THE PLACE OF REFUGE
At the outbreak of the war, Romain Rolland was in Vevey, a small and
ancient city on the lake of Geneva. With few exceptions he spent his
summers in Switzerland, the country in which some of his best literary
work had been accomplished. In Switzerland, where the nations join
fraternal hands to form a state, where Jean Christophe had heralded
European unity, Rolland received the news of the world disaster.
Of a sudden it seemed as if his whole life had become meaningless. Vain
had been his exhortations, vain the twenty years of ardent endeavor. He
had feared this disaster since early boyhood. He had made Olivier cry in
torment of soul: "I dread war so greatly, I have dreaded it for so long.
It has been a nightmare to me, and it poisoned my childhood's days."
Now, what he had prophetically anticipated had become a terrible reality
for hundreds of millions of human beings. The agony of the hour was
nowise diminished because he had foreseen its coming to be inevitable.
On the contrary, while others hastened to deaden their senses with the
opium of false conceptions of duty and with the hashish dreams of
victory, Rolland's pitiless sobriety enabled him to look far out into
the future. On August 3rd he wrote in his diary: "I feel at the end of
my resources. I wish I were dead. It is horrible to live when men have
gone mad, horrible to witness the collapse of civilization. This
European war is the greatest catastrophe in the history of many
centuries, the overthrow of our dearest hopes of human brotherhood." A
few days later, in still greater despair, he penned the following entry:
"My distress is so colossal an accumulation of distresses that I can
scarcely breathe. The ravaging of France, the fate of my friends, their
deaths, their wounds. The grief at all this suffering, the heartrending
sympathetic anguish with the millions of sufferers. I feel a moral
death-struggle as I look on at this mad humanity which is offering up
its most precious possessions, its energies, its genius, its ardors of
heroic devotion, which is sacrificing all these things to the murderous
and stupid idols of war. I am heartbroken at the absence of any divine
message, any divine spirit, any moral leadership, which might upbuild
the City of God when the carnage is at an end. The futility of my whole
life has reached its climax. If I could but sleep, never to reawaken."
Frequently, in this torment of mind, he desired to return to France; but
he knew that he could be of no use there. In youth, undersized and
delicate, he had been unfit for military service. Now, hard upon fifty
years of age, he would obviously be of even less account. The merest
semblance of helping in the war would have been repugnant to his
conscience, for his acceptance of Tolstoi's teaching had made his
convictions steadfast. He knew that it was incumbent upon him to defend
France, but to do so in another sense than that of the combatants and
that of the intellectuals clamorous with hate. "A great nation," he
wrote more than a year later, in the preface to _Au-dessus de la mêlée_,
"has not only its frontiers to protect; it must also protect its good
sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and
follies which war lets loose. To each his part. To the armies, the
protection of the soil of their native land. To the thinkers, the
defense of its thought.... The spirit is by no means the most
insignificant part of a people's patrimony." In these opening days of
misery, it was not yet clear to him whether and how he would be called
upon to speak. Yet he knew that if and when he did speak, he would take
up his parable on behalf of intellectual freedom and supranational
justice.
But justice must have freedom of outlook. Nowhere except in a neutral
country could the observer listen to all voices, make acquaintance with
all opinions. From such a country alone could he secure a view above the
smoke of the battle-field, above the mist of falsehood, above the poison
gas of hatred. Here he could retain freedom of judgment and freedom of
speech. In _Jean Christophe_, he had shown the dangerous power of mass
suggestion. "Under its influence," he had written, "in every country the
firmest intelligences felt their most cherished convictions melting
away." No one knew better than Rolland "the spiritual contagion, the
all-pervading insanity, of collective thought." Knowing these things so
well, he wished all the more to remain free from them, to shun the
intoxication of the crowd, to avoid the risk of having to follow any
other leadership than that of his conscience. He had merely to turn to
his own writings. He could read there the words of Olivier: "I love
France, but I cannot for the sake of France kill my soul or betray my
conscience. This would indeed be to betray my country. How can I hate
when I feel no hatred? How can I truthfully act the comedy of hate?" Or,
again, he could read this memorable confession: "I will not hate. I will
be just even to my enemies. Amid all the stresses of passion, I wish to
keep my vision clear, that I may understand everything and thus be able
to love everything." Only in freedom, only in independence of spirit,
can the artist aid his nation. Thus alone can he serve his generation,
thus alone can he serve humanity. Loyalty to truth is loyalty to the
fatherland.
What had befallen through chance was now confirmed by deliberate choice.
During the five years of the war Romain Rolland remained in Switzerland,
Europe's heart; remained there that he might fulfil his task, "de dire
ce qui est juste et humain." Here, where the breezes blow freely from
all other lands, and whence a voice could pass freely across all the
frontiers, here where no fetters were imposed upon speech, he followed
the call of his invisible duty. Close at hand the endless waves of blood
and hatred emanating from the frenzy of war were foaming against the
frontiers of the cantonal state. But throughout the storm, the magnetic
needle of one intelligence continued to point unerringly towards the
immutable pole of life--to point towards love.