his profound belief in the ethical mission of art. He participated
ardently in the movement, instituted at the close of the last century,
that purposed to educate the workingman by means of elevated amusements,
especially plays. But Rolland did not, like Tolstoy, seek to awaken love
of mankind; he wanted to strengthen power of action and heroism. Rolland
has recently published the second edition of a book in which he has
collected his controversial articles, written at the time when he and a
group of friends hoped to create a new theatre for the awakening people,
and thus contribute to the encouragement of that energy of action
necessary to the solution of the great problems the time presents.
Pleasure, enlightenment, energy, says Rolland, are what the theatre
should furnish the people. Neither the classic drama, which bores the
workingman to death by presenting to him _les parties mortes de l’ame_,
nor the present drama, which injures or lowers him by setting him in a
fever of sordid passions, is fit for a people’s theatre. It must furnish
the best drama of the present time, the spectacle in which the serious
aspect of the time is reflected, or scenes from those earlier phases in
which the spirit of struggle and of devotion lived; in other words, it
must furnish a virile and wholesome art.
The heroes of the French Revolution were Rolland’s inspiration for the
drama, and he utilized the struggles of the time of the Revolution for
spectacles and folk festivals. At that time he wrote and produced for
the people’s theatre: _Le 14 Juillet_, _Danton_, _Les Loups_, _Le
triomphe de la raison_. The last he has recently published, together
with two other early dramas, _St. Louis_ and _Aërt_. They are all, as he
himself says, devoted to religious enthusiasm; for God, for country, for
reason.
He wished to set these pictures of struggling devotion against the
cowardice of thought and cowardice of will that he saw everywhere around
him. He voiced his own sentiment and that of his young kindred spirits
in the words of one of his heroes, who was condemned to death:
“Life will be what I will. I have anticipated victory, but I shall be
victorious.” And in the words of another:
“You are always thinking of what you can keep or lose. Only think of
what you can give. Live; be like the water that flows.... The world
would not exist without that happiness of beings, of flowers in the sun,
that joy of giving one’s life to the point of exhaustion—which is also a
joy of dying continually!”
“It is elder brother to Jean Christophe,” Rolland says, “less robust but
not less faithful,” who uttered these words, which comprise Rolland’s
creed in its most succinct formula.
To revive the energy of action of the French Revolution in order to
continue thus the work interrupted in 1794; to set in motion the great
passions, not for the purpose of arousing chauvinistic or revolutionary
fanaticism, but in order to kindle anew the universal feeling of
solidarity—this was the hope of Rolland and his friends for the future
of France.
“This hope,” he says, “was one of the purest and holiest forces in our
young lives.” Rolland, therefore, calls his _Théâtre du peuple_ a
document of the time, because it “reflects the artistic ideas and hopes
of a whole generation.”
He gives voice now (1913) to that proud utterance: “Let the future judge
us even should it prove that it was our crime to have believed too much
in the future.”
That this little group has not yet been victorious, we know. Romain
Rolland indicated the reason when he said: “In order to fashion a
theatre for the people, we must _first have a people_; a people with a
_freedom of the soul_ able to enjoy art; a people with _leisure_; a
people not oppressed by misery or incessant toil; a people not
brutalized by every superstition and fanaticism from right and left; a
people lord over itself and victor in the battle fought out from day to
day.”
To these utterances of 1903 can be added one of this year, in which
Rolland expressed himself most fervently and with comprehension in
regard to the working class of _women_—and in that connection in regard
to the whole woman question.[3] It was made evident, then, that the
idealist Rolland is no advocate of the chauvanistic-religious reaction.
His idealism is of the whirl of revolutionary times and the future.
[3] In a preface to _Celles qui travaillent_, a work of the
notable and sincere French authoress, Simone Bodève.
