throughout in the same key. The first

sentence gives the note like a tuning fork, and thence the entire book

takes its pitch. Throughout, the same lively melody is sustained. The

writer employs a peculiarly happy form. His style is poetic without

being actually versified; it has a melodious measure without being

strictly metrical. The book, printed as prose, is written in a sort of

free verse, with an occasional rhymed series of lines. It is possible

that Rolland adopted the fundamental tone from Paul Fort; but that which

in the _Ballades françaises_ with their recurrent burdens leads to the

formation of canzones, is here punctuated throughout an entire book,

while the phrasing is most ingeniously infused with archaic French

locutions after the manner of Rabelas.

Here, Rolland wishes to be a Frenchman. He goes to the very heart of the

French spirit, has recourse to "gauloiseries," and makes the most

successful use of the new medium, which is unique, and which cannot be

compared with any familiar literary form. For the first time we

encounter an entire novel which, while written in old-fashioned French

like that of Balzac's _Contes drolatiques_, succeeds in making its

intricate diction musical throughout. "The Old Woman's Death" and "The

Burned House" are as vividly picturesque as ballads. Their

characteristic and spiritualized rhythmical quality contrasts with the

serenity of the other pictures, although they are not essentially

different from these. The moods pass lightly, like clouds drifting

across the sky; and even beneath the darkest of these clouds, the

horizon of the age smiles with a fruitful clearness. Never was Rolland

able to give such exquisite expression to his poetic bent as in this

book wherein he is wholly the Frenchman. What he presents to us as

whimsical sport and caprice, displays more plainly than anything else

the living wellspring of his power: his French soul immersed in its

favorite element of music.

CHAPTER IV

A FRUSTRATE MESSAGE

_Jean Christophe_ was the deliberate divergence from a generation.

_Colas Breugnon_ is another divergence, unconsciously effected; a

divergence from the traditional France, heedlessly cheerful. This

"bourguinon salé" wished to show his fellow countrymen of a later day

how life can be salted with mockery and yet be full of enjoyment.

Rolland here displayed all the riches of his beloved homeland,

displaying above all the most beautiful of these goods, the joy of life.

A heedless world, our world of to-day, was to be awakened by the poet

singing of an earlier world which had been likewise impoverished, had

likewise wasted its energies in futile hostility. A call to joy from a

Frenchman, echoing down the ages, was to answer the voice of the German,

Jean Christophe. Their two voices were to mingle harmoniously as the

voices mingle in the Ode to Joy of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. During

the tranquil summer the pages were stacked like golden sheaves. The book

was in the press, to appear during the next summer, that of 1914.

But the summer of 1914 reaped a bloody harvest. The roar of the cannon,

drowning Jean Christophe's warning cry, deafened the ears of those who

might otherwise have hearkened also to the call to joy. For five years,

the five most terrible years in the world's history, the luminous figure

stood unheeded in the darkness. There was no conjuncture between _Colas

Breugnon_ and "la douce France"; for this book, with its description of

the cheerful France of old, was not to appear until that Old France had

vanished for ever.

PART SIX

THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE

One who is aware of values which he regards as a hundredfold more

precious than the wellbeing of the "fatherland," of society, of the

kinships of blood and race, values which stand above fatherlands

and races, international values, such a man would prove himself

hypocrite should he try to play the patriot. It is a degradation of

mankind to encourage national hatred, to admire it, or to extol it.

NIETZSCHE, _Vorreden Material im Nachlass_.

La vocation ne peut être connue et prouvée que par le sacrifice que

fait le savant et l'artiste de son repos et son bien-être pour

suivre sa vocation.

LETTER DE TOLSTOI A ROMAIN ROLLAND.

4, Octobre, 1887.

CHAPTER I

THE WARDEN OF THE INHERITANCE

The events of August 2, 1914, broke Europe into fragments. Therewith

collapsed the faith which the brothers in the spirit, Jean Christophe

and Olivier, had been building with their lives. A great heritage was

cast aside. The idea of human brotherhood, once sacred, was buried

contemptuously by the grave-diggers of all the lands at war, buried

among the million corpses of the slain.

Romain Rolland was faced by an unparalleled responsibility. He had

presented the problems in imaginative form. Now they had come up for

solution as terrible realities. Faith in Europe, the faith which he had

committed to the care of Jean Christophe, had no protector, no advocate,

at a time when it was more than ever necessary to raise its standard

against the storm. Well did the poet know that a truth remains naught

but a half-truth while it exists merely in verbal formulation. It is in

action that a thought becomes genuinely alive. A faith proves itself

real in the form of a public confession.

In _Jean Christophe_, Romain Rolland had delivered his message to this

fated hour. To make the confession a live thing, he had to give

something more, himself. The time had come for him to do what Jean

Christophe had done for Olivier's son. He must guard the sacred flame;

he must fulfil what his hero had prophetically foreshadowed. The way in

which Rolland fulfilled this obligation has become for us all an

imperishable example of spiritual heroism, which moves us even more

strongly than we were moved by his written words. We saw his life and

personality taking the form of an actually living conviction. We saw

how, with the whole power of his name, and with all the energy of his

artistic temperament, he took his stand against multitudinous

adversaries in his own land and in other countries, his gaze fixed upon

the heaven of his faith.

Rolland had never failed to recognize that in a time of widespread

illusion it would be difficult to hold fast to his convictions, however

self-evident they might seem. But, as he wrote to a French friend in

September, 1914, "We do not choose our own duties. Duty forces itself

upon us. Mine is, with the aid of those who share my ideas, to save from

the deluge the last vestiges of the European spirit.... Mankind demands

of us that those who love their fellows should take a firm stand, and

should even fight, if needs must, against those they love."

For five years we have watched the heroism of this fight, pursuing its

own course amid the warring of the nations. We have watched the miracle

of one man's keeping his senses amid the frenzied millions, of one man's

remaining free amid the universal slavery of public opinion. We have

watched love at war with hate, the European at war with the patriots,

conscience at war with the world. Throughout this long and bloody

night, when we were often ready to perish from despair at the

meaninglessness of nature, the one thing which has consoled us and

sustained us has been the recognition that the mighty forces which were

able to crush towns and annihilate empires, were powerless against an

isolated individual possessed of the will and the courage to be free.

Those who deemed themselves the victors over millions, were to find that

there was one thing which they could not master, a free conscience.

Vain, therefore, was their triumph, when they buried the crucified

thought of Europe. True faith works miracles. Jean Christophe had burst

the bonds of death, had risen again in the living form of his own

creator.