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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romain Rolland
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Eden Paul
+            Cedar Paul
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34888]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAIN ROLLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, University of Michigan Libraries
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FOREARMED
+
+
+We do not detract from the moral services of Romain Rolland, but we may
+perhaps excuse to some extent his opponents, when we insist that Rolland
+had excelled all contemporary imaginative writers in the profundity of
+his preparatory studies of war and its problems. If to-day, in
+retrospect, we contemplate his writings, we marvel to note how, from the
+very first and throughout a long period of years, they combined to build
+up, as it were, a colossal pyramid, culminating in the point upon which
+the lightnings of war were to be discharged. For twenty years, the
+author's thought, his whole creative activity, had been unintermittently
+concentrated upon the contradictions between spirit and force, between
+freedom and the fatherland, between victory and defeat. Through a
+hundred variations he had pursued the same fundamental theme, treating
+it dramatically, epically, and in manifold other ways. There is hardly a
+problem relevant to this question which is not touched upon by
+Christophe and Olivier, by Aërt and by the Girondists, in their
+discussions. Intellectually regarded, Rolland's writings are a
+maneuvering ground for all the incentives to war. He thus had his
+conclusions already drawn when others were beginning an attempt to come
+to terms with events. As historian, he had described the perpetual
+recurrence of war's typical accompaniments, had discussed the psychology
+of mass suggestion, and had shown the effects of wartime mentality upon
+the individual. As moralist and as citizen of the world, he had long ere
+this formulated his creed. We may say, in fact, that Rolland's mind had
+been in a sense immunized against the illusions of the crowd and against
+infection by prevalent falsehoods.
+
+Not by chance does an artist decide which problems he will consider. The
+dramatist does not make a "lucky selection" of his theme. The musician
+does not "discover" a beautiful melody, but already has it within him.
+It is not the artist who creates the problems, but the problems which
+create the artist; just as it is not the prophet who makes his prophecy,
+but the foresight which creates the prophet. The artist's choice is
+always pre-ordained. The man who has foreseen the essential problem of a
+whole civilization, of a disastrous epoch, must of necessity, in the
+decisive hour, play a leading part. He only who had contemplated the
+coming European war as an abyss towards which the mad hunt of recent
+decades, making light of every warning, had been speeding, only such a
+one could command his soul, could refrain from joining the bacchanalian
+rout, could listen unmoved to the throbbing of the war drums. Who but
+such a man could stand upright in the greatest storm of illusion the
+world has ever known?
+
+Thus it came to pass that not merely during the first hour of the war
+was Rolland in opposition to other writers and artists of the day. This
+opposition dated from the very inception of his career, and hence for
+twenty years he had been a solitary. The reason why the contrast between
+his outlook and that of his generation had not hitherto been
+conspicuous, the reason why the cleavage was not disclosed until the
+actual outbreak of war, lies in this, that Rolland's divergence was a
+matter not so much of mood as of character. Before the apocalyptic year,
+almost all persons of artistic temperament had recognized quite as
+definitely as Rolland had recognized that a fratricidal struggle between
+Europeans would be a crime, would disgrace civilization. With few
+exceptions, they were pacifists. It would be more correct to say that
+with few exceptions they believed themselves to be pacifists. For
+pacifism does not simply mean, to be a friend to peace, but to be a
+worker in the cause of peace, an εἱρηνοποιὁς, as the New Testament has
+it. Pacifism signifies the activity of an effective will to peace, not
+merely the love of an easy life and a preference for repose. It
+signifies struggle; and like every struggle it demands, in the hour of
+danger, self-sacrifice and heroism. Now these "pacifists" we have just
+been considering had merely a sentimental fondness for peace; they were
+friendly towards peace, just as they were friendly towards ideas of
+social equality, towards philanthropy, towards the abolition of capital
+punishment. Such faith as they possessed was a faith devoid of passion.
+They wore their opinions as they wore their clothing, and when the time
+of trial came they were ready to exchange their pacifist ethic for the
+ethic of the war-makers, were ready to don a national uniform in matters
+of opinion. At bottom, they knew the right just as well as Rolland, but
+they had not the courage of their opinions. Goethe's saying to Eckermann
+applies to them with deadly force. "All the evils of modern literature
+are due to lack of character in individual investigators and writers."
+
+Thus Rolland did not stand alone in his knowledge, which was shared by
+many intellectuals and statesmen. But in his case, all his knowledge was
+tinged with religious fervor; his beliefs were a living faith; his
+thoughts were actions. He was unique among imaginative writers for the
+splendid vigor with which he remained true to his ideals when all others
+were deserting the standard; for the way in which he defended the
+European spirit against the raging armies of the sometime European
+intellectuals now turned patriots. Fighting as he had fought from youth
+upwards on behalf of the invisible against the world of reality, he
+displayed, as a foil to the heroism of the trenches, a higher heroism
+still. While the soldiers were manifesting the heroism of blood, Rolland
+manifested the heroism of the spirit, and showed the glorious spectacle
+of one who was able, amid the intoxication of the war-maddened masses,
+to maintain the sobriety and freedom of an unclouded mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SERVICE OF MAN
+
+
+In Rolland's view it was the artist's duty to serve his fatherland by
+conscientious service to all mankind, to play his part in the struggle
+by waging war against the suffering the war was causing and against the
+thousandfold torments entailed by the war. He rejected the idea of
+absolute aloofness. "An artist has no right to hold aloof while he is
+still able to help others." But this aid, this participation, must not
+take the form of fostering the murderous hatred which already animated
+the millions. The aim must be to unite the millions further, where
+unseen ties already existed, in their infinite suffering. He therefore
+took his part in the ranks of the helpers, not weapon in hand, but
+following the example of Walt Whitman, who, during the American Civil
+War, served as hospital assistant.
+
+Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all
+lands began to be heard in Switzerland. Thousands who were without news
+of fathers, husbands, and sons in the battlefields, stretched despairing
+arms into the void. By hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands,
+letters and telegrams poured into the little House of the Red Cross in
+Geneva, the only international rallying point that still remained.
+Isolated, like stormy petrels, came the first inquiries for missing
+relatives; then these inquiries themselves became a storm. The letters
+arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared for dealing with such an
+inundation of misery. The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no
+system, and above all no helpers.
+
+Romain Rolland was one of the first to offer personal assistance. The
+Musée Rath was quickly made available for the purposes of the Red Cross.
+In one of the small wooden cubicles, among hundreds of girls, women, and
+students, Rolland sat for more than eighteen months, engaged each day
+for from six to eight hours side by side with the head of the
+undertaking, Dr. Ferrière, to whose genius for organization myriads owe
+it that the period of suspense was shortened. Here Rolland filed
+letters, wrote letters, performed an abundance of detail work, seemingly
+of little importance. But how momentous was every word to the
+individuals whom he could help, for in this vast universe each suffering
+individual is mainly concerned about his own particular grain of
+unhappiness. Countless persons to-day, unaware of the fact, have to
+thank the great writer for news of their lost relatives. A rough stool,
+a small table of unpolished deal, the turmoil of typewriters, the bustle
+of human beings questioning, calling one to another, hastening to and
+fro--such was Romain Rolland's battlefield in this campaign against the
+afflictions of the war. Here, while other authors and intellectuals were
+doing their utmost to foster mutual hatred, he endeavored to promote
+reconciliation, to alleviate the torment of a fraction among the
+countless sufferers by such consolation as the circumstances rendered
+possible. He neither desired, nor occupied, a leading position in the
+work of the Red Cross; but, like so many other nameless assistants, he
+devoted himself to the daily task of promoting the interchange of news.
+His deeds were inconspicuous, and are therefore all the more memorable.
+
+When he was allotted the Nobel peace prize, he refused to retain the
+money for his own use, and devoted the whole sum to the mitigation of
+the miseries of Europe, that he might suit the action to the word, the
+word to the action. Ecce homo! Ecce poeta!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TRIBUNAL OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+No one had been more perfectly forearmed than Romain Rolland. The
+closing chapters of _Jean Christophe_ foretell the coming mass illusion.
+Never for a moment had he entertained the vain hope of certain idealists
+that the fact (or semblance) of civilization, that the increase of human
+kindliness which we owe to two millenniums of Christianity, would make a
+future war, comparatively humane. Too well did he know as historian that
+in the initial outbursts of war passion the veneer of civilization and
+Christianity would be rubbed off; that in all nations alike the naked
+bestiality of human beings would be disclosed; that the smell of the
+shed blood would reduce them all to the level of wild beasts. He did not
+conceal from himself that this strange halitus is able to dull and to
+confuse even the gentlest, the kindliest, the most intelligent of souls.
+The rending asunder of ancient friendships, the sudden solidarity among
+persons most opposed in temperament now eager to abase themselves before
+the idol of the fatherland, the total disappearance of conscientious
+conviction at the first breath of the actualities of war--in _Jean
+Christophe_ these things were written no less plainly than when of old
+the fingers of the hand wrote upon the palace wall in Babylon.
+
+Nevertheless, even this prophetic soul had underestimated the cruel
+reality. During the opening days of the war, Rolland was horrified to
+note how all previous wars were being eclipsed in the atrocity of the
+struggle, in its material and spiritual brutality, in its extent, and in
+the intensity of its passion. All possible anticipations had been
+outdone. Although for thousands of years, by twos or variously allied,
+the peoples of Europe had almost unceasingly been warring one with
+another, never before had their mutual hatreds, as manifested in word
+and deed, risen to such a pitch as in this twentieth century after the
+birth of Christ. Never before in the history of mankind did hatred
+extend so widely through the populations; never did it rage so fiercely
+among the intellectuals; never before was oil pumped into the flames as
+it was now pumped from innumerable fountains and tubes of the spirit,
+from the canals of the newspapers, from the retorts of the professors.
+All evil instincts were fostered among the masses. The whole world of
+feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized. The loathsome
+organization for the dealing of death by material weapons was yet more
+loathsomely reflected in the organization of national telegraphic
+bureaus to scatter lies like sparks over land and sea. For the first
+time, science, poetry, art, and philosophy became no less subservient to
+war than mechanical ingenuity was subservient. In the pulpits and
+professorial chairs, in the research laboratories, in the editorial
+offices and in the authors' studies, all energies were concentrated as
+by an invisible system upon the generation and diffusion of hatred. The
+seer's apocalyptic warnings were surpassed.
+
+A deluge of hatred and blood such as even the blood-drenched soil of
+Europe had never known, flowed from land to land. Romain Rolland knew
+that a lost world, a corrupt generation, cannot be saved from its
+illusions. A world conflagration cannot be extinguished by a word,
+cannot be quelled by the efforts of naked human hands. The only possible
+endeavor was to prevent others adding fuel to the flames, and with the
+lash of scorn and contempt to deter as far as might be those who were
+engaged in such criminal undertakings. It might be possible, too, to
+build an ark wherein what was intellectually precious in this suicidal
+generation might be saved from the deluge, might be made available for
+those of a future day when the waters of hatred should have subsided. A
+sign might be uplifted, round which the faithful could rally, building a
+temple of unity amid, and yet high above, the battlefields.
+
+Among the detestable organizations of the general staffs, mechanical
+ingenuity, lying, and hatred, Rolland dreamed of establishing another
+organization, a fellowship of the free spirits of Europe. The leading
+imaginative writers, the leading men of science, were to constitute the
+ark he desired; they were to be the sustainers of justice in these days
+of injustice and falsehood. While the masses, deceived by words, were
+raging against one another in blind fury, the artists, the writers, the
+men of science, of Germany, France, and England, who for centuries had
+been coöperating for discoveries, advances, ideals, could combine to
+form a tribunal of the spirit which, with scientific earnestness, should
+devote itself to extirpating the falsehoods that were keeping their
+respective peoples apart. Transcending nationality, they could hold
+intercourse on a higher plane. For it was Rolland's most cherished hope
+that the great artists and great investigators would refuse to identify
+themselves with the crime of the war, would refrain from abandoning
+their freedom of conscience and from entrenching themselves behind a
+facile "my country, right or wrong." With few exceptions, intellectuals
+had for centuries recognized the repulsiveness of war. More than a
+thousand years earlier, when China was threatened by ambitious Mongols,
+Li Tai Peh had exclaimed: "Accursed be war! Accursed the work of
+weapons! The sage has nothing to do with these follies." The contention
+that the sage has naught to do with such follies seems to rise like an
+unenunciated refrain from all the utterances of western men of learning
+since Europe began to have a common life. In Latin letters (for Latin,
+the medium of intercourse, was likewise the symbol of supranational
+fellowship), the great humanists whose respective countries were at war
+exchanged their regrets, and offered mutual philosophical solace against
+the murderous illusions of their less instructed fellows. Herder was
+speaking for the learned Germans of the eighteenth century when he
+wrote: "For fatherland to engage in a bloody struggle with fatherland is
+the most preposterous, barbarism." Goethe, Byron, Voltaire, and
+Rousseau, were at one in their contempt for the purposeless butcheries
+of war. To-day, in Rolland's view, the leading intellectuals, the great
+scientific investigators whose minds would perforce remain unclouded,
+the most humane among the imaginative writers, could join in a
+fellowship whose members would renounce the errors of their respective
+nations. He did not, indeed, venture to hope that there would be a very
+large number of persons whose souls would remain free from the passions
+of the time. But spiritual force is not based upon numbers; its laws are
+not those of armies. In this field, Goethe's saying is applicable:
+"Everything great, and everything most worth having comes from a
+minority. It cannot be supposed that reason will ever become popular.
+Passion and sentiment may be popularized, the reason will always remain
+a privilege of the few." This minority, however, may acquire authority
+through spiritual force. Above all, it may constitute a bulwark against
+falsehood. If men of light and leading, free men of all nationalities,
+were to meet somewhere, in Switzerland perhaps, to make common cause
+against every injustice, by whomever committed, a sanctuary would at
+length be established, an asylum for truth which was now everywhere
+bound and gagged. Europe would have a span of soil for home; mankind
+would have a spark of hope. Holding mutual converse, these best of men
+could enlighten one another; and the reciprocal illumination on the part
+of such unprejudiced persons could not fail to diffuse its light over
+the world.
+
+Such was the mood in which Rolland took up his pen for the first time
+after the outbreak of war. He wrote an open letter to Hauptmann, to the
+author whom among Germans he chiefly honored for goodness and
+humaneness. Within the same hour he wrote to Verhaeren, Germany's
+bitterest foe. Rolland thus stretched forth both his hands, rightward
+and leftward, in the hope that he could bring his two correspondents
+together, so that at least within the domain of pure spirit there might
+be a first essay towards spiritual reconciliation, what time upon the
+battlefields the machine-guns with their infernal clatter were mowing
+down the sons of France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Austria-Hungary, and
+Russia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CONTROVERSY WITH GERHART HAUPTMANN
+
+
+Romain Rolland had never been personally acquainted with Gerhart
+Hauptmann. He was familiar with the German's writings, and admired their
+passionate participation in all that is human, loved them for the
+goodness with which the individual figures are intentionally
+characterized. On a visit to Berlin, he had called at Hauptmann's house,
+but the playwright was away. The two had never before exchanged letters.
+
+Nevertheless, Rolland decided to address Hauptmann as a representative
+German author, as writer of _Die Weber_ and as creator of many other
+figures typifying suffering. He wrote on August 29, 1914, the day on
+which a telegram issued by Wolff's agency, ludicrously exaggerating in
+pursuit of the policy of "frightfulness," had announced that "the old
+town of Louvain, rich in works of art, exists no more to-day." An
+outburst of indignation was assuredly justified, but Rolland endeavored
+to exhibit the utmost self-control. He began as follows: "I am not,
+Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany as a nation
+of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness of your
+mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of Old Germany; and
+even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words of _our_
+Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating all
+national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
+heights 'where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
+peoples as our own.'" He goes on with a pathetic self-consciousness for
+the first time noticeable in the work of this most modest of writers.
+Recognizing his mission, he lifts his voice above the controversies of
+the moment. "I have labored all my life to bring together the minds of
+our two nations; and the atrocities of this impious war in which, to the
+ruin of European civilization, they are involved, will never lead me to
+soil my spirit with hatred."
+
+Now Rolland sounds a more impassioned note. He does not hold Germany
+responsible for the war. "War springs from the weakness and stupidity of
+nations." He ignores political questions, but protests vehemently
+against the destruction of works of art, asking Hauptmann and his
+countrymen, "Are you the grandchildren of Goethe or of Attila?"
+Proceeding more quietly, he implores Hauptmann to refrain from any
+attempt to justify such things. "In the name of our Europe, of which you
+have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
+that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
+the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
+Hauptmann, I adjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
+Germany, among whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with the
+utmost energy against this crime which will otherwise recoil upon
+yourselves." Rolland's hope was that the Germans would, like himself,
+refuse to condone the excesses of the war-makers, would refuse to accept
+the war as a fatality. He hoped for a public protest from across the
+Rhine. Rolland was not aware that at this time no one in Germany had or
+could have any inkling of the true political situation. He was not aware
+that such a public protest as he desired was quite impossible.
+
+Gerhart Hauptmann's answer struck a fiercer note than Rolland's letter.
+Instead of complying with the Frenchman's plea, instead of repudiating
+the German militarist policy of frightfulness, he attempted, with
+sinister enthusiasm, to justify that policy. Accepting the maxim, "war
+is war," he, somewhat prematurely, defended the right of the stronger.
+"The weak naturally have recourse to vituperation." He declared the
+report of the destruction of Louvain to be false. It was, he said, a
+matter of life or death for Germany that the German troops should effect
+"their peaceful passage" through Belgium. He referred to the
+pronouncements of the general staff, and quoted, as the highest
+authority for truth, the words of "the Emperor himself."
+
+Therewith the controversy passed from the spiritual to the political
+plane. Rolland, embittered in his turn, rejected the views of Hauptmann,
+who was lending his moral authority to the support of Schlieffen's
+aggressive theories. Hauptmann, declared Rolland, was "accepting
+responsibility for the crimes of those who wield authority." Instead of
+promoting harmony, the correspondence was fostering discord. In reality
+the two had no common ground for discussion. The attempt was ill-timed,
+passion still ran too high; the mists of prevalent falsehood still
+obscured vision on both sides. The waters of the flood continued to
+rise, the infinite deluge of hatred and error. Brethren were as yet
+unable to recognize one another in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERHAEREN
+
+
+Having written to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German, Rolland almost
+simultaneously addressed himself to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian, who
+had been an enthusiast for European unity, but had now become one of
+Germany's bitterest foes. Perhaps no one is better entitled than the
+present writer to bear witness that Verhaeren's hostility to Germany was
+a new thing. As long as peace lasted, the Belgian poet had known no
+other ideal than that of international brotherhood, had detested nothing
+more heartily than he detested international discord. Shortly before the
+war, in his preface to Henri Guilbeaux's anthology of German poetry,
+Verhaeren had spoken of "the ardor of the nations," which, he said, "in
+defiance of that other passion which tends to make them quarrel,
+inclines them towards mutual love." The German invasion of Belgium
+taught him to hate. His verses, which had hitherto been odes to creative
+force, were henceforward dithyrambs in favor of hostility.
+
+Rolland had sent Verhaeren a copy of his protest against the destruction
+of Louvain and the bombardment of Rheims cathedral. Concurring in this
+protest, Verhaeren wrote: "Sadness and hatred overpower me. The latter
+feeling is new in my experience. I cannot rid myself of it, although I
+am one of those who have always regarded hatred as a base sentiment.
+Such love as I can give in this hour is reserved for my country, or
+rather for the heap of ashes to which Belgium has been reduced."
+Rolland's answer ran as follows: "Rid yourself of hatred. Neither you
+nor we should give way to it. Let us guard against hatred even more than
+we guard against our enemies! You will see at a later date that the
+tragedy is more terrible than people can realize while it is actually
+being played.... So stupendous is this European drama that we have no
+right to make human beings responsible for it. It is a convulsion of
+nature.... Let us build an ark as did those who were threatened with the
+deluge. Thus we can save what is left of humanity." Without acrimony,
+Verhaeren rejected this adjuration. He deliberately chose to remain
+inspired with hatred, little as he liked the feeling. In _La Belgique
+sanglante_, he declared that hatred brought a certain solace, although,
+dedicating his work "to the man I once was," he manifested his yearning
+for the revival of his former sentiment that the world was a
+comprehensive whole. Vainly did Rolland return to the charge in a
+touching letter: "Greatly, indeed, must you have suffered, to be able to
+hate. But I am confident that in your case such a feeling cannot long
+endure, for souls like yours would perish in this atmosphere. Justice
+must be done, but it is not a demand of justice that a whole people
+should be held responsible for the crimes of a few hundred individuals.
+Were there but one just man in Israel, you would have no right to pass
+judgment upon all Israel. Surely it is impossible for you to doubt that
+many in Germany and Austria, oppressed and gagged, continue to suffer
+and struggle.... Thousands of innocent persons are being everywhere
+sacrificed to the crimes of politics! Napoleon was not far wrong when he
+said: 'Politics are for us what fate was for the ancients.' Never was
+the destiny of classical days more cruel. Let us refuse, Verhaeren, to
+make common cause with this destiny. Let us take our stand beside the
+oppressed, beside all the oppressed, wherever they may dwell. I
+recognize only two nations on earth, that of those who suffer, and that
+of those who cause the suffering."
+
+Verhaeren, however, was unmoved. He answered as follows: "If I hate, it
+is because what I saw, felt, and heard, is hateful.... I admit that I
+cannot be just, now that I am filled with sadness and burn with anger. I
+am not simply standing near the fire, but am actually amid the flames,
+so that I suffer and weep. I can no otherwise." He remained loyal to
+hatred, and indeed loyal to the hatred-for-hate of Romain Rolland's
+Olivier. Notwithstanding this grave divergence of view between Verhaeren
+and Rolland, the two men continued on terms of friendship and mutual
+respect. Even in the preface he contributed to Loyson's inflammatory
+book, _Êtes-vous neutre devant le crime_, Verhaeren distinguished
+between the person and the cause. He was unable, he said, "to espouse
+Rolland's error," but he would not repudiate his friendship for
+Rolland. Indeed, he desired to emphasize its existence, seeing that in
+France it was already "dangerous to love Romain Rolland."
+
+In this correspondence, as in that with Hauptmann, two strong passions
+seemed to clash; but the opponents in reality remained out of touch.
+Here, likewise, the appeal was fruitless. Practically the whole world
+was given over to hatred, including even the noblest creative artists,
+and the finest among the sons of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE
+
+
+As on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of
+inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and
+had issued it once more in vain. The writers, the men of science, the
+philosophers, the artists, all took the side of the country to which
+they happened to belong; the Germans spoke for Germany, the Frenchmen
+for France, the Englishmen for England. No one would espouse the
+universal cause; no one would rise superior to the device, my country
+right or wrong. In every land, among those of every nation, there were
+to be found plenty of enthusiastic advocates, persons willing blindly to
+justify all their country's doings, including its errors and its crimes,
+to excuse these errors and crimes upon the plea of necessity. There was
+only one land, the land common to them all, Europe, motherland of all
+the fatherlands, which found no advocate, no defender. There was only
+one idea, the most self-evident to a Christian world, which found no
+spokesman--the idea of ideas, humanity.
+
+During these days, Rolland may well have recalled sacred memories of the
+time when Leo Tolstoi's letter came to give him a mission in life.
+Tolstoi had stood alone in the utterance of his celebrated outcry, "I
+can no longer keep silence." At that time his country was at war. He
+arose to defend the invisible rights of human beings, uttering a protest
+against the command that men should murder their brothers. Now his voice
+was no longer heard; his place was empty; the conscience of mankind was
+dumb. To Rolland, the consequent silence, the terrible silence of the
+free spirit amid the hurly-burly of the slaves, seemed more hateful than
+the roar of the cannon. Those to whom he had appealed for help had
+refused to answer the call. The ultimate truth, the truth of conscience,
+had no organized fellowship to sustain it. No one would aid him in the
+struggle for the freedom of the European soul, the struggle of truth
+against falsehood, the struggle of human lovingkindness against frenzied
+hate. Rolland once again was alone with his faith, more alone than
+during the bitterest years of solitude.
+
+But Rolland has never been one to resign himself to loneliness. In youth
+he had already felt that those who are passive while wrong is being done
+are as criminal as the very wrongdoer. "Ceux qui subissent le mal sont
+aussi criminels que ceux qui le font." Upon the poet, above all, it
+seemed to him incumbent to find words for thought, and to vivify the
+words by action. It is not enough to write ornamental comments upon the
+history of one's time. The poet must be part of the very being of his
+time, must fight to make his ideas realize themselves in action. "The
+elite of the intellect constitutes an aristocracy which would fain
+replace the aristocracy of birth. But the aristocracy of intellect is
+apt to forget that the aristocracy of birth won its privileges with
+blood. For hundreds of years men have listened to the words of wisdom,
+but seldom have they seen a sage offering himself up to the sacrifice.
+If we would inspire others with faith we must show that our own faith is
+real. Mere words do not suffice." Fame is a sword as well as a laurel
+crown. Faith imposes obligations. One who had made Jean Christophe utter
+the gospel of a free conscience, could not, when the world had fashioned
+his cross, play the part of Peter denying the Lord. He must take up his
+apostolate, be ready should need arise to face martyrdom. Thus, while
+almost all the artists of the day, in their "passion d'abdiquer," in
+their mad desire to shout with the crowd, were not merely extolling
+force and victory as the masters of the hour, but were actually
+maintaining that force was the very meaning of civilization, that
+victory was the vital energy of the world, Rolland stood forth against
+them all, proclaiming the might of the incorruptible conscience. "Force
+is always hateful to me," wrote Rolland to Jouve in this decisive hour.
+"If the world cannot get on without force, it still behooves me to
+refrain from making terms with force. I must uphold an opposing
+principle, one which will invalidate the principle of force. Each must
+play his own part; each must obey his own inward monitor." He did not
+fail to recognize the titanic nature of the struggle into which he was
+entering, but the words he had written in youth still resounded in his
+memory. "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on
+earth."
+
+Just as in those earlier days, when he had wished by means of his dramas
+to restore faith to his nation, when he had set up the images of the
+heroes as examples to a petty time, when throughout a decade of quiet
+effort he had summoned the people towards love and freedom, so now,
+Rolland set to work alone. He had no party, no newspaper, no influence.
+He had nothing but his passionate enthusiasm, and that indomitable
+courage to which the forlorn hope makes an irresistible appeal. Alone he
+began his onslaught upon the illusions of the multitude, when the
+European conscience, hunted with scorn and hatred from all countries and
+all hearts, had taken sanctuary in his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE MANIFESTOES
+
+
+The struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since
+Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression
+in the form of lying phrases, he had perforce to fight them upon their
+own ground. But the vigor of his ideas, the breath of freedom they
+conveyed, and the authority of the author's name, made of these
+articles, manifestoes which spoke to the whole of Europe and aroused a
+spiritual conflagration. Like electric sparks given off from invisible
+wires, their energy was liberated in all directions, leading here to
+terrible explosions of hatred, throwing there a brilliant light into the
+depths of conscience, in every case producing cordial excitement in its
+contrasted forms of indignation and enthusiasm. Never before, perhaps,
+did newspaper articles exercise so stupendous an influence, at once
+inflammatory and purifying, as was exercised by these two dozen appeals
+and manifestoes issued in a time of enslavement and confusion by a
+lonely man whose spirit was free and whose intellect remained unclouded.
+
+From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by
+comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully considered and
+fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but
+simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that
+to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the
+"_Journal de Genève_" should be reproduced in the French press), the
+ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time
+to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and
+ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and
+appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic
+merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their
+essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of
+incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that
+they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the
+emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many
+millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual.
+For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the
+invisible Europe.
+
+Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made
+available in the volumes _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ and _Les précurseurs_,
+be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at
+the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a
+force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the
+significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the
+sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic
+character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to mind the frenzy of
+the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was
+devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has
+already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We
+have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance
+the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation
+responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal,
+that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that
+_Au-dessus de la mêlée_, whose trend already seems to us a matter of
+course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and
+that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was
+forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured
+wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke
+the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal
+amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that
+Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall
+Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more
+than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is
+scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as
+commonplace." To-day, for the moment at any rate, we may have entered
+into a period, when many of Rolland's utterances are accounted
+commonplace because, since he wrote, they have become the small change
+of thousands of other writers. Yet there was a day when each of these
+words seemed to cut like a whip-lash. The excitement they aroused gives
+us the historic measure of the need that they should be spoken. The
+wrath of Rolland's opponents, of which the only remaining record is a
+pile of pamphlets, bears witness to the heroism of him who was the first
+to take his stand "above the battle." Let us not forget that it was then
+the crime of crimes, "de dire ce qui est juste et humain." Men were
+still so drunken with the fumes of the first bloodshed that they would
+have been fain, as Rolland himself has phrased it, "to crucify Christ
+once again should he have risen; to crucify him for saying, Love one
+another."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ABOVE THE BATTLE
+
+
+On September 22, 1914, the essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was published
+in "_Le Journal de Genève_." After the preliminary skirmish with Gerhart
+Hauptmann, came this declaration of war against hatred, this foundation
+stone of the invisible European church. The title, "Above the Battle,"
+has become at once a watchword and a term of abuse; but amid the
+discordant quarrels of the factions, the essay was the first utterance
+to sound a clear note of imperturbable justice, bringing solace to
+thousands.
+
+It is animated by a strange and tragical emotion, resonant of the hour
+when countless myriads were bleeding and dying, and among them many of
+Rolland's intimate friends. It is the outpouring of a riven heart, the
+heart of one who would fain move others, breathing as it does the heroic
+determination to try conclusions with a world that has fallen a prey to
+madness. It opens with an ode to the youthful fighters. "O young men
+that shed your blood for the thirsty earth with so generous a joy! O
+heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this
+splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by
+a common ideal, ... all of you, marching to your deaths, are dear to
+me.... Those years of skepticism and gay frivolity in which we in
+France grew up are avenged in you.... Conquerors or conquered, quick or
+dead, rejoice!" But after this ode to the faithful, to those who believe
+themselves to be discharging their highest duty, Rolland turns to
+consider the intellectual leaders of the nations, and apostrophises them
+thus: "For what are you squandering them, these living riches, these
+treasures of heroism entrusted to your hands? What ideal have you held
+up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves?
+Mutual slaughter! A European war!" He accuses the leaders of taking
+cowardly refuge behind an idol they term fate. Those who understood
+their responsibilities so ill that they failed to prevent the war,
+inflame and poison it now that it has begun. A terrible picture. In all
+countries, everything becomes involved in the torrent; among all
+peoples, there is the same ecstasy for that which is destroying them.
+"For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men
+blindly one against another.... All the forces of the spirit, of reason,
+of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the
+disposal of the armies in every state. There is not one among the
+leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim that the cause
+of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human
+progress." He mockingly alludes to the preposterous duels between
+philosophers and men of science; and to the failure of what professed to
+be the two great internationalist forces of the age, Christianity and
+socialism, to stand aloof from the fray. "It would seem, then, that
+love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other
+countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defense
+of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian
+dilettantism, which revolts me to the very depths of my being. No! Love
+of my country does not demand that I should hate and slay those noble
+and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor
+them and seek to unite with them for our common good." After some
+further discussion of the attitude of Christians and of socialists
+towards the war, he continues: "There was no reason for war between the
+western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do
+not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a
+minority, a minority vitally interested in the diffusion of hatred; but
+our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty, and for that alone." It
+was a scandal, therefore, that at the outbreak of the war the
+intellectual leaders should have allowed the purity of their thought to
+be besmirched. It was monstrous that intelligence should permit itself
+to be enslaved by the passions of a puerile and absurd policy of race.
+Never should we forget, in the war now being waged, the essential unity
+of all our fatherlands. "Humanity is a symphony of great collective
+souls. He who cannot understand it and love it until he has destroyed a
+part of its elements, is a barbarian.... For the finer spirits of
+Europe, there are two dwelling places: our earthly fatherland, and the
+City of God. Of the one we are the guests, of the other the builders....
+It is our duty to build the walls of this city ever higher and
+stronger, that it may dominate the injustice and the hatred of the
+nations. Then shall we have a refuge wherein the brotherly and free
+spirits from out all the world may assemble." This faith in a lofty
+ideal soars like a sea-mew over the ocean of blood. Rolland is well
+aware how little hope there is that his words can make themselves
+audible above the clamor of thirty million warriors. "I know that such
+thoughts have little chance of being heard to-day. I do not speak to
+convince. I speak only to solace my conscience. And I know that at the
+same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all
+lands, cannot and dare not speak for themselves." As ever, he is on the
+side of the weak, on the side of the minority. His voice grows stronger,
+for he knows that he is speaking for the silent multitude.
+
+[Illustration: Romain Rolland at the time of writing _Above the
+Battle_]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED
+
+
+The essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was the first stroke of the woodman's
+axe in the overgrown forest of hatred; thereupon, a roaring echo
+thundered from all sides, reverberating reluctantly in the newspapers.
+Undismayed, Rolland resolutely continued his work. He wished to cut a
+clearing into which a few sunbeams of reason might shine through the
+gloomy and suffocating atmosphere. His next essays aimed at illuminating
+an open space of such a character. Especially notable were _Inter Arma
+Caritas_ (October 30, 1914); _Les idoles_ (December 4, 1914); _Notre
+prochain l'ennemi_ (March 15, 1915); _Le meutre des élites_ (June 14,
+1915). These were attempts to give a voice to the silent. "Let us help
+the victims! It is true that we cannot do very much. In the everlasting
+struggle between good and evil, the balance is unequal. We require a
+century for the upbuilding of that which a day destroys. Nevertheless,
+the frenzy lasts no more than a day, and the patient labor of
+reconstruction is our daily bread. This work goes on even during an hour
+when the world is perishing around us."
+
+The poet had at length come to understand his task. It is useless to
+attack the war directly. Reason can effect nothing against the elemental
+forces. But he regards it as his predestined duty to combat throughout
+the war everything that the passions of men lead them to undertake for
+the deliberate increase of horror, to combat the spiritual poison of the
+war. The most atrocious feature of the present struggle, one which
+distinguishes it from all previous wars, is this deliberate poisoning.
+That which in earlier days was accepted with simple resignation as a
+disastrous visitation like the plague, was now presented in a heroic
+light, as a sign of "the grandeur of the age." An ethic of force, an
+ethic of destruction, was being preached. The mass struggle of the
+nations was being purposely inflamed to become the mass hatred of
+individuals. Rolland, therefore, was not, as many have supposed,
+attacking the war; he was attacking the ideology of the war, the
+artificial idolization of brutality. As far as the individual was
+concerned, he attacked the readiness to accept a collective morality
+constructed solely for the duration of the war; he attacked the
+surrender of conscience in face of the prevailing universalization of
+falsehood; he attacked the suspension of inner freedom which was
+advocated until the war should be over.
+
+His words, therefore, are not directed against the masses, not against
+the peoples. These know not what they do; they are deceived; they are
+dumb driven cattle. The diffusion of lying has made it easy for them to
+hate. "Il est si commode de haïr sans comprendre." The fault lies with
+the inciters, with the manufacturers of lies, with the intellectuals.
+They are guilty, seven times guilty, because, thanks to their education
+and experience, they cannot fail to know the truth which nevertheless
+they repudiate; because from weakness, and in many cases from
+calculation, they have surrendered to the current of uninstructed
+opinion, instead of using their authority to deflect this current into
+better channels. Of set purpose, instead of defending the ideals they
+formerly espoused, the ideals of humanity and international unity, they
+have revived the ideas of the Spartans and of the Homeric heroes, which
+have as little place in our time as have spears and plate-armor in these
+days of machine-gun warfare. Heretofore, to the great spirits of all
+time, hatred has seemed a base and contemptible accompaniment of war.
+The thoughtful among the non-combatants put it away from them with
+loathing; the warriors rejected the sentiment upon grounds of chivalry.
+Now, hatred is not merely supported with all the arguments of logic,
+science, and poesy; but is actually, in defiance of gospel teaching,
+raised to a place among the moral duties, so that every one who resists
+the feeling of collective hatred is branded as a traitor. Against these
+enemies of the free spirit, Rolland takes up his parable: "Not only have
+they done nothing to lessen reciprocal misunderstanding; not only have
+they done nothing to limit the diffusion of hate; on the contrary, with
+few exceptions, they have done everything in their power to make hatred
+more widespread and more venomous. In large part, this war is their war.
+By their murderous ideologies they have led thousands astray. With
+criminal self-confidence, unteachable in their arrogance, they have
+driven millions to death, sacrificing their fellows to the phantoms
+which they, the intellectuals, have created." The persons to whom blame
+attaches are those who know, or who might have known; but who, from
+sloth, cowardice, or weakness, from desire for fame or for some other
+personal advantage, have given themselves over to lying.
+
+The hatred breathed by the intellectuals was a falsehood. Had it been a
+truth, had it been a genuine passion, those who were inspired with this
+feeling would have ceased talking and would themselves have taken up
+arms. Most people are moved either by hatred or by love, not by abstract
+ideas. For this reason, the attempt to sow dissension among millions of
+unknown individuals, the attempt to "perpetuate" hatred, was a crime
+against the spirit rather than against the flesh. It was a deliberate
+falsification to include leaders and led, drivers and driven, in a
+single category; to generalize Germany as an integral object for hatred.
+We must join one fellowship or the other, that of the truthtellers or
+that of the liars, that of the men of conscience or that of the men of
+phrase. Just as in _Jean Christophe_, Rolland, in order to show forth
+the universally human fellowship, had distinguished between the true
+France and the false, between the old Germany and the new; so now in
+wartime did he draw attention to the ominous resemblance between the war
+fanatics in both camps, and to the heroic isolation of those who were
+above the battle in all the belligerent lands. Thus did he endeavor to
+fulfill Tolstoi's dictum, that it is the function of the imaginative
+writer to strengthen the ties that bind men together. In Rolland's
+comedy _Liluli_, the "cerveaux enchaînés," dressed in various national
+uniforms, dance the same Indian war-dance under the lash of Patriotism,
+the negro slave-driver. There is a terrible resemblance between the
+German professors and those of the Sorbonne. All of them turn the same
+logical somersaults; all join in the same chorus of hate.
+
+But the fellowship to which Rolland wishes to draw our attention, is the
+fellowship of solace. It is true that the humanizing forces are not so
+well organized as the forces of destruction. Free opinion is gagged,
+whereas falsehood bellows through the megaphones of the press. Truth has
+to be sought out with painful labor, for the state makes it its business
+to hide truth. Nevertheless, those who search perseveringly can discover
+truth among all nations and among all races. In these essays, Rolland
+gives many examples, drawn equally from French and from German sources,
+showing that even in the trenches, nay, that especially in the trenches,
+thousands upon thousands are animated with brotherly feelings. He
+publishes letters from German soldiers, side by side with letters from
+French soldiers, all couched in the same phraseology of human
+friendliness. He tells of the women's organizations for helping the
+enemy, and shows that amid the cruelty of arms the same lovingkindness
+is displayed on both sides. He publishes poems from either camp, poems
+which exhale a common sentiment. Just as in his _Vie des hommes
+illustres_ he had wished to show the sufferers of the world that they
+were not alone, but that the greatest minds of all epochs were with
+them, so now does he attempt to convince those who amid the general
+madness are apt to regard themselves as outcasts because they do not
+share the fire and fury of the newspapers and the professors, that they
+have everywhere silent brothers of the spirit. Once more, as of old, he
+wishes to unite the invisible community of the free. "I feel the same
+joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing
+the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly
+March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They
+show that the warmth of life persists below the surface, and that soon
+nothing will prevent its rising again." Undismayed he continues on his
+"humble pélérinage," endeavoring "to discover, beneath the ruins, the
+hearts of those who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human
+brotherhood. What a melancholy joy it is to come to their aid." For the
+sake of this consolation, for the sake of this hope, he gives a new
+significance even to war, which he has hated and dreaded from early
+childhood. "To war we owe one painful benefit, in that it has served to
+bring together those of all nations who refuse to share the prevailing
+sentiments of national hatred. It has steeled their energies, has
+inspired them with an indefatigable will. How mistaken are those who
+imagine that the ideas of human brotherhood have been stifled.... Not
+for a moment do I doubt the coming unity of the European fellowship.
+That unity will be realized. The war is but its baptism of blood."
+
+Thus does the good Samaritan, the healer of souls, endeavor to bring to
+the despairing that hope which is the bread of life. Perchance Rolland
+speaks with a confidence that runs somewhat in advance of his innermost
+convictions. But he only who realized the intense yearnings of the
+innumerable persons who at that date were imprisoned in their respective
+fatherlands, barred in the cages of the censorships, he alone can
+realize the value to such poor captives of Rolland's manifestoes of
+faith, words free from hatred, bringing at length a message of
+brotherhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+OPPONENTS
+
+
+From the first, Rolland knew perfectly well that in a time when party
+feeling runs high, no task can be more ungrateful than that of one who
+advocates impartiality. "The combatants are to-day united in one thing
+only, in their hatred for those who refuse to join in any hymn of hate.
+Whoever does not share the common delirium, is suspect. And nowadays,
+when justice cannot spare the time for thorough investigation, every
+suspect is considered tantamount to a traitor. He who undertakes in
+wartime to defend peace on earth, must realize that he is staking his
+faith, his name, his tranquillity, his repute, and even his friendships.
+But of what value would be a conviction on behalf of which a man would
+take no risks?" Rolland was likewise aware that the most dangerous of
+all positions is that between the fronts, but this certainty of danger
+was but a tonic to his conscience. "If it be really needful, as the
+proverb assures us, to prepare for war in time of peace, it is no less
+needful to prepare for peace in time of war. In my view, the latter role
+is assigned to those who stand outside the struggle, and whose mental
+life has brought them into unusually close contact with the world-all. I
+speak of the members of that little lay church, of those who have been
+exceptionally well able to maintain their faith in the unity of human
+thought, of those for whom all men are sons of the same father. If it
+should chance that we are reviled for holding this conviction, the
+reviling is in truth an honor to us, and we may be satisfied to know
+that we shall earn the approbation of posterity."
+
+It is plain that Rolland is forearmed against opposition. Nevertheless,
+the fierceness of the onslaughts exceeded all expectation. The first
+rumblings of the storm came from Germany. The passage in the _Letter to
+Gerhart Hauptmann_, "are you the sons of Goethe or of Attila," and
+similar utterances, aroused angry echoes. A dozen or so professors and
+scribblers hastened to "chastise" French arrogance. In the columns of
+"_Die Deutsche Rundschau_," a narrow-minded pangerman disclosed the
+great secret that under the mask of neutrality _Jean Christophe_ had
+been a most dangerous French attack upon the German spirit.
+
+French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the
+publication of the essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was reported. Difficult
+as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were
+forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the
+public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot.
+Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from
+leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper
+articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume
+from the pen of a carpet hero. This book was furnished with a thousand
+proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier,
+avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no
+lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning
+of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that
+he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher
+was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately
+falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between
+the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies
+and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press
+combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured
+to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced:
+"Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in
+alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends,
+the "ami de la première heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier
+work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a
+book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government
+likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect
+"materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part
+at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by
+Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the
+authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the
+fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show
+that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan
+to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies.
+
+All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the
+forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from
+a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp
+the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that
+he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the
+most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From
+a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the
+frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely
+exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued
+to develop his ideas.
+
+In the eyes of the patriots, Rolland's first crime was that he openly
+discussed the moral problems of the war. "On ne discute pas la patrie."
+The first axiom of war ethics is that those who cannot or will not shout
+with the crowd must hold their peace. Soldiers must never be taught to
+think; they must only be incited to hate. A lie which promotes
+enthusiasm is worth more in wartime than the best of truths. In
+imitation of the principles of the Catholic church, reflection, doubt,
+is deemed a crime against the infallible dogma of the fatherland. It was
+enough that Rolland should wish to turn things over in his mind, instead
+of unquestioningly affirming the current political theses. Thereby he
+abandoned the "attitude française"; thereby he was stamped as "neutre."
+In those days "neutre" was a good rime to "traître."
+
+Rolland's second crime was that he desired to be just to all mankind,
+that he continued to regard the enemy as human beings, that among them
+he distinguished between guilty and not guilty, that he had as much
+compassion for German sufferers as for French, that he did not hesitate
+to refer to the Germans as brothers. The dogma of patriotism prescribed
+that for the duration of the war the feelings of humanitarianism should
+be stifled. Justice should be put away on the top shelf, to keep company
+there, until victory had been secured, with the divine command, Thou
+shalt not kill. One of the pamphlets against Rolland bears as its motto,
+"Pendant une guerre tout ce qu'on donne de l'amour à l'humanité, on le
+vole à la patrie"--though it must be observed that from the outlook of
+those who share Rolland's views, the order of the terms might well be
+inverted.
+
+The third crime, the offense which seemed most unpardonable of all, and
+the one most dangerous to the state, was that Rolland refused to regard
+a military victory as likely to furnish the elixir of morality, to
+promote spiritual regeneration, to bring justice upon earth. Rolland's
+sin lay in holding that a just and bloodless peace, a complete
+reconciliation, a fraternal union of the European nations, would be more
+fruitful of blessing than an enforced peace, which could only sow the
+dragon's teeth of hatred and of new wars. In France at this date, those
+who wished to fight the war to a finish, to fight until the enemy had
+been utterly crushed, coined the term "defeatist" for those who desired
+peace to be based upon a reasonable understanding. Thus was paralleled
+the German terminology, which spoke of "Flaumachern" (slackers) and of
+"Schmachfriede" (shameful peace). Rolland, who had devoted the whole of
+his life to the elucidation of moral laws higher than those of force,
+was stigmatized as one who would poison the morale of the armies, as
+"l'initiateur du défaitisme." To the militarists, he seemed to be the
+last representative of "dying Renanism," to be the center of a moral
+power, and for this reason they endeavored to represent his ideas as
+nonsensical, to depict him as a Frenchman who desired the defeat of
+France. Yet his words stood unchallenged: "I wish France to be loved. I
+wish France to be victorious, not through force; not solely through
+right (even that would be too harsh); but through the superiority of a
+great heart. I wish that France were strong enough to fight without
+hatred; strong enough to regard even those whom she must strike down, as
+her brothers, as erring brothers, to whom she must extend her fullest
+sympathy as soon as she has put it beyond their power to injure her."
+Rolland made no attempt to answer even the most calumnious of attacks.
+He quietly let the invectives pass, knowing that the thought which he
+felt himself commissioned to announce, was inviolable and imperishable.
+Never had he fought men, but only ideas. The hostile ideas, in this
+case, had long since been answered by the figures of his own creation.
+They had been answered by Olivier, the free Frenchman who hated hatred;
+by Faber, the Girondist, to whom conscience stood higher than the
+arguments of the patriots; by Adam Lux, who compassionately asked his
+fanatical opponent, "N'es tu pas fatigué de ta baine"; by Teulier, and
+by all the great characters through whom during more than two decades he
+had been giving expression to his outlook upon the struggle of the day.
+He was unperturbed at standing alone against almost the entire nation.
+He recalled Chamfort's saying, "There are times when public opinion is
+the worst of all possible opinions." The immeasurable wrath, the
+hysterical frenzy of his opponents, confirmed his conviction that he was
+right, for he felt that their clamor for force betrayed their sense of
+the weakness of their own arguments. Smilingly he contemplated their
+artificially inflamed anger, addressing them in the words of his own
+Clerambault: "You say that yours is the better way? The only good way?
+Very well, take your own path, and leave me to take mine. I make no
+attempt to compel you to follow me. I merely show you which way I am
+going. What are you so excited about? Perhaps at the bottom of your
+hearts you are afraid that my way is the right one?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FRIENDS
+
+
+As soon as he had uttered his first words, a void formed round this
+brave man. As Verhaeren finely phrased it, he positively loved to
+encounter danger, whereas most people shun danger. His oldest friends,
+those who had known his writings and his character from youth upwards,
+left him in the lurch; prudent folk quietly turned their backs on him;
+newspaper editors and publishers refused him hospitality. For the
+moment, Rolland seemed to be alone. But, as he had written in _Jean
+Christophe_, "A great soul is never alone. Abandoned by friends, such a
+one makes new friends, and surrounds himself with a circle of that
+affection of which he is himself full."
+
+Necessity, the touchstone of conscience, had deprived him of friends,
+but had also brought him friends. It is true that their voices were
+hardly audible amid the clangor of the opponents. The war-makers had
+control of all the channels of publicity. They roared hatred through the
+megaphones of the press. Friends could do no more than give expression
+to a few cautious words in such petty periodicals as could slip through
+the meshes of the censorship. Enemies formed a compact mass, flowing to
+the attack in a huge wave (whose waters were ultimately to be dispersed
+in the morass of oblivion); his friends crystallized slowly and secretly
+around his ideas, but they were steadfast. His enemies were a regiment
+advancing fiercely to the attack at the word of command; his friends
+were a fellowship, working tranquilly, and united only through love.
+
+The friends in Paris had the hardest task. It was barely possible for
+them to communicate with him openly. Half of their letters to him and
+half of his replies were lost on the frontier. As from a beleaguered
+fortress, they hailed the liberator, the man who was freely proclaiming
+to the world the ideals which they were forbidden to utter. Their only
+possible way of defending their ideas was to defend the man. In
+Rolland's own fatherland, Amédée Dunois, Fernand Desprès, Georges Pioch,
+Renaitour, Rouanet, Jacques Mesnil, Gaston Thiesson, Marcel Martinet,
+and Sévérine, boldly championed him against calumny. A valiant woman,
+Marcelle Capy, raised the standard, naming her book _Une voix de femme
+dans la mêlée_. Separated from him by the blood-stained sea, they looked
+towards him as towards a distant lighthouse upon the rock, and showed
+their brothers the signal of hope.
+
+In Geneva there formed round him a group of young writers, disciples and
+friends, winning strength from his strength. P. J. Jouve author of _Vous
+êtes des hommes_ and _Danse des morts_, glowing with anger and with love
+of goodness, suffering intensely at witnessing the injustice of the
+world, Olivier redivivus, gave expression in his poems to his hatred for
+force. René Arcos, who like Jouve had realized all the horror of war
+and who hated war no less intensely, had a clearer comprehension of the
+dramatic moment, was more thoughtful than Jouve, but equally simple and
+kindhearted. Arcos extolled the European ideal; Charles Baudouin the
+ideal of eternal goodness. Franz Masereel, the Belgian artist, developed
+his humanist plaint in a series of magnificent woodcuts. Guilbeaux,
+zealot for the social revolution, ever ready to fight like a gamecock
+against authority, founded his monthly review "demain," which was a
+faithful representative of the European spirit for a time, until it
+succumbed because of its passion for the Russian revolution. Charles
+Baudouin founded the monthly review, "Le Carmel," providing a city of
+refuge for the persecuted European spirit, and a platform upon which the
+poets and imaginative writers of all lands could assemble under the
+banner of humanity. Jean Debrit in "La Feuille" combated the
+partisanship of the Latin Swiss press and attacked the war. Claude de
+Maguet founded "Les Tablettes," which, through the boldness of its
+contributors and through the drawings of Masereel, became the most
+vigorous periodical in Switzerland. A little oasis of independence came
+into existence, and hither the breezes from all quarters wafted
+greetings from the distance. Here alone was it possible to breathe a
+European air.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this circle was that, thanks to Rolland,
+enemy brethren were not excluded from spiritual fellowship. Whereas
+everywhere else people were infected with the hysteria of mass hatred
+or were terrified lest they should expose themselves to suspicion, and
+therefore avoided their sometime intimates of enemy countries like the
+pestilence should they chance to meet them in the streets of some
+neutral city, at a time when relatives were afraid to exchange letters
+of enquiry regarding the life or death of those of their own blood,
+Rolland would not for a moment deny his German friends. Never, indeed,
+had he shown more love to those among them who remained faithful, at an
+epoch when to love them was dangerous. He made himself known to them in
+public, and wrote to them freely. His words concerning these friendships
+will never be forgotten: "Yes, I have German friends; just as I have
+French, English, and Italian friends; just as I have friends among the
+members of every race. They are my wealth, which I am proud of, and
+which I seek to preserve. If a man has been so fortunate as to encounter
+loyal souls, persons with whom he can share his most intimate thoughts,
+persons with whom he is connected by brotherly ties, these ties are
+sacred, and the hour of trial is the last of hours in which they should
+be rent asunder. How cowardly would be the refusal to recognize these
+friends, in deference to the impudent demand of a public opinion which
+has no rights over our feelings.... How painful, how tragical, these
+friendships are at such a moment, the letters will show when they are
+published. But it is precisely by means of such friendships that we can
+defend ourselves against hatred, more murderous than war, for it poisons
+the wounds of war, and harms the hater equally with the object of
+hate."
+
+Immeasurable is the debt which friends and numberless unseen companions
+in adversity owe to Rolland for his brave and free attitude. He set an
+example to all those who, though they shared his sentiments, were
+isolated in obscurity, and who needed some such point of crystallization
+before their thoughts and feelings could be consolidated. It was above
+all for those who were not yet sure of themselves that this archetypal
+personality provided so splendid a stimulus. Rolland's steadfastness put
+younger men to shame. In his company we were stronger, freer, more
+genuine, more unprejudiced. Human loving kindness, transfigured by his
+ardor, radiated like a flame. What bound us together was not that we
+chanced to think alike, but a passionate exaltation, which often became
+a positive fanaticism for brotherhood. We foregathered in defiance of
+public opinion and in defiance of the laws of the belligerent states,
+exchanging confidences without reserve; our comradeship exposed us to
+all sorts of suspicions; these things served but to draw us closer
+together, and in many memorable hours we felt with a veritable
+intoxication the unprecedented quality of our friendship. We were but a
+couple of dozen who thus came together in Switzerland; Frenchmen,
+Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians. We few were the only ones
+among the hundreds of millions who could look one another in the face
+without hatred, exchanging our innermost thoughts. This little troop
+was all that then constituted Europe. Our unity, a grain of dust in the
+storm which was raging through the world, was perhaps the seed of the
+coming fraternity. How strong, how happy, how grateful did we often
+feel. For without Rolland, without the genius of his friendship, without
+the connecting link constituted by his disposition, we should never have
+attained to freedom and security. Each of us loved him in a different
+way, and all of us regarded him with equal veneration. To the French, he
+was the purest spiritual expression of their homeland; to us, he was the
+wonderful counterpart of the best in our own world. In this circle that
+formed round Rolland there was the sense of fellowship which has always
+characterized a religious community in the making. The hostility between
+our respective nations, and the consciousness of danger, fired our
+friendship to the pitch of exaggeration; while the example of the
+bravest and freest man we had ever known, brought out all that was best
+in us. When we were near him, we felt ourselves to be in the heart of
+true Europe. Whoever was able to know Rolland's inmost essence,
+acquired, as in the ancient saga, new energy for the wrestle with brute
+force.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LETTERS
+
+
+All that Rolland gave in those days to his friends and collaborators of
+the European fellowship, all that he gave by his immediate proximity,
+was but a part of his nature. For beyond these personal limits, he
+diffused a consolidating and helpful influence. Whoever turned to him
+with a question, an anxiety, a distress, or a suggestion, received an
+answer. In hundreds upon hundreds of letters he spread the message of
+brotherhood, splendidly fulfilling the vow he had made a quarter of a
+century earlier, at the time when Tolstoi's letter had brought him
+spiritual healing. In Rolland's self there had come to life, not only
+Jean Christophe the believer, but likewise Leo Tolstoi, the great
+consoler.
+
+Unknown to the world, he shouldered a stupendous burden during the five
+years of the war. For whoever found himself in revolt against the time
+and in conflict with the prevailing miasma of falsehood, whoever needed
+counsel in a matter of conscience, whoever wanted aid, knew where he
+could turn for what he sought. Who else in Europe inspired such
+confidence? The unknown friends of Jean Christophe, the nameless
+brothers of Olivier, hidden in out-of-the-way parts, knowing no one to
+whom they could whisper their doubts--in whom could they better confide
+than in this man who had first brought them tidings of goodness? They
+sent him requests, submitted proposals, disclosed the turmoil of their
+consciences. Soldiers wrote to him from the trenches; mothers penned
+letters to him in secret. Many of the writers did not venture to give
+their names, merely wishing to send a message of sympathy and to
+inscribe themselves citizens of that invisible "republic of free souls"
+which the author of _Jean Christophe_ had founded amid the warring
+nations. Rolland accepted the infinite labor of being the centralizing
+point and administrator of all these distresses and plaints, of being
+the recipient of all these confessions, of being the consoler of a world
+divided against itself. Wherever there was a stirring of European, of
+universally human sentiment, Rolland did his best to receive and sustain
+it; he was the crossways towards which all these roads converged. At the
+same time he was continuously in communication with leading
+representatives of the European faith, with those of all lands who had
+remained loyal to the free spirit. He studied the periodicals of the day
+for messages of reconciliation. Wherever a man or a work was devoted to
+the reconsolidation of Europe, Rolland's help was ready.
+
+These hundreds and thousands of letters combine to form an ethical
+achievement such as has not been paralleled by any previous writer. They
+brought happiness to countless solitary souls, strength to the wavering,
+hope to the despairing. Never was the poet's mission more nobly
+fulfilled. Considered as works of art, these letters, many of which have
+already been published, are among the finest and maturest of Rolland's
+literary creations. To bring solace is the most intimate purpose of his
+art. Here, when speaking as man to man he can give himself without
+stint, he displays a rhythmical energy, an ardor of lovingkindness,
+which makes many of the letters rank with the loveliest poems of our
+time. The sensitive modesty which often makes him reserved in
+conversation, was no longer a hindrance. The letters are frank
+confessions, wherein his free spirit converses freely with its fellows,
+disclosing the author's goodness, his passionate emotion. That which is
+so generously poured forth for the benefit of unknown correspondents, is
+the most intimate essence of his nature. Like Colas Breugnon he can say:
+"Voilà mon plus beau travail: les âmes que j'ai sculptées."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE COUNSELOR
+
+
+During these years, many people, young for the most part, came to
+Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing
+that their convictions were opposed to war, they ought to refuse
+military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and
+following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they
+should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether
+they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their
+country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought
+spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed
+to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed
+principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working
+moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.
+
+To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your
+conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no
+ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to
+another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own
+model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should
+seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He
+who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he
+follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple
+imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention
+to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate
+his ideal and save his inner freedom--provided always he acts in
+accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential
+was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot
+desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who
+claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other
+maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong,
+the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept
+away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the
+crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical
+instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a
+Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of
+serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died
+for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.
+
+There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth
+is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own.
+Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism,
+serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all
+remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave."
+Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself
+believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is
+cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie.
+There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner
+experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are
+the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind,
+must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a
+moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in
+consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under
+modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion.
+"A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of
+self-sacrifice."
+
+Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such
+free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any
+man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of
+the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our
+present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever
+broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked
+within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania
+were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had
+asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier
+as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians would
+have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments,
+a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt,
+could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom
+of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the
+recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience
+should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one
+recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for
+mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and
+strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation
+of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the
+intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a
+despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons
+who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the
+collective impulse."
+
+Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands
+that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own
+conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks
+clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by
+words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire
+generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the
+world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which
+he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it
+was the moral simplicity of his own example.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE SOLITARY
+
+
+Rolland's life was now in touch with the life of the whole world. It
+radiated influence in all directions. Yet how lonely was this man during
+the five years of voluntary exile. He dwelt apart at Villeneuve by the
+lake of Geneva. His little room resembled that in which he had lived in
+Paris. Here, too, were piles of books and pamphlets; here was a plain
+deal table; here was a piano, the companion of his hours of relaxation.
+His days, and often his nights were spent at work. He seldom went for a
+walk, and rarely received a visitor, for his friends were cut off from
+him, and even his parents and his sister could only get across the
+frontier about once a year. But the worst feature of this loneliness was
+that it was loneliness in a glass house. He was continually spied upon:
+his least words were listened for by eavesdroppers; provocative agents
+sought him out, proclaiming themselves revolutionists and sympathizers.
+Every letter was read before it reached him; every word he spoke over
+the telephone was recorded; every interview was kept under observation.
+Romain Rolland in his glass prison-house was the captive of unseen
+powers.
+
+[Illustration: Rolland's Mother]
+
+It seems hardly credible to-day that during the last two years of the
+war Romain Rolland, to whose words the world is now eager to listen,
+should have had no facility for expressing his ideas in the newspapers,
+no publisher for his books, no possibility of printing anything beyond
+an occasional review article. His homeland had repudiated him; he was
+the "fuoruscito" of the middle ages, was placed under a ban. The more
+unmistakably he proclaimed his spiritual independence, the less did he
+find himself regarded as a welcome guest in Switzerland. He was
+surrounded by an atmosphere of secret suspicion. By degrees, open
+attacks had been replaced by a more dangerous form of persecution. A
+gloomy silence was established around his name and works. His earlier
+companions had more and more withdrawn from him. Many of the new
+friendships had been dissolved, for the younger men in especial were
+devoting their interest to political questions instead of to things of
+the spirit. The more stormy the outside world, the more oppressive the
+stillness of Rolland's existence. He had no wife as helpmate. What to
+him was the best of all companionship, the companionship of his own
+writings, was now unattainable, for he had no freedom of publication in
+France. His country was closed to him, his place of refuge was beset
+with a hundred eyes. Most homeless among the homeless, he lived, as his
+beloved Beethoven had said, "in the air," lived in the realm of the
+ideal, in invisible Europe. Nothing shows better the energy of his
+living goodness than that he was no whit embittered by his experience,
+and that the ordeal has served but to strengthen his faith. For this
+utter solitude among men was a true fellowship with mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DIARY
+
+
+There was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse
+daily--his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the
+war, Rolland recorded his sentiments, his secret thoughts, and the
+messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned
+conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added
+to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than
+twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally
+hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors
+would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts.
+He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole
+remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to
+contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate
+views.
+
+It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this
+document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual
+history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and
+freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired
+moments are those when he is most personal. Consequently, just as the
+letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior
+to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human
+document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the
+war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what
+Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes,
+applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of
+personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was
+delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought
+help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and
+commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and
+loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in
+travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith.
+These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that
+faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the
+inexorable creditor we name Life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES
+
+
+Rolland opened his campaign against hatred almost immediately after the
+war began. For more than a year he continued to deliver his message in
+opposition to the frenzied screams of rancor arising from all lands. His
+efforts proved futile. The war-current rose yet higher, the stream being
+fed by new and ever new blood flowing from innocent victims. Again and
+again some additional country became involved in the carnage. At length,
+as the clamor still grew louder, Rolland paused for a moment to take
+breath. He felt that it would be madness were he to continue the attempt
+to outcry the cries of so many madmen.
+
+After the publication of _Au-dessus de la mêlée_, Rolland withdrew from
+public participation in the controversies with which the essays had been
+concerned. He had spoken his word; he had sown the wind and had reaped
+the whirlwind. He was neither weary in well-doing nor was he weak in
+faith, but he realized that it was useless to speak to a world which
+would not listen. In truth he had lost the sublime illusion with which
+he had been animated at the outset, the belief that men desire reason
+and truth. To his intelligence now grown clearer it was plain that men
+dread truth more than anything else in the world. He began, therefore,
+to settle accounts with his own mind by writing a satirical romance, and
+by other imaginative creations, while continuing his vast private
+correspondence. Thus for a time he was out of the hurly-burly. But after
+a year of silence, when the crimson flood continued to swell, and when
+falsehood was raging more furiously than ever, he felt it his duty to
+reopen the campaign. "We must repeat the truth again and again," said
+Goethe to Schermann, "for the error with which truth has to contend is
+continually being repreached, not by individuals, but by the mass."
+There was so much loneliness in the world that it had become necessary
+to form new ties. Signs of discontent and revolt in the various lands
+were more plentiful. More numerous, too, were the brave men in active
+revolt against the fate which was being forced on them. Rolland felt
+that it was incumbent upon him to give what support he could to these
+dispersed fighters, and to inspirit them for the struggle.
+
+In the first essay of the new series, _La route en lacets qui monte_,
+Rolland explained the position he had reached in December, 1916. He
+wrote: "If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith
+to which I gave expression in _Above the Battle_ has been shaken (it
+stands firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to
+speak to him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical
+insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of
+obstinacy, pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their
+minds because they do not wish to see the light. But we, as between
+brothers of all the nations; as between those who have known how to
+defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their faith in human
+solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid silence,
+oppression, and grief--we do well to exchange, as this year draws to a
+close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one another that
+during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning, that it
+never has been and never will be extinguished. In the abyss of suffering
+into which Europe is plunged, those who wield the pen must be careful
+never to add an additional pang to the mass of pangs already endured,
+and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the burning flood of hate.
+Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits which, athwart the
+mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavoring to break a trail for
+others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are courageously
+attempting in their respective lands to make their fellow-countrymen
+aware of their own faults.... My task is different, for it is to remind
+the hostile brethren of Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their
+best, to recall to them reasons for hoping that there will one day be a
+wiser and more loving humanity."
+
+The essays of the new series appeared, for the most part, in various
+minor reviews, seeing that the more influential and widely circulated
+periodicals had long since closed their columns to Rolland's pen. When
+we study them as a whole, in the collective volume entitled _Les
+précurseurs_, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been
+replaced by intense compassion, this corresponding to the change which
+had taken place at the fighting front. In all the armies, during the
+third year of the war, the fanatical impetus of the opening phases had
+vanished, and the men were now animated by a tranquil but stubborn
+sentiment of duty. Rolland is perhaps even more impassioned and more
+revolutionary in his outlook, and yet the essays are characterized by
+greater gentleness than of old. What he writes is no longer at grips
+with the war, but seems to soar above the war. His gaze is fixed upon
+the distance; his mind ranges down the centuries in search of like
+experiences; looking for consolation, he endeavors to discover a meaning
+in the meaningless. He recurs to the idea of Goethe, that human progress
+is effected by a spiral ascent. At a higher level men return to a point
+only a little above the old. Evolution and reversion go hand in hand.
+Thus he attempts to show that even at this tragical hour we can discern
+intimations of a better day.
+
+The essays comprising _Les précurseurs_ no longer attack adverse
+opinions and the war. They merely draw our attention to the existence in
+all countries of persons who are fighting for a very different ideal, to
+the existence of those heralds of spiritual unity whom Nietzsche speaks
+of as "the pathfinders of the European soul." It is too late to hope for
+anything from the masses. In the address _Aux peuples assassinés_, he
+has nothing but pity for the millions, for those who, with no will of
+their own, must be the mute instruments of others' aims, for those
+whose sacrifice has no other meaning than the beauty of self-sacrifice.
+His hope now turns exclusively towards the elite, towards the few who
+have remained free. These can bring salvation to the world by splendid
+spiritual imagery wherein all truth is mirrored. For the nonce, indeed,
+their activities seem unavailing, but their labors remain as a permanent
+record of their omnipresence. Rolland provides masterly analyses of the
+work of such contemporary writers; he adds silhouettes from earlier
+times; and he gives a portrait of Tolstoi, the great apostle of the
+doctrine of human freedom, with an account of the Russian teacher's
+views on war.
+
+To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the
+volume _Les précurseurs_, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918,
+entitled _Empédocle d'Agrigente et l'âge de la haine_. The great sage of
+classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his
+first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows
+that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of
+carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal
+oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history
+invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as
+inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of
+happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the
+time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages
+have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness
+of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to
+hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible.
+
+Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of
+hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those
+who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the
+infinite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LILULI
+
+
+During these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European,
+had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb.
+To many it may seem strange that Rolland's first imaginative work to be
+written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should
+have been a farcical comedy, _Liluli_. Yet this lightness of mood sprang
+from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when
+contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world,
+turned to irony as a means of abreaction--to employ a term introduced by
+the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric
+spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all
+Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from
+the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to
+bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to
+maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath
+remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be
+shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.
+
+_Liluli_ is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy, or
+rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the
+world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having
+become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost
+more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the
+time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more
+pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of
+1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the
+mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"),
+wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable,
+there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe.
+France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly
+forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight
+on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built
+across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so
+pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation
+progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more
+farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy,
+the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form
+of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols
+of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to
+seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is
+fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it
+were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and
+finally mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the
+scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in
+cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being
+a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being
+the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all
+her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare
+to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is
+a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own
+intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear
+testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it
+furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great
+Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and
+of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth
+is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split
+your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will
+never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void.
+Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be
+gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the
+roar of laughter which will set me free?"
+
+In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating
+laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be
+possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense
+against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new
+work maintains the rhythm of _Colas Breugnon_, with its vibrant rhymes,
+and although in _Liluli_ as in _Colas Breugnon_ there is a strain of
+raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of
+chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days
+of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from
+a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart
+overfull. In _Colas Breugnon_ we find the geniality, the joviality, of a
+broad laugh; in _Liluli_ the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a
+fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and
+kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world
+are heaped between the old France of _Colas Breugnon_ and the new France
+of _Liluli_. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder
+caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of
+the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the
+blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the
+war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my
+feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering
+throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of
+laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter
+irony.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+CLERAMBAULT
+
+
+_Liluli_, the tragi-comedy, was an outcry, a groan, a painful burst of
+mockery; it was an elementary gesture of reaction against suffering that
+was almost physical. But the author's serious, tranquil, and enduring
+settlement of accounts with the times is his novel, _Clerambault,
+l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_, which was slowly
+brought to completion in the space of four years. It is not
+autobiography, but a transcription of Rolland's ideas. Like Jean
+Christophe, it is simultaneously the biography of an imaginary
+personality and a comprehensive picture of the age. Matter is here
+collected that is elsewhere dispersed in manifestoes and letters.
+Artistically, it is the subterranean link between Rolland's manifold
+activities. Amid the hindrances imposed by his public duties, and amid
+the difficulties deriving from other outward circumstances, the author
+built the work upwards out of the depths of sorrow to the heights of
+consolation. It was not completed until the war was over, when Rolland
+had returned to Paris in the summer of 1920.
+
+Just as little as _Jean Christophe_ can _Clerambault_ properly be termed
+a novel. It is something less than a novel, and at the same time a
+great deal more. It describes the development, not of a man, but of an
+idea. As in _Jean Christophe_, so here, we have a philosophy presented,
+but not as something ready-made, complete, a finished datum. In company
+with a human being, we rise stage by stage from error and weakness
+towards clarity. In a sense it is a religious book, the history of a
+conversion, of an illumination. It is a modern legend of the saints in
+the form of the life history of a simple citizen. In a word, as the
+sub-title phrases it, we have here the story of a conscience. The
+ultimate significance of the book is freedom, the attainment of
+self-knowledge, but raised to the heroic plane inasmuch as knowledge
+becomes action. The scene is played in the intimate recesses of a man's
+nature, where he is alone with truth. In the new book, therefore, there
+is no countertype, as Olivier was the countertype to Jean Christophe;
+nor do we find in _Clerambault_ what was in truth the countertype of
+_Jean Christophe_, external life. Clerambault's countertype,
+Clerambault's antagonist, is himself; is the old, the earlier, the weak
+Clerambault; is the Clerambault with whom the new, the knowing, the true
+man has to wrestle, whom the new Clerambault has to overcome. The hero's
+heroism is not displayed, as was that of Jean Christophe, in a struggle
+with the forces of the visible world. Clerambault's war is waged in the
+invisible realm of thought.
+
+At the outset, therefore, Rolland designed to call the book "un
+roman-méditation." It was to have been entitled "L'un contre tous," this
+being an adaptation of La Boëtie's title _Contr'un_. The proposed name
+was, however, ultimately abandoned for fear of misunderstanding. The
+spiritual character of the new work recalls a long-forgotten tradition,
+the meditations of the old French moralists, the sixteenth century
+stoics who during a time of war-madness endeavored in besieged Paris to
+maintain their intellectual serenity by engaging in Platonic dialogues.
+The war itself, however, was not to be the theme, for the free soul does
+not strive with the elements. The author's intention was to discuss the
+spiritual accompaniments of this war, for these to Rolland seemed as
+tragical as the destruction of millions of men. His concern was the
+destruction of the individual soul in the deluge produced by the
+overflowing of the mass soul. He wished to show how strenuous an effort
+must be made by any one who would escape from the tyranny of the herd
+instinct; to display the hateful enslavement of individuals by the
+revengeful, jealous, and authoritarian mentality of the crowd; to depict
+the terrific efforts which a man must make if he would avoid being
+sucked into the maelstrom of epidemic falsehood. He hoped to make it
+clear that what appears to be the simplest thing in the world is in
+reality the most difficult of tasks in these epochs of excessive
+solidarity, namely, for a man to remain what he really is, and not to
+become that which the levelling forces of the world, the fatherland, or
+some other artificial community, would fain make of him.
+
+Romain Rolland deliberately refrained from casting his hero in a heroic
+mold, the treatment thus differing from what he had chosen in the case
+of Jean Christophe. Agenor Clerambault is an inconspicuous figure, a
+quiet fellow of little account, an author of no particular note, one of
+those persons whose literary work succeeds in pleasing a complaisant
+generation, though it has no significance for posterity. He has the
+nebulous idealism of mediocre minds; he hymns the praises of perpetual
+peace and international conciliation. His own tepid goodness makes him
+believe that nature is good, is man's wellwisher, desiring to lead
+mankind gently onward towards a more beautiful future. Life does not
+torment him with problems, and he therefore extols life amid the
+tranquil comforts of his bourgeois existence. Blessed with a kindly and
+somewhat simple-minded wife, and with two children, a son and a
+daughter, he may be considered a modern Theocritus wearing the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honor, singing the joyful present and the still more
+joyful future of our ancient cosmos.
+
+The quiet suburban household is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt with
+the news of the outbreak of war. Clerambault takes the train to Paris;
+and no sooner is he sprinkled with spray from the hot waves of
+enthusiasm, than all his ideals of international amity and perpetual
+peace vanish into thin air. He returns home a fanatic, oozing hate, and
+steaming with phrases. Under the influence of the tremendous storm he
+begins to sound his lyre: Theocritus has become Pindar, a war poet.
+Rolland gives a marvelously vivid description of something every one of
+us has witnessed, showing how Clerambault, like all persons of average
+nature, really takes a delight in horrors, however unwilling he may be
+to admit it even to himself. He is rejuvenated, his life seems to move
+on wings; the enthusiasm of the masses stirs the almost extinguished
+flame of enthusiasm in his own breast; he is fired by the national fire;
+he is physically and mentally refreshed by the new atmosphere. Like so
+many other mediocrities, he secures in these days his greatest literary
+triumph. His war songs, precisely because they give such vigorous
+expression to the sentiments of the man in the street, become a national
+property. Fame and public favor are showered upon him, so that (at this
+time when millions of his fellows are perishing) he feels well,
+self-confident, alive as never before.
+
+His pride is increased, his joy of life accentuated, when his son Maxime
+leaves for the front filled with martial ardor. His first thought, a few
+months later, when the young man comes home on leave, is that Maxime
+should retail to him all the ecstasies of war. Strangely enough,
+however, the young soldier, whose eyes still burn with the sights he has
+seen, is unresponsive. Not wishing to mortify his father, he does not
+positively attempt to silence the latter's paeans, but for his part, he
+maintains silence. For days this muteness stands between them, and the
+father is unable to solve the riddle. He feels dumbly that his son is
+concealing something. But shame binds both their tongues. On the last
+day of the furlough, Maxime suddenly pulls himself together, and begins,
+"Father, are you quite sure ...?" But the question remains unfinished,
+utterance is choked. Still silent, the young man returns to the
+realities of war.
+
+A few days later there is a fresh offensive. Maxime is reported missing.
+Soon his father learns that he is dead. Now Clerambault gropes for the
+meaning of those last words behind the silence, and is tormented by the
+thought of what was left unspoken. He locks himself into his room, and
+for the first time he is alone with his conscience. He begins to
+question himself in search of the truth, and throughout the long night
+he communes with his soul as he traverses the road to Damascus. Piece by
+piece he tears away the wrapping of lies with which he has enveloped
+himself, until he stands naked before his own criticism. Prejudices have
+eaten deep into his skin, so that the blood flows as he plucks them from
+him. They must all be surrendered; the prejudice of the fatherland, the
+prejudice of the herd, must go; in the end he recognizes that one thing
+only is true, one thing only sacred, life. A fever of enquiry consumes
+him; the old Adam perishes in the flame; when the day dawns he is a new
+man.
+
+He knows the truth now, and wishes to strengthen his own faith. He goes
+to some of his fellows and talks to them. Most of them do not understand
+him. Others refuse to understand him. Some, however, among whom Perrotin
+the academician is notable, are yet more alarming. They know the truth.
+To their penetrating vision the nature of the popular idols has long
+been plain. But they are cautious folk. They compress their lips and
+smile at one another like the augurs of ancient Rome. Like Buddha, they
+take refuge in Nirvana, looking down calmly upon the madness of the
+world, tranquilly seated upon their pedestals of stone. Clerambault
+calls to mind that other Indian saint, who took a solemn vow that he
+would not withdraw from the world until he had delivered mankind from
+suffering. The truth still glows too fiercely within him; he feels as if
+it would stifle him as it strives to gush forth in volcanic eruption.
+Once again he plunges into the solitude of a wakeful night. Men's words
+have sounded empty. He listens to his conscience, and it speaks with the
+voice of his son. Truth knocks at the door of his soul, and he opens to
+truth. In this lonely night Clerambault begins to speak to his fellows;
+no longer to individuals, but to all mankind. For the first time the man
+of letters becomes aware of the poet's true mission, his responsibility
+for all persons and for everything. He knows that he is beginning a new
+war, he who alone must wage war for all. But the consciousness of truth
+is with him, his heroism has begun.
+
+"Forgive us, ye Dead," the dialogue of the country with its children, is
+published. At first no one heeds the pamphlet. But after a time it
+arouses public animosity. A storm of indignation bursts upon
+Clerambault, threatening to lay his life in ruins. Friends forsake him.
+Envy, which had long been crouching for a spring, now sends whole
+regiments to the attack. Ambitious colleagues seize the opportunity of
+proclaiming their patriotism in contrast with his deplorable sentiments.
+Worst of all for Clerambault in that his innocent wife and daughter
+have to suffer on his account. They do not upbraid him, but he feels as
+if he had aimed a shaft against them. He who has hitherto sunned himself
+in the warmth of family life and has enjoyed the comforts of modest
+fame, is now absolutely alone.
+
+Nevertheless he continues on his course, although these stations of the
+cross become harder and harder. Rolland shows how Clerambault finds new
+friends, only to discover that they too fail to understand him. How his
+words are mutilated, his ideas misapplied. How he is overwhelmed to
+learn that his fellows, those whom he wishes to help, have no desire for
+truth, but are nourished by falsehood; that they are continually in
+search, not of freedom, but of some new form of slavery. (In these
+wonderful passages the reader is again and again reminded of
+Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.) He perseveres in his pilgrimage even
+when he has lost faith in his power to help his fellow men, for this is
+no longer his goal. He passes men by, marching onward towards the
+unseen, towards truth; his love for truth exposing him ever more
+pitilessly to the hatred of men. By degrees he becomes entangled in a
+net of calumnies; his troubles develop into a "Clerambault affair"; at
+length a prosecution is initiated. The state has recognized its enemy in
+the free man. But while the case is still in progress, the "defeatist"
+meets his fate from the pistol bullet of a fanatic. Clerambault's end
+recalls the opening of the world catastrophe with the assassination of
+Jaurès.
+
+Never has the tragedy of conscience been more simply and more
+poignantly depicted than in this account of the martyrdom of an average
+man. Rolland's ripe spiritual powers, his magical faculty for combining
+mastery with the human touch, are here at their highest. Never was his
+outlook over the world so extensive, never was the view so serene, as
+from this last summit. And yet, though we are thus led upwards to the
+consideration of the ultimate problems of the spirit, we start from the
+plain of everyday life. It is the soul of a commonplace man, the soul it
+might seem of a weakling, which moves through this long passion. Herein
+lies the marvel of the moral solace which the book conveys. Rolland was
+the first to recognize the defect of his previous writings, considered
+as means of helping the average man. In the heroic biographies, heroism
+is displayed only by those in whom the heroic soul is inborn, only by
+those whose flight is winged with genius. In _Jean Christophe_, the
+moral victory is a triumph of native energy. But in _Clerambault_ we are
+shown that even the weakling, even the mediocre man, every one of us,
+can be stronger than the whole world if he have but the will. It is open
+to every man to be true, open to every man to win spiritual freedom, if
+he be at one with his conscience, and if he regard this fellowship with
+his conscience as of greater value than fellowship with men and with the
+age. For each man there is always time, for each man there is always
+opportunity, to become master of realities. Aërt, the first of Rolland's
+heroes to show himself greater than fate, speaks for us all when he
+says: "It is never too late to be free!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE LAST APPEAL
+
+
+For five years Romain Rolland was at war with the madness of the times.
+At length the fiery chains were loosened from the racked body of Europe.
+The war was over, the armistice had been signed. Men were no longer
+murdering one another; but their evil passions, their hate, continued.
+Romain Rolland's prophetic insight celebrated a mournful triumph. His
+distrust of victory, his reiterated warnings that conquerors are
+merciless, were more than justified by the revengeful reality. "Victory
+in arms is disastrous to the ideal of an unselfish humanity. Men find it
+extraordinarily difficult to remain gentle in the hour of triumph."
+These forecasts were terribly fulfilled. Forgotten were all the fine
+words anent the victory of freedom and right. The Versailles conference
+devoted itself to the installation of a new regime of force and to the
+humiliation of a defeated enemy. What the idealism of simpletons had
+expected to be the end of all wars, proved, as the true idealists who
+look beyond men towards ideas had foreseen, the seed of fresh hatred and
+renewed acts of violence.
+
+Once again, at the eleventh hour, Rolland raised his voice in an
+address to the man whom sanguine persons then regarded as the last
+representative of idealism, as the advocate of perfect justice. Woodrow
+Wilson, when he landed in Europe, was received by the exultant cries of
+millions. But the historian is aware "that universal history is but a
+succession of proofs that the conqueror invariably grows arrogant and
+thus plants the seed of new wars." Rolland felt that there was never
+greater need for a policy that should be moral, not militarist, that
+should be constructive, not destructive. The citizen of the world, the
+man who had endeavored to free the war from the stigma of hate, now
+tried to perform the same service on behalf of the peace. The European
+addressed the American in moving terms: "You alone, Monsieur le
+Président, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the
+policy of the nations, you alone enjoy world-wide moral authority. You
+inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate
+hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one
+another.... Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses,
+disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into
+excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the
+parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction.... Heir of
+George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a
+party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of
+the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full
+authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness
+and in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The
+world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations
+and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future
+hail you by the name of Reconciler!"
+
+The prophet's voice was drowned by the clamors for revenge. Bismarckism
+triumphed. Literally fulfilled was the prophecy that the peace would be
+as inhuman as the war had been. Humanity could find no abiding place
+among men. When the regeneration of Europe might have been begun, the
+sinister spirit of conquest continued to prevail. "There are no victors,
+but only vanquished."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND
+
+
+Despite all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued
+his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of
+fellowship. On the day when peace was signed, June 26, 1919, he
+published in "_L'Humanité_" a manifesto composed by himself and
+subscribed by sympathizers of all nationalities. In a world falling to
+ruin, it was to be the cornerstone of the invisible temple, the refuge
+of the disillusioned. With masterly touch Rolland sums up the past, and
+displays it as a warning to the future. He issues a clarion call.
+
+"Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for
+five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the
+warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being
+reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union,
+and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly
+built than that which previously existed.
+
+"The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed
+their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the
+governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any
+reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the
+elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
+moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in
+the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us
+for the future!
+
+"First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from
+the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and
+from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers,
+artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the
+plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal
+of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought
+reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
+logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding
+and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled,
+debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They
+have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance)
+they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or
+social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the
+fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and
+the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom
+of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their
+access of mania--now, Thought, which has been entangled in their
+struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: Original manuscript of _The Declaration of the
+Independence of the Mind_]
+
+"Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy
+alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is
+we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to
+bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed
+sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to
+point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night.
+Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice;
+we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
+frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of
+race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we
+work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know
+the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which
+struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which
+continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and
+its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that
+they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their
+blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant--Mind, which is free, one and
+manifold, eternal."
+
+Many hundreds of persons have signed this manifesto, for leading spirits
+in every land accept the message and make it their own. The invisible
+republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established
+among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who
+wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only
+enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his
+home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is
+the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforward he is an
+indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and
+the universal future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ENVOY
+
+
+Strange has been the rhythm of this man's life, surging again and again
+in passionate waves against the time, sinking once more into the abyss
+of disappointment, but never failing to rise on the crest of faith
+renewed. Once again we see Romain Rolland as prototype of those who are
+magnificent in defeat. Not one of his ideals, not one of his wishes, not
+one of his dreams, has been realized. Might has triumphed over right,
+force over spirit, men over humanity.