His critique upon the classic French literature, his “Teutonism” in
_Jean Christophe_, his political and religious radicalism, have made him
as obnoxious to nationalistic-Catholic France as Mme. de Stael once was
because of her _De l’Allemagne_. Among other evidences of Rolland’s
status in his own country is the circumstance that when the French
Academy recently awarded its new prize of 10,000 francs, it was given,
through the influence of Maurice Barrès, to a wholly new man in French
literature: André Lafon du Blaye, instructor in a Catholic private
school, who had written a book about a school boy, a book which was
found to possess that “elevated character” the awarding of the prize
demanded! _Jean Christophe_ had just been finished! It is, however, not
merely in academic circles that Romain Rolland is denied recognition. He
has succeeded in getting himself well hated in many another circle
because of the cutting truths in _Jean Christophe_, directed against all
factions. In _Ord och Bild_, 1912, George Brandes has given a brief but
excellent characterization of Rolland’s spiritual and intellectual
endowments and of his limitations.
Without doubt Rolland’s spiritual tendency in youth was determined not
only by Tolstoy but also by Guyau; the more because Tolstoy has Guyau to
thank for whatever of reason is found in his theories of art.
In regard to the influence of Guyau upon Tolstoy and Nietzsche, see, for
example, Professor Albert Nilson’s excellent essay upon _Guyau’s
Aesthetics_.
In the mind of Rolland as well as of Guyau, the ethical ideal is the
highest intensive quality of life, the most effective energy. Rolland is
far from the Christian asceticism that diluted the wine of Tolstoy. But
along with Tolstoy, with Guyau, with Nietzsche, he demands an art that
possesses life’s consummate vigor; that is itself the richest life, the
highest intensity of power. In other words: the ethical ideal and the
aesthetic are at heart the same thing; the fundamental principle of art
and religion is solidarity; the sense of beauty is at the same time the
most intensive and the most expansive of feelings, and so—like the love
of humanity—the great fraternizing power. “They who love most create
most richly,” and “the work that reveals to us the life of greatest
value is the noblest”: these propositions permeated Rolland just as they
did Guyau and Tolstoy, although Rolland establishes a basis of valuation
quite different from that of the latter. Perhaps Bergson, too, has in
some respects confirmed Rolland’s personal view of life. But as
Rolland’s view was enunciated before Bergson began to write, the
influence could have been only to strengthen, not to determine it. No
idea harmonized better with Rolland’s own innermost being than that
respecting the power of the spirit to make a way for creative,
unfathomable, inexhaustible life. _Jean Christophe_, from the first
chapter to the last, is an illustration of this explosive power, this
_élan vital_.
Schiller’s words come to mind: Der Dichter ist der einzige wahre
_Mensch_ und der beste Philosoph ist nur eine Karikatur gegen ihn.[4]
The poet is the only real _Man_ and the best philosopher is only a
caricature beside him.
[4] In a letter to Goethe, 1795, after reading _Wilhelm Meister_.
Not only with his dramas of the Revolution did Romain Rolland endeavor
to make his countrymen hero-worshippers; he also began a series of
popular biographies aimed to present, not the great man’s work, but the
personal powers and experiences that found expression in his work. He
says in the preface: “Europe is poisoned with materialism and egotism;
we must throw open the windows to get air: _Respirons le souffle des
heros. Let us breathe the breath of heroes._” He rejoices that he too
has witnessed contemporary heroic deeds: the defense of the Boers and
the vindication of Dreyfus. But he knows that it is “easier to kindle
enthusiasm by heroes of the past,” heroes “who were great in heart.”
His hero-worship did not lead him, however, to glorification at the
expense of truth. He utters the thought, profoundly true and all too
little understood, that every lack of harmony between life and its laws
depends—even in great spirits—not upon their greatness, but upon their
weaknesses. “But these weaknesses render them not less worthy of our
love.... The idealism that will not recognize the truth is cowardice;
there is only one heroism in the world: _to see the world as it is—and
to love it_.”
So without hesitation, Rolland points out weaknesses in Michael Angelo’s
life, and inconsistencies in Tolstoy’s. He sees in both great specimens
of the “type that will pass away”; the Christian—those who “have had
their refuge in God and the everlasting life when this life has gone
against them; those whose faith has often been expression for deficient
belief in life, in the future, in themselves; a lack of courage and a
lack of gladness.” “I know,” he continues, “of how many defeats your
grievous victories are made, and therefore I pity you and admire you.
You make the world more doleful but more beautiful. Praised be pain and
praised be joy! Both are holy; they form the world and they broaden
great souls: joy and pain are powers, are life, are God.”[5]
[5] Epitome of the introduction to _Michael Angelo_.