+
+Yet never has his struggle been grander, and never has his existence
+been more indispensable, than during recent years; for it is his
+apostolate alone which has saved the gospel of crucified Europe; and
+furthermore he has rescued for us another faith, that of the imaginative
+writer as the spiritual leader, the moral spokesman of his own nation
+and of all nations. This man of letters has preserved us from what would
+have been an imperishable shame, had there been no one in our days to
+testify against the lunacy of murder and hatred. To him we owe it that
+even during the fiercest storm in history the sacred fire of brotherhood
+was never extinguished. The world of the spirit has no concern with the
+deceptive force of numbers. In that realm, one individual can outweigh a
+multitude. For an idea never glows so brightly as in the mind of the
+solitary thinker; and in the darkest hour we were able to draw
+consolation from the signal example of this poet. One great man who
+remains human can for ever and for all men rescue our faith in
+humanity.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+I
+
+CRITICAL STUDIES
+
+Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne. (Histoire de l'opéra en Europe
+avant Lully et Scarlatti.) Fontemoing, Paris, 1895.
+
+Cur ars picturae apud Italos XVI saeculi deciderit Fontemoing, Paris,
+1895.
+
+Millet. Duckworth, London, 1902 (has appeared in English translation
+only).
+
+Vie de Beethoven. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+série IV, No. 10, Paris, 1903; Hachette, Paris, 1907; another edition
+with woodcuts by Perrichon, J. P. Laurens, P. A. Laurens, and Perrichon,
+published by Edouard Pelletan, Paris, 1909.
+
+Le Théâtre du Peuple. Cahiers de la quinzaine, série V, No. 4, Paris,
+1903; Hachette, Paris, 1908; enlarged edition, Hachette, Paris, 1913;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Paris als Musikstadt. Marquardt, Berlin, 1905 (has appeared in German
+translation only).
+
+La vie de Michel-Ange. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, série VII, No. 18; série VIII, No. 2, Paris, 1906; Hachette,
+Paris, 1907. Another edition in Les maîtres de l'art series, Librairie
+de l'art, ancien et moderne, Plon, Paris, 1905.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. L'opéra avant l'opéra.
+2. Le premier opèra joué à Paris: L'Orféo de Luigi Rossi. 3. Notes sur
+Lully. 4. Gluck. 5. Grétry. 6. Mozart.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. Berlioz. 2. Wagner:
+Siegfried; Tristan. 3. Saint-Saëns. 4. Vincent d'Indy. 5. Richard
+Strauss. 6. Hugo Wolf. 7. Don Lorenzo Perosi 8. Musique française et
+musique allemande. 9. Pelléas et Mélisande. 10. Le renouveau: esquisse
+du movement musical à Paris depuis 1870.
+
+Paul Dupin. Mercure musical. S. J. M. 15/12, 1908.
+
+Haendel. (Les maîtres de la musique.) Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Hachette, Paris, 1911.
+
+L'humble vie héroique. Pensées choisies et précédées d'une introduction
+par Alphonse Séché. Sansot, Paris, 1912.
+
+Empédocle d' Agrigente. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1917; La maison française
+d'art et edition, Paris, 1918.
+
+Voyage musical aux pays du passe. With woodcuts by D. Glans. Edouard
+Joseph, Paris, 1919; Hachette, Paris, 1920.
+
+Ecole des Hates Etudes Socials (1900-1910). Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+
+II
+
+POLITICAL STUDIES
+
+Au-dessus de la mêlée. Ollendorff, Paris, 1915.
+
+Les précurseurs. L'Humanité, Paris, 1919.
+
+Aux peuples assassinés. Jeunesses Socialistes Romandes, La
+Chaux-de-Fonds, 1917; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Aux peuples assassinés (under the title: Civilisation). Privately
+printed, Paris, 1918.
+
+Aux peuples assassinés. As frontispiece a wood-engraving by Frans
+Masereel. Restricted circulation. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+III
+
+NOVELS
+
+Jean-Christophe. 15 parts 1904-1912. Cahiers de la quinzaine, Série V,
+Nos. 9 and 10; Série VI, No. 8; Série VIII, Nos. 4, 6, 9; Série IX, Nos.
+13, 14, 15; Série X, Nos. 9, 10; Série XI, Nos. 7, 8; Série XIII, Nos.
+5, 6; Série XIV, Nos. 2, 3; Paris, 1904 et seq.
+
+Jean-Christophe. 10 vols. 1. L'aube. 2. Le matin. 3. L'adolescent 4 La
+révolte. (1904-1907.)
+
+Jean-Christophe à Paris. 1. La foire sur la place. 2. Antoinette. 3.
+Dans la maison. (1908-1910.)
+
+Jean-Christophe. La fin du voyage. 1. Les amies. 2. Le buisson ardent 3.
+La nouvelle journée. (1910-1912.) Ollendorff, Paris.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Ollendorff, Paris, 1918.
+
+Pierre et Luce. Le Sablier, Geneva, 1920; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Clerambault. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+IV
+
+PREFACES
+
+Introduction to Une lettre inédite de Tolstoi, Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+Série III, No. 9, Paris, 1902.
+
+Haendel et le Messie. (Preface to Le Messie de G. F. Haendel by Félix
+Raugel.) Dépôt de la Société coöpérative des compositeurs de musique,
+Paris, 1912.
+
+Stendhal et la musique. (Preface to La vie de Haydn in the complete
+edition of Stendhal's works.) Champion, Paris, 1913.
+
+Preface to Celles qui travaillent by Simone Bodève, Ollendorff, Paris,
+1913.
+
+Preface to Une voix de femme dans la mêlée by Marcelle Capy, Ollendorff,
+Paris, 1916.
+
+Anthologie des poètes contre la guerre. Le Sablier, Genera, 1920.
+
+
+V
+
+DRAMAS
+
+Saint Louis. (5 acts.) Revue de Paris, March-April, 1897.
+
+Aërt. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1898.
+
+Les loups. (3 acts.) Georges Bellais, Paris, 1898.
+
+Le triomphe de la raison. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris,
+1899.
+
+Danton. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1900; Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, Série II, No. 6, 1901.
+
+Le quatorze juillet. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, Série III, No.
+11, Paris, 1902.
+
+Le temps viendra. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, Série IV, No. 14,
+Paris, 1903; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Les trois amoureuses. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+La Montespan. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+Théâtre de la Révolution. Les loups. Danton. Le quatorze juillet.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Les tragédies de la foi. Saint Louis. Aërt. Le triomphe de la raison.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Liluli (with woodcuts by Frans Masereel). Le Sablier, Geneva, 1919;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS
+
+ENGLISH
+
+Millet. Translated by Clementina Black. Duckworth, London, 1902.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by F. Rothwell. Drane, London, 1907.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Constance Hull. With a brief analysis of the
+sonatas, symphonies, and the quartets, by A. Eaglefield Hull, and 24
+musical illustrations and 4 plates and an introduction by Edward
+Carpenter. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London, 1917.
+
+The Life of Michael Angelo. Translated by Frederic Lees. Heinemann,
+London, 1912.
+
+Tolstoy. Translated by Bernard Miall. Fisher Unwin, London, 1911.
+
+Some Musicians of former Days. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul,
+Trench, Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+Handel. Translated by A. Eaglefield Hull. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
+London, 1916.
+
+Musicians of To-day. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul, Trench,
+Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+The People's Theater. Translated by Barrett H. Clark. Holt, New York,
+1918; C. Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Go to the Ant. (Reflections on reading Auguste Sorel.) Translated by De
+Kay. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1919, New York.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by G. Lowes Dickinson,
+Bowes, Cambridge, 1914.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by Rev. Richards Roberts, M.
+A. Friends' Peace Committee, London, 1915.
+
+Above the Battle. Translated by C. K. Ogden. G. Allen & Unwin, London,
+1916.
+
+The Idols. Translated by C. K. Ogden. With a letter by R. Rolland to
+Dr. van Eeden on the rights of small nations. Bowes, Cambridge, 1915.
+
+The Forerunners. Translated by Eden & Cedar Paul. G. Allen & Unwin,
+London, 1920; Harcourt, Brace, U. S. A., 1920.
+
+The Fourteenth of July and Danton: two plays of the French Revolution.
+Translated with a preface by Barrett H. Clarke. Holt, New York, 1918; G.
+Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Liluli. The Nation, London, Sept 20 to Nov. 29, 1919; Boni & Liveright,
+New York, 1920.
+
+Jean Christophe. Translated by Gilbert Cannan. Heinemann, London,
+1910-1913; Holt, New York, 1911-1913.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York. 1921.
+
+
+GERMAN
+
+Beethoven. Translated by L. Langnese-Hug. Rascher, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Michelangelo. Translated by W. Herzog. Rütten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1918.
+
+Michelangelo. Rascher, Zurich, 1919.
+
+Tolstoi. Translated by W. Herzog. Rütten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Den hingeschlachteten Völkern, translated by Stefan Zweig. Rascher,
+Zurich, 1918.
+
+Au-dessus de la mêlée. Rütten & Loening, Frankfort.
+
+Les précurseurs. Rütten & Loeing, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Johann Christof. Translated by Otto & Erna Grautoff. Rütten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1912-1918.
+
+Meister Breugnon. Translated by Otto & Etna Grautoff. Rütten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by Stefan Zweig. Rütten & Loening, Frankfort,
+1920.
+
+Die Wölfe. Translated by W. Herzog. Müller, Munich, 1914.
+
+Danton. Translated by Lucy von Jacobi and W. Herzog. Müller, Munich,
+1919.
+
+Die Zeit wird kommen. Translated by Stefan Zweig. "Die Zwölf Bücher,"
+Tal, Vienna, 1920.
+
+
+SPANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by J. R. Jimenez, à la Residentia de
+Estudiantes de Madrid, 1914.
+
+Au-dessus de la mêlée. Delgado & Santonja, Madrid, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Toro y Gomez. Ollendorff, Paris-Madrid,
+1905-1910.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Agence de Librairie, Madrid, 1919.
+
+
+ITALIAN
+
+Au-dessus de la mêlée. Avanti, Milan, 1916.
+
+Aux peuples assassinés. Translated by Monanni with drawings by Frans
+Masereel. Libreria Internationale, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Cesare Alessandri. Sonzogno, Milan, 1920.
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by Maria Venti Felice le Monnier,
+Florence. [In the press.]
+
+
+RUSSIAN
+
+Théâtre de la Révolution. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg, St.
+Petersburg. 1909.
+
+Théâtre du Peuple. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg. St. Petersburg.
+1909.
+
+Empédocle d'Agrigente. [In the press.]
+
+Jean-Christophe. Unauthorized translation in 4 vols. Vetcherni Zvon,
+Moscow, 1912.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Authorized translation by M. Tchlenoff.
+
+
+DANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Branner, Copenhagen, 1915.
+
+Tolstoi. Branner, Copenhagen, 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Denmark & Norway, 1917.
+
+Au-dessus de la mêlée. Lios, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Hagerup, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Denmark & Norway; Norstedt, Stockholm, 1917.
+
+
+CZECH
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by M. Kalassova. Prague, 1912.
+
+Danton. 1920.
+
+
+POLISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Jacewski, Warsaw, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Edwige Sienkiewicz. Vols.
+
+I & II, Bibljoteka Sfinska, Warsaw, 1910; the remaining vols., Maski,
+Cracow, 1917-19--.
+
+
+SWEDISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Vie de Michelange. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1916.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Händel. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Millet. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Voyage musical au pays du passé. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Au-dessus de la mêleé. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Les précurseurs. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Théâtre de la Révolution. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Tragédies de la foi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Le temps viendra. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+
+Liluli. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1913-1917.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1919.
+
+Clerambault In course of preparation. Bonnier, Stockholm.
+
+
+DUTCH
+
+Vie de Beethoven, Simon, Amsterdam, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Brusse, Rotterdam, 1915.
+
+L'aube. Special edition, W. F. J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1919.
+
+
+JAPANESE
+
+Tolstoi Seichi Naruse, Tokyo, 1916. And many other unauthorized
+translations.
+
+
+GREEK
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Niramos. 1920.
+
+
+WORKS ON ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+FRENCH
+
+_Jean Bonnerot._ Romain Rolland (Extraits de ses œuvres avec
+introduction biographique), Cahiers du Centre, Nevers, 1909.
+
+_Lucien Maury._ Figures littéraires. Perrin, 1911.
+
+_J. H. Retinger._ Histoire de la littérature française du romantisme à
+nos jours. B. Grasset, 1911.
+
+_Jules Bertaut._ Les romanciers du nouveau siècle. Sansot, 1912.
+
+_Paul Seippel._ Romain Rolland, l'homme et l'œuvre. Ollendorff, 1913.
+
+_Marc Elder._ Romain Rolland. Paris, 1914
+
+_Robert Dreyfus._ Maîtres contemporains. (Péguy, Claudel, Suarès, Romain
+Rolland.) Paris, 1914.
+
+_Daniel Halévy._ Quelques nouveaux maîtres. Cahiers du Centre. Figuière,
+1914.
+
+_G. Dwelshauvers._ Romain Rolland. Vue caractéristique de l'homme et de
+l'œuvre. Ed. de la Belgique artistique et littéraire, Brussels, 1913
+or 1914.
+
+_Paul Souday._ Les drames philosophiques de Romain Rolland. Emile Paul,
+Paris, 1914.
+
+_Max Hochstätter._ Essai sur l'œuvre de Romain Rolland. Fischbacher,
+Paris; Georg & Co., Geneva, 1914.
+
+_Henri Guilbeaux._ Pour Romain Rolland. Jeheber, Geneva, 1915.
+
+_Massis._ Romain Rolland contre la France. Floury, Paris, 1915.
+
+_P. H. Loyson._ Etes-vous neutre devant le crime? Payot, Paris and
+Lausanne, 1916.
+
+_Renaitour et Loyson._ Dans la mêlée. Ed. du Bonnet Rouge, 1916.
+
+_Isabelle Debran._ M. Romain Rolland initiateur du défaitisme.
+(Introduction de Diodore.) Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Jacques Servance._ Réponse à Mme. Isabelle Debran. Comité d'initiative
+en faveur d'une paix durable, Neuchâtel, 1916.
+
+_Charles Baudouin_, Romain Rolland calomnié. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Daniel Halévy._ Charles Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Payot,
+Paris, 1918 et seq.
+
+_Paul Colin._ Romain Rolland, Bruxelles, 1920.
+
+_P. J. Jouve._ Romain Rolland vivant, Ollendorff, 1920.
+
+
+OTHER LANGUAGES
+
+_Otto Grautoff._ Romain Rolland, Frankfurt, 1914.
+
+_Winifred Stephens._ French Novelists of To-day. Second series. J. Lane,
+London and New York, 1915.
+
+_Albert L. Guerard._ Five Masters of French Romance. Scribner, New York,
+1916.
+
+_Dr. J. Ziegler._ Romain Rolland in "Johann Christof," über Juden und
+Judentum. v. Dr. Ziegler, Rabbiner in Karlsbad. Vienna, 1918.
+
+_Agnes Darmesteter._ Twentieth Century French Writers. London, 1919.
+
+_Blumenfeld._ Etude sur Romain Rolland, en langue yiddisch. Cahiers de
+littérature et d'art. Paris, 1920.
+
+_Albert Schinz._ French Literature of the War. Appleton, New York, 1920.
+
+_Pedro Cesare Dominici._ De Lutecia, Arte y Critica. Ollendorff, Madrid.
+
+_Papini._ Studii di Romain Rolland. Florence, 1916.
+
+_F. F. Curtis._ Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreichs.
+Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1920.
+
+_Walter Küchler._ Vier Vorträge über R. Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Fritz
+v. Unruh. Würzburg, 1919.
+
+
+MUSIC CONNECTED WITH ROMAIN ROLLAND'S WRITINGS
+
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Trois pièces pour piano.)
+
+1. L'oncle Gottfried (dialogue avec Christophe).
+
+2. Méditation sur un passage du "Matin."
+
+3. Berceuse de Louisa. Chant du Pélerin (piano et chant). Paroles de
+Paul Gerhardt Ed. Demets, Paris, 1907.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Suite pour quatuor à cordes.)
+
+1. La mort de l'oncle Gottfried.
+
+2. Bienvenue au petit Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Pastorale, Sabine. 1. Dans le Jardinet. Piano et quatuor.
+Transcription pour piano et violon. Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Albert Doyen._ Le Triomphe de la Liberté. (Scène finale du Quatorze
+Juillet). Prix de la ville de Paris, 1913. (Soli, Orchestre et Choeurs.)
+Ed. A. Leduc, Paris.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Above the Battle_, 266, 290, 291, 293-6, 297, 305, 329.
+
+Abbesse de Jouarre, l', 125.
+
+_Aërt_, 66, 73, 77-8, 83-5, 87, 112.
+
+Aërt, 77-8, 83-5, 121, 125, 161, 198, 244, 260, 347.
+
+Antoinette, in _Jean Christophe_, 4, 165, 175, 212, 224.
+
+Arcos, René, 312, 313.
+
+Art, love of, and love of mankind, 20;
+  epic quality in Rolland's, 63-66, 67 ff;
+  moral force in Rolland's, 63 ff;
+  Tolstoi's views on, 18-20;
+  universality of, 26.
+
+_Au-dessus de la mêlée, see Above the Battle._
+
+_Aux peuples assassinés_, 332.
+
+
+Bach, Friedemann, 173.
+
+Bach, Johann Sebastian, 173, 245.
+
+_Ballades françaises_, 250.
+
+Balzac, 64, 65, 169, 177, 250.
+
+Barrès, Maurice, 59, 62.
+
+Baudouin, Charles, 313.
+
+_Beethoven_, 50, 137 ff, 140-3, 150.
+
+Beethoven, 10, 18, 19, 40, 45, 67, 104, 140-143, 144, 145, 147, 148,
+151, 161, 163, 172, 174, 175, 182, 245, 252, 325, 328;
+  festival, 35, influence of, on Rolland's childhood, 5 ff;
+  Jean Christophe's resemblance to, 173.
+
+_Beginnings of Opera, The_, 34.
+
+_Belgique sanglante, la_, 282.
+
+Berlioz, 10, 150.
+
+Bibliography, 357 ff.
+
+Biographies, heroic, 133-53;
+  unwritten, 150-3.
+
+Bonn, 35, 140, 141.
+
+Brahms, 174.
+
+Bréal, Michel, 35.
+
+Breugnon, Colas, in _Colas Breugnon_, 241-53, 319;
+  spiritual kinship of, with Jean Christophe, 244-48;
+  see _Colas Breugnon_.
+
+Brunetière, 16.
+
+Burckhardt, Jakob, 16.
+
+Byron, 275.
+
+
+"_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," 20, 40, 43, 50, 143.
+
+_Caligula_, 73.
+
+"_Carmel, le_," 313.
+
+Carnot, 99.
+
+Claes, in _Aërt_, 87.
+
+Clamecy, birthplace of Rolland, 3, 4, 99.
+
+Claudel, Paul, 89, 44, 59.
+
+_Clerambault, l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_,
+339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Agenor, in _Clerambault_, 310, 339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Maxime, 343 ff.
+
+Clifford, General, in _A Day Will Come_, 120, 121, 125.
+
+_Colas Breugnon_, 241-253, 337;
+  as an artistic production, 249-51;
+  gauloiseries in, 249-51;
+  origin of, 241-43.
+
+Comédie Française, 71, 74.
+
+Conscience, story of, in Clerambault, 339-47;
+  _see_ Freedom of conscience.
+
+Corneille, 91, 92.
+
+Couthon, 99.
+
+_Credo quia verum_, 16, 17.
+
+Corinne, in _Jean Christophe_, 211.
+
+Cycles, of Rolland, 67-71.
+
+
+D'Alembert, 87.
+
+_Danse des morts_, 312.
+
+_Danton_, 41, 101, 106-9, 113, 117.
+
+Danton, 99, 106-9, 113, 126.
+
+Debrit, Jean, 313.
+
+Debussy, 35, 175.
+
+Declaration of the independence of the mind, 351-354.
+
+Decsey, Ernest, 174.
+
+Defeat, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 61, 62, 83 ff,
+110 ff, 134 ff, 139.
+
+"Defeatism," 297-303.
+
+De Maguet, Claude, 313.
+
+"_Demain_," 313.
+
+Deprès, Suzanne, 175.
+
+Desmoulins, 126.
+
+Desprès, Fernand, 312.
+
+_Deutscher Musiker in Paris, Ein_, 174.
+
+"_Deutsche Rundschau, Die_," 305.
+
+_Don Carlos_, 101.
+
+Dostoievsky, 2, 346.
+
+Doyen, 105.
+
+D'Oyron, in _The Wolves_, 114.
+
+Drama, and the masses, _see_ People's Theater;
+  erotic _vs._ political, 127 ff;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 69, 70, 86-99, 100-18.
+
+Dramatic writings, of Rolland, 25, 32, 39, 41, 57-130;
+  craftsmanship of, 127-130;
+  cycles, 67-71;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 100-130;
+  People's Theater, 85-130;
+  poems, 28;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unknown cycle, 71-75.
+
+_Drames philosophiques_, 125.
+
+Dreyfus affair, 38, 39, 106, 115, 119, 133.
+
+Dunois, Amédée, 312.
+
+Duse, Eleanore, 175.
+
+
+_Empédocle d'Agrigente et l'âge de la haine_, 72, 333 ff.
+
+_Etes-vous neutre devant le crime_, 283.
+
+
+Faber, in _Le triomphe de la raison_, 111, 114, 309.
+
+Faith, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 77-79, 81 ff, 166-71, 244 ff;
+  tragedies of, 76-85.
+
+Fellowship, of free spirits, during the war, 273 ff, 311-316: 351, 354.
+
+_Fêtes de Beethoven, les_, 141.
+
+"_Feuille, la_," 313.
+
+Flaubert, 37, 58, 80, 177.
+
+_Forerunners, The_, 290, 339-334
+
+Fort, Paul, 250.
+
+_Fourteenth of July, The_, 101-2, 103-5, 109.
+
+France, after 1870, 57;
+  picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 211-216
+
+France, Anatole, 58, 84, 169.
+
+Frank, César, 175.
+
+Frank, Ludwig, 321.
+
+Freedom, of conscience, 287 ff, 257-9, 119, 274, 285-8, 298 ff, 320 ff,
+339-47;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Triumph of Reason_.
+
+French literature, state of, after 1870, 37, 58 ff.
+
+French Revolution, 68, 98 ff, 100-120, 121, 122;
+  _see_ Drama of the
+  Revolution;
+  _also_ People's Theater. French stage, after 1870, 86-89.
+
+
+_Galeries des femmes de Shakespeare_, 6.
+
+Gamache, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+"Gauloiseries," 250.
+
+Generations, conflicting ideas of the 229-234.
+
+Geneva, during the   Great War, 268 ff.
+
+Germany, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 217-220.
+
+Girondists, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 110 ff, 121, 129, 169, 260.
+
+_Gli Baglioni_, 73, 74.
+
+Gluck, 173, 175, 212.
+
+Goethe, 64, 72, 97, 118, 150, 155, 169, 175, 177, 180, 211, 184, 193,
+219, 230, 263, 275, 278, 305, 330, 332.
+
+Gottfried, in _Jean Christophe_, 204.
+
+Grautoff, 166, 168.
+
+Grazia, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 200-202, 205.
+
+Greatness, will to, in Rolland's philosophy, 63.
+
+Great War, The, 1, 65, 257-355, 253, 264 ff, 339-347.
+
+Greek tragedy, method of, 128 ff
+
+_Grüne Heinrich, Der_, 169.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri, 281, 313.
+
+
+_Haendel_, 34.
+
+Handel, 150, 173, 175, 245.
+
+Hatred Holland's campaign against, 297-304;
+  Verhaeren's attitude of, during the war, 281-4.
+
+Hauptmann, 92, 276;
+  Rolland's controversy with, 277-280.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, 64.
+
+Hassler in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Hebbel, 73, 123.
+
+Hecht, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+Heroes of suffering, 133-153.
+
+Heroic biographies, 133-153.
+
+Herzen, 26.
+
+Historical drama, _see_ People's Theater.
+
+History, and the People's Theater, 95 ff;
+  Rolland's conception of, 95 ff;
+  sense of, in early writings, 32.
+
+Hoche, General, 150.
+
+Hölderlin, 73.
+
+Hugot, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 63, 111, 114.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 37, 64, 92, 121.
+
+
+_Idoles les_, 299.
+
+"Iliad of the French People," _see_ People's Theater.
+
+_Illusions perdues, les_, 65.
+
+_Inter Arma Caritas_, 297.
+
+_Iphigenia_, 118.
+
+Italy, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 221-3.
+
+Idealism, in Rolland's philosophy, 60 ff, 85, 123, 166-71;
+  characterization of Germany, 211-216;
+  of Italy, 222.
+
+Internationalism, 207-10, 255, 285-8, 351-4;
+  _see Above the Battle_;
+  Fellowship, of free spirits;
+  Hatred, Rolland's campaign against
+
+Ibsen, 126 ff.
+
+Italy, Rolland's sojourn in, 23-28, 71.
+
+
+Jaurès, 13, 41, 109, 346.
+
+_Jean Christophe_, 18, 30, 36, 49, 65, 70, 130, 143, 157-237, 165, 257,
+300, 305, 311, 318, 339, 340;
+  as an educational romance, 166-71;
+  characters of, 172-5;
+  enigma of creative work, 181-7;
+  France, picture of, in, 211-16;
+  generations, conflicting ideas of, in 229-34;
+  Germany, picture of, in, 217-220;
+  Italy, picture of, in 221-3;
+  Jews, the, in, 224-8;
+  message of, 157-159;
+  music, form and content of, 177-80;
+  origin of 162-5;
+  writing of, 43-44, 162-5.
+
+Jean Christophe, 26, 31, 38, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 65, 68, 76, 97, 153,
+157-237, 241, 246, 257, 258, 260, 317, 336, 340, 342;
+  and Grazia, 200-1;
+  and his fellow men, 203-6;
+  and his generation, 229-36;
+  and the nations, 207-10;
+  apostle of force, 189 ff;
+  as the artist and creator, 188-94;
+  character of, 172-75;
+  contrast to Olivier, 195 ff.
+
+Jouve, 287, 312, 313.
+
+Justice, problem of, considered by Rolland in Dreyfus case, 39;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Wolves_.
+
+
+Kaufmann, Emil, 174.
+
+Keller, Gottfried, 169, 177.
+
+Kleist, 73, 92.
+
+Kohn, Sylvain, in _Jean Christophe_, 212, 224.
+
+Krafft, Jean Christophe, _see_ Jean Christophe.
+
+
+Language, as obstacle to internationalism, 229 ff.
+
+Lazare, Bernard, 39, 143.
+
+_Lebens Abend einer Idealistin, Der_, 27, 73.
+
+_Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, 80.
+
+Letters, of Rolland, during war, 317-19.
+
+Lévy-Coeur, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 205, 224.
+
+_Le 14 Juillet_, _see Fourteenth of July, The_.
+
+Liberty, characterization of France, 211-16.
+
+_Life of Michael Angelo, The_, 40, 144-46.
+
+_Life of Timolien_, 131.
+
+_Liluli_, 300, 335-338, 339.
+
+_Loups, les, see The Wolves._
+
+Lux, Adams, 101, 111, 112, 309.
+
+Lyceum of Louis the Great, 8.
+
+
+Madame Bovary, 64.
+
+Mahler, Gustave, 35, 175.
+
+Mannheim, Judith, in _Jean Christophe_, 226.
+
+Marat, 101.
+
+Martinet, Marcel, 312.
+
+Masereel, Franz, 313.
+
+Maupassant, 13, 37, 58, 64, 91.
+
+Mazzini, 26, 150, 151, 222.
+
+_Meistersinger, Die_, 92.
+
+Mesnil, Jacques, 312.
+
+Meunier, 87.
+
+_Meutre des élites, le_, 297.
+
+Meyerbeer, 212.
+
+Michelangelo, 67, 71, 144-6, 147, 148, 151, 161, 182, 245.
+
+Michelet, 13.
+
+Millet, 87, 50.
+
+Mirbeau, 85.
+
+Molière, 92.
+
+Monod Gabriel, 13, 16, 26, 73.
+
+_Mon Oncle Benjamin_, 3.
+
+_Montespan, la_, 73, 119.
+
+Mooch, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+Moreas, 175.
+
+Mornet, Lieutenant, 306.
+
+Mounet-Sully, 74.
+
+Mozart, 5, 173.
+
+Music, early influence of, on Rolland, 4;
+  form and content in _Jean Christophe_, 177-80;
+  part of Rolland's drama, 104 ff;
+  Rolland's love of, 47;
+  Rolland's philosophy of, 132-3;
+  Tolstoi's stigmatization of 19.
+
+_Musiciens d'autrefois_, 34, 35, 183.
+
+
+Nationalistic school of writers 59, 60, 62.
+
+Nationalism, 208 ff; 217-20, 225, 226.
+
+Naturalism, 15.
+
+"Neues Vaterland," 306.
+
+Nietzsche, 2, 26, 37, 162, 174, 177, 217-20, 255, 332.
+
+_Niobé_, 73, 74.
+
+Nobel peace prize, 270.
+
+Normal School, 10, 11, 12-17, 13, 14, 23, 29, 32, 162.
+
+_Notre prochain l'ennemi_, 297.
+
+Novalis, 169.
+
+
+Offenbach, 212.
+
+Olivier, in _Jean Christophe_, 61, 68, 76, 78, 84, 176, 179, 195-9, 200,
+201, 205, 214 ff, 220, 224, 225, 233, 244, 246, 257, 260, 264, 267, 283,
+309, 318, 336 340.
+
+Olivier, Georges, in _Jean Christophe_, 233.
+
+_Offiziere, Die_, 85.
+
+_Oration on Shakespeare_, 72.
+
+_Orfeo_, 33.
+
+_Origines du théâtre lyrique moderne, les_, 32, 183.
+
+_Orsino_, 72, 74.
+
+Oudon, Françoise, in _Jean Christophe_, 75.
+
+
+Pacifism, 262 ff.
+
+Paine, Thomas 9, 7, 150.
+
+Parsifal, 30, 31, 62, 191.
+
+Péguy, Charles, 14, 20, 38, 39, 59, 115, 143.
+
+People's Theater, The, 41, 65, 133, 68, 88, 94-97.
+
+Philippe, Charles Louis, 44, 91.
+
+Philosophy of life, of Rolland, _see_ Art of Rolland;
+  Conscience;
+  Defeat, significance of;
+  Faith;
+  Freedom of Conscience;
+  Greatness will to;
+  Hatred, campaign against;
+  Idealism;
+  Internationalism;
+  Justice;
+  Struggle, element of;
+  Suffering, significance of.
+
+Picquart, 39, 115.
+
+Perrotin, in _Clerambault_, 344.
+
+Pioch, Georges, 312.
+
+Polichinelle, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+_Précurseurs, les, see The Forerunners._
+
+_Prêtre de Nemi, le_, 125.
+
+_Prinz von Homburg, Der_, 92.
+
+Provenzale, Francesco, 34.
+
+
+Quesnel, in _Les Loups_, 114.
+
+
+Racine, 91, 92.
+
+_Räuber, Die_, 92.
+
+Red Cross, in Switzerland, 268 ff, 269 ff.
+
+Renaissance, 24, 25, 68, 71.
+
+Renaitour, 312.
+
+Renan, 12, 13, 25, 37, 125 ff, 176, 196, 214, 309.
+
+"_Revue de l'art dramatique_," 35, 88.
+
+"_Revue de Paris_," 25, 141.
+
+Robespierre, 99, 101, 108, 113, 117, 126.
+
+Rolland, Madeleine, 3.
+
+Rolland, Romain, academic life of, in Paris, 32-35, 42;
+  adolescence
+  of, 3-11;
+  ancestry of, 3;
+  and his epoch, 57-62;
+  and the European spirit, 52, 53;
+  appeal to President Wilson, 348-50;
+  as embodiment of European spirit, 52-3;
+  art of, 63-6;
+  at Paris, 32-5, 36;
+  attitude of, during the war, 257-355;
+  campaign of, against hatred 297-303;
+  childhood of, 3-7;
+  controversy of, with Hauptmann, 277-80;
+  correspondence of, with Verhaeren 281-4;
+  cycles of 67-75;
+  diary of, during the war, 327-28;
+  drama of the revolution, 100-30;
+  dramatic writings, 25, 28, 57, 130;
+  Dreyfus case, 38-47;
+  fame, 49, 50, 51, 48;
+  father of, 6;
+  friendships, 13-15, 25, 26-28, 311-316;
+  heroic biographies, 133-153;
+  humanitarianism of, 307 ff;
+  idealism of, 60 ff;
+  influence of, during the war, 320-326, 355-6;
+  influence of Tolstoi on, 19-22;
+  Jean Christophe, 157-237;
+  letters of, during the war, 317-319;
+  marriage of, 35, 41, 73, 134;
+  mass suggestion in writings of, 261, 266, 329-47;
+  mother of, 3, 27;
+  newspaper writing of 289-292;
+  opponents of, during the war, 304-10;
+  portrait of, 46, 47;
+  rôle of, in fellowship of free spirits during the war, 273 ff;
+  Rome, 23, 28;
+  schooling of 5-17;
+  seclusion, 43, 44, 45-7, 48-49, 324;
+  significance of life work, 2;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unwritten biographies, 150-153.
+
+Rossi, Ernesto, 24.
+
+Rossi, Luigi, 33.
+
+Rostand, 117.
+
+Rouanet, 312.
+
+Rousseau, 275.
+
+Roussin, in _Jean Christophe_, 176.
+
+_Route en lacets qui monte, la_, 330.
+
+
+St. Christophe, 157.
+
+Saint-Just, _pseud._, 39, 84, 101, 108, 113, 126.
+
+_Saint Louis_, 77-8, 80-82, 83, 125, 244.
+
+Salviati, 24.
+
+Suarès, André, 14, 15, 39.
+
+Scarlatti, Alessandro, 34.
+
+Schermann, 330.
+
+Scheurer, Kestner, 39, 115.
+
+Schiller, 73, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95, 97, 100-1, 123, 155, 193, 196.
+
+Schubert, 175, 180.
+
+Schulz, Prof. in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Seippel, Paul, 50, 165, 172.
+
+Sévérine, 312.
+
+Shakespeare, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 15, 64, 69, 72, 92, 100, 123,
+125, 150.
+
+Sidonie, in _Jean Christophe_, 213.
+
+_Siege de Mantoue, le_, 73.
+
+Sorbonne, 32, 33.
+
+_Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, 12.
+
+Spinoza, 10, 13, 18.
+
+Stendhal, 169, 177.
+
+Strauss, Hugo, 35.
+
+Strindberg, 2, 126 ff.
+
+Struggle, element of, in Rolland's philosophy, 222, 246 ff.
+
+Suffering, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy, 133-136, 181-7,
+188-94; 204 ff;
+  heroes of 133-53.
+
+Switzerland, refuge of Rolland during the war, 264-7.
+
+
+_"Tablettes, les,"_ 313.
+
+_Tasso_, 118.
+
+Teulier, in _The Wolves_, 114, 115, 121, 310.
+
+_Théâtre du peuple, le, see_ People's Theatre.
+
+Thiesson, Gaston, 312.
+
+Tillier, Claude, 3.
+
+Tolstoi, 18, 20, 21, 23, 15, 24, 53, 60, 64, 67, 82, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94,
+135, 138, 147-149, 151, 161, 165, 170, 175, 176, 182, 204, 245, 255,
+265, 300, 317, 320, 333.
+
+_To the Undying Antigone_, 27.
+
+_Tragédies de la foi, les, see Tragedies of Faith._
+
+_Tragedies of Faith_, 69, 76-83, 76.
+
+"Tribunal of the spirit," _see_ Fellowship.
+
+_Triumph of Reason, The_, 63, 101, 102, 113, 114, 119.
+
+_Trois Amoureuses, les_, 173.
+
+Truth, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+
+Unknown dramatic cycle, 71-75.
+
+
+Verhaeren, 44, 77, 175, 276, 311;
+  Rolland's   correspondence with, 281-84.
+
+_Vie de Beethoven, see Beethoven._
+
+_Vie de Tolstoi, see Tolstoi._
+
+_Vie de Michel-Ange, la, see Life of Michael Angelo, The._
+
+_Vie des hommes illustres_, 301.
+
+Von Kerich, Frau, in _Jean Christophe_, 173, 204.
+
+Von Meysenbug, Malwida, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29-31, 73, 150, 162.
+
+Von Unruh, Fritz, 85.
+
+_Vorreden Material im Nachlass_, 255.
+
+_Vous êtes des hommes_, 312.
+
+
+Wagner, 2, 9, 10, 14, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 64, 92, 162, 174, 212.
+
+_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, 175.
+
+_War and Peace_, 64, 170.
+
+War, dominant theme in Rolland's plays, 28;
+  of the generations, 229-234;
+  in Rolland's writings, 260 ff.
+
+_Weber, Die_, 92, 277.
+
+Weil, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+_What is to be Done?_ 18.
+
+_Wilhelm Meister_, 155, 168.
+
+William the Silent, 66.
+
+Wilson, President, 348-50.
+
+Wolf, Hugo, 35, 150, 174.
+
+Wolff's news agency, 277.
+
+_Wolves, The_, 39, 101, 102, 113, 114.
+
+
+Zola, 15, 58, 85, 87, 39, 91, 115, 177.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
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diff --git a/34888-8.txt b/34888-8.txt
new file mode 100644
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romain Rolland
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Eden Paul
+            Cedar Paul
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34888]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAIN ROLLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, University of Michigan Libraries
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+[Illustration: Romain Rolland after a drawing by Grani� (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, A�RT, 1895-1898               76
+
+VI. SAINT LOUIS. 1894                                                 80
+
+VII. A�RT, 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 Grani� (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.
+
+H�LDERLIN.
+
+
+
+
+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
+Corn�lien." 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 � 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,
+Jaur�s, 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, Andr� Suar�s, and Charles
+P�guy, 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, Suar�s, Claudel, and P�guy, has from a
+different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.
+
+As in the case of Claudel at the Lyceum, so now with Suar�s 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. Suar�s 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, Bruneti�re, 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 P�guy as No. 4 of the third
+series of "_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," began with the affectionate
+words, "Cher Fr�re." 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, Suar�s 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 th��tre
+lyrique moderns_ (_Histoire de l'op�ra 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'�ternelle 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'Op�ra_, 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 Br�al, 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 P�guy'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 P�guy 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 P�guy, and
+with Suar�s 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, P�guy's, and
+Suar�s' 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. Jaur�s
+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 Suar�s, 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 Elys�es,
+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
+succ�s n'�tait pas son but; son but �tait 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'�tait pas le succ�s; son but �tait la foi.
+
+     JEAN CHRISTOPHE, "_La R�volte_."
+
+
+
+
+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 re�ntered 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 Barr�s, Paul Claudel, and P�guy. 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 Barr�s. 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 th��tre 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 _A�rt_: "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
+_Trag�dies de la foi_ form the second cycle; the _Th��tre de la
+r�volution_ 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 H�lderlin'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 _Niob�_. From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he
+returned with a new Renaissance drama, _Le si�ge 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 _Trag�dies de la foi_. Next came _Jeanne de
+Piennes_ (1894), which remains unpublished.... _A�rt_ (1895), the second
+of the _Trag�dies de la foi_, was the first of Rolland's plays to be
+staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the _Th��tre
+de la r�volution_. 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 Com�die Fran�aise,
+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 _Niob�_ 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. A�rt. 1895-1898_
+
+
+Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten
+dramas of his youth under the title _Les trag�dies 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 A�rt 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 A�rt, 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 l�gende 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
+Panth�on, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte
+Genevi�ve 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
+�cras� 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
+
+A�RT
+
+1898
+
+
+_A�rt_ 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; _A�rt_ 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 A�rt, 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, Ma�tre
+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 A�rt'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, A�rt 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 _A�rt_ 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 an�mia 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
+s�ve populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la sant�." 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 th��tre du peuple_, and his _Th��tre
+de la r�volution_, 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 Com�die Fran�aise 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 "th��tre 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
+Moli�re 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
+R�uber_ 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 �
+dire! Tout est � 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-G�ne! "Tout est � faire! Tout est � 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
+'com�die 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 Flor�al, 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'�tat. 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 th��tre
+de la r�volution_.
+
+
+
+
+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 th��tre de la r�volution_, "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 "f�tes galantes." We
+are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien
+r�gime; 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 "f�tes 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 fr�res" 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 so�le 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 Jaur�s characterize it, Jaur�s
+who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the
+work when it was staged at the Th��tre 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 _A�rt_, 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 � 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 Th��tre de
+l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political
+demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, P�guy, 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
+th��tre de la r�volution_ 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. "Ob�ir � ma patrie? Ob�ir � 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 o� la libert� est
+menac�e." A�rt, 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 A�rt 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 pr�tre 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 Tr�guier, 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, voil� la fatalit� 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 A�rt, 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 th��tre 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 f�tes 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 P�guy 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 � 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 Elys�es.
+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
+     �sthetic 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, A�rt 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 dompt�e"; 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
+"com�die 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 gr�ne 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 C�sar 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; Fran�oise Oudon,
+the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds
+us of Suzanne Depr�s. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are
+purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles
+Louis Philippe and Charles P�guy; 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,
+L�vy-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'op�ra 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
+pr�texte � sa f�condit� 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 g�nie
+veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le g�nie"--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, "transfigur� 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 g�nie
+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 A�rt, 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, re�ncounters, 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, L�vy-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 fa�ade, 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, L�vy-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 �sthetic, 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 gar�on, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"--"Que veux
+     tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'emp�che pas de
+     souffrir; mais souffrir n'emp�chera jamais un bon Fran�ais 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 A�rt 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 fran�aises_ 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 sal�" 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 �tre connue et prouv�e que par le sacrifice que
+     fait le savant et l'artiste de son repos et son bien-�tre 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FOREARMED
+
+
+We do not detract from the moral services of Romain Rolland, but we may
+perhaps excuse to some extent his opponents, when we insist that Rolland
+had excelled all contemporary imaginative writers in the profundity of
+his preparatory studies of war and its problems. If to-day, in
+retrospect, we contemplate his writings, we marvel to note how, from the
+very first and throughout a long period of years, they combined to build
+up, as it were, a colossal pyramid, culminating in the point upon which
+the lightnings of war were to be discharged. For twenty years, the
+author's thought, his whole creative activity, had been unintermittently
+concentrated upon the contradictions between spirit and force, between
+freedom and the fatherland, between victory and defeat. Through a
+hundred variations he had pursued the same fundamental theme, treating
+it dramatically, epically, and in manifold other ways. There is hardly a
+problem relevant to this question which is not touched upon by
+Christophe and Olivier, by A�rt and by the Girondists, in their
+discussions. Intellectually regarded, Rolland's writings are a
+maneuvering ground for all the incentives to war. He thus had his
+conclusions already drawn when others were beginning an attempt to come
+to terms with events. As historian, he had described the perpetual
+recurrence of war's typical accompaniments, had discussed the psychology
+of mass suggestion, and had shown the effects of wartime mentality upon
+the individual. As moralist and as citizen of the world, he had long ere
+this formulated his creed. We may say, in fact, that Rolland's mind had
+been in a sense immunized against the illusions of the crowd and against
+infection by prevalent falsehoods.
+
+Not by chance does an artist decide which problems he will consider. The
+dramatist does not make a "lucky selection" of his theme. The musician
+does not "discover" a beautiful melody, but already has it within him.
+It is not the artist who creates the problems, but the problems which
+create the artist; just as it is not the prophet who makes his prophecy,
+but the foresight which creates the prophet. The artist's choice is
+always pre-ordained. The man who has foreseen the essential problem of a
+whole civilization, of a disastrous epoch, must of necessity, in the
+decisive hour, play a leading part. He only who had contemplated the
+coming European war as an abyss towards which the mad hunt of recent
+decades, making light of every warning, had been speeding, only such a
+one could command his soul, could refrain from joining the bacchanalian
+rout, could listen unmoved to the throbbing of the war drums. Who but
+such a man could stand upright in the greatest storm of illusion the
+world has ever known?
+
+Thus it came to pass that not merely during the first hour of the war
+was Rolland in opposition to other writers and artists of the day. This
+opposition dated from the very inception of his career, and hence for
+twenty years he had been a solitary. The reason why the contrast between
+his outlook and that of his generation had not hitherto been
+conspicuous, the reason why the cleavage was not disclosed until the
+actual outbreak of war, lies in this, that Rolland's divergence was a
+matter not so much of mood as of character. Before the apocalyptic year,
+almost all persons of artistic temperament had recognized quite as
+definitely as Rolland had recognized that a fratricidal struggle between
+Europeans would be a crime, would disgrace civilization. With few
+exceptions, they were pacifists. It would be more correct to say that
+with few exceptions they believed themselves to be pacifists. For
+pacifism does not simply mean, to be a friend to peace, but to be a
+worker in the cause of peace, an [Greek: eir�nopoi�s], as the New Testament has
+it. Pacifism signifies the activity of an effective will to peace, not
+merely the love of an easy life and a preference for repose. It
+signifies struggle; and like every struggle it demands, in the hour of
+danger, self-sacrifice and heroism. Now these "pacifists" we have just
+been considering had merely a sentimental fondness for peace; they were
+friendly towards peace, just as they were friendly towards ideas of
+social equality, towards philanthropy, towards the abolition of capital
+punishment. Such faith as they possessed was a faith devoid of passion.
+They wore their opinions as they wore their clothing, and when the time
+of trial came they were ready to exchange their pacifist ethic for the
+ethic of the war-makers, were ready to don a national uniform in matters
+of opinion. At bottom, they knew the right just as well as Rolland, but
+they had not the courage of their opinions. Goethe's saying to Eckermann
+applies to them with deadly force. "All the evils of modern literature
+are due to lack of character in individual investigators and writers."
+
+Thus Rolland did not stand alone in his knowledge, which was shared by
+many intellectuals and statesmen. But in his case, all his knowledge was
+tinged with religious fervor; his beliefs were a living faith; his
+thoughts were actions. He was unique among imaginative writers for the
+splendid vigor with which he remained true to his ideals when all others
+were deserting the standard; for the way in which he defended the
+European spirit against the raging armies of the sometime European
+intellectuals now turned patriots. Fighting as he had fought from youth
+upwards on behalf of the invisible against the world of reality, he
+displayed, as a foil to the heroism of the trenches, a higher heroism
+still. While the soldiers were manifesting the heroism of blood, Rolland
+manifested the heroism of the spirit, and showed the glorious spectacle
+of one who was able, amid the intoxication of the war-maddened masses,
+to maintain the sobriety and freedom of an unclouded mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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 m�l�e_,
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SERVICE OF MAN
+
+
+In Rolland's view it was the artist's duty to serve his fatherland by
+conscientious service to all mankind, to play his part in the struggle
+by waging war against the suffering the war was causing and against the
+thousandfold torments entailed by the war. He rejected the idea of
+absolute aloofness. "An artist has no right to hold aloof while he is
+still able to help others." But this aid, this participation, must not
+take the form of fostering the murderous hatred which already animated
+the millions. The aim must be to unite the millions further, where
+unseen ties already existed, in their infinite suffering. He therefore
+took his part in the ranks of the helpers, not weapon in hand, but
+following the example of Walt Whitman, who, during the American Civil
+War, served as hospital assistant.
+
+Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all
+lands began to be heard in Switzerland. Thousands who were without news
+of fathers, husbands, and sons in the battlefields, stretched despairing
+arms into the void. By hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands,
+letters and telegrams poured into the little House of the Red Cross in
+Geneva, the only international rallying point that still remained.
+Isolated, like stormy petrels, came the first inquiries for missing
+relatives; then these inquiries themselves became a storm. The letters
+arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared for dealing with such an
+inundation of misery. The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no
+system, and above all no helpers.
+
+Romain Rolland was one of the first to offer personal assistance. The
+Mus�e Rath was quickly made available for the purposes of the Red Cross.
+In one of the small wooden cubicles, among hundreds of girls, women, and
+students, Rolland sat for more than eighteen months, engaged each day
+for from six to eight hours side by side with the head of the
+undertaking, Dr. Ferri�re, to whose genius for organization myriads owe
+it that the period of suspense was shortened. Here Rolland filed
+letters, wrote letters, performed an abundance of detail work, seemingly
+of little importance. But how momentous was every word to the
+individuals whom he could help, for in this vast universe each suffering
+individual is mainly concerned about his own particular grain of
+unhappiness. Countless persons to-day, unaware of the fact, have to
+thank the great writer for news of their lost relatives. A rough stool,
+a small table of unpolished deal, the turmoil of typewriters, the bustle
+of human beings questioning, calling one to another, hastening to and
+fro--such was Romain Rolland's battlefield in this campaign against the
+afflictions of the war. Here, while other authors and intellectuals were
+doing their utmost to foster mutual hatred, he endeavored to promote
+reconciliation, to alleviate the torment of a fraction among the
+countless sufferers by such consolation as the circumstances rendered
+possible. He neither desired, nor occupied, a leading position in the
+work of the Red Cross; but, like so many other nameless assistants, he
+devoted himself to the daily task of promoting the interchange of news.
+His deeds were inconspicuous, and are therefore all the more memorable.
+
+When he was allotted the Nobel peace prize, he refused to retain the
+money for his own use, and devoted the whole sum to the mitigation of
+the miseries of Europe, that he might suit the action to the word, the
+word to the action. Ecce homo! Ecce poeta!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TRIBUNAL OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+No one had been more perfectly forearmed than Romain Rolland. The
+closing chapters of _Jean Christophe_ foretell the coming mass illusion.
+Never for a moment had he entertained the vain hope of certain idealists
+that the fact (or semblance) of civilization, that the increase of human
+kindliness which we owe to two millenniums of Christianity, would make a
+future war, comparatively humane. Too well did he know as historian that
+in the initial outbursts of war passion the veneer of civilization and
+Christianity would be rubbed off; that in all nations alike the naked
+bestiality of human beings would be disclosed; that the smell of the
+shed blood would reduce them all to the level of wild beasts. He did not
+conceal from himself that this strange halitus is able to dull and to
+confuse even the gentlest, the kindliest, the most intelligent of souls.
+The rending asunder of ancient friendships, the sudden solidarity among
+persons most opposed in temperament now eager to abase themselves before
+the idol of the fatherland, the total disappearance of conscientious
+conviction at the first breath of the actualities of war--in _Jean
+Christophe_ these things were written no less plainly than when of old
+the fingers of the hand wrote upon the palace wall in Babylon.
+
+Nevertheless, even this prophetic soul had underestimated the cruel
+reality. During the opening days of the war, Rolland was horrified to
+note how all previous wars were being eclipsed in the atrocity of the
+struggle, in its material and spiritual brutality, in its extent, and in
+the intensity of its passion. All possible anticipations had been
+outdone. Although for thousands of years, by twos or variously allied,
+the peoples of Europe had almost unceasingly been warring one with
+another, never before had their mutual hatreds, as manifested in word
+and deed, risen to such a pitch as in this twentieth century after the
+birth of Christ. Never before in the history of mankind did hatred
+extend so widely through the populations; never did it rage so fiercely
+among the intellectuals; never before was oil pumped into the flames as
+it was now pumped from innumerable fountains and tubes of the spirit,
+from the canals of the newspapers, from the retorts of the professors.
+All evil instincts were fostered among the masses. The whole world of
+feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized. The loathsome
+organization for the dealing of death by material weapons was yet more
+loathsomely reflected in the organization of national telegraphic
+bureaus to scatter lies like sparks over land and sea. For the first
+time, science, poetry, art, and philosophy became no less subservient to
+war than mechanical ingenuity was subservient. In the pulpits and
+professorial chairs, in the research laboratories, in the editorial
+offices and in the authors' studies, all energies were concentrated as
+by an invisible system upon the generation and diffusion of hatred. The
+seer's apocalyptic warnings were surpassed.
+
+A deluge of hatred and blood such as even the blood-drenched soil of
+Europe had never known, flowed from land to land. Romain Rolland knew
+that a lost world, a corrupt generation, cannot be saved from its
+illusions. A world conflagration cannot be extinguished by a word,
+cannot be quelled by the efforts of naked human hands. The only possible
+endeavor was to prevent others adding fuel to the flames, and with the
+lash of scorn and contempt to deter as far as might be those who were
+engaged in such criminal undertakings. It might be possible, too, to
+build an ark wherein what was intellectually precious in this suicidal
+generation might be saved from the deluge, might be made available for
+those of a future day when the waters of hatred should have subsided. A
+sign might be uplifted, round which the faithful could rally, building a
+temple of unity amid, and yet high above, the battlefields.
+
+Among the detestable organizations of the general staffs, mechanical
+ingenuity, lying, and hatred, Rolland dreamed of establishing another
+organization, a fellowship of the free spirits of Europe. The leading
+imaginative writers, the leading men of science, were to constitute the
+ark he desired; they were to be the sustainers of justice in these days
+of injustice and falsehood. While the masses, deceived by words, were
+raging against one another in blind fury, the artists, the writers, the
+men of science, of Germany, France, and England, who for centuries had
+been co�perating for discoveries, advances, ideals, could combine to
+form a tribunal of the spirit which, with scientific earnestness, should
+devote itself to extirpating the falsehoods that were keeping their
+respective peoples apart. Transcending nationality, they could hold
+intercourse on a higher plane. For it was Rolland's most cherished hope
+that the great artists and great investigators would refuse to identify
+themselves with the crime of the war, would refrain from abandoning
+their freedom of conscience and from entrenching themselves behind a
+facile "my country, right or wrong." With few exceptions, intellectuals
+had for centuries recognized the repulsiveness of war. More than a
+thousand years earlier, when China was threatened by ambitious Mongols,
+Li Tai Peh had exclaimed: "Accursed be war! Accursed the work of
+weapons! The sage has nothing to do with these follies." The contention
+that the sage has naught to do with such follies seems to rise like an
+unenunciated refrain from all the utterances of western men of learning
+since Europe began to have a common life. In Latin letters (for Latin,
+the medium of intercourse, was likewise the symbol of supranational
+fellowship), the great humanists whose respective countries were at war
+exchanged their regrets, and offered mutual philosophical solace against
+the murderous illusions of their less instructed fellows. Herder was
+speaking for the learned Germans of the eighteenth century when he
+wrote: "For fatherland to engage in a bloody struggle with fatherland is
+the most preposterous, barbarism." Goethe, Byron, Voltaire, and
+Rousseau, were at one in their contempt for the purposeless butcheries
+of war. To-day, in Rolland's view, the leading intellectuals, the great
+scientific investigators whose minds would perforce remain unclouded,
+the most humane among the imaginative writers, could join in a
+fellowship whose members would renounce the errors of their respective
+nations. He did not, indeed, venture to hope that there would be a very
+large number of persons whose souls would remain free from the passions
+of the time. But spiritual force is not based upon numbers; its laws are
+not those of armies. In this field, Goethe's saying is applicable:
+"Everything great, and everything most worth having comes from a
+minority. It cannot be supposed that reason will ever become popular.
+Passion and sentiment may be popularized, the reason will always remain
+a privilege of the few." This minority, however, may acquire authority
+through spiritual force. Above all, it may constitute a bulwark against
+falsehood. If men of light and leading, free men of all nationalities,
+were to meet somewhere, in Switzerland perhaps, to make common cause
+against every injustice, by whomever committed, a sanctuary would at
+length be established, an asylum for truth which was now everywhere
+bound and gagged. Europe would have a span of soil for home; mankind
+would have a spark of hope. Holding mutual converse, these best of men
+could enlighten one another; and the reciprocal illumination on the part
+of such unprejudiced persons could not fail to diffuse its light over
+the world.
+
+Such was the mood in which Rolland took up his pen for the first time
+after the outbreak of war. He wrote an open letter to Hauptmann, to the
+author whom among Germans he chiefly honored for goodness and
+humaneness. Within the same hour he wrote to Verhaeren, Germany's
+bitterest foe. Rolland thus stretched forth both his hands, rightward
+and leftward, in the hope that he could bring his two correspondents
+together, so that at least within the domain of pure spirit there might
+be a first essay towards spiritual reconciliation, what time upon the
+battlefields the machine-guns with their infernal clatter were mowing
+down the sons of France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Austria-Hungary, and
+Russia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CONTROVERSY WITH GERHART HAUPTMANN
+
+
+Romain Rolland had never been personally acquainted with Gerhart
+Hauptmann. He was familiar with the German's writings, and admired their
+passionate participation in all that is human, loved them for the
+goodness with which the individual figures are intentionally
+characterized. On a visit to Berlin, he had called at Hauptmann's house,
+but the playwright was away. The two had never before exchanged letters.
+
+Nevertheless, Rolland decided to address Hauptmann as a representative
+German author, as writer of _Die Weber_ and as creator of many other
+figures typifying suffering. He wrote on August 29, 1914, the day on
+which a telegram issued by Wolff's agency, ludicrously exaggerating in
+pursuit of the policy of "frightfulness," had announced that "the old
+town of Louvain, rich in works of art, exists no more to-day." An
+outburst of indignation was assuredly justified, but Rolland endeavored
+to exhibit the utmost self-control. He began as follows: "I am not,
+Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany as a nation
+of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness of your
+mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of Old Germany; and
+even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words of _our_
+Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating all
+national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
+heights 'where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
+peoples as our own.'" He goes on with a pathetic self-consciousness for
+the first time noticeable in the work of this most modest of writers.
+Recognizing his mission, he lifts his voice above the controversies of
+the moment. "I have labored all my life to bring together the minds of
+our two nations; and the atrocities of this impious war in which, to the
+ruin of European civilization, they are involved, will never lead me to
+soil my spirit with hatred."
+
+Now Rolland sounds a more impassioned note. He does not hold Germany
+responsible for the war. "War springs from the weakness and stupidity of
+nations." He ignores political questions, but protests vehemently
+against the destruction of works of art, asking Hauptmann and his
+countrymen, "Are you the grandchildren of Goethe or of Attila?"
+Proceeding more quietly, he implores Hauptmann to refrain from any
+attempt to justify such things. "In the name of our Europe, of which you
+have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
+that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
+the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
+Hauptmann, I adjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
+Germany, among whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with the
+utmost energy against this crime which will otherwise recoil upon
+yourselves." Rolland's hope was that the Germans would, like himself,
+refuse to condone the excesses of the war-makers, would refuse to accept
+the war as a fatality. He hoped for a public protest from across the
+Rhine. Rolland was not aware that at this time no one in Germany had or
+could have any inkling of the true political situation. He was not aware
+that such a public protest as he desired was quite impossible.
+
+Gerhart Hauptmann's answer struck a fiercer note than Rolland's letter.
+Instead of complying with the Frenchman's plea, instead of repudiating
+the German militarist policy of frightfulness, he attempted, with
+sinister enthusiasm, to justify that policy. Accepting the maxim, "war
+is war," he, somewhat prematurely, defended the right of the stronger.
+"The weak naturally have recourse to vituperation." He declared the
+report of the destruction of Louvain to be false. It was, he said, a
+matter of life or death for Germany that the German troops should effect
+"their peaceful passage" through Belgium. He referred to the
+pronouncements of the general staff, and quoted, as the highest
+authority for truth, the words of "the Emperor himself."
+
+Therewith the controversy passed from the spiritual to the political
+plane. Rolland, embittered in his turn, rejected the views of Hauptmann,
+who was lending his moral authority to the support of Schlieffen's
+aggressive theories. Hauptmann, declared Rolland, was "accepting
+responsibility for the crimes of those who wield authority." Instead of
+promoting harmony, the correspondence was fostering discord. In reality
+the two had no common ground for discussion. The attempt was ill-timed,
+passion still ran too high; the mists of prevalent falsehood still
+obscured vision on both sides. The waters of the flood continued to
+rise, the infinite deluge of hatred and error. Brethren were as yet
+unable to recognize one another in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERHAEREN
+
+
+Having written to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German, Rolland almost
+simultaneously addressed himself to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian, who
+had been an enthusiast for European unity, but had now become one of
+Germany's bitterest foes. Perhaps no one is better entitled than the
+present writer to bear witness that Verhaeren's hostility to Germany was
+a new thing. As long as peace lasted, the Belgian poet had known no
+other ideal than that of international brotherhood, had detested nothing
+more heartily than he detested international discord. Shortly before the
+war, in his preface to Henri Guilbeaux's anthology of German poetry,
+Verhaeren had spoken of "the ardor of the nations," which, he said, "in
+defiance of that other passion which tends to make them quarrel,
+inclines them towards mutual love." The German invasion of Belgium
+taught him to hate. His verses, which had hitherto been odes to creative
+force, were henceforward dithyrambs in favor of hostility.
+
+Rolland had sent Verhaeren a copy of his protest against the destruction
+of Louvain and the bombardment of Rheims cathedral. Concurring in this
+protest, Verhaeren wrote: "Sadness and hatred overpower me. The latter
+feeling is new in my experience. I cannot rid myself of it, although I
+am one of those who have always regarded hatred as a base sentiment.
+Such love as I can give in this hour is reserved for my country, or
+rather for the heap of ashes to which Belgium has been reduced."
+Rolland's answer ran as follows: "Rid yourself of hatred. Neither you
+nor we should give way to it. Let us guard against hatred even more than
+we guard against our enemies! You will see at a later date that the
+tragedy is more terrible than people can realize while it is actually
+being played.... So stupendous is this European drama that we have no
+right to make human beings responsible for it. It is a convulsion of
+nature.... Let us build an ark as did those who were threatened with the
+deluge. Thus we can save what is left of humanity." Without acrimony,
+Verhaeren rejected this adjuration. He deliberately chose to remain
+inspired with hatred, little as he liked the feeling. In _La Belgique
+sanglante_, he declared that hatred brought a certain solace, although,
+dedicating his work "to the man I once was," he manifested his yearning
+for the revival of his former sentiment that the world was a
+comprehensive whole. Vainly did Rolland return to the charge in a
+touching letter: "Greatly, indeed, must you have suffered, to be able to
+hate. But I am confident that in your case such a feeling cannot long
+endure, for souls like yours would perish in this atmosphere. Justice
+must be done, but it is not a demand of justice that a whole people
+should be held responsible for the crimes of a few hundred individuals.
+Were there but one just man in Israel, you would have no right to pass
+judgment upon all Israel. Surely it is impossible for you to doubt that
+many in Germany and Austria, oppressed and gagged, continue to suffer
+and struggle.... Thousands of innocent persons are being everywhere
+sacrificed to the crimes of politics! Napoleon was not far wrong when he
+said: 'Politics are for us what fate was for the ancients.' Never was
+the destiny of classical days more cruel. Let us refuse, Verhaeren, to
+make common cause with this destiny. Let us take our stand beside the
+oppressed, beside all the oppressed, wherever they may dwell. I
+recognize only two nations on earth, that of those who suffer, and that
+of those who cause the suffering."
+
+Verhaeren, however, was unmoved. He answered as follows: "If I hate, it
+is because what I saw, felt, and heard, is hateful.... I admit that I
+cannot be just, now that I am filled with sadness and burn with anger. I
+am not simply standing near the fire, but am actually amid the flames,
+so that I suffer and weep. I can no otherwise." He remained loyal to
+hatred, and indeed loyal to the hatred-for-hate of Romain Rolland's
+Olivier. Notwithstanding this grave divergence of view between Verhaeren
+and Rolland, the two men continued on terms of friendship and mutual
+respect. Even in the preface he contributed to Loyson's inflammatory
+book, _�tes-vous neutre devant le crime_, Verhaeren distinguished
+between the person and the cause. He was unable, he said, "to espouse
+Rolland's error," but he would not repudiate his friendship for
+Rolland. Indeed, he desired to emphasize its existence, seeing that in
+France it was already "dangerous to love Romain Rolland."
+
+In this correspondence, as in that with Hauptmann, two strong passions
+seemed to clash; but the opponents in reality remained out of touch.
+Here, likewise, the appeal was fruitless. Practically the whole world
+was given over to hatred, including even the noblest creative artists,
+and the finest among the sons of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE
+
+
+As on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of
+inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and
+had issued it once more in vain. The writers, the men of science, the
+philosophers, the artists, all took the side of the country to which
+they happened to belong; the Germans spoke for Germany, the Frenchmen
+for France, the Englishmen for England. No one would espouse the
+universal cause; no one would rise superior to the device, my country
+right or wrong. In every land, among those of every nation, there were
+to be found plenty of enthusiastic advocates, persons willing blindly to
+justify all their country's doings, including its errors and its crimes,
+to excuse these errors and crimes upon the plea of necessity. There was
+only one land, the land common to them all, Europe, motherland of all
+the fatherlands, which found no advocate, no defender. There was only
+one idea, the most self-evident to a Christian world, which found no
+spokesman--the idea of ideas, humanity.
+
+During these days, Rolland may well have recalled sacred memories of the
+time when Leo Tolstoi's letter came to give him a mission in life.
+Tolstoi had stood alone in the utterance of his celebrated outcry, "I
+can no longer keep silence." At that time his country was at war. He
+arose to defend the invisible rights of human beings, uttering a protest
+against the command that men should murder their brothers. Now his voice
+was no longer heard; his place was empty; the conscience of mankind was
+dumb. To Rolland, the consequent silence, the terrible silence of the
+free spirit amid the hurly-burly of the slaves, seemed more hateful than
+the roar of the cannon. Those to whom he had appealed for help had
+refused to answer the call. The ultimate truth, the truth of conscience,
+had no organized fellowship to sustain it. No one would aid him in the
+struggle for the freedom of the European soul, the struggle of truth
+against falsehood, the struggle of human lovingkindness against frenzied
+hate. Rolland once again was alone with his faith, more alone than
+during the bitterest years of solitude.
+
+But Rolland has never been one to resign himself to loneliness. In youth
+he had already felt that those who are passive while wrong is being done
+are as criminal as the very wrongdoer. "Ceux qui subissent le mal sont
+aussi criminels que ceux qui le font." Upon the poet, above all, it
+seemed to him incumbent to find words for thought, and to vivify the
+words by action. It is not enough to write ornamental comments upon the
+history of one's time. The poet must be part of the very being of his
+time, must fight to make his ideas realize themselves in action. "The
+elite of the intellect constitutes an aristocracy which would fain
+replace the aristocracy of birth. But the aristocracy of intellect is
+apt to forget that the aristocracy of birth won its privileges with
+blood. For hundreds of years men have listened to the words of wisdom,
+but seldom have they seen a sage offering himself up to the sacrifice.
+If we would inspire others with faith we must show that our own faith is
+real. Mere words do not suffice." Fame is a sword as well as a laurel
+crown. Faith imposes obligations. One who had made Jean Christophe utter
+the gospel of a free conscience, could not, when the world had fashioned
+his cross, play the part of Peter denying the Lord. He must take up his
+apostolate, be ready should need arise to face martyrdom. Thus, while
+almost all the artists of the day, in their "passion d'abdiquer," in
+their mad desire to shout with the crowd, were not merely extolling
+force and victory as the masters of the hour, but were actually
+maintaining that force was the very meaning of civilization, that
+victory was the vital energy of the world, Rolland stood forth against
+them all, proclaiming the might of the incorruptible conscience. "Force
+is always hateful to me," wrote Rolland to Jouve in this decisive hour.
+"If the world cannot get on without force, it still behooves me to
+refrain from making terms with force. I must uphold an opposing
+principle, one which will invalidate the principle of force. Each must
+play his own part; each must obey his own inward monitor." He did not
+fail to recognize the titanic nature of the struggle into which he was
+entering, but the words he had written in youth still resounded in his
+memory. "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on
+earth."
+
+Just as in those earlier days, when he had wished by means of his dramas
+to restore faith to his nation, when he had set up the images of the
+heroes as examples to a petty time, when throughout a decade of quiet
+effort he had summoned the people towards love and freedom, so now,
+Rolland set to work alone. He had no party, no newspaper, no influence.
+He had nothing but his passionate enthusiasm, and that indomitable
+courage to which the forlorn hope makes an irresistible appeal. Alone he
+began his onslaught upon the illusions of the multitude, when the
+European conscience, hunted with scorn and hatred from all countries and
+all hearts, had taken sanctuary in his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE MANIFESTOES
+
+
+The struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since
+Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression
+in the form of lying phrases, he had perforce to fight them upon their
+own ground. But the vigor of his ideas, the breath of freedom they
+conveyed, and the authority of the author's name, made of these
+articles, manifestoes which spoke to the whole of Europe and aroused a
+spiritual conflagration. Like electric sparks given off from invisible
+wires, their energy was liberated in all directions, leading here to
+terrible explosions of hatred, throwing there a brilliant light into the
+depths of conscience, in every case producing cordial excitement in its
+contrasted forms of indignation and enthusiasm. Never before, perhaps,
+did newspaper articles exercise so stupendous an influence, at once
+inflammatory and purifying, as was exercised by these two dozen appeals
+and manifestoes issued in a time of enslavement and confusion by a
+lonely man whose spirit was free and whose intellect remained unclouded.
+
+From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by
+comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully considered and
+fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but
+simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that
+to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the
+"_Journal de Gen�ve_" should be reproduced in the French press), the
+ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time
+to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and
+ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and
+appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic
+merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their
+essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of
+incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that
+they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the
+emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many
+millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual.
+For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the
+invisible Europe.
+
+Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made
+available in the volumes _Au-dessus de la m�l�e_ and _Les pr�curseurs_,
+be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at
+the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a
+force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the
+significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the
+sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic
+character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to mind the frenzy of
+the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was
+devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has
+already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We
+have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance
+the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation
+responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal,
+that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that
+_Au-dessus de la m�l�e_, whose trend already seems to us a matter of
+course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and
+that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was
+forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured
+wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke
+the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal
+amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that
+Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall
+Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more
+than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is
+scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as
+commonplace." To-day, for the moment at any rate, we may have entered
+into a period, when many of Rolland's utterances are accounted
+commonplace because, since he wrote, they have become the small change
+of thousands of other writers. Yet there was a day when each of these
+words seemed to cut like a whip-lash. The excitement they aroused gives
+us the historic measure of the need that they should be spoken. The
+wrath of Rolland's opponents, of which the only remaining record is a
+pile of pamphlets, bears witness to the heroism of him who was the first
+to take his stand "above the battle." Let us not forget that it was then
+the crime of crimes, "de dire ce qui est juste et humain." Men were
+still so drunken with the fumes of the first bloodshed that they would
+have been fain, as Rolland himself has phrased it, "to crucify Christ
+once again should he have risen; to crucify him for saying, Love one
+another."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ABOVE THE BATTLE
+
+
+On September 22, 1914, the essay _Au-dessus de la m�l�e_ was published
+in "_Le Journal de Gen�ve_." After the preliminary skirmish with Gerhart
+Hauptmann, came this declaration of war against hatred, this foundation
+stone of the invisible European church. The title, "Above the Battle,"
+has become at once a watchword and a term of abuse; but amid the
+discordant quarrels of the factions, the essay was the first utterance
+to sound a clear note of imperturbable justice, bringing solace to
+thousands.
+
+It is animated by a strange and tragical emotion, resonant of the hour
+when countless myriads were bleeding and dying, and among them many of
+Rolland's intimate friends. It is the outpouring of a riven heart, the
+heart of one who would fain move others, breathing as it does the heroic
+determination to try conclusions with a world that has fallen a prey to
+madness. It opens with an ode to the youthful fighters. "O young men
+that shed your blood for the thirsty earth with so generous a joy! O
+heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this
+splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by
+a common ideal, ... all of you, marching to your deaths, are dear to
+me.... Those years of skepticism and gay frivolity in which we in
+France grew up are avenged in you.... Conquerors or conquered, quick or
+dead, rejoice!" But after this ode to the faithful, to those who believe
+themselves to be discharging their highest duty, Rolland turns to
+consider the intellectual leaders of the nations, and apostrophises them
+thus: "For what are you squandering them, these living riches, these
+treasures of heroism entrusted to your hands? What ideal have you held
+up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves?
+Mutual slaughter! A European war!" He accuses the leaders of taking
+cowardly refuge behind an idol they term fate. Those who understood
+their responsibilities so ill that they failed to prevent the war,
+inflame and poison it now that it has begun. A terrible picture. In all
+countries, everything becomes involved in the torrent; among all
+peoples, there is the same ecstasy for that which is destroying them.
+"For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men
+blindly one against another.... All the forces of the spirit, of reason,
+of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the
+disposal of the armies in every state. There is not one among the
+leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim that the cause
+of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human
+progress." He mockingly alludes to the preposterous duels between
+philosophers and men of science; and to the failure of what professed to
+be the two great internationalist forces of the age, Christianity and
+socialism, to stand aloof from the fray. "It would seem, then, that
+love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other
+countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defense
+of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian
+dilettantism, which revolts me to the very depths of my being. No! Love
+of my country does not demand that I should hate and slay those noble
+and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor
+them and seek to unite with them for our common good." After some
+further discussion of the attitude of Christians and of socialists
+towards the war, he continues: "There was no reason for war between the
+western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do
+not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a
+minority, a minority vitally interested in the diffusion of hatred; but
+our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty, and for that alone." It
+was a scandal, therefore, that at the outbreak of the war the
+intellectual leaders should have allowed the purity of their thought to
+be besmirched. It was monstrous that intelligence should permit itself
+to be enslaved by the passions of a puerile and absurd policy of race.
+Never should we forget, in the war now being waged, the essential unity
+of all our fatherlands. "Humanity is a symphony of great collective
+souls. He who cannot understand it and love it until he has destroyed a
+part of its elements, is a barbarian.... For the finer spirits of
+Europe, there are two dwelling places: our earthly fatherland, and the
+City of God. Of the one we are the guests, of the other the builders....
+It is our duty to build the walls of this city ever higher and
+stronger, that it may dominate the injustice and the hatred of the
+nations. Then shall we have a refuge wherein the brotherly and free
+spirits from out all the world may assemble." This faith in a lofty
+ideal soars like a sea-mew over the ocean of blood. Rolland is well
+aware how little hope there is that his words can make themselves
+audible above the clamor of thirty million warriors. "I know that such
+thoughts have little chance of being heard to-day. I do not speak to
+convince. I speak only to solace my conscience. And I know that at the
+same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all
+lands, cannot and dare not speak for themselves." As ever, he is on the
+side of the weak, on the side of the minority. His voice grows stronger,
+for he knows that he is speaking for the silent multitude.
+
+[Illustration: Romain Rolland at the time of writing _Above the
+Battle_]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED
+
+
+The essay _Au-dessus de la m�l�e_ was the first stroke of the woodman's
+axe in the overgrown forest of hatred; thereupon, a roaring echo
+thundered from all sides, reverberating reluctantly in the newspapers.
+Undismayed, Rolland resolutely continued his work. He wished to cut a
+clearing into which a few sunbeams of reason might shine through the
+gloomy and suffocating atmosphere. His next essays aimed at illuminating
+an open space of such a character. Especially notable were _Inter Arma
+Caritas_ (October 30, 1914); _Les idoles_ (December 4, 1914); _Notre
+prochain l'ennemi_ (March 15, 1915); _Le meutre des �lites_ (June 14,
+1915). These were attempts to give a voice to the silent. "Let us help
+the victims! It is true that we cannot do very much. In the everlasting
+struggle between good and evil, the balance is unequal. We require a
+century for the upbuilding of that which a day destroys. Nevertheless,
+the frenzy lasts no more than a day, and the patient labor of
+reconstruction is our daily bread. This work goes on even during an hour
+when the world is perishing around us."
+
+The poet had at length come to understand his task. It is useless to
+attack the war directly. Reason can effect nothing against the elemental
+forces. But he regards it as his predestined duty to combat throughout
+the war everything that the passions of men lead them to undertake for
+the deliberate increase of horror, to combat the spiritual poison of the
+war. The most atrocious feature of the present struggle, one which
+distinguishes it from all previous wars, is this deliberate poisoning.
+That which in earlier days was accepted with simple resignation as a
+disastrous visitation like the plague, was now presented in a heroic
+light, as a sign of "the grandeur of the age." An ethic of force, an
+ethic of destruction, was being preached. The mass struggle of the
+nations was being purposely inflamed to become the mass hatred of
+individuals. Rolland, therefore, was not, as many have supposed,
+attacking the war; he was attacking the ideology of the war, the
+artificial idolization of brutality. As far as the individual was
+concerned, he attacked the readiness to accept a collective morality
+constructed solely for the duration of the war; he attacked the
+surrender of conscience in face of the prevailing universalization of
+falsehood; he attacked the suspension of inner freedom which was
+advocated until the war should be over.
+
+His words, therefore, are not directed against the masses, not against
+the peoples. These know not what they do; they are deceived; they are
+dumb driven cattle. The diffusion of lying has made it easy for them to
+hate. "Il est si commode de ha�r sans comprendre." The fault lies with
+the inciters, with the manufacturers of lies, with the intellectuals.
+They are guilty, seven times guilty, because, thanks to their education
+and experience, they cannot fail to know the truth which nevertheless
+they repudiate; because from weakness, and in many cases from
+calculation, they have surrendered to the current of uninstructed
+opinion, instead of using their authority to deflect this current into
+better channels. Of set purpose, instead of defending the ideals they
+formerly espoused, the ideals of humanity and international unity, they
+have revived the ideas of the Spartans and of the Homeric heroes, which
+have as little place in our time as have spears and plate-armor in these
+days of machine-gun warfare. Heretofore, to the great spirits of all
+time, hatred has seemed a base and contemptible accompaniment of war.
+The thoughtful among the non-combatants put it away from them with
+loathing; the warriors rejected the sentiment upon grounds of chivalry.
+Now, hatred is not merely supported with all the arguments of logic,
+science, and poesy; but is actually, in defiance of gospel teaching,
+raised to a place among the moral duties, so that every one who resists
+the feeling of collective hatred is branded as a traitor. Against these
+enemies of the free spirit, Rolland takes up his parable: "Not only have
+they done nothing to lessen reciprocal misunderstanding; not only have
+they done nothing to limit the diffusion of hate; on the contrary, with
+few exceptions, they have done everything in their power to make hatred
+more widespread and more venomous. In large part, this war is their war.
+By their murderous ideologies they have led thousands astray. With
+criminal self-confidence, unteachable in their arrogance, they have
+driven millions to death, sacrificing their fellows to the phantoms
+which they, the intellectuals, have created." The persons to whom blame
+attaches are those who know, or who might have known; but who, from
+sloth, cowardice, or weakness, from desire for fame or for some other
+personal advantage, have given themselves over to lying.
+
+The hatred breathed by the intellectuals was a falsehood. Had it been a
+truth, had it been a genuine passion, those who were inspired with this
+feeling would have ceased talking and would themselves have taken up
+arms. Most people are moved either by hatred or by love, not by abstract
+ideas. For this reason, the attempt to sow dissension among millions of
+unknown individuals, the attempt to "perpetuate" hatred, was a crime
+against the spirit rather than against the flesh. It was a deliberate
+falsification to include leaders and led, drivers and driven, in a
+single category; to generalize Germany as an integral object for hatred.
+We must join one fellowship or the other, that of the truthtellers or
+that of the liars, that of the men of conscience or that of the men of
+phrase. Just as in _Jean Christophe_, Rolland, in order to show forth
+the universally human fellowship, had distinguished between the true
+France and the false, between the old Germany and the new; so now in
+wartime did he draw attention to the ominous resemblance between the war
+fanatics in both camps, and to the heroic isolation of those who were
+above the battle in all the belligerent lands. Thus did he endeavor to
+fulfill Tolstoi's dictum, that it is the function of the imaginative
+writer to strengthen the ties that bind men together. In Rolland's
+comedy _Liluli_, the "cerveaux encha�n�s," dressed in various national
+uniforms, dance the same Indian war-dance under the lash of Patriotism,
+the negro slave-driver. There is a terrible resemblance between the
+German professors and those of the Sorbonne. All of them turn the same
+logical somersaults; all join in the same chorus of hate.
+
+But the fellowship to which Rolland wishes to draw our attention, is the
+fellowship of solace. It is true that the humanizing forces are not so
+well organized as the forces of destruction. Free opinion is gagged,
+whereas falsehood bellows through the megaphones of the press. Truth has
+to be sought out with painful labor, for the state makes it its business
+to hide truth. Nevertheless, those who search perseveringly can discover
+truth among all nations and among all races. In these essays, Rolland
+gives many examples, drawn equally from French and from German sources,
+showing that even in the trenches, nay, that especially in the trenches,
+thousands upon thousands are animated with brotherly feelings. He
+publishes letters from German soldiers, side by side with letters from
+French soldiers, all couched in the same phraseology of human
+friendliness. He tells of the women's organizations for helping the
+enemy, and shows that amid the cruelty of arms the same lovingkindness
+is displayed on both sides. He publishes poems from either camp, poems
+which exhale a common sentiment. Just as in his _Vie des hommes
+illustres_ he had wished to show the sufferers of the world that they
+were not alone, but that the greatest minds of all epochs were with
+them, so now does he attempt to convince those who amid the general
+madness are apt to regard themselves as outcasts because they do not
+share the fire and fury of the newspapers and the professors, that they
+have everywhere silent brothers of the spirit. Once more, as of old, he
+wishes to unite the invisible community of the free. "I feel the same
+joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing
+the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly
+March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They
+show that the warmth of life persists below the surface, and that soon
+nothing will prevent its rising again." Undismayed he continues on his
+"humble p�l�rinage," endeavoring "to discover, beneath the ruins, the
+hearts of those who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human
+brotherhood. What a melancholy joy it is to come to their aid." For the
+sake of this consolation, for the sake of this hope, he gives a new
+significance even to war, which he has hated and dreaded from early
+childhood. "To war we owe one painful benefit, in that it has served to
+bring together those of all nations who refuse to share the prevailing
+sentiments of national hatred. It has steeled their energies, has
+inspired them with an indefatigable will. How mistaken are those who
+imagine that the ideas of human brotherhood have been stifled.... Not
+for a moment do I doubt the coming unity of the European fellowship.
+That unity will be realized. The war is but its baptism of blood."
+
+Thus does the good Samaritan, the healer of souls, endeavor to bring to
+the despairing that hope which is the bread of life. Perchance Rolland
+speaks with a confidence that runs somewhat in advance of his innermost
+convictions. But he only who realized the intense yearnings of the
+innumerable persons who at that date were imprisoned in their respective
+fatherlands, barred in the cages of the censorships, he alone can
+realize the value to such poor captives of Rolland's manifestoes of
+faith, words free from hatred, bringing at length a message of
+brotherhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+OPPONENTS
+
+
+From the first, Rolland knew perfectly well that in a time when party
+feeling runs high, no task can be more ungrateful than that of one who
+advocates impartiality. "The combatants are to-day united in one thing
+only, in their hatred for those who refuse to join in any hymn of hate.
+Whoever does not share the common delirium, is suspect. And nowadays,
+when justice cannot spare the time for thorough investigation, every
+suspect is considered tantamount to a traitor. He who undertakes in
+wartime to defend peace on earth, must realize that he is staking his
+faith, his name, his tranquillity, his repute, and even his friendships.
+But of what value would be a conviction on behalf of which a man would
+take no risks?" Rolland was likewise aware that the most dangerous of
+all positions is that between the fronts, but this certainty of danger
+was but a tonic to his conscience. "If it be really needful, as the
+proverb assures us, to prepare for war in time of peace, it is no less
+needful to prepare for peace in time of war. In my view, the latter role
+is assigned to those who stand outside the struggle, and whose mental
+life has brought them into unusually close contact with the world-all. I
+speak of the members of that little lay church, of those who have been
+exceptionally well able to maintain their faith in the unity of human
+thought, of those for whom all men are sons of the same father. If it
+should chance that we are reviled for holding this conviction, the
+reviling is in truth an honor to us, and we may be satisfied to know
+that we shall earn the approbation of posterity."
+
+It is plain that Rolland is forearmed against opposition. Nevertheless,
+the fierceness of the onslaughts exceeded all expectation. The first
+rumblings of the storm came from Germany. The passage in the _Letter to
+Gerhart Hauptmann_, "are you the sons of Goethe or of Attila," and
+similar utterances, aroused angry echoes. A dozen or so professors and
+scribblers hastened to "chastise" French arrogance. In the columns of
+"_Die Deutsche Rundschau_," a narrow-minded pangerman disclosed the
+great secret that under the mask of neutrality _Jean Christophe_ had
+been a most dangerous French attack upon the German spirit.
+
+French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the
+publication of the essay _Au-dessus de la m�l�e_ was reported. Difficult
+as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were
+forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the
+public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot.
+Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from
+leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper
+articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume
+from the pen of a carpet hero. This book was furnished with a thousand
+proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier,
+avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no
+lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning
+of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that
+he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher
+was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately
+falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between
+the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies
+and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press
+combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured
+to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced:
+"Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in
+alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends,
+the "ami de la premi�re heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier
+work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a
+book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government
+likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect
+"materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part
+at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by
+Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the
+authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the
+fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show
+that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan
+to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies.
+
+All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the
+forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from
+a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp
+the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that
+he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the
+most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From
+a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the
+frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely
+exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued
+to develop his ideas.
+
+In the eyes of the patriots, Rolland's first crime was that he openly
+discussed the moral problems of the war. "On ne discute pas la patrie."
+The first axiom of war ethics is that those who cannot or will not shout
+with the crowd must hold their peace. Soldiers must never be taught to
+think; they must only be incited to hate. A lie which promotes
+enthusiasm is worth more in wartime than the best of truths. In
+imitation of the principles of the Catholic church, reflection, doubt,
+is deemed a crime against the infallible dogma of the fatherland. It was
+enough that Rolland should wish to turn things over in his mind, instead
+of unquestioningly affirming the current political theses. Thereby he
+abandoned the "attitude fran�aise"; thereby he was stamped as "neutre."
+In those days "neutre" was a good rime to "tra�tre."