The three biographies that Rolland has thus far published are of
Beethoven, Michael Angelo, and Tolstoy. In the first, it is the love of
life and the courage of life; in the second, creative power and strength
of belief; in the third, the ecstacy of life and the love of mankind,
that he emphasizes. Such souls, he says, restore to us belief in life
and in mankind, for from them “issues a current of social power and
potent goodness.”
II.
Beethoven is Rolland’s own conception of life, and is nearest his heart.
To that “soul of music, heroism, and goodness” Rolland has reared the
only memorial worthy of Beethoven that art has created: _Jean
Christophe_.
This book was published during the course of nine years. But long before
it began to appear it had lived in and with its writer for the greater
part of his life. In it Rolland has committed to writing his profound
conception of the innermost being of a musical genius, and has done it
in such a manner that one is firmly convinced of the truth of the
revelations that one follows from the cradle to the grave. In other
novels concerning geniuses the writers assert incessantly that they
_are_ geniuses; here the genius evinces himself through his being. One
does not read a book, one lives a life—and a life of the highest value,
the existence that great spirit creates: that of the genius, who out of
the flaming chaos of his nature forms a cosmos. An “educational novel,”
of which the world’s literature thus far possesses only one such in
_Wilhelm Meister_, and, in a measure, in Keller’s _Der Grüne
Heinrich_.... I have lived more intensely with _Jean Christophe_ than
with most living people.[6]
[6] Lack of space forces me to omit Miss Key’s interesting but
very long analysis of _Jean Christophe_.—The Editor.
World fame is a curious thing. Sometimes it is attained quickly through
glorifying friends: a path to fame that often early avenges itself,—that
is more dangerous even than the fame that the attacks of enemies
furnish. Sometimes fame is won with one blow, by an exceptional work;
again it is prepared for in silence and then suddenly rushes forth with
the roar of a great torrent formed by many small streams. The last is
the case with Romain Rolland.
When I read him in 1909, in Switzerland, I went shortly afterwards to
Paris, where, at that time, he was not mentioned among the celebrated
writers and where even his friends thought he dare not reckon his circle
of readers larger than the ten or fifteen thousand faithful he possessed
in the world of French-speaking readers. In Germany his circle was still
narrower; in Sweden, he was unknown even by name.
For the new generation the book is a document of the spiritual history
of the time. For the serious-minded portion of the French youth, Rolland
has possessed an influence comparable with his own description of
Tolstoy’s influence upon himself and the young generation with him.
Youth has learned from him that the fleeting fashionable attitude toward
the great souls or ideas that Paris shapes is sterile; that it is only
by devotion that a spiritual growth can be attained; that skepticism in
the face of all greatness is poverty, but admiration and love “is the
way, to the most potent, the richest, life.” Youth has found in him
contempt for mere fine phrases, for declamation, and received from him
Goethe’s conception of creation: “In the beginning was action.” They
have heard him proclaim _that_ nationalism that is loyalty to the best
in the essence of the French nation: love of truth and justice, desire
for freedom and fraternity, devotion to its ideal values and above all
the dream of happiness for all mankind. This dream that among us Teutons
is content to sleep, is among Frenchmen an ever restless disturbance of
the blood. And it is only by occasionally letting his blood flow for
these dreams that he feels he is living up to his highest ideals. _This_
Youth for whom each new part of _Jean Christophe_ has been a great
event, despises with Rolland the estheticism that turns from life. This
youth has learned to distinguish between great art and the work of those
who think they are creating art but are only making arts. But above all,
at a time of reaction toward the Christian “faith”—a reaction that has
been justified by the fact that science has not been able to “explain”
life nor “vindicate” it—they receive a new fountain of living water.
Rolland has attempted neither to explain life nor defend it. The
leit-motiv of his great symphonic work is Beethoven’s thought: “Durch
Leiden Freude,”—“Through suffering joy comes.” We can, so he says,
neither understand life in all its plenitude of contradictions nor
ennoble it in all its brutality in any way other than by _living_ it
one’s self in the fullest and highest meaning of the word. Music, the
all-unifying art, love, the all-embracing condition of the soul, are the
two highest attitudes of devotion to God, who is life.