+
+Rolland's second crime was that he desired to be just to all mankind,
+that he continued to regard the enemy as human beings, that among them
+he distinguished between guilty and not guilty, that he had as much
+compassion for German sufferers as for French, that he did not hesitate
+to refer to the Germans as brothers. The dogma of patriotism prescribed
+that for the duration of the war the feelings of humanitarianism should
+be stifled. Justice should be put away on the top shelf, to keep company
+there, until victory had been secured, with the divine command, Thou
+shalt not kill. One of the pamphlets against Rolland bears as its motto,
+"Pendant une guerre tout ce qu'on donne de l'amour � l'humanit�, on le
+vole � la patrie"--though it must be observed that from the outlook of
+those who share Rolland's views, the order of the terms might well be
+inverted.
+
+The third crime, the offense which seemed most unpardonable of all, and
+the one most dangerous to the state, was that Rolland refused to regard
+a military victory as likely to furnish the elixir of morality, to
+promote spiritual regeneration, to bring justice upon earth. Rolland's
+sin lay in holding that a just and bloodless peace, a complete
+reconciliation, a fraternal union of the European nations, would be more
+fruitful of blessing than an enforced peace, which could only sow the
+dragon's teeth of hatred and of new wars. In France at this date, those
+who wished to fight the war to a finish, to fight until the enemy had
+been utterly crushed, coined the term "defeatist" for those who desired
+peace to be based upon a reasonable understanding. Thus was paralleled
+the German terminology, which spoke of "Flaumachern" (slackers) and of
+"Schmachfriede" (shameful peace). Rolland, who had devoted the whole of
+his life to the elucidation of moral laws higher than those of force,
+was stigmatized as one who would poison the morale of the armies, as
+"l'initiateur du d�faitisme." To the militarists, he seemed to be the
+last representative of "dying Renanism," to be the center of a moral
+power, and for this reason they endeavored to represent his ideas as
+nonsensical, to depict him as a Frenchman who desired the defeat of
+France. Yet his words stood unchallenged: "I wish France to be loved. I
+wish France to be victorious, not through force; not solely through
+right (even that would be too harsh); but through the superiority of a
+great heart. I wish that France were strong enough to fight without
+hatred; strong enough to regard even those whom she must strike down, as
+her brothers, as erring brothers, to whom she must extend her fullest
+sympathy as soon as she has put it beyond their power to injure her."
+Rolland made no attempt to answer even the most calumnious of attacks.
+He quietly let the invectives pass, knowing that the thought which he
+felt himself commissioned to announce, was inviolable and imperishable.
+Never had he fought men, but only ideas. The hostile ideas, in this
+case, had long since been answered by the figures of his own creation.
+They had been answered by Olivier, the free Frenchman who hated hatred;
+by Faber, the Girondist, to whom conscience stood higher than the
+arguments of the patriots; by Adam Lux, who compassionately asked his
+fanatical opponent, "N'es tu pas fatigu� de ta baine"; by Teulier, and
+by all the great characters through whom during more than two decades he
+had been giving expression to his outlook upon the struggle of the day.
+He was unperturbed at standing alone against almost the entire nation.
+He recalled Chamfort's saying, "There are times when public opinion is
+the worst of all possible opinions." The immeasurable wrath, the
+hysterical frenzy of his opponents, confirmed his conviction that he was
+right, for he felt that their clamor for force betrayed their sense of
+the weakness of their own arguments. Smilingly he contemplated their
+artificially inflamed anger, addressing them in the words of his own
+Clerambault: "You say that yours is the better way? The only good way?
+Very well, take your own path, and leave me to take mine. I make no
+attempt to compel you to follow me. I merely show you which way I am
+going. What are you so excited about? Perhaps at the bottom of your
+hearts you are afraid that my way is the right one?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FRIENDS
+
+
+As soon as he had uttered his first words, a void formed round this
+brave man. As Verhaeren finely phrased it, he positively loved to
+encounter danger, whereas most people shun danger. His oldest friends,
+those who had known his writings and his character from youth upwards,
+left him in the lurch; prudent folk quietly turned their backs on him;
+newspaper editors and publishers refused him hospitality. For the
+moment, Rolland seemed to be alone. But, as he had written in _Jean
+Christophe_, "A great soul is never alone. Abandoned by friends, such a
+one makes new friends, and surrounds himself with a circle of that
+affection of which he is himself full."
+
+Necessity, the touchstone of conscience, had deprived him of friends,
+but had also brought him friends. It is true that their voices were
+hardly audible amid the clangor of the opponents. The war-makers had
+control of all the channels of publicity. They roared hatred through the
+megaphones of the press. Friends could do no more than give expression
+to a few cautious words in such petty periodicals as could slip through
+the meshes of the censorship. Enemies formed a compact mass, flowing to
+the attack in a huge wave (whose waters were ultimately to be dispersed
+in the morass of oblivion); his friends crystallized slowly and secretly
+around his ideas, but they were steadfast. His enemies were a regiment
+advancing fiercely to the attack at the word of command; his friends
+were a fellowship, working tranquilly, and united only through love.
+
+The friends in Paris had the hardest task. It was barely possible for
+them to communicate with him openly. Half of their letters to him and
+half of his replies were lost on the frontier. As from a beleaguered
+fortress, they hailed the liberator, the man who was freely proclaiming
+to the world the ideals which they were forbidden to utter. Their only
+possible way of defending their ideas was to defend the man. In
+Rolland's own fatherland, Am�d�e Dunois, Fernand Despr�s, Georges Pioch,
+Renaitour, Rouanet, Jacques Mesnil, Gaston Thiesson, Marcel Martinet,
+and S�v�rine, boldly championed him against calumny. A valiant woman,
+Marcelle Capy, raised the standard, naming her book _Une voix de femme
+dans la m�l�e_. Separated from him by the blood-stained sea, they looked
+towards him as towards a distant lighthouse upon the rock, and showed
+their brothers the signal of hope.
+
+In Geneva there formed round him a group of young writers, disciples and
+friends, winning strength from his strength. P. J. Jouve author of _Vous
+�tes des hommes_ and _Danse des morts_, glowing with anger and with love
+of goodness, suffering intensely at witnessing the injustice of the
+world, Olivier redivivus, gave expression in his poems to his hatred for
+force. Ren� Arcos, who like Jouve had realized all the horror of war
+and who hated war no less intensely, had a clearer comprehension of the
+dramatic moment, was more thoughtful than Jouve, but equally simple and
+kindhearted. Arcos extolled the European ideal; Charles Baudouin the
+ideal of eternal goodness. Franz Masereel, the Belgian artist, developed
+his humanist plaint in a series of magnificent woodcuts. Guilbeaux,
+zealot for the social revolution, ever ready to fight like a gamecock
+against authority, founded his monthly review "demain," which was a
+faithful representative of the European spirit for a time, until it
+succumbed because of its passion for the Russian revolution. Charles
+Baudouin founded the monthly review, "Le Carmel," providing a city of
+refuge for the persecuted European spirit, and a platform upon which the
+poets and imaginative writers of all lands could assemble under the
+banner of humanity. Jean Debrit in "La Feuille" combated the
+partisanship of the Latin Swiss press and attacked the war. Claude de
+Maguet founded "Les Tablettes," which, through the boldness of its
+contributors and through the drawings of Masereel, became the most
+vigorous periodical in Switzerland. A little oasis of independence came
+into existence, and hither the breezes from all quarters wafted
+greetings from the distance. Here alone was it possible to breathe a
+European air.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this circle was that, thanks to Rolland,
+enemy brethren were not excluded from spiritual fellowship. Whereas
+everywhere else people were infected with the hysteria of mass hatred
+or were terrified lest they should expose themselves to suspicion, and
+therefore avoided their sometime intimates of enemy countries like the
+pestilence should they chance to meet them in the streets of some
+neutral city, at a time when relatives were afraid to exchange letters
+of enquiry regarding the life or death of those of their own blood,
+Rolland would not for a moment deny his German friends. Never, indeed,
+had he shown more love to those among them who remained faithful, at an
+epoch when to love them was dangerous. He made himself known to them in
+public, and wrote to them freely. His words concerning these friendships
+will never be forgotten: "Yes, I have German friends; just as I have
+French, English, and Italian friends; just as I have friends among the
+members of every race. They are my wealth, which I am proud of, and
+which I seek to preserve. If a man has been so fortunate as to encounter
+loyal souls, persons with whom he can share his most intimate thoughts,
+persons with whom he is connected by brotherly ties, these ties are
+sacred, and the hour of trial is the last of hours in which they should
+be rent asunder. How cowardly would be the refusal to recognize these
+friends, in deference to the impudent demand of a public opinion which
+has no rights over our feelings.... How painful, how tragical, these
+friendships are at such a moment, the letters will show when they are
+published. But it is precisely by means of such friendships that we can
+defend ourselves against hatred, more murderous than war, for it poisons
+the wounds of war, and harms the hater equally with the object of
+hate."
+
+Immeasurable is the debt which friends and numberless unseen companions
+in adversity owe to Rolland for his brave and free attitude. He set an
+example to all those who, though they shared his sentiments, were
+isolated in obscurity, and who needed some such point of crystallization
+before their thoughts and feelings could be consolidated. It was above
+all for those who were not yet sure of themselves that this archetypal
+personality provided so splendid a stimulus. Rolland's steadfastness put
+younger men to shame. In his company we were stronger, freer, more
+genuine, more unprejudiced. Human loving kindness, transfigured by his
+ardor, radiated like a flame. What bound us together was not that we
+chanced to think alike, but a passionate exaltation, which often became
+a positive fanaticism for brotherhood. We foregathered in defiance of
+public opinion and in defiance of the laws of the belligerent states,
+exchanging confidences without reserve; our comradeship exposed us to
+all sorts of suspicions; these things served but to draw us closer
+together, and in many memorable hours we felt with a veritable
+intoxication the unprecedented quality of our friendship. We were but a
+couple of dozen who thus came together in Switzerland; Frenchmen,
+Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians. We few were the only ones
+among the hundreds of millions who could look one another in the face
+without hatred, exchanging our innermost thoughts. This little troop
+was all that then constituted Europe. Our unity, a grain of dust in the
+storm which was raging through the world, was perhaps the seed of the
+coming fraternity. How strong, how happy, how grateful did we often
+feel. For without Rolland, without the genius of his friendship, without
+the connecting link constituted by his disposition, we should never have
+attained to freedom and security. Each of us loved him in a different
+way, and all of us regarded him with equal veneration. To the French, he
+was the purest spiritual expression of their homeland; to us, he was the
+wonderful counterpart of the best in our own world. In this circle that
+formed round Rolland there was the sense of fellowship which has always
+characterized a religious community in the making. The hostility between
+our respective nations, and the consciousness of danger, fired our
+friendship to the pitch of exaggeration; while the example of the
+bravest and freest man we had ever known, brought out all that was best
+in us. When we were near him, we felt ourselves to be in the heart of
+true Europe. Whoever was able to know Rolland's inmost essence,
+acquired, as in the ancient saga, new energy for the wrestle with brute
+force.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LETTERS
+
+
+All that Rolland gave in those days to his friends and collaborators of
+the European fellowship, all that he gave by his immediate proximity,
+was but a part of his nature. For beyond these personal limits, he
+diffused a consolidating and helpful influence. Whoever turned to him
+with a question, an anxiety, a distress, or a suggestion, received an
+answer. In hundreds upon hundreds of letters he spread the message of
+brotherhood, splendidly fulfilling the vow he had made a quarter of a
+century earlier, at the time when Tolstoi's letter had brought him
+spiritual healing. In Rolland's self there had come to life, not only
+Jean Christophe the believer, but likewise Leo Tolstoi, the great
+consoler.
+
+Unknown to the world, he shouldered a stupendous burden during the five
+years of the war. For whoever found himself in revolt against the time
+and in conflict with the prevailing miasma of falsehood, whoever needed
+counsel in a matter of conscience, whoever wanted aid, knew where he
+could turn for what he sought. Who else in Europe inspired such
+confidence? The unknown friends of Jean Christophe, the nameless
+brothers of Olivier, hidden in out-of-the-way parts, knowing no one to
+whom they could whisper their doubts--in whom could they better confide
+than in this man who had first brought them tidings of goodness? They
+sent him requests, submitted proposals, disclosed the turmoil of their
+consciences. Soldiers wrote to him from the trenches; mothers penned
+letters to him in secret. Many of the writers did not venture to give
+their names, merely wishing to send a message of sympathy and to
+inscribe themselves citizens of that invisible "republic of free souls"
+which the author of _Jean Christophe_ had founded amid the warring
+nations. Rolland accepted the infinite labor of being the centralizing
+point and administrator of all these distresses and plaints, of being
+the recipient of all these confessions, of being the consoler of a world
+divided against itself. Wherever there was a stirring of European, of
+universally human sentiment, Rolland did his best to receive and sustain
+it; he was the crossways towards which all these roads converged. At the
+same time he was continuously in communication with leading
+representatives of the European faith, with those of all lands who had
+remained loyal to the free spirit. He studied the periodicals of the day
+for messages of reconciliation. Wherever a man or a work was devoted to
+the reconsolidation of Europe, Rolland's help was ready.
+
+These hundreds and thousands of letters combine to form an ethical
+achievement such as has not been paralleled by any previous writer. They
+brought happiness to countless solitary souls, strength to the wavering,
+hope to the despairing. Never was the poet's mission more nobly
+fulfilled. Considered as works of art, these letters, many of which have
+already been published, are among the finest and maturest of Rolland's
+literary creations. To bring solace is the most intimate purpose of his
+art. Here, when speaking as man to man he can give himself without
+stint, he displays a rhythmical energy, an ardor of lovingkindness,
+which makes many of the letters rank with the loveliest poems of our
+time. The sensitive modesty which often makes him reserved in
+conversation, was no longer a hindrance. The letters are frank
+confessions, wherein his free spirit converses freely with its fellows,
+disclosing the author's goodness, his passionate emotion. That which is
+so generously poured forth for the benefit of unknown correspondents, is
+the most intimate essence of his nature. Like Colas Breugnon he can say:
+"Voil� mon plus beau travail: les �mes que j'ai sculpt�es."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE COUNSELOR
+
+
+During these years, many people, young for the most part, came to
+Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing
+that their convictions were opposed to war, they ought to refuse
+military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and
+following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they
+should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether
+they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their
+country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought
+spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed
+to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed
+principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working
+moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.
+
+To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your
+conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no
+ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to
+another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own
+model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should
+seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He
+who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he
+follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple
+imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention
+to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate
+his ideal and save his inner freedom--provided always he acts in
+accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential
+was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot
+desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who
+claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other
+maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong,
+the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept
+away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the
+crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical
+instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a
+Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of
+serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died
+for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.
+
+There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth
+is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own.
+Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism,
+serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all
+remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave."
+Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself
+believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is
+cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie.
+There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner
+experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are
+the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind,
+must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a
+moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in
+consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under
+modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion.
+"A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of
+self-sacrifice."
+
+Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such
+free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any
+man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of
+the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our
+present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever
+broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked
+within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania
+were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had
+asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier
+as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians would
+have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments,
+a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt,
+could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom
+of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the
+recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience
+should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one
+recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for
+mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and
+strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation
+of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the
+intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a
+despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons
+who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the
+collective impulse."
+
+Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands
+that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own
+conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks
+clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by
+words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire
+generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the
+world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which
+he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it
+was the moral simplicity of his own example.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE SOLITARY
+
+
+Rolland's life was now in touch with the life of the whole world. It
+radiated influence in all directions. Yet how lonely was this man during
+the five years of voluntary exile. He dwelt apart at Villeneuve by the
+lake of Geneva. His little room resembled that in which he had lived in
+Paris. Here, too, were piles of books and pamphlets; here was a plain
+deal table; here was a piano, the companion of his hours of relaxation.
+His days, and often his nights were spent at work. He seldom went for a
+walk, and rarely received a visitor, for his friends were cut off from
+him, and even his parents and his sister could only get across the
+frontier about once a year. But the worst feature of this loneliness was
+that it was loneliness in a glass house. He was continually spied upon:
+his least words were listened for by eavesdroppers; provocative agents
+sought him out, proclaiming themselves revolutionists and sympathizers.
+Every letter was read before it reached him; every word he spoke over
+the telephone was recorded; every interview was kept under observation.
+Romain Rolland in his glass prison-house was the captive of unseen
+powers.
+
+[Illustration: Rolland's Mother]
+
+It seems hardly credible to-day that during the last two years of the
+war Romain Rolland, to whose words the world is now eager to listen,
+should have had no facility for expressing his ideas in the newspapers,
+no publisher for his books, no possibility of printing anything beyond
+an occasional review article. His homeland had repudiated him; he was
+the "fuoruscito" of the middle ages, was placed under a ban. The more
+unmistakably he proclaimed his spiritual independence, the less did he
+find himself regarded as a welcome guest in Switzerland. He was
+surrounded by an atmosphere of secret suspicion. By degrees, open
+attacks had been replaced by a more dangerous form of persecution. A
+gloomy silence was established around his name and works. His earlier
+companions had more and more withdrawn from him. Many of the new
+friendships had been dissolved, for the younger men in especial were
+devoting their interest to political questions instead of to things of
+the spirit. The more stormy the outside world, the more oppressive the
+stillness of Rolland's existence. He had no wife as helpmate. What to
+him was the best of all companionship, the companionship of his own
+writings, was now unattainable, for he had no freedom of publication in
+France. His country was closed to him, his place of refuge was beset
+with a hundred eyes. Most homeless among the homeless, he lived, as his
+beloved Beethoven had said, "in the air," lived in the realm of the
+ideal, in invisible Europe. Nothing shows better the energy of his
+living goodness than that he was no whit embittered by his experience,
+and that the ordeal has served but to strengthen his faith. For this
+utter solitude among men was a true fellowship with mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DIARY
+
+
+There was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse
+daily--his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the
+war, Rolland recorded his sentiments, his secret thoughts, and the
+messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned
+conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added
+to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than
+twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally
+hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors
+would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts.
+He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole
+remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to
+contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate
+views.
+
+It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this
+document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual
+history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and
+freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired
+moments are those when he is most personal. Consequently, just as the
+letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior
+to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human
+document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the
+war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what
+Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes,
+applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of
+personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was
+delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought
+help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and
+commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and
+loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in
+travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith.
+These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that
+faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the
+inexorable creditor we name Life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES
+
+
+Rolland opened his campaign against hatred almost immediately after the
+war began. For more than a year he continued to deliver his message in
+opposition to the frenzied screams of rancor arising from all lands. His
+efforts proved futile. The war-current rose yet higher, the stream being
+fed by new and ever new blood flowing from innocent victims. Again and
+again some additional country became involved in the carnage. At length,
+as the clamor still grew louder, Rolland paused for a moment to take
+breath. He felt that it would be madness were he to continue the attempt
+to outcry the cries of so many madmen.
+
+After the publication of _Au-dessus de la m�l�e_, Rolland withdrew from
+public participation in the controversies with which the essays had been
+concerned. He had spoken his word; he had sown the wind and had reaped
+the whirlwind. He was neither weary in well-doing nor was he weak in
+faith, but he realized that it was useless to speak to a world which
+would not listen. In truth he had lost the sublime illusion with which
+he had been animated at the outset, the belief that men desire reason
+and truth. To his intelligence now grown clearer it was plain that men
+dread truth more than anything else in the world. He began, therefore,
+to settle accounts with his own mind by writing a satirical romance, and
+by other imaginative creations, while continuing his vast private
+correspondence. Thus for a time he was out of the hurly-burly. But after
+a year of silence, when the crimson flood continued to swell, and when
+falsehood was raging more furiously than ever, he felt it his duty to
+reopen the campaign. "We must repeat the truth again and again," said
+Goethe to Schermann, "for the error with which truth has to contend is
+continually being repreached, not by individuals, but by the mass."
+There was so much loneliness in the world that it had become necessary
+to form new ties. Signs of discontent and revolt in the various lands
+were more plentiful. More numerous, too, were the brave men in active
+revolt against the fate which was being forced on them. Rolland felt
+that it was incumbent upon him to give what support he could to these
+dispersed fighters, and to inspirit them for the struggle.
+
+In the first essay of the new series, _La route en lacets qui monte_,
+Rolland explained the position he had reached in December, 1916. He
+wrote: "If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith
+to which I gave expression in _Above the Battle_ has been shaken (it
+stands firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to
+speak to him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical
+insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of
+obstinacy, pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their
+minds because they do not wish to see the light. But we, as between
+brothers of all the nations; as between those who have known how to
+defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their faith in human
+solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid silence,
+oppression, and grief--we do well to exchange, as this year draws to a
+close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one another that
+during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning, that it
+never has been and never will be extinguished. In the abyss of suffering
+into which Europe is plunged, those who wield the pen must be careful
+never to add an additional pang to the mass of pangs already endured,
+and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the burning flood of hate.
+Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits which, athwart the
+mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavoring to break a trail for
+others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are courageously
+attempting in their respective lands to make their fellow-countrymen
+aware of their own faults.... My task is different, for it is to remind
+the hostile brethren of Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their
+best, to recall to them reasons for hoping that there will one day be a
+wiser and more loving humanity."
+
+The essays of the new series appeared, for the most part, in various
+minor reviews, seeing that the more influential and widely circulated
+periodicals had long since closed their columns to Rolland's pen. When
+we study them as a whole, in the collective volume entitled _Les
+pr�curseurs_, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been
+replaced by intense compassion, this corresponding to the change which
+had taken place at the fighting front. In all the armies, during the
+third year of the war, the fanatical impetus of the opening phases had
+vanished, and the men were now animated by a tranquil but stubborn
+sentiment of duty. Rolland is perhaps even more impassioned and more
+revolutionary in his outlook, and yet the essays are characterized by
+greater gentleness than of old. What he writes is no longer at grips
+with the war, but seems to soar above the war. His gaze is fixed upon
+the distance; his mind ranges down the centuries in search of like
+experiences; looking for consolation, he endeavors to discover a meaning
+in the meaningless. He recurs to the idea of Goethe, that human progress
+is effected by a spiral ascent. At a higher level men return to a point
+only a little above the old. Evolution and reversion go hand in hand.
+Thus he attempts to show that even at this tragical hour we can discern
+intimations of a better day.
+
+The essays comprising _Les pr�curseurs_ no longer attack adverse
+opinions and the war. They merely draw our attention to the existence in
+all countries of persons who are fighting for a very different ideal, to
+the existence of those heralds of spiritual unity whom Nietzsche speaks
+of as "the pathfinders of the European soul." It is too late to hope for
+anything from the masses. In the address _Aux peuples assassin�s_, he
+has nothing but pity for the millions, for those who, with no will of
+their own, must be the mute instruments of others' aims, for those
+whose sacrifice has no other meaning than the beauty of self-sacrifice.
+His hope now turns exclusively towards the elite, towards the few who
+have remained free. These can bring salvation to the world by splendid
+spiritual imagery wherein all truth is mirrored. For the nonce, indeed,
+their activities seem unavailing, but their labors remain as a permanent
+record of their omnipresence. Rolland provides masterly analyses of the
+work of such contemporary writers; he adds silhouettes from earlier
+times; and he gives a portrait of Tolstoi, the great apostle of the
+doctrine of human freedom, with an account of the Russian teacher's
+views on war.
+
+To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the
+volume _Les pr�curseurs_, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918,
+entitled _Emp�docle d'Agrigente et l'�ge de la haine_. The great sage of
+classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his
+first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows
+that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of
+carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal
+oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history
+invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as
+inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of
+happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the
+time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages
+have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness
+of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to
+hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible.
+
+Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of
+hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those
+who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the
+infinite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LILULI
+
+
+During these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European,
+had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb.
+To many it may seem strange that Rolland's first imaginative work to be
+written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should
+have been a farcical comedy, _Liluli_. Yet this lightness of mood sprang
+from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when
+contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world,
+turned to irony as a means of abreaction--to employ a term introduced by
+the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric
+spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all
+Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from
+the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to
+bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to
+maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath
+remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be
+shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.
+
+_Liluli_ is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy, or
+rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the
+world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having
+become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost
+more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the
+time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more
+pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of
+1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the
+mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"),
+wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable,
+there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe.
+France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly
+forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight
+on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built
+across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so
+pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation
+progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more
+farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy,
+the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form
+of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols
+of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to
+seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is
+fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it
+were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and
+finally mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the
+scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in
+cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being
+a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being
+the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all
+her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare
+to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is
+a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own
+intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear
+testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it
+furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great
+Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and
+of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth
+is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split
+your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will
+never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void.
+Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be
+gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the
+roar of laughter which will set me free?"
+
+In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating
+laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be
+possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense
+against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new
+work maintains the rhythm of _Colas Breugnon_, with its vibrant rhymes,
+and although in _Liluli_ as in _Colas Breugnon_ there is a strain of
+raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of
+chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days
+of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from
+a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart
+overfull. In _Colas Breugnon_ we find the geniality, the joviality, of a
+broad laugh; in _Liluli_ the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a
+fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and
+kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world
+are heaped between the old France of _Colas Breugnon_ and the new France
+of _Liluli_. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder
+caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of
+the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the
+blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the
+war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my
+feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering
+throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of
+laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter
+irony.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+CLERAMBAULT
+
+
+_Liluli_, the tragi-comedy, was an outcry, a groan, a painful burst of
+mockery; it was an elementary gesture of reaction against suffering that
+was almost physical. But the author's serious, tranquil, and enduring
+settlement of accounts with the times is his novel, _Clerambault,
+l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_, which was slowly
+brought to completion in the space of four years. It is not
+autobiography, but a transcription of Rolland's ideas. Like Jean
+Christophe, it is simultaneously the biography of an imaginary
+personality and a comprehensive picture of the age. Matter is here
+collected that is elsewhere dispersed in manifestoes and letters.
+Artistically, it is the subterranean link between Rolland's manifold
+activities. Amid the hindrances imposed by his public duties, and amid
+the difficulties deriving from other outward circumstances, the author
+built the work upwards out of the depths of sorrow to the heights of
+consolation. It was not completed until the war was over, when Rolland
+had returned to Paris in the summer of 1920.
+
+Just as little as _Jean Christophe_ can _Clerambault_ properly be termed
+a novel. It is something less than a novel, and at the same time a
+great deal more. It describes the development, not of a man, but of an
+idea. As in _Jean Christophe_, so here, we have a philosophy presented,
+but not as something ready-made, complete, a finished datum. In company
+with a human being, we rise stage by stage from error and weakness
+towards clarity. In a sense it is a religious book, the history of a
+conversion, of an illumination. It is a modern legend of the saints in
+the form of the life history of a simple citizen. In a word, as the
+sub-title phrases it, we have here the story of a conscience. The
+ultimate significance of the book is freedom, the attainment of
+self-knowledge, but raised to the heroic plane inasmuch as knowledge
+becomes action. The scene is played in the intimate recesses of a man's
+nature, where he is alone with truth. In the new book, therefore, there
+is no countertype, as Olivier was the countertype to Jean Christophe;
+nor do we find in _Clerambault_ what was in truth the countertype of
+_Jean Christophe_, external life. Clerambault's countertype,
+Clerambault's antagonist, is himself; is the old, the earlier, the weak
+Clerambault; is the Clerambault with whom the new, the knowing, the true
+man has to wrestle, whom the new Clerambault has to overcome. The hero's
+heroism is not displayed, as was that of Jean Christophe, in a struggle
+with the forces of the visible world. Clerambault's war is waged in the
+invisible realm of thought.
+
+At the outset, therefore, Rolland designed to call the book "un
+roman-m�ditation." It was to have been entitled "L'un contre tous," this
+being an adaptation of La Bo�tie's title _Contr'un_. The proposed name
+was, however, ultimately abandoned for fear of misunderstanding. The
+spiritual character of the new work recalls a long-forgotten tradition,
+the meditations of the old French moralists, the sixteenth century
+stoics who during a time of war-madness endeavored in besieged Paris to
+maintain their intellectual serenity by engaging in Platonic dialogues.
+The war itself, however, was not to be the theme, for the free soul does
+not strive with the elements. The author's intention was to discuss the
+spiritual accompaniments of this war, for these to Rolland seemed as
+tragical as the destruction of millions of men. His concern was the
+destruction of the individual soul in the deluge produced by the
+overflowing of the mass soul. He wished to show how strenuous an effort
+must be made by any one who would escape from the tyranny of the herd
+instinct; to display the hateful enslavement of individuals by the
+revengeful, jealous, and authoritarian mentality of the crowd; to depict
+the terrific efforts which a man must make if he would avoid being
+sucked into the maelstrom of epidemic falsehood. He hoped to make it
+clear that what appears to be the simplest thing in the world is in
+reality the most difficult of tasks in these epochs of excessive
+solidarity, namely, for a man to remain what he really is, and not to
+become that which the levelling forces of the world, the fatherland, or
+some other artificial community, would fain make of him.
+
+Romain Rolland deliberately refrained from casting his hero in a heroic
+mold, the treatment thus differing from what he had chosen in the case
+of Jean Christophe. Agenor Clerambault is an inconspicuous figure, a
+quiet fellow of little account, an author of no particular note, one of
+those persons whose literary work succeeds in pleasing a complaisant
+generation, though it has no significance for posterity. He has the
+nebulous idealism of mediocre minds; he hymns the praises of perpetual
+peace and international conciliation. His own tepid goodness makes him
+believe that nature is good, is man's wellwisher, desiring to lead
+mankind gently onward towards a more beautiful future. Life does not
+torment him with problems, and he therefore extols life amid the
+tranquil comforts of his bourgeois existence. Blessed with a kindly and
+somewhat simple-minded wife, and with two children, a son and a
+daughter, he may be considered a modern Theocritus wearing the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honor, singing the joyful present and the still more
+joyful future of our ancient cosmos.
+
+The quiet suburban household is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt with
+the news of the outbreak of war. Clerambault takes the train to Paris;
+and no sooner is he sprinkled with spray from the hot waves of
+enthusiasm, than all his ideals of international amity and perpetual
+peace vanish into thin air. He returns home a fanatic, oozing hate, and
+steaming with phrases. Under the influence of the tremendous storm he
+begins to sound his lyre: Theocritus has become Pindar, a war poet.
+Rolland gives a marvelously vivid description of something every one of
+us has witnessed, showing how Clerambault, like all persons of average
+nature, really takes a delight in horrors, however unwilling he may be
+to admit it even to himself. He is rejuvenated, his life seems to move
+on wings; the enthusiasm of the masses stirs the almost extinguished
+flame of enthusiasm in his own breast; he is fired by the national fire;
+he is physically and mentally refreshed by the new atmosphere. Like so
+many other mediocrities, he secures in these days his greatest literary
+triumph. His war songs, precisely because they give such vigorous
+expression to the sentiments of the man in the street, become a national
+property. Fame and public favor are showered upon him, so that (at this
+time when millions of his fellows are perishing) he feels well,
+self-confident, alive as never before.
+
+His pride is increased, his joy of life accentuated, when his son Maxime
+leaves for the front filled with martial ardor. His first thought, a few
+months later, when the young man comes home on leave, is that Maxime
+should retail to him all the ecstasies of war. Strangely enough,
+however, the young soldier, whose eyes still burn with the sights he has
+seen, is unresponsive. Not wishing to mortify his father, he does not
+positively attempt to silence the latter's paeans, but for his part, he
+maintains silence. For days this muteness stands between them, and the
+father is unable to solve the riddle. He feels dumbly that his son is
+concealing something. But shame binds both their tongues. On the last
+day of the furlough, Maxime suddenly pulls himself together, and begins,
+"Father, are you quite sure ...?" But the question remains unfinished,
+utterance is choked. Still silent, the young man returns to the
+realities of war.
+
+A few days later there is a fresh offensive. Maxime is reported missing.
+Soon his father learns that he is dead. Now Clerambault gropes for the
+meaning of those last words behind the silence, and is tormented by the
+thought of what was left unspoken. He locks himself into his room, and
+for the first time he is alone with his conscience. He begins to
+question himself in search of the truth, and throughout the long night
+he communes with his soul as he traverses the road to Damascus. Piece by
+piece he tears away the wrapping of lies with which he has enveloped
+himself, until he stands naked before his own criticism. Prejudices have
+eaten deep into his skin, so that the blood flows as he plucks them from
+him. They must all be surrendered; the prejudice of the fatherland, the
+prejudice of the herd, must go; in the end he recognizes that one thing
+only is true, one thing only sacred, life. A fever of enquiry consumes
+him; the old Adam perishes in the flame; when the day dawns he is a new
+man.
+
+He knows the truth now, and wishes to strengthen his own faith. He goes
+to some of his fellows and talks to them. Most of them do not understand
+him. Others refuse to understand him. Some, however, among whom Perrotin
+the academician is notable, are yet more alarming. They know the truth.
+To their penetrating vision the nature of the popular idols has long
+been plain. But they are cautious folk. They compress their lips and
+smile at one another like the augurs of ancient Rome. Like Buddha, they
+take refuge in Nirvana, looking down calmly upon the madness of the
+world, tranquilly seated upon their pedestals of stone. Clerambault
+calls to mind that other Indian saint, who took a solemn vow that he
+would not withdraw from the world until he had delivered mankind from
+suffering. The truth still glows too fiercely within him; he feels as if
+it would stifle him as it strives to gush forth in volcanic eruption.
+Once again he plunges into the solitude of a wakeful night. Men's words
+have sounded empty. He listens to his conscience, and it speaks with the
+voice of his son. Truth knocks at the door of his soul, and he opens to
+truth. In this lonely night Clerambault begins to speak to his fellows;
+no longer to individuals, but to all mankind. For the first time the man
+of letters becomes aware of the poet's true mission, his responsibility
+for all persons and for everything. He knows that he is beginning a new
+war, he who alone must wage war for all. But the consciousness of truth
+is with him, his heroism has begun.
+
+"Forgive us, ye Dead," the dialogue of the country with its children, is
+published. At first no one heeds the pamphlet. But after a time it
+arouses public animosity. A storm of indignation bursts upon
+Clerambault, threatening to lay his life in ruins. Friends forsake him.
+Envy, which had long been crouching for a spring, now sends whole
+regiments to the attack. Ambitious colleagues seize the opportunity of
+proclaiming their patriotism in contrast with his deplorable sentiments.
+Worst of all for Clerambault in that his innocent wife and daughter
+have to suffer on his account. They do not upbraid him, but he feels as
+if he had aimed a shaft against them. He who has hitherto sunned himself
+in the warmth of family life and has enjoyed the comforts of modest
+fame, is now absolutely alone.
+
+Nevertheless he continues on his course, although these stations of the
+cross become harder and harder. Rolland shows how Clerambault finds new
+friends, only to discover that they too fail to understand him. How his
+words are mutilated, his ideas misapplied. How he is overwhelmed to
+learn that his fellows, those whom he wishes to help, have no desire for
+truth, but are nourished by falsehood; that they are continually in
+search, not of freedom, but of some new form of slavery. (In these
+wonderful passages the reader is again and again reminded of
+Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.) He perseveres in his pilgrimage even
+when he has lost faith in his power to help his fellow men, for this is
+no longer his goal. He passes men by, marching onward towards the
+unseen, towards truth; his love for truth exposing him ever more
+pitilessly to the hatred of men. By degrees he becomes entangled in a
+net of calumnies; his troubles develop into a "Clerambault affair"; at
+length a prosecution is initiated. The state has recognized its enemy in
+the free man. But while the case is still in progress, the "defeatist"
+meets his fate from the pistol bullet of a fanatic. Clerambault's end
+recalls the opening of the world catastrophe with the assassination of
+Jaur�s.
+
+Never has the tragedy of conscience been more simply and more
+poignantly depicted than in this account of the martyrdom of an average
+man. Rolland's ripe spiritual powers, his magical faculty for combining
+mastery with the human touch, are here at their highest. Never was his
+outlook over the world so extensive, never was the view so serene, as
+from this last summit. And yet, though we are thus led upwards to the
+consideration of the ultimate problems of the spirit, we start from the
+plain of everyday life. It is the soul of a commonplace man, the soul it
+might seem of a weakling, which moves through this long passion. Herein
+lies the marvel of the moral solace which the book conveys. Rolland was
+the first to recognize the defect of his previous writings, considered
+as means of helping the average man. In the heroic biographies, heroism
+is displayed only by those in whom the heroic soul is inborn, only by
+those whose flight is winged with genius. In _Jean Christophe_, the
+moral victory is a triumph of native energy. But in _Clerambault_ we are
+shown that even the weakling, even the mediocre man, every one of us,
+can be stronger than the whole world if he have but the will. It is open
+to every man to be true, open to every man to win spiritual freedom, if
+he be at one with his conscience, and if he regard this fellowship with
+his conscience as of greater value than fellowship with men and with the
+age. For each man there is always time, for each man there is always
+opportunity, to become master of realities. A�rt, the first of Rolland's
+heroes to show himself greater than fate, speaks for us all when he
+says: "It is never too late to be free!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE LAST APPEAL
+
+
+For five years Romain Rolland was at war with the madness of the times.
+At length the fiery chains were loosened from the racked body of Europe.
+The war was over, the armistice had been signed. Men were no longer
+murdering one another; but their evil passions, their hate, continued.
+Romain Rolland's prophetic insight celebrated a mournful triumph. His
+distrust of victory, his reiterated warnings that conquerors are
+merciless, were more than justified by the revengeful reality. "Victory
+in arms is disastrous to the ideal of an unselfish humanity. Men find it
+extraordinarily difficult to remain gentle in the hour of triumph."
+These forecasts were terribly fulfilled. Forgotten were all the fine
+words anent the victory of freedom and right. The Versailles conference
+devoted itself to the installation of a new regime of force and to the
+humiliation of a defeated enemy. What the idealism of simpletons had
+expected to be the end of all wars, proved, as the true idealists who
+look beyond men towards ideas had foreseen, the seed of fresh hatred and
+renewed acts of violence.
+
+Once again, at the eleventh hour, Rolland raised his voice in an
+address to the man whom sanguine persons then regarded as the last
+representative of idealism, as the advocate of perfect justice. Woodrow
+Wilson, when he landed in Europe, was received by the exultant cries of
+millions. But the historian is aware "that universal history is but a
+succession of proofs that the conqueror invariably grows arrogant and
+thus plants the seed of new wars." Rolland felt that there was never
+greater need for a policy that should be moral, not militarist, that
+should be constructive, not destructive. The citizen of the world, the
+man who had endeavored to free the war from the stigma of hate, now
+tried to perform the same service on behalf of the peace. The European
+addressed the American in moving terms: "You alone, Monsieur le
+Pr�sident, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the
+policy of the nations, you alone enjoy world-wide moral authority. You
+inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate
+hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one
+another.... Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses,
+disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into
+excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the
+parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction.... Heir of
+George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a
+party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of
+the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full
+authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness
+and in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The
+world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations
+and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future
+hail you by the name of Reconciler!"
+
+The prophet's voice was drowned by the clamors for revenge. Bismarckism
+triumphed. Literally fulfilled was the prophecy that the peace would be
+as inhuman as the war had been. Humanity could find no abiding place
+among men. When the regeneration of Europe might have been begun, the
+sinister spirit of conquest continued to prevail. "There are no victors,
+but only vanquished."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND
+
+
+Despite all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued
+his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of
+fellowship. On the day when peace was signed, June 26, 1919, he
+published in "_L'Humanit�_" a manifesto composed by himself and
+subscribed by sympathizers of all nationalities. In a world falling to
+ruin, it was to be the cornerstone of the invisible temple, the refuge
+of the disillusioned. With masterly touch Rolland sums up the past, and
+displays it as a warning to the future. He issues a clarion call.
+
+"Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for
+five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the
+warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being
+reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union,
+and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly
+built than that which previously existed.
+
+"The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed
+their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the
+governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any
+reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the
+elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
+moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in
+the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us
+for the future!
+
+"First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from
+the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and
+from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers,
+artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the
+plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal
+of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought
+reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
+logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding
+and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled,
+debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They
+have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance)
+they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or
+social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the
+fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and
+the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom
+of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their
+access of mania--now, Thought, which has been entangled in their
+struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: Original manuscript of _The Declaration of the
+Independence of the Mind_]
+
+"Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy
+alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is
+we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to
+bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed
+sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to
+point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night.
+Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice;
+we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
+frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of
+race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we
+work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know
+the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which
+struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which
+continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and
+its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that
+they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their
+blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant--Mind, which is free, one and
+manifold, eternal."
+
+Many hundreds of persons have signed this manifesto, for leading spirits
+in every land accept the message and make it their own. The invisible
+republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established
+among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who
+wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only
+enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his
+home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is
+the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforward he is an
+indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and
+the universal future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ENVOY
+
+
+Strange has been the rhythm of this man's life, surging again and again
+in passionate waves against the time, sinking once more into the abyss
+of disappointment, but never failing to rise on the crest of faith
+renewed. Once again we see Romain Rolland as prototype of those who are
+magnificent in defeat. Not one of his ideals, not one of his wishes, not
+one of his dreams, has been realized. Might has triumphed over right,
+force over spirit, men over humanity.
+
+Yet never has his struggle been grander, and never has his existence
+been more indispensable, than during recent years; for it is his
+apostolate alone which has saved the gospel of crucified Europe; and
+furthermore he has rescued for us another faith, that of the imaginative
+writer as the spiritual leader, the moral spokesman of his own nation
+and of all nations. This man of letters has preserved us from what would
+have been an imperishable shame, had there been no one in our days to
+testify against the lunacy of murder and hatred. To him we owe it that
+even during the fiercest storm in history the sacred fire of brotherhood
+was never extinguished. The world of the spirit has no concern with the
+deceptive force of numbers. In that realm, one individual can outweigh a
+multitude. For an idea never glows so brightly as in the mind of the
+solitary thinker; and in the darkest hour we were able to draw
+consolation from the signal example of this poet. One great man who
+remains human can for ever and for all men rescue our faith in
+humanity.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+I
+
+CRITICAL STUDIES
+
+Les origines du th��tre lyrique moderne. (Histoire de l'op�ra en Europe
+avant Lully et Scarlatti.) Fontemoing, Paris, 1895.
+
+Cur ars picturae apud Italos XVI saeculi deciderit Fontemoing, Paris,
+1895.
+
+Millet. Duckworth, London, 1902 (has appeared in English translation
+only).
+
+Vie de Beethoven. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+s�rie IV, No. 10, Paris, 1903; Hachette, Paris, 1907; another edition
+with woodcuts by Perrichon, J. P. Laurens, P. A. Laurens, and Perrichon,
+published by Edouard Pelletan, Paris, 1909.
+
+Le Th��tre du Peuple. Cahiers de la quinzaine, s�rie V, No. 4, Paris,
+1903; Hachette, Paris, 1908; enlarged edition, Hachette, Paris, 1913;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Paris als Musikstadt. Marquardt, Berlin, 1905 (has appeared in German
+translation only).