More Rolland knows not. And more than he knows the veracious man does
not say.
“I cannot,” he writes, “give any metaphysical credo. For, in the
first place, I will never deceive myself by saying _I know that
which I do not know_—which, at the most, I can imagine or hope.
In the second place, I will never confine myself within the
limits of any belief. For I hope to develop until my last day; I
wish to reserve for myself unlimited freedom of intellectual
transformation and renewal. I have many gods in my Pantheon; but
my chief godhead is _Liberty_. At present I do not separate the
essence of the human soul from that of the divine spirit, of
which the former is a part. But I hardly believe that this divine
spirit fills the universe. It _seeks_, certainly, to fill the
world and guide it; but nothing indicates that it will succeed.
Even in this regard I reserve space for liberty. Pure monism does
not satisfy me. I am more inclined to a dualism such as the
ancient Empedocles believed in. I have an unbounded admiration
for the pre-Socratic philosophers, the sages of Ionia and Magna
Graecia. Indeed my first work, written at Rome, twenty years ago,
was a drama with Empedocles as hero. The struggle between two
principles is manifest to me in the whole history of the world,
material as well as moral history. The question is whether there
is not a _third_ principle, in which the other two are included
or harmonized. A trinity therefore—it is singular how this form
forces itself upon the human mind—but a trinity very different
from the Christian conception of the trinity, since it comprises
a father and two striving brothers: a triad that approaches the
antique cosmogony of which we find a reflection in Hesiod, in
_Chaos_, _Gaea_, and _Eros_. If I live I shall go deeper into
ancient thought. Those ancient philosophers lived in more
intimate contact with nature than any of their successors, and,
moreover, collected the thousand-year-old wisdom of the whole
Orient.”
Besides this personal utterance of Rolland himself, a French friend of
his, intimate with his thought, has given me permission to communicate
the following statement of the trend of Rolland’s thought:
The liberty of his mind, his lucidity, his keen penetration,
render him incapable of accepting the least dogma or the least
constraint. It is impossible to conceive of anything that could
have upon such a mind, not to say a direct hold, but even an
appreciable influence. That mind is alone, magnificently alone,
as independent as if the world were just born. Moreover, he is
quite as far from all revealed religions as from all systems. He
would in no wise admit that the Christian or any other religion
is more closely related to the past, and Darwinism or any
scientism whatever more to the future. He would see, in these
diverse ways of viewing life, forms of the human mind which
return at periodic intervals and of which one no more than the
other is an absolute progress in which he does not believe. Only
by his very nature, he is antimaterialistic. He believes in the
duality of soul and body in an absolute, organic manner. He hopes
sincerely to quit this body and go to live a larger and fuller
life. No personal immortality! He cannot endure the thought. That
would be the continuation of this captivity in a limited
personality, which to him appears stifling. He feels that he is
also going to live in God, not understanding by that word any
anthropomorphic god, but a fountain of universal life. He loves
to plunge, through time and space, into a meditation in which he
totally forgets his personality, and wherein he finds a sort of
intoxication. He has uttered this admirable and terrible
sentence: “Sometimes I feel _no difference_ between my friends
absent or present, living or dead.” To ask such a being if he is
of the past or of the future would have no significance; he is
beyond the compass of time.
I have met Rolland only through letters. But some words concerning his
personality, as it had affected another poet, I can communicate here in
conclusion:
“The confident grasp replete with experience, the modest ripeness ... in
his being; the benignity, the unprecedented purity in all his purpose
... are beneficent.... Everything is genuine, developed with will and
consciousness: a man who has improved steadily.... From him emanates a
gentle plenitude, consummate in action, like that of a star at
twilight.”
When world renown comes to such a man, it has not much to say to him.
Rolland meets it with an averted glance in his far-seeing luminous eyes,
eyes which quietly and steadily look towards new works and new horizons.
From all corners of the world he hears: that he has given to the time
the book most brimming with the whole seething life of the time; that he
has given men the book most permeated with the essence of music and
Orphean effects; that he has created an entire human race, a race in
which all ages of life and degrees of development, in which women as
well as men are equally convincing in truth to life; that he has given a
work overflowing with ideas, with philosophy of life, with vital help,
by exhibiting a great human life in all its weakness and in all its
strength. And assuredly this will give him joy.