+
+La vie de Michel-Ange. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, s�rie VII, No. 18; s�rie VIII, No. 2, Paris, 1906; Hachette,
+Paris, 1907. Another edition in Les ma�tres de l'art series, Librairie
+de l'art, ancien et moderne, Plon, Paris, 1905.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. L'op�ra avant l'op�ra.
+2. Le premier op�ra jou� � Paris: L'Orf�o de Luigi Rossi. 3. Notes sur
+Lully. 4. Gluck. 5. Gr�try. 6. Mozart.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. Berlioz. 2. Wagner:
+Siegfried; Tristan. 3. Saint-Sa�ns. 4. Vincent d'Indy. 5. Richard
+Strauss. 6. Hugo Wolf. 7. Don Lorenzo Perosi 8. Musique fran�aise et
+musique allemande. 9. Pell�as et M�lisande. 10. Le renouveau: esquisse
+du movement musical � Paris depuis 1870.
+
+Paul Dupin. Mercure musical. S. J. M. 15/12, 1908.
+
+Haendel. (Les ma�tres de la musique.) Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Hachette, Paris, 1911.
+
+L'humble vie h�roique. Pens�es choisies et pr�c�d�es d'une introduction
+par Alphonse S�ch�. Sansot, Paris, 1912.
+
+Emp�docle d' Agrigente. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1917; La maison fran�aise
+d'art et edition, Paris, 1918.
+
+Voyage musical aux pays du passe. With woodcuts by D. Glans. Edouard
+Joseph, Paris, 1919; Hachette, Paris, 1920.
+
+Ecole des Hates Etudes Socials (1900-1910). Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+
+II
+
+POLITICAL STUDIES
+
+Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Ollendorff, Paris, 1915.
+
+Les pr�curseurs. L'Humanit�, Paris, 1919.
+
+Aux peuples assassin�s. Jeunesses Socialistes Romandes, La
+Chaux-de-Fonds, 1917; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Aux peuples assassin�s (under the title: Civilisation). Privately
+printed, Paris, 1918.
+
+Aux peuples assassin�s. As frontispiece a wood-engraving by Frans
+Masereel. Restricted circulation. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+III
+
+NOVELS
+
+Jean-Christophe. 15 parts 1904-1912. Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie V,
+Nos. 9 and 10; S�rie VI, No. 8; S�rie VIII, Nos. 4, 6, 9; S�rie IX, Nos.
+13, 14, 15; S�rie X, Nos. 9, 10; S�rie XI, Nos. 7, 8; S�rie XIII, Nos.
+5, 6; S�rie XIV, Nos. 2, 3; Paris, 1904 et seq.
+
+Jean-Christophe. 10 vols. 1. L'aube. 2. Le matin. 3. L'adolescent 4 La
+r�volte. (1904-1907.)
+
+Jean-Christophe � Paris. 1. La foire sur la place. 2. Antoinette. 3.
+Dans la maison. (1908-1910.)
+
+Jean-Christophe. La fin du voyage. 1. Les amies. 2. Le buisson ardent 3.
+La nouvelle journ�e. (1910-1912.) Ollendorff, Paris.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Ollendorff, Paris, 1918.
+
+Pierre et Luce. Le Sablier, Geneva, 1920; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Clerambault. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+IV
+
+PREFACES
+
+Introduction to Une lettre in�dite de Tolstoi, Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+S�rie III, No. 9, Paris, 1902.
+
+Haendel et le Messie. (Preface to Le Messie de G. F. Haendel by F�lix
+Raugel.) D�p�t de la Soci�t� co�p�rative des compositeurs de musique,
+Paris, 1912.
+
+Stendhal et la musique. (Preface to La vie de Haydn in the complete
+edition of Stendhal's works.) Champion, Paris, 1913.
+
+Preface to Celles qui travaillent by Simone Bod�ve, Ollendorff, Paris,
+1913.
+
+Preface to Une voix de femme dans la m�l�e by Marcelle Capy, Ollendorff,
+Paris, 1916.
+
+Anthologie des po�tes contre la guerre. Le Sablier, Genera, 1920.
+
+
+V
+
+DRAMAS
+
+Saint Louis. (5 acts.) Revue de Paris, March-April, 1897.
+
+A�rt. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1898.
+
+Les loups. (3 acts.) Georges Bellais, Paris, 1898.
+
+Le triomphe de la raison. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris,
+1899.
+
+Danton. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1900; Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, S�rie II, No. 6, 1901.
+
+Le quatorze juillet. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie III, No.
+11, Paris, 1902.
+
+Le temps viendra. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie IV, No. 14,
+Paris, 1903; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Les trois amoureuses. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+La Montespan. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+Th��tre de la R�volution. Les loups. Danton. Le quatorze juillet.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Les trag�dies de la foi. Saint Louis. A�rt. Le triomphe de la raison.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Liluli (with woodcuts by Frans Masereel). Le Sablier, Geneva, 1919;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS
+
+ENGLISH
+
+Millet. Translated by Clementina Black. Duckworth, London, 1902.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by F. Rothwell. Drane, London, 1907.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Constance Hull. With a brief analysis of the
+sonatas, symphonies, and the quartets, by A. Eaglefield Hull, and 24
+musical illustrations and 4 plates and an introduction by Edward
+Carpenter. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London, 1917.
+
+The Life of Michael Angelo. Translated by Frederic Lees. Heinemann,
+London, 1912.
+
+Tolstoy. Translated by Bernard Miall. Fisher Unwin, London, 1911.
+
+Some Musicians of former Days. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul,
+Trench, Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+Handel. Translated by A. Eaglefield Hull. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
+London, 1916.
+
+Musicians of To-day. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul, Trench,
+Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+The People's Theater. Translated by Barrett H. Clark. Holt, New York,
+1918; C. Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Go to the Ant. (Reflections on reading Auguste Sorel.) Translated by De
+Kay. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1919, New York.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by G. Lowes Dickinson,
+Bowes, Cambridge, 1914.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by Rev. Richards Roberts, M.
+A. Friends' Peace Committee, London, 1915.
+
+Above the Battle. Translated by C. K. Ogden. G. Allen & Unwin, London,
+1916.
+
+The Idols. Translated by C. K. Ogden. With a letter by R. Rolland to
+Dr. van Eeden on the rights of small nations. Bowes, Cambridge, 1915.
+
+The Forerunners. Translated by Eden & Cedar Paul. G. Allen & Unwin,
+London, 1920; Harcourt, Brace, U. S. A., 1920.
+
+The Fourteenth of July and Danton: two plays of the French Revolution.
+Translated with a preface by Barrett H. Clarke. Holt, New York, 1918; G.
+Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Liluli. The Nation, London, Sept 20 to Nov. 29, 1919; Boni & Liveright,
+New York, 1920.
+
+Jean Christophe. Translated by Gilbert Cannan. Heinemann, London,
+1910-1913; Holt, New York, 1911-1913.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York. 1921.
+
+
+GERMAN
+
+Beethoven. Translated by L. Langnese-Hug. Rascher, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Michelangelo. Translated by W. Herzog. R�tten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1918.
+
+Michelangelo. Rascher, Zurich, 1919.
+
+Tolstoi. Translated by W. Herzog. R�tten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Den hingeschlachteten V�lkern, translated by Stefan Zweig. Rascher,
+Zurich, 1918.
+
+Au-dessus de la m�l�e. R�tten & Loening, Frankfort.
+
+Les pr�curseurs. R�tten & Loeing, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Johann Christof. Translated by Otto & Erna Grautoff. R�tten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1912-1918.
+
+Meister Breugnon. Translated by Otto & Etna Grautoff. R�tten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by Stefan Zweig. R�tten & Loening, Frankfort,
+1920.
+
+Die W�lfe. Translated by W. Herzog. M�ller, Munich, 1914.
+
+Danton. Translated by Lucy von Jacobi and W. Herzog. M�ller, Munich,
+1919.
+
+Die Zeit wird kommen. Translated by Stefan Zweig. "Die Zw�lf B�cher,"
+Tal, Vienna, 1920.
+
+
+SPANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by J. R. Jimenez, � la Residentia de
+Estudiantes de Madrid, 1914.
+
+Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Delgado & Santonja, Madrid, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Toro y Gomez. Ollendorff, Paris-Madrid,
+1905-1910.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Agence de Librairie, Madrid, 1919.
+
+
+ITALIAN
+
+Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Avanti, Milan, 1916.
+
+Aux peuples assassin�s. Translated by Monanni with drawings by Frans
+Masereel. Libreria Internationale, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Cesare Alessandri. Sonzogno, Milan, 1920.
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by Maria Venti Felice le Monnier,
+Florence. [In the press.]
+
+
+RUSSIAN
+
+Th��tre de la R�volution. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg, St.
+Petersburg. 1909.
+
+Th��tre du Peuple. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg. St. Petersburg.
+1909.
+
+Emp�docle d'Agrigente. [In the press.]
+
+Jean-Christophe. Unauthorized translation in 4 vols. Vetcherni Zvon,
+Moscow, 1912.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Authorized translation by M. Tchlenoff.
+
+
+DANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Branner, Copenhagen, 1915.
+
+Tolstoi. Branner, Copenhagen, 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Denmark & Norway, 1917.
+
+Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Lios, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Hagerup, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Denmark & Norway; Norstedt, Stockholm, 1917.
+
+
+CZECH
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by M. Kalassova. Prague, 1912.
+
+Danton. 1920.
+
+
+POLISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Jacewski, Warsaw, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Edwige Sienkiewicz. Vols.
+
+I & II, Bibljoteka Sfinska, Warsaw, 1910; the remaining vols., Maski,
+Cracow, 1917-19--.
+
+
+SWEDISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Vie de Michelange. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1916.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+H�ndel. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Millet. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Voyage musical au pays du pass�. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Au-dessus de la m�le�. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Les pr�curseurs. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Th��tre de la R�volution. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Trag�dies de la foi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Le temps viendra. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+
+Liluli. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1913-1917.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1919.
+
+Clerambault In course of preparation. Bonnier, Stockholm.
+
+
+DUTCH
+
+Vie de Beethoven, Simon, Amsterdam, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Brusse, Rotterdam, 1915.
+
+L'aube. Special edition, W. F. J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1919.
+
+
+JAPANESE
+
+Tolstoi Seichi Naruse, Tokyo, 1916. And many other unauthorized
+translations.
+
+
+GREEK
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Niramos. 1920.
+
+
+WORKS ON ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+FRENCH
+
+_Jean Bonnerot._ Romain Rolland (Extraits de ses oeuvres avec
+introduction biographique), Cahiers du Centre, Nevers, 1909.
+
+_Lucien Maury._ Figures litt�raires. Perrin, 1911.
+
+_J. H. Retinger._ Histoire de la litt�rature fran�aise du romantisme �
+nos jours. B. Grasset, 1911.
+
+_Jules Bertaut._ Les romanciers du nouveau si�cle. Sansot, 1912.
+
+_Paul Seippel._ Romain Rolland, l'homme et l'oeuvre. Ollendorff, 1913.
+
+_Marc Elder._ Romain Rolland. Paris, 1914
+
+_Robert Dreyfus._ Ma�tres contemporains. (P�guy, Claudel, Suar�s, Romain
+Rolland.) Paris, 1914.
+
+_Daniel Hal�vy._ Quelques nouveaux ma�tres. Cahiers du Centre. Figui�re,
+1914.
+
+_G. Dwelshauvers._ Romain Rolland. Vue caract�ristique de l'homme et de
+l'oeuvre. Ed. de la Belgique artistique et litt�raire, Brussels, 1913
+or 1914.
+
+_Paul Souday._ Les drames philosophiques de Romain Rolland. Emile Paul,
+Paris, 1914.
+
+_Max Hochst�tter._ Essai sur l'oeuvre de Romain Rolland. Fischbacher,
+Paris; Georg & Co., Geneva, 1914.
+
+_Henri Guilbeaux._ Pour Romain Rolland. Jeheber, Geneva, 1915.
+
+_Massis._ Romain Rolland contre la France. Floury, Paris, 1915.
+
+_P. H. Loyson._ Etes-vous neutre devant le crime? Payot, Paris and
+Lausanne, 1916.
+
+_Renaitour et Loyson._ Dans la m�l�e. Ed. du Bonnet Rouge, 1916.
+
+_Isabelle Debran._ M. Romain Rolland initiateur du d�faitisme.
+(Introduction de Diodore.) Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Jacques Servance._ R�ponse � Mme. Isabelle Debran. Comit� d'initiative
+en faveur d'une paix durable, Neuch�tel, 1916.
+
+_Charles Baudouin_, Romain Rolland calomni�. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Daniel Hal�vy._ Charles P�guy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Payot,
+Paris, 1918 et seq.
+
+_Paul Colin._ Romain Rolland, Bruxelles, 1920.
+
+_P. J. Jouve._ Romain Rolland vivant, Ollendorff, 1920.
+
+
+OTHER LANGUAGES
+
+_Otto Grautoff._ Romain Rolland, Frankfurt, 1914.
+
+_Winifred Stephens._ French Novelists of To-day. Second series. J. Lane,
+London and New York, 1915.
+
+_Albert L. Guerard._ Five Masters of French Romance. Scribner, New York,
+1916.
+
+_Dr. J. Ziegler._ Romain Rolland in "Johann Christof," �ber Juden und
+Judentum. v. Dr. Ziegler, Rabbiner in Karlsbad. Vienna, 1918.
+
+_Agnes Darmesteter._ Twentieth Century French Writers. London, 1919.
+
+_Blumenfeld._ Etude sur Romain Rolland, en langue yiddisch. Cahiers de
+litt�rature et d'art. Paris, 1920.
+
+_Albert Schinz._ French Literature of the War. Appleton, New York, 1920.
+
+_Pedro Cesare Dominici._ De Lutecia, Arte y Critica. Ollendorff, Madrid.
+
+_Papini._ Studii di Romain Rolland. Florence, 1916.
+
+_F. F. Curtis._ Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreichs.
+Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1920.
+
+_Walter K�chler._ Vier Vortr�ge �ber R. Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Fritz
+v. Unruh. W�rzburg, 1919.
+
+
+MUSIC CONNECTED WITH ROMAIN ROLLAND'S WRITINGS
+
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Trois pi�ces pour piano.)
+
+1. L'oncle Gottfried (dialogue avec Christophe).
+
+2. M�ditation sur un passage du "Matin."
+
+3. Berceuse de Louisa. Chant du P�lerin (piano et chant). Paroles de
+Paul Gerhardt Ed. Demets, Paris, 1907.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Suite pour quatuor � cordes.)
+
+1. La mort de l'oncle Gottfried.
+
+2. Bienvenue au petit Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Pastorale, Sabine. 1. Dans le Jardinet. Piano et quatuor.
+Transcription pour piano et violon. Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Albert Doyen._ Le Triomphe de la Libert�. (Sc�ne finale du Quatorze
+Juillet). Prix de la ville de Paris, 1913. (Soli, Orchestre et Choeurs.)
+Ed. A. Leduc, Paris.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Above the Battle_, 266, 290, 291, 293-6, 297, 305, 329.
+
+Abbesse de Jouarre, l', 125.
+
+_A�rt_, 66, 73, 77-8, 83-5, 87, 112.
+
+A�rt, 77-8, 83-5, 121, 125, 161, 198, 244, 260, 347.
+
+Antoinette, in _Jean Christophe_, 4, 165, 175, 212, 224.
+
+Arcos, Ren�, 312, 313.
+
+Art, love of, and love of mankind, 20;
+  epic quality in Rolland's, 63-66, 67 ff;
+  moral force in Rolland's, 63 ff;
+  Tolstoi's views on, 18-20;
+  universality of, 26.
+
+_Au-dessus de la m�l�e, see Above the Battle._
+
+_Aux peuples assassin�s_, 332.
+
+
+Bach, Friedemann, 173.
+
+Bach, Johann Sebastian, 173, 245.
+
+_Ballades fran�aises_, 250.
+
+Balzac, 64, 65, 169, 177, 250.
+
+Barr�s, Maurice, 59, 62.
+
+Baudouin, Charles, 313.
+
+_Beethoven_, 50, 137 ff, 140-3, 150.
+
+Beethoven, 10, 18, 19, 40, 45, 67, 104, 140-143, 144, 145, 147, 148,
+151, 161, 163, 172, 174, 175, 182, 245, 252, 325, 328;
+  festival, 35, influence of, on Rolland's childhood, 5 ff;
+  Jean Christophe's resemblance to, 173.
+
+_Beginnings of Opera, The_, 34.
+
+_Belgique sanglante, la_, 282.
+
+Berlioz, 10, 150.
+
+Bibliography, 357 ff.
+
+Biographies, heroic, 133-53;
+  unwritten, 150-3.
+
+Bonn, 35, 140, 141.
+
+Brahms, 174.
+
+Br�al, Michel, 35.
+
+Breugnon, Colas, in _Colas Breugnon_, 241-53, 319;
+  spiritual kinship of, with Jean Christophe, 244-48;
+  see _Colas Breugnon_.
+
+Bruneti�re, 16.
+
+Burckhardt, Jakob, 16.
+
+Byron, 275.
+
+
+"_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," 20, 40, 43, 50, 143.
+
+_Caligula_, 73.
+
+"_Carmel, le_," 313.
+
+Carnot, 99.
+
+Claes, in _A�rt_, 87.
+
+Clamecy, birthplace of Rolland, 3, 4, 99.
+
+Claudel, Paul, 89, 44, 59.
+
+_Clerambault, l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_,
+339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Agenor, in _Clerambault_, 310, 339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Maxime, 343 ff.
+
+Clifford, General, in _A Day Will Come_, 120, 121, 125.
+
+_Colas Breugnon_, 241-253, 337;
+  as an artistic production, 249-51;
+  gauloiseries in, 249-51;
+  origin of, 241-43.
+
+Com�die Fran�aise, 71, 74.
+
+Conscience, story of, in Clerambault, 339-47;
+  _see_ Freedom of conscience.
+
+Corneille, 91, 92.
+
+Couthon, 99.
+
+_Credo quia verum_, 16, 17.
+
+Corinne, in _Jean Christophe_, 211.
+
+Cycles, of Rolland, 67-71.
+
+
+D'Alembert, 87.
+
+_Danse des morts_, 312.
+
+_Danton_, 41, 101, 106-9, 113, 117.
+
+Danton, 99, 106-9, 113, 126.
+
+Debrit, Jean, 313.
+
+Debussy, 35, 175.
+
+Declaration of the independence of the mind, 351-354.
+
+Decsey, Ernest, 174.
+
+Defeat, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 61, 62, 83 ff,
+110 ff, 134 ff, 139.
+
+"Defeatism," 297-303.
+
+De Maguet, Claude, 313.
+
+"_Demain_," 313.
+
+Depr�s, Suzanne, 175.
+
+Desmoulins, 126.
+
+Despr�s, Fernand, 312.
+
+_Deutscher Musiker in Paris, Ein_, 174.
+
+"_Deutsche Rundschau, Die_," 305.
+
+_Don Carlos_, 101.
+
+Dostoievsky, 2, 346.
+
+Doyen, 105.
+
+D'Oyron, in _The Wolves_, 114.
+
+Drama, and the masses, _see_ People's Theater;
+  erotic _vs._ political, 127 ff;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 69, 70, 86-99, 100-18.
+
+Dramatic writings, of Rolland, 25, 32, 39, 41, 57-130;
+  craftsmanship of, 127-130;
+  cycles, 67-71;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 100-130;
+  People's Theater, 85-130;
+  poems, 28;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unknown cycle, 71-75.
+
+_Drames philosophiques_, 125.
+
+Dreyfus affair, 38, 39, 106, 115, 119, 133.
+
+Dunois, Am�d�e, 312.
+
+Duse, Eleanore, 175.
+
+
+_Emp�docle d'Agrigente et l'�ge de la haine_, 72, 333 ff.
+
+_Etes-vous neutre devant le crime_, 283.
+
+
+Faber, in _Le triomphe de la raison_, 111, 114, 309.
+
+Faith, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 77-79, 81 ff, 166-71, 244 ff;
+  tragedies of, 76-85.
+
+Fellowship, of free spirits, during the war, 273 ff, 311-316: 351, 354.
+
+_F�tes de Beethoven, les_, 141.
+
+"_Feuille, la_," 313.
+
+Flaubert, 37, 58, 80, 177.
+
+_Forerunners, The_, 290, 339-334
+
+Fort, Paul, 250.
+
+_Fourteenth of July, The_, 101-2, 103-5, 109.
+
+France, after 1870, 57;
+  picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 211-216
+
+France, Anatole, 58, 84, 169.
+
+Frank, C�sar, 175.
+
+Frank, Ludwig, 321.
+
+Freedom, of conscience, 287 ff, 257-9, 119, 274, 285-8, 298 ff, 320 ff,
+339-47;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Triumph of Reason_.
+
+French literature, state of, after 1870, 37, 58 ff.
+
+French Revolution, 68, 98 ff, 100-120, 121, 122;
+  _see_ Drama of the
+  Revolution;
+  _also_ People's Theater. French stage, after 1870, 86-89.
+
+
+_Galeries des femmes de Shakespeare_, 6.
+
+Gamache, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+"Gauloiseries," 250.
+
+Generations, conflicting ideas of the 229-234.
+
+Geneva, during the   Great War, 268 ff.
+
+Germany, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 217-220.
+
+Girondists, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 110 ff, 121, 129, 169, 260.
+
+_Gli Baglioni_, 73, 74.
+
+Gluck, 173, 175, 212.
+
+Goethe, 64, 72, 97, 118, 150, 155, 169, 175, 177, 180, 211, 184, 193,
+219, 230, 263, 275, 278, 305, 330, 332.
+
+Gottfried, in _Jean Christophe_, 204.
+
+Grautoff, 166, 168.
+
+Grazia, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 200-202, 205.
+
+Greatness, will to, in Rolland's philosophy, 63.
+
+Great War, The, 1, 65, 257-355, 253, 264 ff, 339-347.
+
+Greek tragedy, method of, 128 ff
+
+_Gr�ne Heinrich, Der_, 169.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri, 281, 313.
+
+
+_Haendel_, 34.
+
+Handel, 150, 173, 175, 245.
+
+Hatred Holland's campaign against, 297-304;
+  Verhaeren's attitude of, during the war, 281-4.
+
+Hauptmann, 92, 276;
+  Rolland's controversy with, 277-280.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, 64.
+
+Hassler in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Hebbel, 73, 123.
+
+Hecht, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+Heroes of suffering, 133-153.
+
+Heroic biographies, 133-153.
+
+Herzen, 26.
+
+Historical drama, _see_ People's Theater.
+
+History, and the People's Theater, 95 ff;
+  Rolland's conception of, 95 ff;
+  sense of, in early writings, 32.
+
+Hoche, General, 150.
+
+H�lderlin, 73.
+
+Hugot, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 63, 111, 114.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 37, 64, 92, 121.
+
+
+_Idoles les_, 299.
+
+"Iliad of the French People," _see_ People's Theater.
+
+_Illusions perdues, les_, 65.
+
+_Inter Arma Caritas_, 297.
+
+_Iphigenia_, 118.
+
+Italy, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 221-3.
+
+Idealism, in Rolland's philosophy, 60 ff, 85, 123, 166-71;
+  characterization of Germany, 211-216;
+  of Italy, 222.
+
+Internationalism, 207-10, 255, 285-8, 351-4;
+  _see Above the Battle_;
+  Fellowship, of free spirits;
+  Hatred, Rolland's campaign against
+
+Ibsen, 126 ff.
+
+Italy, Rolland's sojourn in, 23-28, 71.
+
+
+Jaur�s, 13, 41, 109, 346.
+
+_Jean Christophe_, 18, 30, 36, 49, 65, 70, 130, 143, 157-237, 165, 257,
+300, 305, 311, 318, 339, 340;
+  as an educational romance, 166-71;
+  characters of, 172-5;
+  enigma of creative work, 181-7;
+  France, picture of, in, 211-16;
+  generations, conflicting ideas of, in 229-34;
+  Germany, picture of, in, 217-220;
+  Italy, picture of, in 221-3;
+  Jews, the, in, 224-8;
+  message of, 157-159;
+  music, form and content of, 177-80;
+  origin of 162-5;
+  writing of, 43-44, 162-5.
+
+Jean Christophe, 26, 31, 38, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 65, 68, 76, 97, 153,
+157-237, 241, 246, 257, 258, 260, 317, 336, 340, 342;
+  and Grazia, 200-1;
+  and his fellow men, 203-6;
+  and his generation, 229-36;
+  and the nations, 207-10;
+  apostle of force, 189 ff;
+  as the artist and creator, 188-94;
+  character of, 172-75;
+  contrast to Olivier, 195 ff.
+
+Jouve, 287, 312, 313.
+
+Justice, problem of, considered by Rolland in Dreyfus case, 39;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Wolves_.
+
+
+Kaufmann, Emil, 174.
+
+Keller, Gottfried, 169, 177.
+
+Kleist, 73, 92.
+
+Kohn, Sylvain, in _Jean Christophe_, 212, 224.
+
+Krafft, Jean Christophe, _see_ Jean Christophe.
+
+
+Language, as obstacle to internationalism, 229 ff.
+
+Lazare, Bernard, 39, 143.
+
+_Lebens Abend einer Idealistin, Der_, 27, 73.
+
+_L�gende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, 80.
+
+Letters, of Rolland, during war, 317-19.
+
+L�vy-Coeur, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 205, 224.
+
+_Le 14 Juillet_, _see Fourteenth of July, The_.
+
+Liberty, characterization of France, 211-16.
+
+_Life of Michael Angelo, The_, 40, 144-46.
+
+_Life of Timolien_, 131.
+
+_Liluli_, 300, 335-338, 339.
+
+_Loups, les, see The Wolves._
+
+Lux, Adams, 101, 111, 112, 309.
+
+Lyceum of Louis the Great, 8.
+
+
+Madame Bovary, 64.
+
+Mahler, Gustave, 35, 175.
+
+Mannheim, Judith, in _Jean Christophe_, 226.
+
+Marat, 101.
+
+Martinet, Marcel, 312.
+
+Masereel, Franz, 313.
+
+Maupassant, 13, 37, 58, 64, 91.
+
+Mazzini, 26, 150, 151, 222.
+
+_Meistersinger, Die_, 92.
+
+Mesnil, Jacques, 312.
+
+Meunier, 87.
+
+_Meutre des �lites, le_, 297.
+
+Meyerbeer, 212.
+
+Michelangelo, 67, 71, 144-6, 147, 148, 151, 161, 182, 245.
+
+Michelet, 13.
+
+Millet, 87, 50.
+
+Mirbeau, 85.
+
+Moli�re, 92.
+
+Monod Gabriel, 13, 16, 26, 73.
+
+_Mon Oncle Benjamin_, 3.
+
+_Montespan, la_, 73, 119.
+
+Mooch, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+Moreas, 175.
+
+Mornet, Lieutenant, 306.
+
+Mounet-Sully, 74.
+
+Mozart, 5, 173.
+
+Music, early influence of, on Rolland, 4;
+  form and content in _Jean Christophe_, 177-80;
+  part of Rolland's drama, 104 ff;
+  Rolland's love of, 47;
+  Rolland's philosophy of, 132-3;
+  Tolstoi's stigmatization of 19.
+
+_Musiciens d'autrefois_, 34, 35, 183.
+
+
+Nationalistic school of writers 59, 60, 62.
+
+Nationalism, 208 ff; 217-20, 225, 226.
+
+Naturalism, 15.
+
+"Neues Vaterland," 306.
+
+Nietzsche, 2, 26, 37, 162, 174, 177, 217-20, 255, 332.
+
+_Niob�_, 73, 74.
+
+Nobel peace prize, 270.
+
+Normal School, 10, 11, 12-17, 13, 14, 23, 29, 32, 162.
+
+_Notre prochain l'ennemi_, 297.
+
+Novalis, 169.
+
+
+Offenbach, 212.
+
+Olivier, in _Jean Christophe_, 61, 68, 76, 78, 84, 176, 179, 195-9, 200,
+201, 205, 214 ff, 220, 224, 225, 233, 244, 246, 257, 260, 264, 267, 283,
+309, 318, 336 340.
+
+Olivier, Georges, in _Jean Christophe_, 233.
+
+_Offiziere, Die_, 85.
+
+_Oration on Shakespeare_, 72.
+
+_Orfeo_, 33.
+
+_Origines du th��tre lyrique moderne, les_, 32, 183.
+
+_Orsino_, 72, 74.
+
+Oudon, Fran�oise, in _Jean Christophe_, 75.
+
+
+Pacifism, 262 ff.
+
+Paine, Thomas 9, 7, 150.
+
+Parsifal, 30, 31, 62, 191.
+
+P�guy, Charles, 14, 20, 38, 39, 59, 115, 143.
+
+People's Theater, The, 41, 65, 133, 68, 88, 94-97.
+
+Philippe, Charles Louis, 44, 91.
+
+Philosophy of life, of Rolland, _see_ Art of Rolland;
+  Conscience;
+  Defeat, significance of;
+  Faith;
+  Freedom of Conscience;
+  Greatness will to;
+  Hatred, campaign against;
+  Idealism;
+  Internationalism;
+  Justice;
+  Struggle, element of;
+  Suffering, significance of.
+
+Picquart, 39, 115.
+
+Perrotin, in _Clerambault_, 344.
+
+Pioch, Georges, 312.
+
+Polichinelle, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+_Pr�curseurs, les, see The Forerunners._
+
+_Pr�tre de Nemi, le_, 125.
+
+_Prinz von Homburg, Der_, 92.
+
+Provenzale, Francesco, 34.
+
+
+Quesnel, in _Les Loups_, 114.
+
+
+Racine, 91, 92.
+
+_R�uber, Die_, 92.
+
+Red Cross, in Switzerland, 268 ff, 269 ff.
+
+Renaissance, 24, 25, 68, 71.
+
+Renaitour, 312.
+
+Renan, 12, 13, 25, 37, 125 ff, 176, 196, 214, 309.
+
+"_Revue de l'art dramatique_," 35, 88.
+
+"_Revue de Paris_," 25, 141.
+
+Robespierre, 99, 101, 108, 113, 117, 126.
+
+Rolland, Madeleine, 3.
+
+Rolland, Romain, academic life of, in Paris, 32-35, 42;
+  adolescence
+  of, 3-11;
+  ancestry of, 3;
+  and his epoch, 57-62;
+  and the European spirit, 52, 53;
+  appeal to President Wilson, 348-50;
+  as embodiment of European spirit, 52-3;
+  art of, 63-6;
+  at Paris, 32-5, 36;
+  attitude of, during the war, 257-355;
+  campaign of, against hatred 297-303;
+  childhood of, 3-7;
+  controversy of, with Hauptmann, 277-80;
+  correspondence of, with Verhaeren 281-4;
+  cycles of 67-75;
+  diary of, during the war, 327-28;
+  drama of the revolution, 100-30;
+  dramatic writings, 25, 28, 57, 130;
+  Dreyfus case, 38-47;
+  fame, 49, 50, 51, 48;
+  father of, 6;
+  friendships, 13-15, 25, 26-28, 311-316;
+  heroic biographies, 133-153;
+  humanitarianism of, 307 ff;
+  idealism of, 60 ff;
+  influence of, during the war, 320-326, 355-6;
+  influence of Tolstoi on, 19-22;
+  Jean Christophe, 157-237;
+  letters of, during the war, 317-319;
+  marriage of, 35, 41, 73, 134;
+  mass suggestion in writings of, 261, 266, 329-47;
+  mother of, 3, 27;
+  newspaper writing of 289-292;
+  opponents of, during the war, 304-10;
+  portrait of, 46, 47;
+  r�le of, in fellowship of free spirits during the war, 273 ff;
+  Rome, 23, 28;
+  schooling of 5-17;
+  seclusion, 43, 44, 45-7, 48-49, 324;
+  significance of life work, 2;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unwritten biographies, 150-153.
+
+Rossi, Ernesto, 24.
+
+Rossi, Luigi, 33.
+
+Rostand, 117.
+
+Rouanet, 312.
+
+Rousseau, 275.
+
+Roussin, in _Jean Christophe_, 176.
+
+_Route en lacets qui monte, la_, 330.
+
+
+St. Christophe, 157.
+
+Saint-Just, _pseud._, 39, 84, 101, 108, 113, 126.
+
+_Saint Louis_, 77-8, 80-82, 83, 125, 244.
+
+Salviati, 24.
+
+Suar�s, Andr�, 14, 15, 39.
+
+Scarlatti, Alessandro, 34.
+
+Schermann, 330.
+
+Scheurer, Kestner, 39, 115.
+
+Schiller, 73, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95, 97, 100-1, 123, 155, 193, 196.
+
+Schubert, 175, 180.
+
+Schulz, Prof. in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Seippel, Paul, 50, 165, 172.
+
+S�v�rine, 312.
+
+Shakespeare, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 15, 64, 69, 72, 92, 100, 123,
+125, 150.
+
+Sidonie, in _Jean Christophe_, 213.
+
+_Siege de Mantoue, le_, 73.
+
+Sorbonne, 32, 33.
+
+_Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, 12.
+
+Spinoza, 10, 13, 18.
+
+Stendhal, 169, 177.
+
+Strauss, Hugo, 35.
+
+Strindberg, 2, 126 ff.
+
+Struggle, element of, in Rolland's philosophy, 222, 246 ff.
+
+Suffering, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy, 133-136, 181-7,
+188-94; 204 ff;
+  heroes of 133-53.
+
+Switzerland, refuge of Rolland during the war, 264-7.
+
+
+_"Tablettes, les,"_ 313.
+
+_Tasso_, 118.
+
+Teulier, in _The Wolves_, 114, 115, 121, 310.
+
+_Th��tre du peuple, le, see_ People's Theatre.
+
+Thiesson, Gaston, 312.
+
+Tillier, Claude, 3.
+
+Tolstoi, 18, 20, 21, 23, 15, 24, 53, 60, 64, 67, 82, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94,
+135, 138, 147-149, 151, 161, 165, 170, 175, 176, 182, 204, 245, 255,
+265, 300, 317, 320, 333.
+
+_To the Undying Antigone_, 27.
+
+_Trag�dies de la foi, les, see Tragedies of Faith._
+
+_Tragedies of Faith_, 69, 76-83, 76.
+
+"Tribunal of the spirit," _see_ Fellowship.
+
+_Triumph of Reason, The_, 63, 101, 102, 113, 114, 119.
+
+_Trois Amoureuses, les_, 173.
+
+Truth, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+
+Unknown dramatic cycle, 71-75.
+
+
+Verhaeren, 44, 77, 175, 276, 311;
+  Rolland's   correspondence with, 281-84.
+
+_Vie de Beethoven, see Beethoven._
+
+_Vie de Tolstoi, see Tolstoi._
+
+_Vie de Michel-Ange, la, see Life of Michael Angelo, The._
+
+_Vie des hommes illustres_, 301.
+
+Von Kerich, Frau, in _Jean Christophe_, 173, 204.
+
+Von Meysenbug, Malwida, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29-31, 73, 150, 162.
+
+Von Unruh, Fritz, 85.
+
+_Vorreden Material im Nachlass_, 255.
+
+_Vous �tes des hommes_, 312.
+
+
+Wagner, 2, 9, 10, 14, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 64, 92, 162, 174, 212.
+
+_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, 175.
+
+_War and Peace_, 64, 170.
+
+War, dominant theme in Rolland's plays, 28;
+  of the generations, 229-234;
+  in Rolland's writings, 260 ff.
+
+_Weber, Die_, 92, 277.
+
+Weil, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+_What is to be Done?_ 18.
+
+_Wilhelm Meister_, 155, 168.
+
+William the Silent, 66.
+
+Wilson, President, 348-50.
+
+Wolf, Hugo, 35, 150, 174.
+
+Wolff's news agency, 277.
+
+_Wolves, The_, 39, 101, 102, 113, 114.
+
+
+Zola, 15, 58, 85, 87, 39, 91, 115, 177.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
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+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romain Rolland
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Eden Paul
+            Cedar Paul
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34888]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAIN ROLLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, University of Michigan Libraries
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<h1>ROMAIN ROLLAND</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 380px;"><a name="front" id="front"></a>
+<a href="images/front.jpg">
+<img src="images/front_thumb.jpg" width="380" height="550" alt="Romain Rolland after a drawing by Grani� (1909)" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Romain Rolland after a drawing by Grani� (1909)</span>
+</div>
+
+<h1>ROMAIN ROLLAND<br />
+<small>THE MAN AND HIS WORK</small></h1>
+
+<p class="c"><small>BY</small><br />
+STEFAN ZWEIG</p>
+
+<p class="c"><small><small>TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT<br />
+BY</small></small><br />
+EDEN and CEDAR PAUL</p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 75px;">
+<img src="images/colophon.png" width="75" height="48" alt="colophon" title="colophon" />
+</div>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="c">N<small>EW</small> Y<small>ORK</small><br />
+THOMAS SELTZER<br />
+1921</p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>Copyright, 1921, by<br />
+THOMAS SELTZER, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span><br />
+<i>All rights reserved</i><br />
+PRINTED IN U. S. A.</small></p>
+
+<p>
+<br />
+</p>
+
+<div style="max-width:50%;margin:auto;">
+<h3><a name="Dedication" id="Dedication"></a>
+<span style="font-family: Old English Text MT, serif;">Dedication</span></h3>
+
+<p class="nind">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.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>IN COMMEMORATION</small></p>
+
+<p class="nind">of this uniqueness, I dedicate the book to those few who, in the hour of
+fiery trial, remained faithful to</p>
+
+<p class="c"><small>ROMAIN ROLLAND<br />
+<br />
+AND TO OUR BELOVED HOME OF<br />
+<br />
+EUROPE</small></p>
+</div>
+
+<h3><a name="TABLE_OF_CONTENTS" id="TABLE_OF_CONTENTS"></a>TABLE OF CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="contents">
+<tr><td><span class="smcap">Dedication</span></td><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART ONE: BIOGRAPHICAL</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-a">I.</a></td>
+<td> <span class="smcap">Introductory</span></td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page_001">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-a">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Early Childhood</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_003">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-a">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">School Days</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_008">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-a">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Normal School</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_012">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-a">V.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A Message From Afar</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_018">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-a">VI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Rome</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_023">23</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-a">VII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Consecration</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_029">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-a">VIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Years of Apprenticeship</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_032">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-a">IX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Years of Struggle</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_037">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-a">X.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A Decade of Seclusion</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_043">43</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI-a">XI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A Portrait</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_045">45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII-a">XII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Renown</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_048">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII-a">XIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Rolland As the Embodiment of the European Spirit</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_052">52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART TWO: EARLY WORK AS A DRAMATIST</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-b">I.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Work and the Epoch</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_057">57</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-b">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Will To Greatness</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_063">63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-b">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Creative Cycles</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_067">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-b">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Unknown Dramatic Cycle</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_071">71</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-b">V.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Tragedies of Faith. Saint Louis, A�rt, 1895-1898</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_076">76</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-b">VI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Saint Louis. 1894</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_080">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-b">VII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A�rt, 1898</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_083">83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-b">VIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Attempt To Regenerate the French Stage</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_086">86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-b">IX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">An Appeal to the People</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_090">90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-b">X.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Program</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_094">94</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI-b">XI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Creative Artist</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_098">98</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII-b">XII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Drama of the Revolution, 1898-1902</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_100">100</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII-b">XIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Fourteenth of July, 1902</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV-b">XIV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Danton, 1900</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_106">106</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV-b">XV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Triumph of Reason, 1899</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI-b">XVI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Wolves, 1898</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_113">113</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII-b">XVII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Call Lost in the Void</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII-b">XVIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap"> A Day Will Come, 1902</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_119">119</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX-b">XIX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Playwright</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART THREE: THE HEROIC BIOGRAPHIES</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-c">I.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">De Profundis</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_133">133</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-c">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Heroes of Suffering</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_137">137</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-c">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Beethoven</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_140">140</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-c">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Michelangelo</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-c">V.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Tolstoi</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_147">147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-c">VI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Unwritten Biographies</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART FOUR: JEAN CHRISTOPHE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-d">I.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Sanctus Christophorus</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_157">157</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-d">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Resurrection</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_160">160</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-d">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Origin of the Work</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-d">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Work without a Formula</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-d">V.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Key to the Characters</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_172">172</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-d">VI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A Heroic Symphony</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-d">VII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Enigma of Creative Work</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-d">VIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Jean Christophe</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_188">188</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-d">IX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Olivier</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_195">195</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-d">X.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Grazia</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_200">200</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI-d">XI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Jean Christophe and his Fellow Men</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_203">203</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII-d">XII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Jean Christophe and the Nations</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII-d">XIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Picture of France</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_211">211</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV-d">XIV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Picture of Germany</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_217">217</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV-d">XV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Picture of Italy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_221">221</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI-d">XVI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Jews</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_224">224</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII-d">XVII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Generations</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_229">229</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII-d">XVIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Departure</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_235">235</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART FIVE: INTERMEZZO SCHERZO (COLAS BREUGNON)</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-e">I.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Taken Unawares</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_241">241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-e">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Burgundian Brother</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_244">244</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-e">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Gauloiseries</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_249">249</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-e">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">A Frustrate Message</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_252">252</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan="3"><br />PART SIX: THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I-f">I.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Warden of the Inheritance</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_257">257</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II-f">II.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Forearmed</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_260">260</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III-f">III.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Place of Refuge</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_264">264</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV-f">IV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Service of Man</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_268">268</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V-f">V.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Tribunal of the Spirit</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_271">271</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI-f">VI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Controversy with Gerhardt Hauptmann</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_277">277</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII-f">VII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Correspondence with Verhaeren</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_281">281</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII-f">VIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The European Conscience</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_285">285</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX-f">IX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Manifestoes</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_289">289</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_X-f">X.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Above the Battle</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_293">293</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI-f">XI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Campaign against Hatred</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_297">297</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII-f">XII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Opponents</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_304">304</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII-f">XIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Friends</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_311">311</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV-f">XIV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Letters</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_317">317</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV-f">XV.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Counselor</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_320">320</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI-f">XVI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Solitary</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII-f">XVII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Diary</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_327">327</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII-f">XVIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Forerunners and Empedocles</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_329">329</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX-f">XIX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Liluli</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_335">335</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX-f">XX.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Clerambault</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_339">339</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI-f">XXI.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">The Last Appeal</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_348">348</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII-f">XXII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Declaration of the Independence of the Mind</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_351">351</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII-f">XXIII.</a></td><td> <span class="smcap">Envoy</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_355">355</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Bibliography</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_357">357</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_371">371</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<p class="c">[Click on any image to view it enlarged. (note from the etext producer.)]</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="illustrations">
+<tr><td>Romain Rolland after a drawing by Grani� (1909)</td><td align="right"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="right"><small>FACING<br />
+PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romain Rolland at the Normal School </td><td align="right"><a href="#page_012">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Leo Tolstoi's Letter</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_020">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rolland's Transcript of Francesco Provenzale's Aria from <i>Lo Schiavo di sua Moglie</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_034">34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rolland's Transcript of a Melody by Paul Dupin, <i>L'Oncle Gottfried</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_035">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing <i>Beethoven</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing <i>Jean Christophe</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing <i>Above the Battle</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_294">294</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Rolland's Mother</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_324">324</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Original Manuscript of <i>The Declaration of the Independence of the Mind</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_352">352</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_ONE" id="PART_ONE"></a>PART ONE<br />
+BIOGRAPHICAL</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">H�lderlin.</span></p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p>
+
+<h1>ROMAIN ROLLAND</h1>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-a" id="CHAPTER_I-a"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+INTRODUCTORY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that they may
+be guided more unmistakably in the right course. Fate plays with them,
+plays a game with a sublime issue,<a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-a" id="CHAPTER_II-a"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+EARLY CHILDHOOD</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OMAIN 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 <i>Mon Oncle Benjamin</i>, 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 <a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a>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.</p>
+
+<p>His first years of childhood were passed in the shadow of the defeat of
+1870. In <i>Antoinette</i>, 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
+<a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a> entitled <i>Galerie des femmes de Shakespeare</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a> 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&mdash;responsibility.<a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-a" id="CHAPTER_III-a"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+SCHOOL DAYS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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
+Corn�lien." 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.</p>
+
+<p>By the caprice of chance, for this friend likewise fame was to come only
+after twenty years of silence. Romain<a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a> Rolland and his intimate Paul
+Claudel (author of <i>Annonce faite � Marie</i>), 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> concerts,
+when the pulse of music came to thrill his heart&mdash;how charmingly is not
+this described in <i>Antoinette</i>! 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a> 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.<a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-a" id="CHAPTER_IV-a"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+THE NORMAL SCHOOL</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OLLAND'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
+<i>Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse</i>, 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,<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> 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,
+Jaur�s, Michelet, Monod, and Rolland.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 381px;">
+<a href="images/illp_012.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_012_thumb.jpg" width="381" height="550" alt="Romain Rolland at the Normal School" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Romain Rolland at the Normal School</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> 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, Andr� Suar�s, and Charles
+P�guy, 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, Suar�s, Claudel, and P�guy, has from a
+different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.</p>
+
+<p>As in the case of Claudel at the Lyceum, so now with Suar�s 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<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a> long chain of our
+friendship. Suar�s 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.<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a></p>
+
+<p>During these years of hard work at the Normal School, Rolland devoured
+book after book, writing after writing. His teachers, Bruneti�re, 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"&mdash;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 <i>Credo quia verum</i>. 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<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>, 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.<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-a" id="CHAPTER_V-a"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+A MESSAGE FROM AFAR</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">S</span>CHOOL 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>What is to be Done?</i>, 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<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In this state of mental cleavage, the student now<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> 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 P�guy as No. 4 of the third
+series of "<i>Cahiers de la quinzaine</i>," began with the affectionate
+words, "Cher Fr�re." 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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 364px;">
+<a href="images/illp_020.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_020_thumb.jpg" width="364" height="550" alt="Leo Tolstoi&#39;s Letter" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Leo Tolstoi&#39;s Letter</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>These words exercised a decisive influence upon the future of Romain
+Rolland. But the doctrine summarized above has been expounded by Tolstoi
+often enough,<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> 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<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> 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.<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-a" id="CHAPTER_VI-a"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+ROME</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>ROM 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a></p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, Suar�s 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;<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> 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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>.<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>To the Undying
+Antigone</i>, 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 <i>Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin</i> 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<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> 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.<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-a" id="CHAPTER_VII-a"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+THE CONSECRATION</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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."<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Parsifal</i>. This composition,
+which, like the visit to Bayreuth, is strangely interconnected with the
+genesis of <i>Jean Christophe</i>, 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
+<i>Parsifal</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>Although an epoch that had been rich for both was now closed, their
+friendship was by no means over. For<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> 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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>, that great epic was already living in his blood.<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-a" id="CHAPTER_VIII-a"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+YEARS OF APPRENTICESHIP</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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 <i>Les origines du th��tre
+lyrique moderns</i> (<i>Histoire de l'op�ra en Europe avant Lully et
+Scarlatti</i>), 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 "<i>l'�ternelle floraison</i>," 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<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Orfeo</i>,<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> 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 <i>The
+Beginnings of Opera</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<a href="images/illp_034.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_034_thumb.jpg" width="550" height="331" alt="Rolland&#39;s transcript of Francesco Provenzale&#39;s Aria from
+Lo Schiaro di sua Moglie" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Rolland&#39;s transcript of Francesco Provenzale&#39;s Aria from
+Lo Schiaro di sua Moglie</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<a href="images/illp_035.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_035_thumb.jpg" width="550" height="328" alt="Rolland&#39;s transcript of a melody by Paul Dupin, L&#39;Oncle
+Gottfried" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Rolland&#39;s transcript of a melody by Paul Dupin, L&#39;Oncle
+Gottfried</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Musiciens
+d'autrefois</i>, <i>Haendel</i>,<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> <i>Histoire de l'Op�ra</i>, etc., we have his
+<i>Musiciens d'aujourd'hui</i>, a collection of essays which were first
+published in the "<i>Revue de Paris</i>" and the "<i>Revue de l'art
+dramatique</i>," 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Br�al, 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<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> 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 <i>La foire sur la place</i>
+and <i>Dans la maison</i>. 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&mdash;the present.<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-a" id="CHAPTER_IX-a"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+YEARS OF STRUGGLE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OLLAND 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> was a fighter, but his world desired an
+easy life. He wanted fellowship, but all that his world wanted was
+enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> and in P�guy'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 P�guy was
+enthralled by the mystical<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> 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, <i>Les loups</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Simultaneously, Rolland was working shoulder to shoulder with P�guy, and
+with Suar�s 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<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> 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 "<i>Cahiers de la quinzaine</i>." 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>,
+<i>Beethoven</i>, <i>Michel-Ange</i>, and the plays. Though during this epoch the
+author's financial position was far from easy, he received nothing for
+any of these writings&mdash;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, P�guy's, and
+Suar�s' 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> 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. Jaur�s
+delivered a speech introducing <i>Danton</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;but nothing could shatter his idealism. When<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a>
+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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>, a work which in the ethical sense is more truly real than
+reality itself, a work which embodies the living faith of his
+generation.<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-a" id="CHAPTER_X-a"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br />
+A DECADE OF SECLUSION</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>OR 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>. The "<i>Cahiers de la quinzaine</i>" 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<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> Philippe, like
+Verhaeren, like Claudel, and like Suar�s, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the knowledge of a man whom the world did not
+yet know.<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI-a" id="CHAPTER_XI-a"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br />
+A PORTRAIT</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>WO 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a> 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.<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XII-a" id="CHAPTER_XII-a"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br />
+RENOWN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>E are in the year 1910. A motor is tearing along the Champs Elys�es,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> our generation&mdash;the dozen
+or so dramas, the biographies of the heroes, and the first eight volumes
+of <i>Jean Christophe</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>La foire sur la place</i>,
+through which he permanently forfeited the favor of the Parisian press.
+What he writes<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a> of Jean Christophe applies perfectly to himself: "Le
+succ�s n'�tait pas son but; son but �tait la foi." [Not success, but
+faith was his goal.]</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Beethoven</i>. They followed Jean
+Christophe in his pilgrimage. The faithful of the "<i>Cahiers de la
+quinzaine</i>" 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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a mystical significance in Romain Rolland's rise to fame, just
+as in every event of his life. Fame<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> 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.<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIII-a" id="CHAPTER_XIII-a"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br />
+ROLLAND AS THE EMBODIMENT OF THE EUROPEAN SPIRIT</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HUS 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_TWO" id="PART_TWO"></a>PART TWO<br /><br />
+EARLY WORK AS A DRAMATIST</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Son but n'�tait pas le succ�s; son but �tait la foi.</p>
+
+<p class="r"><span class="smcap">Jean Christophe</span>, "<i>La R�volte</i>."</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-b" id="CHAPTER_I-b"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+THE WORK AND THE EPOCH</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OMAIN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 re�ntered 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<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Barr�s, Paul Claudel, and P�guy. For thirty years, with the
+hammers of verse and prose, they fashioned the wounded pride of the
+French nation that it might become<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Jean Christophe</i>, are the words of<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> war&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Barr�s. 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.<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-b" id="CHAPTER_II-b"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+THE WILL TO GREATNESS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OLLAND realized his mission early in his career. The hero of one of his
+first writings, the Girondist Hugot in <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i>,
+discloses the author's own ardent faith when he declares: "Our first
+duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on earth."</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> 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 <i>War
+and Peace</i>, 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 <i>War and Peace</i>; not of writing a new <i>Madame Bovary</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a>
+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, <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>. He embroiled himself with the theaters, when in his
+manifesto <i>Le th��tre du peuple</i> he censured the triteness and
+commercialism of the contemporary drama. He likewise embroiled himself
+with the critics, when, in <i>La foire sur la place</i>, 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 <i>Les illusions perdues</i>. This young man whose
+financial position was precarious, who had no powerful associates, who
+had found no favor with newspaper editors,<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> 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&mdash;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 <i>A�rt</i>: "I have no need of approval to give me hope;
+nor of success, to brace me to perseverance."<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-b" id="CHAPTER_III-b"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+THE CREATIVE CYCLES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> 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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> 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,<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> 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&mdash;to Rolland, ever the musician, this
+symbol of sensory justice is the favorite and wellnigh exclusive form.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Trag�dies de la foi</i> form the second cycle; the <i>Th��tre de la
+r�volution</i><a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> forms the third. Both are unfinished, but the fragments are
+of imperishable value. The fourth cycle, the <i>Vie des hommes illustres</i>,
+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
+<i>Jean Christophe</i> alone succeed in rounding off the full circle of a
+generation, uniting grandeur and justice in the foreshadowed concord.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-b" id="CHAPTER_IV-b"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+THE UNKNOWN DRAMATIC CYCLE. 1890-1895</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;for in that epoch, after centuries of interment with the
+antique<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a> 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
+<i>Oration on Shakespeare</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Orsino</i>, was written at Rome in 1890. Next, in the halcyon clime of
+Sicily, he composed <i>Empedocles</i>, uninfluenced<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> by H�lderlin's ambitious
+draft, of which Rolland heard first from Malwida von Meysenbug. In the
+same year, 1891, he wrote <i>Gli Baglioni</i>. His return to Paris did not
+interrupt this outpouring, for in 1892 he wrote two plays, <i>Caligula</i>,
+and <i>Niob�</i>. From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he
+returned with a new Renaissance drama, <i>Le si�ge de Mantoue</i>. 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 <i>Saint Louis</i>
+(1893), the first of his <i>Trag�dies de la foi</i>. Next came <i>Jeanne de
+Piennes</i> (1894), which remains unpublished.... <i>A�rt</i> (1895), the second
+of the <i>Trag�dies de la foi</i>, was the first of Rolland's plays to be
+staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the <i>Th��tre
+de la r�volution</i>. In 1900 he wrote <i>La Montespan</i> and <i>Les trois
+amoureuses</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin</i> (a connoisseur's
+tribute to their artistic merits), not a word has ever been said about
+them.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> 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 Com�die Fran�aise,
+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. <i>Orsino</i> and <i>Gli Baglioni</i> were
+ruthlessly rejected, but <i>Niob�</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> 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.<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-b" id="CHAPTER_V-b"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH</h3>
+
+<p class="c"><i>Saint Louis. A�rt. 1895-1898</i></p>
+
+<p>Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten
+dramas of his youth under the title <i>Les trag�dies de la foi</i> (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<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> skies&mdash;and yet it was the expression of an undying faith
+in life.</p>
+
+<p>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 A�rt 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<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> is
+why Saint Louis died without seeing Jerusalem; why A�rt, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> 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.<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-b" id="CHAPTER_VI-b"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+SAINT LOUIS</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1894</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>La l�gende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier</i>, 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
+Panth�on, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte
+Genevi�ve 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.<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a></p>
+
+<p>The music of <i>Parsifal</i> 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"&mdash;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
+�cras� par les choses plus il semble les dominer davantage"&mdash;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"&mdash;it is glorious to fight
+for the unattainable when the unattainable is God. For the vanquished<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-b" id="CHAPTER_VII-b"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+A�RT</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1898</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span><i>�RT</i> was written a year later than <i>Saint Louis</i>; more explicitly than
+the pious epic does it aim at restoring faith and idealism to the
+disheartened nation. <i>Saint Louis</i> is a heroic legend, a tender
+reminiscence of former greatness; <i>A�rt</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>Such is the environment in which Rolland places A�rt, 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<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> 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, Ma�tre
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 A�rt'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.</p>
+
+<p>This romanticist play is a piece of tragical symbolism.<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> 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 <i>Die Offiziere</i>, 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, A�rt 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.<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-b" id="CHAPTER_VIII-b"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>ITH 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<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>A�rt</i> 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<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></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 an�mia 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
+s�ve populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la sant�." 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 "<i>Revue dramatique</i>" 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, <i>Le th��tre du peuple</i>, and his <i>Th��tre
+de<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> la r�volution</i>, 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.<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-b" id="CHAPTER_IX-b"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">&#8220;T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a>
+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 Com�die Fran�aise 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 "th��tre 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<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> proletarian idealism, the drama has remained sterile
+and antipopular.</p>
+
+<p>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
+Moli�re 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 <i>Die
+R�uber</i> and <i>Wilhelm Tell</i>, might be expected to arouse enthusiasm; but
+Schiller, like Kleist with <i>Der Prinz von Homburg</i>, is, for nationalist
+reasons, somewhat uncongenial to the Parisians. Tolstoi's <i>The Dominion
+of Darkness</i> and Hauptmann's <i>Die Weber</i> 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
+<i>Die Meistersinger</i> Rolland regards as the climax of universally
+comprehensible and elevating art, cannot be presented without the aid of
+music.<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 �
+dire! Tout est � faire! A l'oeuvre!" In the beginning was the deed.<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-b" id="CHAPTER_X-b"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br />
+THE PROGRAM</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HAT 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<a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a></p>
+
+<p>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-G�ne! "Tout est � faire! Tout est � 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
+'com�die 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<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a>
+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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI-b" id="CHAPTER_XI-b"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br />
+THE CREATIVE ARTIST</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Flor�al, 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<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a> 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'�tat. 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 <i>Le th��tre
+de la r�volution</i>.<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XII-b" id="CHAPTER_XII-b"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br />
+THE DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTION</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1898-1902</p>
+
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">P</span>LANNING 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 <i>Le th��tre de la r�volution</i>, "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<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> with Schiller's, we may say that
+Rolland was thinking of a <i>Don Carlos</i> without the Eboli episodes, of a
+<i>Wallenstein</i> without the Thekla sentimentalities. He wished to show the
+people the sublimities of history, not to entertain the audience with
+anecdotes of popular heroes.</p>
+
+<p>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 "f�tes galantes." We
+are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien
+r�gime; 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Le 14 Juillet</i> is the flourish of trumpets; it marks the opening of the
+storm. <i>Danton</i> is the critical climax; in the hour of victory comes the
+beginning of moral defeat, the fratricidal struggle. A <i>Robespierre</i> was
+to introduce the declining phase. <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i> shows the
+disintegration of the Revolution in the provinces; <i>Les loups</i> 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,<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Le
+14 Juillet</i>, <i>Danton</i>, <i>Les loups</i>, and <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i>. 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.<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIII-b" id="CHAPTER_XIII-b"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br />
+THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1902</p>
+
+<p>Of the four completed revolutionary dramas, <i>Le 14 Juillet</i> 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.<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a></p>
+
+<p><i>Le 14 Juillet</i>, 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 "f�tes 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a> 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 fr�res" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIV-b" id="CHAPTER_XIV-b"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br />
+DANTON</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1900</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">D</span><i>ANTON</i> 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.<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> Victory brings power, and power is just to
+itself alone.</p>
+
+<p>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 so�le des hommes. Je les vomis."&mdash;I am surfeited with men. I spue
+them out of my mouth.&mdash;He longs for a frank naturalness, for an
+unsophisticated<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> 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&mdash;the zealot of virtue, the
+blood-thirsty apostle of justice, the stubborn papist or
+calvinist&mdash;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<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a> that he will
+drag his opponent after him adown the precipice.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Le 14 Juillet</i> 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
+<i>Le 14 Juillet Rolland</i> exhibits to his nation the greatness of its
+powers; in <i>Danton</i> 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, <i>Danton</i> likewise is a call to
+action, an energizing elixir. Thus did Jaur�s characterize it, Jaur�s
+who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the
+work when it was staged at the Th��tre Civique on December 20, 1900&mdash;a
+performance forgotten in twenty-four hours, like all Rolland's early
+efforts.<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XV-b" id="CHAPTER_XV-b"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br />
+THE TRIUMPH OF REASON</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1899</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">L</span><i>E triomphe de la raison</i> 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&mdash;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?<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>A�rt</i>, 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.<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVI-b" id="CHAPTER_XVI-b"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br />
+THE WOLVES</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1898</p>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i>, 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. <i>Les loups</i> embodies a variation of the same
+theme. Here the choice has to be made between the fatherland and
+justice.</p>
+
+<p>The subject has already been mooted in <i>Danton</i>. 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 � tout prix"&mdash;conquer at any cost&mdash;calls one.
+"When the country is in danger, it matters nothing that one man should
+be illegally condemned," cries another. Saint-Just bows<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> before the
+argument, sacrificing honor to expediency, the law to his fatherland.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Les loups</i>, 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 <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> citizen of the state, was the reflection of the actual
+happenings during the days when it was written. In <i>Les loups</i>, 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 Th��tre de
+l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political
+demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, P�guy, 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<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a> 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.<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVII-b" id="CHAPTER_XVII-b"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br />
+THE CALL LOST IN THE VOID</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>Le
+th��tre de la r�volution</i> remained a fragment. A <i>Robespierre</i>, which
+was to be the spiritual counterpart of <i>Danton</i>, already sketched in
+broad outline, was left unfinished. The other segments of the great
+dramatic cycle have never<a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a> 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 <i>Iphigenia</i> and <i>Tasso</i>. 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."</p>
+
+<p>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."<a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII-b" id="CHAPTER_XVIII-b"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br />
+A DAY WILL COME</h3>
+
+<p class="c">1902</p>
+
+<p>Once only has Rolland been tempted to resume dramatic composition.
+(Parenthetically I may mention a minor play of the same period, <i>La
+Montespan</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Le temps viendra</i> 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 <i>Le
+triomphe de la raison</i>, the problem was one of freedom versus the
+fatherland; in <i>Les loups</i> it was one of<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a> 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&mdash;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. "Ob�ir � ma patrie? Ob�ir � 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."<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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 o� la libert� est
+menac�e." A�rt, Saint Louis, Hugot, the Girondists, Teulier, the martyrs
+in <i>Les loups</i>, are the author's spiritual brethren, the children of his
+belief that the individual's will is stronger than his secular<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a>
+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.<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIX-b" id="CHAPTER_XIX-b"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br />
+THE PLAYWRIGHT</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>E 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a> they are vanquished, when A�rt 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Drames philosophiques</i>, among which
+<i>L'abbesse de Jouarre</i> and <i>Le pr�tre de Nemi</i> 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 Tr�guier, 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<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, voil� la fatalit� 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,<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a> 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&mdash;though the latter can still destroy a hardy rebel with the
+thunderbolts of Jupiter.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_129" id="page_129"></a> 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?"&mdash;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 A�rt, 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&mdash;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<a name="page_130" id="page_130"></a>
+understanding as do the tragedies which lay for years in obscurity, and
+were then overshadowed by the fame of their late-born brother, <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>? 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.<a name="page_131" id="page_131"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_THREE" id="PART_THREE"></a>PART THREE<br /><br />
+THE HEROIC BIOGRAPHIES</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Plutarch</span>, <i>Preamble to the Life of Timoleon</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_132" id="page_132"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_133" id="page_133"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-c" id="CHAPTER_I-c"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+DE PROFUNDIS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>Vain had been the attempt. Ten years, fifteen years&mdash;how easily the
+phrase is spoken, but how long the time may seem to a sad heart&mdash;had
+been spent in fruitless endeavor. Disillusionment had followed upon
+disillusionment. <i>Le th��tre du peuple</i> 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.<a name="page_134" id="page_134"></a> Public life was lukewarm and torpid as of old. The world was
+in search of profit instead of faith and spiritual force.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_135" id="page_135"></a> 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"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_136" id="page_136"></a> 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&mdash;never happier&mdash;than in suffering."</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_137" id="page_137"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-c" id="CHAPTER_II-c"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+THE HEROES OF SUFFERING</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">L</span>IKE the revolutionary dramas, the new creative cycle was preluded by a
+manifesto, a new call to greatness. The preface to <i>Beethoven</i>
+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,<a name="page_138" id="page_138"></a> 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.'"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;to
+know life and yet to love it."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_139" id="page_139"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_140" id="page_140"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-c" id="CHAPTER_III-c"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+BEETHOVEN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">B</span>EETHOVEN, 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'<a name="page_141" id="page_141"></a>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.</p>
+
+<p>After the visit to Bonn, Rolland wrote an article for the "<i>Revue de
+Paris</i>," entitled <i>Les f�tes de Beethoven</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,<a name="page_142" id="page_142"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 384px;">
+<a href="images/illp_142.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_142_thumb.jpg" width="384" height="550" alt="Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing Beethoven" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing Beethoven</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_143" id="page_143"></a> 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
+<i>Beethoven</i>. 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> in the first steps toward
+celebrity. Simultaneously, there was an improvement in the fortunes of
+"<i>Les cahiers de la quinzaine</i>." The obscure periodical began to
+circulate more freely. For the first time, a second edition was called
+for. Charles P�guy 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.<a name="page_144" id="page_144"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-c" id="CHAPTER_IV-c"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+MICHELANGELO</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">B</span>EETHOVEN 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_145" id="page_145"></a> 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 � la malincolia"&mdash;melancholy<a name="page_146" id="page_146"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."<a name="page_147" id="page_147"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-c" id="CHAPTER_V-c"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+TOLSTOI</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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 Elys�es.
+On his recovery, the news of his beloved master's end came to him with
+profound significance and as a sublime exhortation.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_148" id="page_148"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_149" id="page_149"></a> 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.<a name="page_150" id="page_150"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-c" id="CHAPTER_VI-c"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+THE UNWRITTEN BIOGRAPHIES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>N the cover of the <i>Beethoven</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_151" id="page_151"></a> 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<a name="page_152" id="page_152"></a> 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?"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>Justice to himself, justice to those whose names he honored, veneration
+for the truth, compassion for his<a name="page_153" id="page_153"></a> fellows&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_154" id="page_154"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_155" id="page_155"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_IV" id="PART_IV"></a>PART IV<br /><br />
+JEAN CHRISTOPHE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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
+�sthetic 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Schiller to Goethe concerning</span> <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="r">October 19, 1796.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_156" id="page_156"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_157" id="page_157"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-d" id="CHAPTER_I-d"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+SANCTUS CHRISTOPHORUS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">U</span>PON 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_158" id="page_158"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_159" id="page_159"></a> 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.<a name="page_160" id="page_160"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-d" id="CHAPTER_II-d"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+RESURRECTION</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OMAIN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_161" id="page_161"></a></p>
+
+<p>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, A�rt 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, <i>Jean Christophe</i>.<a name="page_162" id="page_162"></a></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 385px;">
+<a href="images/illp_162.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_162_thumb.jpg" width="385" height="550" alt="Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing Jean Christophe" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing Jean Christophe</span>
+</div>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-d" id="CHAPTER_III-d"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span>EAN 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_163" id="page_163"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_164" id="page_164"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_165" id="page_165"></a> 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; <i>L'adolescent</i> in Zurich and
+by the shores of Lake Zug; much in Paris; much in Italy; <i>Antoinette</i> in
+Oxford; while, after nearly fifteen years' labor, the work was completed
+in Baveno.</p>
+
+<p>In February, 1902, the first volume, <i>L'aube</i>, was published in "<i>Les
+cahiers de la quinzaine</i>," and the last serial number was issued on
+October 20, 1912. When the fifth serial issue, <i>La foire sur la place</i>,
+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.<a name="page_166" id="page_166"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-d" id="CHAPTER_IV-d"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+THE WORK WITHOUT A FORMULA</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>HAT, then, is <i>Jean Christophe</i>? 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> is the
+refusal to permit so living a creation to be hidebound by the
+restrictions of a name. <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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<a name="page_167" id="page_167"></a>
+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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<a name="page_168" id="page_168"></a>
+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."</p>
+
+<p><i>Jean Christophe</i> 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 dompt�e"; 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 <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>.
+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<a name="page_169" id="page_169"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>But this educational romance is simultaneously a historical romance, a
+"com�die 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Der gr�ne Heinrich</i>, 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<a name="page_170" id="page_170"></a>
+aim at giving an analysis of the world; he desires also to expound the
+mystery of creation, the primal secret of life.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Such a wealth of design and execution was unprecedented. In one work
+alone, Tolstoi's <i>War and Peace</i>, 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,
+<i>Jean Christophe</i> was not to be a literary work, but a deed. For this
+reason, Rolland's great symphony<a name="page_171" id="page_171"></a> 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.<a name="page_172" id="page_172"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-d" id="CHAPTER_V-d"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+KEY TO THE CHARACTERS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>S a romance, <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Jean Christophe seems at first to be Beethoven. Seippel has aptly
+described <i>La vie de Beethoven</i> as a preface<a name="page_173" id="page_173"></a> to <i>Jean Christophe</i>. 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<a name="page_174" id="page_174"></a> 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&mdash;all these things
+have been transposed almost verbatim into <i>Jean Christophe</i> from
+Wagner's autobiographical sketches <i>Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 "<i>Dionysos</i>" ("<i>Wiener Salonblatt</i>"), the
+tragi-comedy of the unsuccessful overture to <i>Penthesilea</i>, 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&mdash;this form of genius which was native
+to Hugo Wolf becomes part of the tragical equipment of Jean<a name="page_175" id="page_175"></a> 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 C�sar 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.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, in Jean Christophe's life we find incidents deriving from
+the adventures of those who were not musicians. From Goethe's <i>Wahrheit
+und Dichtung</i> 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; Fran�oise Oudon,
+the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds
+us of Suzanne Depr�s. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are
+purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles
+Louis Philippe and Charles P�guy; among the minor figures, lightly
+sketched, we seem to see Debussy, Verhaeren, and Moreas. When <i>La foire
+sur la place</i><a name="page_176" id="page_176"></a> was published, the figures of Roussin the deputy,
+L�vy-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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_177" id="page_177"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-d" id="CHAPTER_VI-d"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+A HEROIC SYMPHONY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>N abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of
+contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In <i>Jean Christophe</i>,
+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, <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_178" id="page_178"></a> 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&mdash;songs and
+airs which appear and pass, rapidly giving place to new movements. Some
+of the preludes in <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Only through the spirit of music can the architectonic of <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> be understood. However plastic the elaboration of the
+characters, their effective force is displayed<a name="page_179" id="page_179"></a> 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_180" id="page_180"></a> 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 <i>Le buisson ardent</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Thus <i>Jean Christophe</i>, 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.<a name="page_181" id="page_181"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-d" id="CHAPTER_VII-d"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+THE ENIGMA OF CREATIVE WORK</h3>
+
+<p><i>Jean Christophe</i> 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<a name="page_182" id="page_182"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_183" id="page_183"></a> in this mystery are
+comprised the root and the blossoms of the whole of life's enigma.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Histoire de l'op�ra avant Lully et Scarlatti</i>, and in his <i>Musiciens
+d'autrefois</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_184" id="page_184"></a> 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'<a name="page_185" id="page_185"></a>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_186" id="page_186"></a>
+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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>. 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
+pr�texte � sa f�condit� 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_187" id="page_187"></a> 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.<a name="page_188" id="page_188"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-d" id="CHAPTER_VIII-d"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+JEAN CHRISTOPHE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>RT 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_189" id="page_189"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>But struggle implies the use of force. Despite his natural kindliness of
+disposition, Jean Christophe is an<a name="page_190" id="page_190"></a> 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 g�nie
+veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le g�nie"&mdash;genius desires obstacles,
+for obstacles create genius.</p>
+
+<p>Force, however, is always wilful Young Jean Christophe, while his
+energies have not yet been spiritually<a name="page_191" id="page_191"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_192" id="page_192"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_193" id="page_193"></a>
+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, "transfigur� 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.<a name="page_194" id="page_194"></a></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the imaginary personalities in the book, and no less the real
+human beings who read the book&mdash;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.<a name="page_195" id="page_195"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-d" id="CHAPTER_IX-d"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+OLIVIER</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span>EAN 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"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_196" id="page_196"></a> 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 g�nie
+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.</p>
+
+<p>At first we incline to regard him as a weakling, as<a name="page_197" id="page_197"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_198" id="page_198"></a> 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 A�rt, 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<a name="page_199" id="page_199"></a> his true life, survive him, to renew for
+those of a later generation the mystic idealism of his faith.</p>
+
+<p>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"&mdash;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.<a name="page_200" id="page_200"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-d" id="CHAPTER_X-d"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br />
+GRAZIA</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span>EAN 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, re�ncounters, comparatively
+late in life, Grazia, who now embodies the calm beauty of womanhood.
+Thus his impetuous spirit is helped to realize the final harmony.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_201" id="page_201"></a> 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 <i>Le buisson ardent</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_202" id="page_202"></a> 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.<a name="page_203" id="page_203"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI-d" id="CHAPTER_XI-d"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br />
+JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND HIS FELLOW MEN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">N</span>OTWITHSTANDING 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?<a name="page_204" id="page_204"></a>
+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&mdash;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<a name="page_205" id="page_205"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, L�vy-Coeur, and
+spontaneously offers his hand. This reconciliation implies something
+more than transient sympathy. It expresses the meaning of the long<a name="page_206" id="page_206"></a>
+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."<a name="page_207" id="page_207"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XII-d" id="CHAPTER_XII-d"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br />
+JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND THE NATIONS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">Y</span>OUNG 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."</p>
+
+<p>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,<a name="page_208" id="page_208"></a> 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<a name="page_209" id="page_209"></a> but one science, that of the heart and not of books.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_210" id="page_210"></a> 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.<a name="page_211" id="page_211"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIII-d" id="CHAPTER_XIII-d"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br />
+THE PICTURE OF FRANCE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_212" id="page_212"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_213" id="page_213"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_214" id="page_214"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 fa�ade, 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<a name="page_215" id="page_215"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_216" id="page_216"></a> 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.<a name="page_217" id="page_217"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIV-d" id="CHAPTER_XIV-d"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br />
+THE PICTURE OF GERMANY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N 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<a name="page_218" id="page_218"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_219" id="page_219"></a> 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<a name="page_220" id="page_220"></a> 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."<a name="page_221" id="page_221"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XV-d" id="CHAPTER_XV-d"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br />
+THE PICTURE OF ITALY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span>EAN 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<a name="page_222" id="page_222"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_223" id="page_223"></a> 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.<a name="page_224" id="page_224"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVI-d" id="CHAPTER_XVI-d"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br />
+THE JEWS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N 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&mdash;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, L�vy-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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_225" id="page_225"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>Christophe agrees, saying: "It is perfectly true that they have
+encouraged me and helped me; that they have<a name="page_226" id="page_226"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_227" id="page_227"></a> 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<a name="page_228" id="page_228"></a> 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.<a name="page_229" id="page_229"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVII-d" id="CHAPTER_XVII-d"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br />
+THE GENERATIONS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HUS 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_230" id="page_230"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_231" id="page_231"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_232" id="page_232"></a>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_233" id="page_233"></a> 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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<a name="page_234" id="page_234"></a></p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;the task of remaking an
+entire world, an ethic, an �sthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were
+we in our generation.</p>
+
+<p>"Men of to-day, young men, your turn has come. March forward over our
+bodies. Be greater and happier than we have been.</p>
+
+<p>"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."<a name="page_235" id="page_235"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII-d" id="CHAPTER_XVIII-d"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br />
+DEPARTURE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span>EAN 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&mdash;the meaning of the world, faith in life.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_236" id="page_236"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."<a name="page_237" id="page_237"></a></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But beside the dying man is the Child, smiling and full of knowledge;
+the Child who is Eternal Life.</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_238" id="page_238"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_239" id="page_239"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_FIVE" id="PART_FIVE"></a>PART FIVE<br /><br />
+INTERMEZZO SCHERZOSO</h2>
+
+<p class="c">(Colas Breugnon)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">"Brugnon, mauvais gar�on, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"&mdash;"Que veux
+tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'emp�che pas de
+souffrir; mais souffrir n'emp�chera jamais un bon Fran�ais de rire.
+Et qu'il rie ou larmoie, il faut d'abord qu'il voie."</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Colas Breugnon.</span></p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_240" id="page_240"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_241" id="page_241"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-e" id="CHAPTER_I-e"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+TAKEN UNAWARES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> 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<a name="page_242" id="page_242"></a> romance
+belonging to the same intellectual and cultural category as Jean
+Christophe.</p>
+
+<p>Now of a sudden, as had happened twenty-five years earlier when the
+vision of <i>Jean Christophe</i> 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.<a name="page_243" id="page_243"></a></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Colas Breugnon</i>, the French intermezzo in the
+European symphony.<a name="page_244" id="page_244"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-e" id="CHAPTER_II-e"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+THE BURGUNDIAN BROTHER</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>T 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 A�rt 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>Colas Breugnon</i>, like <i>Jean Christophe</i>, is the<a name="page_245" id="page_245"></a> 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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>. 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 <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>, 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<a name="page_246" id="page_246"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_247" id="page_247"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_248" id="page_248"></a> this tragi-comedy he
+is animated by the unalloyed desire to stand by his own strength.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_249" id="page_249"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-e" id="CHAPTER_III-e"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+GAULOISERIES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OMAIN ROLLAND had looked upon <i>Colas Breugnon</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>From the artistic point of view, <i>Colas Breugnon</i> 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. <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> 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 <i>Colas Breugnon</i> is written throughout in the same key. The first
+sentence gives the note like a tuning fork, and<a name="page_250" id="page_250"></a> 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 <i>Ballades fran�aises</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Contes drolatiques</i>, 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<a name="page_251" id="page_251"></a> 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.<a name="page_252" id="page_252"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-e" id="CHAPTER_IV-e"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+A FRUSTRATE MESSAGE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">J</span><i>EAN CHRISTOPHE</i> was the deliberate divergence from a generation.
+<i>Colas Breugnon</i> is another divergence, unconsciously effected; a
+divergence from the traditional France, heedlessly cheerful. This
+"bourguinon sal�" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the summer of 1914 reaped a bloody harvest. The roar of the cannon,
+drowning Jean Christophe's<a name="page_253" id="page_253"></a> 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 <i>Colas
+Breugnon</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><a name="page_254" id="page_254"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_255" id="page_255"></a></p>
+
+<h2><a name="PART_SIX" id="PART_SIX"></a>PART SIX<br /><br />
+THE CONSCIENCE OF EUROPE</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="nind">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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Nietzsche</span>, <i>Vorreden Material im Nachlass</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="nind">La vocation ne peut �tre connue et prouv�e que par le sacrifice que
+fait le savant et l'artiste de son repos et son bien-�tre pour
+suivre sa vocation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Letter de Tolstoi a Romain Rolland.</span></p>
+
+<p class="r">4, Octobre, 1887.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="page_256" id="page_256"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_257" id="page_257"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_I-f" id="CHAPTER_I-f"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+THE WARDEN OF THE INHERITANCE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Jean Christophe</i>, 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<a name="page_258" id="page_258"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_259" id="page_259"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="page_260" id="page_260"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_II-f" id="CHAPTER_II-f"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+FOREARMED</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">W</span>E do not detract from the moral services of Romain Rolland, but we may
+perhaps excuse to some extent his opponents, when we insist that Rolland
+had excelled all contemporary imaginative writers in the profundity of
+his preparatory studies of war and its problems. If to-day, in
+retrospect, we contemplate his writings, we marvel to note how, from the
+very first and throughout a long period of years, they combined to build
+up, as it were, a colossal pyramid, culminating in the point upon which
+the lightnings of war were to be discharged. For twenty years, the
+author's thought, his whole creative activity, had been unintermittently
+concentrated upon the contradictions between spirit and force, between
+freedom and the fatherland, between victory and defeat. Through a
+hundred variations he had pursued the same fundamental theme, treating
+it dramatically, epically, and in manifold other ways. There is hardly a
+problem relevant to this question which is not touched upon by
+Christophe and Olivier, by A�rt and by the Girondists, in their
+discussions. Intellectually regarded, Rolland's writings are a
+maneuvering ground for all the incentives to war. He thus had<a name="page_261" id="page_261"></a> his
+conclusions already drawn when others were beginning an attempt to come
+to terms with events. As historian, he had described the perpetual
+recurrence of war's typical accompaniments, had discussed the psychology
+of mass suggestion, and had shown the effects of wartime mentality upon
+the individual. As moralist and as citizen of the world, he had long ere
+this formulated his creed. We may say, in fact, that Rolland's mind had
+been in a sense immunized against the illusions of the crowd and against
+infection by prevalent falsehoods.</p>
+
+<p>Not by chance does an artist decide which problems he will consider. The
+dramatist does not make a "lucky selection" of his theme. The musician
+does not "discover" a beautiful melody, but already has it within him.
+It is not the artist who creates the problems, but the problems which
+create the artist; just as it is not the prophet who makes his prophecy,
+but the foresight which creates the prophet. The artist's choice is
+always pre-ordained. The man who has foreseen the essential problem of a
+whole civilization, of a disastrous epoch, must of necessity, in the
+decisive hour, play a leading part. He only who had contemplated the
+coming European war as an abyss towards which the mad hunt of recent
+decades, making light of every warning, had been speeding, only such a
+one could command his soul, could refrain from joining the bacchanalian
+rout, could listen unmoved to the throbbing of the war drums. Who but
+such a man could stand upright in the greatest storm of illusion the
+world has ever known?</p>
+
+<p>Thus it came to pass that not merely during the first<a name="page_262" id="page_262"></a> hour of the war
+was Rolland in opposition to other writers and artists of the day. This
+opposition dated from the very inception of his career, and hence for
+twenty years he had been a solitary. The reason why the contrast between
+his outlook and that of his generation had not hitherto been
+conspicuous, the reason why the cleavage was not disclosed until the
+actual outbreak of war, lies in this, that Rolland's divergence was a
+matter not so much of mood as of character. Before the apocalyptic year,
+almost all persons of artistic temperament had recognized quite as
+definitely as Rolland had recognized that a fratricidal struggle between
+Europeans would be a crime, would disgrace civilization. With few
+exceptions, they were pacifists. It would be more correct to say that
+with few exceptions they believed themselves to be pacifists. For
+pacifism does not simply mean, to be a friend to peace, but to be a
+worker in the cause of peace, an <span title="Greek: eir�nopoi�s">
+&#949;&#7985;&#961;&#951;&#957;&#959;&#960;&#959;&#953;&#8001;&#962;</span>, as the New
+Testament has it. Pacifism signifies the activity of an effective will
+to peace, not merely the love of an easy life and a preference for
+repose. It signifies struggle; and like every struggle it demands, in
+the hour of danger, self-sacrifice and heroism. Now these "pacifists" we
+have just been considering had merely a sentimental fondness for peace;
+they were friendly towards peace, just as they were friendly towards
+ideas of social equality, towards philanthropy, towards the abolition of
+capital punishment. Such faith as they possessed was a faith devoid of
+passion. They wore their opinions as they wore their clothing, and when
+the time of trial came they were ready to exchange their<a name="page_263" id="page_263"></a> pacifist ethic
+for the ethic of the war-makers, were ready to don a national uniform in
+matters of opinion. At bottom, they knew the right just as well as
+Rolland, but they had not the courage of their opinions. Goethe's saying
+to Eckermann applies to them with deadly force. "All the evils of modern
+literature are due to lack of character in individual investigators and
+writers."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Rolland did not stand alone in his knowledge, which was shared by
+many intellectuals and statesmen. But in his case, all his knowledge was
+tinged with religious fervor; his beliefs were a living faith; his
+thoughts were actions. He was unique among imaginative writers for the
+splendid vigor with which he remained true to his ideals when all others
+were deserting the standard; for the way in which he defended the
+European spirit against the raging armies of the sometime European
+intellectuals now turned patriots. Fighting as he had fought from youth
+upwards on behalf of the invisible against the world of reality, he
+displayed, as a foil to the heroism of the trenches, a higher heroism
+still. While the soldiers were manifesting the heroism of blood, Rolland
+manifested the heroism of the spirit, and showed the glorious spectacle
+of one who was able, amid the intoxication of the war-maddened masses,
+to maintain the sobriety and freedom of an unclouded mind.<a name="page_264" id="page_264"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_III-f" id="CHAPTER_III-f"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+THE PLACE OF REFUGE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>T 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_265" id="page_265"></a> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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<a name="page_266" id="page_266"></a> 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 <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i>,
+"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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Jean Christophe</i>, 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<a name="page_267" id="page_267"></a> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;to point towards love.<a name="page_268" id="page_268"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IV-f" id="CHAPTER_IV-f"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+THE SERVICE OF MAN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span>N Rolland's view it was the artist's duty to serve his fatherland by
+conscientious service to all mankind, to play his part in the struggle
+by waging war against the suffering the war was causing and against the
+thousandfold torments entailed by the war. He rejected the idea of
+absolute aloofness. "An artist has no right to hold aloof while he is
+still able to help others." But this aid, this participation, must not
+take the form of fostering the murderous hatred which already animated
+the millions. The aim must be to unite the millions further, where
+unseen ties already existed, in their infinite suffering. He therefore
+took his part in the ranks of the helpers, not weapon in hand, but
+following the example of Walt Whitman, who, during the American Civil
+War, served as hospital assistant.</p>
+
+<p>Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all
+lands began to be heard in Switzerland. Thousands who were without news
+of fathers, husbands, and sons in the battlefields, stretched despairing
+arms into the void. By hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands,
+letters and telegrams poured into the little House of the Red Cross in
+Geneva, the only international<a name="page_269" id="page_269"></a> rallying point that still remained.
+Isolated, like stormy petrels, came the first inquiries for missing
+relatives; then these inquiries themselves became a storm. The letters
+arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared for dealing with such an
+inundation of misery. The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no
+system, and above all no helpers.</p>
+
+<p>Romain Rolland was one of the first to offer personal assistance. The
+Mus�e Rath was quickly made available for the purposes of the Red Cross.