But he will feel proud only when the word comes that his French heart
longs to hear: The people that has given to the world such a work is
not, as its enemies say, going to destruction. That nation is ever
potent with the energy of life.
Rolland’s great book is not merely a glorious revelation of the fact
that all the greatest ideas that France has given the world live ever in
the French people. It demonstrates also that mankind needs the French
spirit always in order to realize them.
Poems
WITTER BYNNER
I Shall Come to You Again
If you have pity, pity me a little,
For I had seen your pitiless lips and dared them
And I deserve the pity given fools...
Your mouth was passion but your eyes were love.
Your mouth might soon consent to harshness, but your eyes,
Your eyes would see me and be kind to me.
I should not suffer, loving you.
I should but carry the heroic pain of love.
Wounds that might come from hardness of your heart,
If I received them, I should heal, watching the everlasting pity of your
eyes...
If you have pity, pity me a little.
I who had seen your cruelty and dared it
Am stricken with it now
And have come through the streets in daylight
As though the daylight were the sound of laughter
Surrounding and consuming me.
I have put up my hands to ward it off,
The heaviness of light that would not let me hide
But held me and looked leering in my face...
For there has come a passer-by ....
And you have come with him.
I have no hatred for the passer-by, and none for you,
But hatred only of my own humiliation,
For I had challenged and been overthrown...
If you have pity, pity me a little.
For I who love life
Have heard its mouth despise me
And have seen its eyes, that had been kind, turn into stone.
Wherefore I lack new strength, new laughter.
And in the time before that strength is due,
If you have pity, pity me a little.
But if you have none—soon I shall have no need.
For I who choose life,
Shall receive my strength,
And I shall come to you again, laughing with love...
For my humiliation shall have been a rain,
Its arms about me and its lips alive.
And I shall walk in daylight
And it shall be a singing waterfall
Surrounding me and pouring over me.
Sicilia
(_In memory of Salvatore Garrito who was hanged at Reading,
Pennsylvania, October 29, 1908, for the killing of a State
Trooper._)
“It shows you on that paper where she lives,
In Sicily. Write her that I today
Am dead for having killed my second man.”
“Your second?” “Yes, sir, two. It’s not so bad
To kill a trooper. But I killed, before,
A friend who, like my brother and like me,
Loved her in Sicily. The jury thought
My brother did it. He’s been all alone
In jail eight years. Tell her I shall be glad
If now she gets him out and marries him.”
Christian
Truth heard him ask employ
And took him in,
A poor unfriended boy,
As her own kin,
And everything she made
She taught the youth.
When he had learned her trade
He went from Truth.
And when his eyes were dim
And he was rich,
Then Truth returned to him
Out of a ditch,
Poorer than he had been,
Pleading she came...
He would not let her in
Nor ask her name.
Marriage
Shall marriage never be the glory
That was wooed?
But ever enervate and vex,
Obstruct, intrude,
And make more wistful and complex
The solitude,
Trying to tell the human story
To its brood?
No matter how the homes are humming
In a mood
Of ecstasy or sentiment
Or love renewed,
What favored two can circumvent
The ancient feud?—
Till both in one shall die, becoming
Multitude!
A Glimpse at Russia
Wars have been the landmarks in Russian modern history. The Napoleonic
war was followed by the insurrection of the Decembrists, the first
attempt on the part of liberal Russia to break the autocracy. The iron
reign of Nicolas I culminated in the Crimean campaign, which revealed
the utter rottenness of the old order and necessitated the general
reconstruction of the estate, from the liberation of the serfs to the
establishment of jury-tribunals. The reaction under Alexander III and
Nicolas II came to a collapse with the Japanese war, more disastrous and
richer in results than Sebastopol. It may be interesting to notice that
each of the mentioned epochs followed the previous one at a space of
about a quarter of a century, and the fact that the present war broke
out only ten years after the last one may be interpreted as an attempt
for self-correction on the part of History. Both the war with Japan and
the revolution that came as its result were abortive and premature
phenomena, and were destined “to be continued.”