+In one of the small wooden cubicles, among hundreds of girls, women, and
+students, Rolland sat for more than eighteen months, engaged each day
+for from six to eight hours side by side with the head of the
+undertaking, Dr. Ferri�re, to whose genius for organization myriads owe
+it that the period of suspense was shortened. Here Rolland filed
+letters, wrote letters, performed an abundance of detail work, seemingly
+of little importance. But how momentous was every word to the
+individuals whom he could help, for in this vast universe each suffering
+individual is mainly concerned about his own particular grain of
+unhappiness. Countless persons to-day, unaware of the fact, have to
+thank the great writer for news of their lost relatives. A rough stool,
+a small table of unpolished deal, the turmoil of typewriters, the bustle
+of human beings questioning, calling one to another, hastening to and
+fro&mdash;such was Romain Rolland's battlefield in this campaign against the
+afflictions of the war. Here, while other authors and intellectuals were
+doing their utmost to foster mutual hatred, he endeavored to promote
+reconciliation,<a name="page_270" id="page_270"></a> to alleviate the torment of a fraction among the
+countless sufferers by such consolation as the circumstances rendered
+possible. He neither desired, nor occupied, a leading position in the
+work of the Red Cross; but, like so many other nameless assistants, he
+devoted himself to the daily task of promoting the interchange of news.
+His deeds were inconspicuous, and are therefore all the more memorable.</p>
+
+<p>When he was allotted the Nobel peace prize, he refused to retain the
+money for his own use, and devoted the whole sum to the mitigation of
+the miseries of Europe, that he might suit the action to the word, the
+word to the action. Ecce homo! Ecce poeta!<a name="page_271" id="page_271"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_V-f" id="CHAPTER_V-f"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+THE TRIBUNAL OF THE SPIRIT</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">N</span>O one had been more perfectly forearmed than Romain Rolland. The
+closing chapters of <i>Jean Christophe</i> foretell the coming mass illusion.
+Never for a moment had he entertained the vain hope of certain idealists
+that the fact (or semblance) of civilization, that the increase of human
+kindliness which we owe to two millenniums of Christianity, would make a
+future war, comparatively humane. Too well did he know as historian that
+in the initial outbursts of war passion the veneer of civilization and
+Christianity would be rubbed off; that in all nations alike the naked
+bestiality of human beings would be disclosed; that the smell of the
+shed blood would reduce them all to the level of wild beasts. He did not
+conceal from himself that this strange halitus is able to dull and to
+confuse even the gentlest, the kindliest, the most intelligent of souls.
+The rending asunder of ancient friendships, the sudden solidarity among
+persons most opposed in temperament now eager to abase themselves before
+the idol of the fatherland, the total disappearance of conscientious
+conviction at the first breath of the actualities of war&mdash;in <i>Jean
+Christophe</i> these things were written no less plainly than<a name="page_272" id="page_272"></a> when of old
+the fingers of the hand wrote upon the palace wall in Babylon.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, even this prophetic soul had underestimated the cruel
+reality. During the opening days of the war, Rolland was horrified to
+note how all previous wars were being eclipsed in the atrocity of the
+struggle, in its material and spiritual brutality, in its extent, and in
+the intensity of its passion. All possible anticipations had been
+outdone. Although for thousands of years, by twos or variously allied,
+the peoples of Europe had almost unceasingly been warring one with
+another, never before had their mutual hatreds, as manifested in word
+and deed, risen to such a pitch as in this twentieth century after the
+birth of Christ. Never before in the history of mankind did hatred
+extend so widely through the populations; never did it rage so fiercely
+among the intellectuals; never before was oil pumped into the flames as
+it was now pumped from innumerable fountains and tubes of the spirit,
+from the canals of the newspapers, from the retorts of the professors.
+All evil instincts were fostered among the masses. The whole world of
+feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized. The loathsome
+organization for the dealing of death by material weapons was yet more
+loathsomely reflected in the organization of national telegraphic
+bureaus to scatter lies like sparks over land and sea. For the first
+time, science, poetry, art, and philosophy became no less subservient to
+war than mechanical ingenuity was subservient. In the pulpits and
+professorial chairs, in the research laboratories, in the editorial
+offices and in the<a name="page_273" id="page_273"></a> authors' studies, all energies were concentrated as
+by an invisible system upon the generation and diffusion of hatred. The
+seer's apocalyptic warnings were surpassed.</p>
+
+<p>A deluge of hatred and blood such as even the blood-drenched soil of
+Europe had never known, flowed from land to land. Romain Rolland knew
+that a lost world, a corrupt generation, cannot be saved from its
+illusions. A world conflagration cannot be extinguished by a word,
+cannot be quelled by the efforts of naked human hands. The only possible
+endeavor was to prevent others adding fuel to the flames, and with the
+lash of scorn and contempt to deter as far as might be those who were
+engaged in such criminal undertakings. It might be possible, too, to
+build an ark wherein what was intellectually precious in this suicidal
+generation might be saved from the deluge, might be made available for
+those of a future day when the waters of hatred should have subsided. A
+sign might be uplifted, round which the faithful could rally, building a
+temple of unity amid, and yet high above, the battlefields.</p>
+
+<p>Among the detestable organizations of the general staffs, mechanical
+ingenuity, lying, and hatred, Rolland dreamed of establishing another
+organization, a fellowship of the free spirits of Europe. The leading
+imaginative writers, the leading men of science, were to constitute the
+ark he desired; they were to be the sustainers of justice in these days
+of injustice and falsehood. While the masses, deceived by words, were
+raging against one another in blind fury, the artists, the writers, the
+men of<a name="page_274" id="page_274"></a> science, of Germany, France, and England, who for centuries had
+been co�perating for discoveries, advances, ideals, could combine to
+form a tribunal of the spirit which, with scientific earnestness, should
+devote itself to extirpating the falsehoods that were keeping their
+respective peoples apart. Transcending nationality, they could hold
+intercourse on a higher plane. For it was Rolland's most cherished hope
+that the great artists and great investigators would refuse to identify
+themselves with the crime of the war, would refrain from abandoning
+their freedom of conscience and from entrenching themselves behind a
+facile "my country, right or wrong." With few exceptions, intellectuals
+had for centuries recognized the repulsiveness of war. More than a
+thousand years earlier, when China was threatened by ambitious Mongols,
+Li Tai Peh had exclaimed: "Accursed be war! Accursed the work of
+weapons! The sage has nothing to do with these follies." The contention
+that the sage has naught to do with such follies seems to rise like an
+unenunciated refrain from all the utterances of western men of learning
+since Europe began to have a common life. In Latin letters (for Latin,
+the medium of intercourse, was likewise the symbol of supranational
+fellowship), the great humanists whose respective countries were at war
+exchanged their regrets, and offered mutual philosophical solace against
+the murderous illusions of their less instructed fellows. Herder was
+speaking for the learned Germans of the eighteenth century when he
+wrote: "For fatherland to engage in a bloody struggle with fatherland is
+the most preposterous, barbarism."<a name="page_275" id="page_275"></a> Goethe, Byron, Voltaire, and
+Rousseau, were at one in their contempt for the purposeless butcheries
+of war. To-day, in Rolland's view, the leading intellectuals, the great
+scientific investigators whose minds would perforce remain unclouded,
+the most humane among the imaginative writers, could join in a
+fellowship whose members would renounce the errors of their respective
+nations. He did not, indeed, venture to hope that there would be a very
+large number of persons whose souls would remain free from the passions
+of the time. But spiritual force is not based upon numbers; its laws are
+not those of armies. In this field, Goethe's saying is applicable:
+"Everything great, and everything most worth having comes from a
+minority. It cannot be supposed that reason will ever become popular.
+Passion and sentiment may be popularized, the reason will always remain
+a privilege of the few." This minority, however, may acquire authority
+through spiritual force. Above all, it may constitute a bulwark against
+falsehood. If men of light and leading, free men of all nationalities,
+were to meet somewhere, in Switzerland perhaps, to make common cause
+against every injustice, by whomever committed, a sanctuary would at
+length be established, an asylum for truth which was now everywhere
+bound and gagged. Europe would have a span of soil for home; mankind
+would have a spark of hope. Holding mutual converse, these best of men
+could enlighten one another; and the reciprocal illumination on the part
+of such unprejudiced persons could not fail to diffuse its light over
+the world.<a name="page_276" id="page_276"></a></p>
+
+<p>Such was the mood in which Rolland took up his pen for the first time
+after the outbreak of war. He wrote an open letter to Hauptmann, to the
+author whom among Germans he chiefly honored for goodness and
+humaneness. Within the same hour he wrote to Verhaeren, Germany's
+bitterest foe. Rolland thus stretched forth both his hands, rightward
+and leftward, in the hope that he could bring his two correspondents
+together, so that at least within the domain of pure spirit there might
+be a first essay towards spiritual reconciliation, what time upon the
+battlefields the machine-guns with their infernal clatter were mowing
+down the sons of France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Austria-Hungary, and
+Russia.<a name="page_277" id="page_277"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VI-f" id="CHAPTER_VI-f"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+THE CONTROVERSY WITH GERHART HAUPTMANN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OMAIN ROLLAND had never been personally acquainted with Gerhart
+Hauptmann. He was familiar with the German's writings, and admired their
+passionate participation in all that is human, loved them for the
+goodness with which the individual figures are intentionally
+characterized. On a visit to Berlin, he had called at Hauptmann's house,
+but the playwright was away. The two had never before exchanged letters.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Rolland decided to address Hauptmann as a representative
+German author, as writer of <i>Die Weber</i> and as creator of many other
+figures typifying suffering. He wrote on August 29, 1914, the day on
+which a telegram issued by Wolff's agency, ludicrously exaggerating in
+pursuit of the policy of "frightfulness," had announced that "the old
+town of Louvain, rich in works of art, exists no more to-day." An
+outburst of indignation was assuredly justified, but Rolland endeavored
+to exhibit the utmost self-control. He began as follows: "I am not,
+Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany as a nation
+of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness<a name="page_278" id="page_278"></a> of your
+mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of Old Germany; and
+even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words of <i>our</i>
+Goethe&mdash;for he belongs to the whole of humanity&mdash;repudiating all
+national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
+heights 'where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
+peoples as our own.'" He goes on with a pathetic self-consciousness for
+the first time noticeable in the work of this most modest of writers.
+Recognizing his mission, he lifts his voice above the controversies of
+the moment. "I have labored all my life to bring together the minds of
+our two nations; and the atrocities of this impious war in which, to the
+ruin of European civilization, they are involved, will never lead me to
+soil my spirit with hatred."</p>
+
+<p>Now Rolland sounds a more impassioned note. He does not hold Germany
+responsible for the war. "War springs from the weakness and stupidity of
+nations." He ignores political questions, but protests vehemently
+against the destruction of works of art, asking Hauptmann and his
+countrymen, "Are you the grandchildren of Goethe or of Attila?"
+Proceeding more quietly, he implores Hauptmann to refrain from any
+attempt to justify such things. "In the name of our Europe, of which you
+have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
+that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
+the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
+Hauptmann, I adjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
+Germany, among whom I reckon so many<a name="page_279" id="page_279"></a> friends, to protest with the
+utmost energy against this crime which will otherwise recoil upon
+yourselves." Rolland's hope was that the Germans would, like himself,
+refuse to condone the excesses of the war-makers, would refuse to accept
+the war as a fatality. He hoped for a public protest from across the
+Rhine. Rolland was not aware that at this time no one in Germany had or
+could have any inkling of the true political situation. He was not aware
+that such a public protest as he desired was quite impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Gerhart Hauptmann's answer struck a fiercer note than Rolland's letter.
+Instead of complying with the Frenchman's plea, instead of repudiating
+the German militarist policy of frightfulness, he attempted, with
+sinister enthusiasm, to justify that policy. Accepting the maxim, "war
+is war," he, somewhat prematurely, defended the right of the stronger.
+"The weak naturally have recourse to vituperation." He declared the
+report of the destruction of Louvain to be false. It was, he said, a
+matter of life or death for Germany that the German troops should effect
+"their peaceful passage" through Belgium. He referred to the
+pronouncements of the general staff, and quoted, as the highest
+authority for truth, the words of "the Emperor himself."</p>
+
+<p>Therewith the controversy passed from the spiritual to the political
+plane. Rolland, embittered in his turn, rejected the views of Hauptmann,
+who was lending his moral authority to the support of Schlieffen's
+aggressive theories. Hauptmann, declared Rolland, was "accepting
+responsibility for the crimes of those who wield<a name="page_280" id="page_280"></a> authority." Instead of
+promoting harmony, the correspondence was fostering discord. In reality
+the two had no common ground for discussion. The attempt was ill-timed,
+passion still ran too high; the mists of prevalent falsehood still
+obscured vision on both sides. The waters of the flood continued to
+rise, the infinite deluge of hatred and error. Brethren were as yet
+unable to recognize one another in the darkness.<a name="page_281" id="page_281"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VII-f" id="CHAPTER_VII-f"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERHAEREN</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">H</span>AVING written to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German, Rolland almost
+simultaneously addressed himself to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian, who
+had been an enthusiast for European unity, but had now become one of
+Germany's bitterest foes. Perhaps no one is better entitled than the
+present writer to bear witness that Verhaeren's hostility to Germany was
+a new thing. As long as peace lasted, the Belgian poet had known no
+other ideal than that of international brotherhood, had detested nothing
+more heartily than he detested international discord. Shortly before the
+war, in his preface to Henri Guilbeaux's anthology of German poetry,
+Verhaeren had spoken of "the ardor of the nations," which, he said, "in
+defiance of that other passion which tends to make them quarrel,
+inclines them towards mutual love." The German invasion of Belgium
+taught him to hate. His verses, which had hitherto been odes to creative
+force, were henceforward dithyrambs in favor of hostility.</p>
+
+<p>Rolland had sent Verhaeren a copy of his protest against the destruction
+of Louvain and the bombardment of Rheims cathedral. Concurring in this
+protest, Verhaeren<a name="page_282" id="page_282"></a> wrote: "Sadness and hatred overpower me. The latter
+feeling is new in my experience. I cannot rid myself of it, although I
+am one of those who have always regarded hatred as a base sentiment.
+Such love as I can give in this hour is reserved for my country, or
+rather for the heap of ashes to which Belgium has been reduced."
+Rolland's answer ran as follows: "Rid yourself of hatred. Neither you
+nor we should give way to it. Let us guard against hatred even more than
+we guard against our enemies! You will see at a later date that the
+tragedy is more terrible than people can realize while it is actually
+being played.... So stupendous is this European drama that we have no
+right to make human beings responsible for it. It is a convulsion of
+nature.... Let us build an ark as did those who were threatened with the
+deluge. Thus we can save what is left of humanity." Without acrimony,
+Verhaeren rejected this adjuration. He deliberately chose to remain
+inspired with hatred, little as he liked the feeling. In <i>La Belgique
+sanglante</i>, he declared that hatred brought a certain solace, although,
+dedicating his work "to the man I once was," he manifested his yearning
+for the revival of his former sentiment that the world was a
+comprehensive whole. Vainly did Rolland return to the charge in a
+touching letter: "Greatly, indeed, must you have suffered, to be able to
+hate. But I am confident that in your case such a feeling cannot long
+endure, for souls like yours would perish in this atmosphere. Justice
+must be done, but it is not a demand of justice that a whole people
+should be held responsible<a name="page_283" id="page_283"></a> for the crimes of a few hundred individuals.
+Were there but one just man in Israel, you would have no right to pass
+judgment upon all Israel. Surely it is impossible for you to doubt that
+many in Germany and Austria, oppressed and gagged, continue to suffer
+and struggle.... Thousands of innocent persons are being everywhere
+sacrificed to the crimes of politics! Napoleon was not far wrong when he
+said: 'Politics are for us what fate was for the ancients.' Never was
+the destiny of classical days more cruel. Let us refuse, Verhaeren, to
+make common cause with this destiny. Let us take our stand beside the
+oppressed, beside all the oppressed, wherever they may dwell. I
+recognize only two nations on earth, that of those who suffer, and that
+of those who cause the suffering."</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren, however, was unmoved. He answered as follows: "If I hate, it
+is because what I saw, felt, and heard, is hateful.... I admit that I
+cannot be just, now that I am filled with sadness and burn with anger. I
+am not simply standing near the fire, but am actually amid the flames,
+so that I suffer and weep. I can no otherwise." He remained loyal to
+hatred, and indeed loyal to the hatred-for-hate of Romain Rolland's
+Olivier. Notwithstanding this grave divergence of view between Verhaeren
+and Rolland, the two men continued on terms of friendship and mutual
+respect. Even in the preface he contributed to Loyson's inflammatory
+book, <i>�tes-vous neutre devant le crime</i>, Verhaeren distinguished
+between the person and the cause. He was unable, he said, "to espouse
+Rolland's error," but he would not repudiate<a name="page_284" id="page_284"></a> his friendship for
+Rolland. Indeed, he desired to emphasize its existence, seeing that in
+France it was already "dangerous to love Romain Rolland."</p>
+
+<p>In this correspondence, as in that with Hauptmann, two strong passions
+seemed to clash; but the opponents in reality remained out of touch.
+Here, likewise, the appeal was fruitless. Practically the whole world
+was given over to hatred, including even the noblest creative artists,
+and the finest among the sons of men.<a name="page_285" id="page_285"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_VIII-f" id="CHAPTER_VIII-f"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>S on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of
+inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and
+had issued it once more in vain. The writers, the men of science, the
+philosophers, the artists, all took the side of the country to which
+they happened to belong; the Germans spoke for Germany, the Frenchmen
+for France, the Englishmen for England. No one would espouse the
+universal cause; no one would rise superior to the device, my country
+right or wrong. In every land, among those of every nation, there were
+to be found plenty of enthusiastic advocates, persons willing blindly to
+justify all their country's doings, including its errors and its crimes,
+to excuse these errors and crimes upon the plea of necessity. There was
+only one land, the land common to them all, Europe, motherland of all
+the fatherlands, which found no advocate, no defender. There was only
+one idea, the most self-evident to a Christian world, which found no
+spokesman&mdash;the idea of ideas, humanity.</p>
+
+<p>During these days, Rolland may well have recalled sacred memories of the
+time when Leo Tolstoi's letter came to give him a mission in life.
+Tolstoi had stood<a name="page_286" id="page_286"></a> alone in the utterance of his celebrated outcry, "I
+can no longer keep silence." At that time his country was at war. He
+arose to defend the invisible rights of human beings, uttering a protest
+against the command that men should murder their brothers. Now his voice
+was no longer heard; his place was empty; the conscience of mankind was
+dumb. To Rolland, the consequent silence, the terrible silence of the
+free spirit amid the hurly-burly of the slaves, seemed more hateful than
+the roar of the cannon. Those to whom he had appealed for help had
+refused to answer the call. The ultimate truth, the truth of conscience,
+had no organized fellowship to sustain it. No one would aid him in the
+struggle for the freedom of the European soul, the struggle of truth
+against falsehood, the struggle of human lovingkindness against frenzied
+hate. Rolland once again was alone with his faith, more alone than
+during the bitterest years of solitude.</p>
+
+<p>But Rolland has never been one to resign himself to loneliness. In youth
+he had already felt that those who are passive while wrong is being done
+are as criminal as the very wrongdoer. "Ceux qui subissent le mal sont
+aussi criminels que ceux qui le font." Upon the poet, above all, it
+seemed to him incumbent to find words for thought, and to vivify the
+words by action. It is not enough to write ornamental comments upon the
+history of one's time. The poet must be part of the very being of his
+time, must fight to make his ideas realize themselves in action. "The
+elite of the intellect constitutes<a name="page_287" id="page_287"></a> an aristocracy which would fain
+replace the aristocracy of birth. But the aristocracy of intellect is
+apt to forget that the aristocracy of birth won its privileges with
+blood. For hundreds of years men have listened to the words of wisdom,
+but seldom have they seen a sage offering himself up to the sacrifice.
+If we would inspire others with faith we must show that our own faith is
+real. Mere words do not suffice." Fame is a sword as well as a laurel
+crown. Faith imposes obligations. One who had made Jean Christophe utter
+the gospel of a free conscience, could not, when the world had fashioned
+his cross, play the part of Peter denying the Lord. He must take up his
+apostolate, be ready should need arise to face martyrdom. Thus, while
+almost all the artists of the day, in their "passion d'abdiquer," in
+their mad desire to shout with the crowd, were not merely extolling
+force and victory as the masters of the hour, but were actually
+maintaining that force was the very meaning of civilization, that
+victory was the vital energy of the world, Rolland stood forth against
+them all, proclaiming the might of the incorruptible conscience. "Force
+is always hateful to me," wrote Rolland to Jouve in this decisive hour.
+"If the world cannot get on without force, it still behooves me to
+refrain from making terms with force. I must uphold an opposing
+principle, one which will invalidate the principle of force. Each must
+play his own part; each must obey his own inward monitor." He did not
+fail to recognize the titanic nature of the struggle into which he was
+entering, but the words<a name="page_288" id="page_288"></a> he had written in youth still resounded in his
+memory. "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on
+earth."</p>
+
+<p>Just as in those earlier days, when he had wished by means of his dramas
+to restore faith to his nation, when he had set up the images of the
+heroes as examples to a petty time, when throughout a decade of quiet
+effort he had summoned the people towards love and freedom, so now,
+Rolland set to work alone. He had no party, no newspaper, no influence.
+He had nothing but his passionate enthusiasm, and that indomitable
+courage to which the forlorn hope makes an irresistible appeal. Alone he
+began his onslaught upon the illusions of the multitude, when the
+European conscience, hunted with scorn and hatred from all countries and
+all hearts, had taken sanctuary in his heart.<a name="page_289" id="page_289"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_IX-f" id="CHAPTER_IX-f"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+THE MANIFESTOES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since
+Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression
+in the form of lying phrases, he had perforce to fight them upon their
+own ground. But the vigor of his ideas, the breath of freedom they
+conveyed, and the authority of the author's name, made of these
+articles, manifestoes which spoke to the whole of Europe and aroused a
+spiritual conflagration. Like electric sparks given off from invisible
+wires, their energy was liberated in all directions, leading here to
+terrible explosions of hatred, throwing there a brilliant light into the
+depths of conscience, in every case producing cordial excitement in its
+contrasted forms of indignation and enthusiasm. Never before, perhaps,
+did newspaper articles exercise so stupendous an influence, at once
+inflammatory and purifying, as was exercised by these two dozen appeals
+and manifestoes issued in a time of enslavement and confusion by a
+lonely man whose spirit was free and whose intellect remained unclouded.</p>
+
+<p>From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by
+comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully<a name="page_290" id="page_290"></a> considered and
+fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but
+simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that
+to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the
+"<i>Journal de Gen�ve</i>" should be reproduced in the French press), the
+ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time
+to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and
+ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and
+appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic
+merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their
+essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of
+incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that
+they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the
+emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many
+millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual.
+For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the
+invisible Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made
+available in the volumes <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i> and <i>Les pr�curseurs</i>,
+be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at
+the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a
+force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the
+significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the
+sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic
+character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to<a name="page_291" id="page_291"></a> mind the frenzy of
+the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was
+devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has
+already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We
+have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance
+the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation
+responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal,
+that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that
+<i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i>, whose trend already seems to us a matter of
+course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and
+that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was
+forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured
+wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke
+the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal
+amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that
+Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall
+Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more
+than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is
+scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as
+commonplace." To-day, for the moment at any rate, we may have entered
+into a period, when many of Rolland's utterances are accounted
+commonplace because, since he wrote, they have become the small change
+of thousands of other writers. Yet there was a day when each of these
+words seemed to cut like a whip-lash. The excitement they aroused gives
+us the historic measure<a name="page_292" id="page_292"></a> of the need that they should be spoken. The
+wrath of Rolland's opponents, of which the only remaining record is a
+pile of pamphlets, bears witness to the heroism of him who was the first
+to take his stand "above the battle." Let us not forget that it was then
+the crime of crimes, "de dire ce qui est juste et humain." Men were
+still so drunken with the fumes of the first bloodshed that they would
+have been fain, as Rolland himself has phrased it, "to crucify Christ
+once again should he have risen; to crucify him for saying, Love one
+another."<a name="page_293" id="page_293"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_X-f" id="CHAPTER_X-f"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br />
+ABOVE THE BATTLE</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">O</span>N September 22, 1914, the essay <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i> was published
+in "<i>Le Journal de Gen�ve</i>." After the preliminary skirmish with Gerhart
+Hauptmann, came this declaration of war against hatred, this foundation
+stone of the invisible European church. The title, "Above the Battle,"
+has become at once a watchword and a term of abuse; but amid the
+discordant quarrels of the factions, the essay was the first utterance
+to sound a clear note of imperturbable justice, bringing solace to
+thousands.</p>
+
+<p>It is animated by a strange and tragical emotion, resonant of the hour
+when countless myriads were bleeding and dying, and among them many of
+Rolland's intimate friends. It is the outpouring of a riven heart, the
+heart of one who would fain move others, breathing as it does the heroic
+determination to try conclusions with a world that has fallen a prey to
+madness. It opens with an ode to the youthful fighters. "O young men
+that shed your blood for the thirsty earth with so generous a joy! O
+heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this
+splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by
+a common ideal, ... all of you, marching to your deaths, are dear to
+me....<a name="page_294" id="page_294"></a> Those years of skepticism and gay frivolity in which we in
+France grew up are avenged in you.... Conquerors or conquered, quick or
+dead, rejoice!" But after this ode to the faithful, to those who believe
+themselves to be discharging their highest duty, Rolland turns to
+consider the intellectual leaders of the nations, and apostrophises them
+thus: "For what are you squandering them, these living riches, these
+treasures of heroism entrusted to your hands? What ideal have you held
+up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves?
+Mutual slaughter! A European war!" He accuses the leaders of taking
+cowardly refuge behind an idol they term fate. Those who understood
+their responsibilities so ill that they failed to prevent the war,
+inflame and poison it now that it has begun. A terrible picture. In all
+countries, everything becomes involved in the torrent; among all
+peoples, there is the same ecstasy for that which is destroying them.
+"For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men
+blindly one against another.... All the forces of the spirit, of reason,
+of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the
+disposal of the armies in every state. There is not one among the
+leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim that the cause
+of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human
+progress." He mockingly alludes to the preposterous duels between
+philosophers and men of science; and to the failure of what professed to
+be the two great internationalist forces of the age, Christianity and
+socialism, to stand aloof from the fray. "It would seem,<a name="page_295" id="page_295"></a> then, that
+love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other
+countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defense
+of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian
+dilettantism, which revolts me to the very depths of my being. No! Love
+of my country does not demand that I should hate and slay those noble
+and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor
+them and seek to unite with them for our common good." After some
+further discussion of the attitude of Christians and of socialists
+towards the war, he continues: "There was no reason for war between the
+western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do
+not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a
+minority, a minority vitally interested in the diffusion of hatred; but
+our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty, and for that alone." It
+was a scandal, therefore, that at the outbreak of the war the
+intellectual leaders should have allowed the purity of their thought to
+be besmirched. It was monstrous that intelligence should permit itself
+to be enslaved by the passions of a puerile and absurd policy of race.
+Never should we forget, in the war now being waged, the essential unity
+of all our fatherlands. "Humanity is a symphony of great collective
+souls. He who cannot understand it and love it until he has destroyed a
+part of its elements, is a barbarian.... For the finer spirits of
+Europe, there are two dwelling places: our earthly fatherland, and the
+City of God. Of the one we are the guests, of the other the builders....
+It is our duty to build the walls of this<a name="page_296" id="page_296"></a> city ever higher and
+stronger, that it may dominate the injustice and the hatred of the
+nations. Then shall we have a refuge wherein the brotherly and free
+spirits from out all the world may assemble." This faith in a lofty
+ideal soars like a sea-mew over the ocean of blood. Rolland is well
+aware how little hope there is that his words can make themselves
+audible above the clamor of thirty million warriors. "I know that such
+thoughts have little chance of being heard to-day. I do not speak to
+convince. I speak only to solace my conscience. And I know that at the
+same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all
+lands, cannot and dare not speak for themselves." As ever, he is on the
+side of the weak, on the side of the minority. His voice grows stronger,
+for he knows that he is speaking for the silent multitude.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 382px;">
+<a href="images/illp_294.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_294_thumb.jpg" width="382" height="550" alt="Romain Rolland at the time of writing Above the
+Battle" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Romain Rolland at the time of writing Above the
+Battle</span>
+</div><p><a name="page_297" id="page_297"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XI-f" id="CHAPTER_XI-f"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br />
+THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HE essay <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i> was the first stroke of the woodman's
+axe in the overgrown forest of hatred; thereupon, a roaring echo
+thundered from all sides, reverberating reluctantly in the newspapers.
+Undismayed, Rolland resolutely continued his work. He wished to cut a
+clearing into which a few sunbeams of reason might shine through the
+gloomy and suffocating atmosphere. His next essays aimed at illuminating
+an open space of such a character. Especially notable were <i>Inter Arma
+Caritas</i> (October 30, 1914); <i>Les idoles</i> (December 4, 1914); <i>Notre
+prochain l'ennemi</i> (March 15, 1915); <i>Le meutre des �lites</i> (June 14,
+1915). These were attempts to give a voice to the silent. "Let us help
+the victims! It is true that we cannot do very much. In the everlasting
+struggle between good and evil, the balance is unequal. We require a
+century for the upbuilding of that which a day destroys. Nevertheless,
+the frenzy lasts no more than a day, and the patient labor of
+reconstruction is our daily bread. This work goes on even during an hour
+when the world is perishing around us."</p>
+
+<p>The poet had at length come to understand his task.<a name="page_298" id="page_298"></a> It is useless to
+attack the war directly. Reason can effect nothing against the elemental
+forces. But he regards it as his predestined duty to combat throughout
+the war everything that the passions of men lead them to undertake for
+the deliberate increase of horror, to combat the spiritual poison of the
+war. The most atrocious feature of the present struggle, one which
+distinguishes it from all previous wars, is this deliberate poisoning.
+That which in earlier days was accepted with simple resignation as a
+disastrous visitation like the plague, was now presented in a heroic
+light, as a sign of "the grandeur of the age." An ethic of force, an
+ethic of destruction, was being preached. The mass struggle of the
+nations was being purposely inflamed to become the mass hatred of
+individuals. Rolland, therefore, was not, as many have supposed,
+attacking the war; he was attacking the ideology of the war, the
+artificial idolization of brutality. As far as the individual was
+concerned, he attacked the readiness to accept a collective morality
+constructed solely for the duration of the war; he attacked the
+surrender of conscience in face of the prevailing universalization of
+falsehood; he attacked the suspension of inner freedom which was
+advocated until the war should be over.</p>
+
+<p>His words, therefore, are not directed against the masses, not against
+the peoples. These know not what they do; they are deceived; they are
+dumb driven cattle. The diffusion of lying has made it easy for them to
+hate. "Il est si commode de ha�r sans comprendre." The fault lies with
+the inciters, with the manufacturers of lies,<a name="page_299" id="page_299"></a> with the intellectuals.
+They are guilty, seven times guilty, because, thanks to their education
+and experience, they cannot fail to know the truth which nevertheless
+they repudiate; because from weakness, and in many cases from
+calculation, they have surrendered to the current of uninstructed
+opinion, instead of using their authority to deflect this current into
+better channels. Of set purpose, instead of defending the ideals they
+formerly espoused, the ideals of humanity and international unity, they
+have revived the ideas of the Spartans and of the Homeric heroes, which
+have as little place in our time as have spears and plate-armor in these
+days of machine-gun warfare. Heretofore, to the great spirits of all
+time, hatred has seemed a base and contemptible accompaniment of war.
+The thoughtful among the non-combatants put it away from them with
+loathing; the warriors rejected the sentiment upon grounds of chivalry.
+Now, hatred is not merely supported with all the arguments of logic,
+science, and poesy; but is actually, in defiance of gospel teaching,
+raised to a place among the moral duties, so that every one who resists
+the feeling of collective hatred is branded as a traitor. Against these
+enemies of the free spirit, Rolland takes up his parable: "Not only have
+they done nothing to lessen reciprocal misunderstanding; not only have
+they done nothing to limit the diffusion of hate; on the contrary, with
+few exceptions, they have done everything in their power to make hatred
+more widespread and more venomous. In large part, this war is their war.
+By their murderous ideologies they have led thousands astray. With
+criminal self-confidence, unteachable in their arrogance, they have<a name="page_300" id="page_300"></a>
+driven millions to death, sacrificing their fellows to the phantoms
+which they, the intellectuals, have created." The persons to whom blame
+attaches are those who know, or who might have known; but who, from
+sloth, cowardice, or weakness, from desire for fame or for some other
+personal advantage, have given themselves over to lying.</p>
+
+<p>The hatred breathed by the intellectuals was a falsehood. Had it been a
+truth, had it been a genuine passion, those who were inspired with this
+feeling would have ceased talking and would themselves have taken up
+arms. Most people are moved either by hatred or by love, not by abstract
+ideas. For this reason, the attempt to sow dissension among millions of
+unknown individuals, the attempt to "perpetuate" hatred, was a crime
+against the spirit rather than against the flesh. It was a deliberate
+falsification to include leaders and led, drivers and driven, in a
+single category; to generalize Germany as an integral object for hatred.
+We must join one fellowship or the other, that of the truthtellers or
+that of the liars, that of the men of conscience or that of the men of
+phrase. Just as in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, Rolland, in order to show forth
+the universally human fellowship, had distinguished between the true
+France and the false, between the old Germany and the new; so now in
+wartime did he draw attention to the ominous resemblance between the war
+fanatics in both camps, and to the heroic isolation of those who were
+above the battle in all the belligerent lands. Thus did he endeavor to
+fulfill Tolstoi's dictum, that it is the function of the imaginative
+writer to strengthen the ties that bind men together. In<a name="page_301" id="page_301"></a> Rolland's
+comedy <i>Liluli</i>, the "cerveaux encha�n�s," dressed in various national
+uniforms, dance the same Indian war-dance under the lash of Patriotism,
+the negro slave-driver. There is a terrible resemblance between the
+German professors and those of the Sorbonne. All of them turn the same
+logical somersaults; all join in the same chorus of hate.</p>
+
+<p>But the fellowship to which Rolland wishes to draw our attention, is the
+fellowship of solace. It is true that the humanizing forces are not so
+well organized as the forces of destruction. Free opinion is gagged,
+whereas falsehood bellows through the megaphones of the press. Truth has
+to be sought out with painful labor, for the state makes it its business
+to hide truth. Nevertheless, those who search perseveringly can discover
+truth among all nations and among all races. In these essays, Rolland
+gives many examples, drawn equally from French and from German sources,
+showing that even in the trenches, nay, that especially in the trenches,
+thousands upon thousands are animated with brotherly feelings. He
+publishes letters from German soldiers, side by side with letters from
+French soldiers, all couched in the same phraseology of human
+friendliness. He tells of the women's organizations for helping the
+enemy, and shows that amid the cruelty of arms the same lovingkindness
+is displayed on both sides. He publishes poems from either camp, poems
+which exhale a common sentiment. Just as in his <i>Vie des hommes
+illustres</i> he had wished to show the sufferers of the world that they
+were not alone, but that the greatest minds of all epochs were with
+them,<a name="page_302" id="page_302"></a> so now does he attempt to convince those who amid the general
+madness are apt to regard themselves as outcasts because they do not
+share the fire and fury of the newspapers and the professors, that they
+have everywhere silent brothers of the spirit. Once more, as of old, he
+wishes to unite the invisible community of the free. "I feel the same
+joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing
+the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly
+March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They
+show that the warmth of life persists below the surface, and that soon
+nothing will prevent its rising again." Undismayed he continues on his
+"humble p�l�rinage," endeavoring "to discover, beneath the ruins, the
+hearts of those who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human
+brotherhood. What a melancholy joy it is to come to their aid." For the
+sake of this consolation, for the sake of this hope, he gives a new
+significance even to war, which he has hated and dreaded from early
+childhood. "To war we owe one painful benefit, in that it has served to
+bring together those of all nations who refuse to share the prevailing
+sentiments of national hatred. It has steeled their energies, has
+inspired them with an indefatigable will. How mistaken are those who
+imagine that the ideas of human brotherhood have been stifled.... Not
+for a moment do I doubt the coming unity of the European fellowship.
+That unity will be realized. The war is but its baptism of blood."</p>
+
+<p>Thus does the good Samaritan, the healer of souls, endeavor to bring to
+the despairing that hope which is the<a name="page_303" id="page_303"></a> bread of life. Perchance Rolland
+speaks with a confidence that runs somewhat in advance of his innermost
+convictions. But he only who realized the intense yearnings of the
+innumerable persons who at that date were imprisoned in their respective
+fatherlands, barred in the cages of the censorships, he alone can
+realize the value to such poor captives of Rolland's manifestoes of
+faith, words free from hatred, bringing at length a message of
+brotherhood.<a name="page_304" id="page_304"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XII-f" id="CHAPTER_XII-f"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br />
+OPPONENTS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>ROM the first, Rolland knew perfectly well that in a time when party
+feeling runs high, no task can be more ungrateful than that of one who
+advocates impartiality. "The combatants are to-day united in one thing
+only, in their hatred for those who refuse to join in any hymn of hate.
+Whoever does not share the common delirium, is suspect. And nowadays,
+when justice cannot spare the time for thorough investigation, every
+suspect is considered tantamount to a traitor. He who undertakes in
+wartime to defend peace on earth, must realize that he is staking his
+faith, his name, his tranquillity, his repute, and even his friendships.
+But of what value would be a conviction on behalf of which a man would
+take no risks?" Rolland was likewise aware that the most dangerous of
+all positions is that between the fronts, but this certainty of danger
+was but a tonic to his conscience. "If it be really needful, as the
+proverb assures us, to prepare for war in time of peace, it is no less
+needful to prepare for peace in time of war. In my view, the latter role
+is assigned to those who stand outside the struggle, and whose mental
+life has brought them into unusually close contact with the world-all. I
+speak of the members of that little lay<a name="page_305" id="page_305"></a> church, of those who have been
+exceptionally well able to maintain their faith in the unity of human
+thought, of those for whom all men are sons of the same father. If it
+should chance that we are reviled for holding this conviction, the
+reviling is in truth an honor to us, and we may be satisfied to know
+that we shall earn the approbation of posterity."</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that Rolland is forearmed against opposition. Nevertheless,
+the fierceness of the onslaughts exceeded all expectation. The first
+rumblings of the storm came from Germany. The passage in the <i>Letter to
+Gerhart Hauptmann</i>, "are you the sons of Goethe or of Attila," and
+similar utterances, aroused angry echoes. A dozen or so professors and
+scribblers hastened to "chastise" French arrogance. In the columns of
+"<i>Die Deutsche Rundschau</i>," a narrow-minded pangerman disclosed the
+great secret that under the mask of neutrality <i>Jean Christophe</i> had
+been a most dangerous French attack upon the German spirit.</p>
+
+<p>French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the
+publication of the essay <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i> was reported. Difficult
+as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were
+forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the
+public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot.
+Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from
+leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper
+articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume
+from the pen of a carpet<a name="page_306" id="page_306"></a> hero. This book was furnished with a thousand
+proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier,
+avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no
+lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning
+of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that
+he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher
+was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately
+falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between
+the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies
+and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press
+combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured
+to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced:
+"Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in
+alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends,
+the "ami de la premi�re heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier
+work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a
+book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government
+likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect
+"materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part
+at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by
+Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the
+authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the
+fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show<a name="page_307" id="page_307"></a>
+that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan
+to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies.</p>
+
+<p>All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the
+forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from
+a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp
+the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that
+he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the
+most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From
+a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the
+frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely
+exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued
+to develop his ideas.</p>
+
+<p>In the eyes of the patriots, Rolland's first crime was that he openly
+discussed the moral problems of the war. "On ne discute pas la patrie."
+The first axiom of war ethics is that those who cannot or will not shout
+with the crowd must hold their peace. Soldiers must never be taught to
+think; they must only be incited to hate. A lie which promotes
+enthusiasm is worth more in wartime than the best of truths. In
+imitation of the principles of the Catholic church, reflection, doubt,
+is deemed a crime against the infallible dogma of the fatherland. It was
+enough that Rolland should wish to turn things over in his mind, instead
+of unquestioningly affirming the current political theses. Thereby he
+abandoned the "attitude fran�aise"; thereby he was stamped as "neutre."
+In those days "neutre" was a good rime to "tra�tre."<a name="page_308" id="page_308"></a></p>
+
+<p>Rolland's second crime was that he desired to be just to all mankind,
+that he continued to regard the enemy as human beings, that among them
+he distinguished between guilty and not guilty, that he had as much
+compassion for German sufferers as for French, that he did not hesitate
+to refer to the Germans as brothers. The dogma of patriotism prescribed
+that for the duration of the war the feelings of humanitarianism should
+be stifled. Justice should be put away on the top shelf, to keep company
+there, until victory had been secured, with the divine command, Thou
+shalt not kill. One of the pamphlets against Rolland bears as its motto,
+"Pendant une guerre tout ce qu'on donne de l'amour � l'humanit�, on le
+vole � la patrie"&mdash;though it must be observed that from the outlook of
+those who share Rolland's views, the order of the terms might well be
+inverted.</p>
+
+<p>The third crime, the offense which seemed most unpardonable of all, and
+the one most dangerous to the state, was that Rolland refused to regard
+a military victory as likely to furnish the elixir of morality, to
+promote spiritual regeneration, to bring justice upon earth. Rolland's
+sin lay in holding that a just and bloodless peace, a complete
+reconciliation, a fraternal union of the European nations, would be more
+fruitful of blessing than an enforced peace, which could only sow the
+dragon's teeth of hatred and of new wars. In France at this date, those
+who wished to fight the war to a finish, to fight until the enemy had
+been utterly crushed, coined the term "defeatist" for those who desired
+peace to be based upon a reasonable understanding. Thus was<a name="page_309" id="page_309"></a> paralleled
+the German terminology, which spoke of "Flaumachern" (slackers) and of
+"Schmachfriede" (shameful peace). Rolland, who had devoted the whole of
+his life to the elucidation of moral laws higher than those of force,
+was stigmatized as one who would poison the morale of the armies, as
+"l'initiateur du d�faitisme." To the militarists, he seemed to be the
+last representative of "dying Renanism," to be the center of a moral
+power, and for this reason they endeavored to represent his ideas as
+nonsensical, to depict him as a Frenchman who desired the defeat of
+France. Yet his words stood unchallenged: "I wish France to be loved. I
+wish France to be victorious, not through force; not solely through
+right (even that would be too harsh); but through the superiority of a
+great heart. I wish that France were strong enough to fight without
+hatred; strong enough to regard even those whom she must strike down, as
+her brothers, as erring brothers, to whom she must extend her fullest
+sympathy as soon as she has put it beyond their power to injure her."
+Rolland made no attempt to answer even the most calumnious of attacks.
+He quietly let the invectives pass, knowing that the thought which he
+felt himself commissioned to announce, was inviolable and imperishable.
+Never had he fought men, but only ideas. The hostile ideas, in this
+case, had long since been answered by the figures of his own creation.
+They had been answered by Olivier, the free Frenchman who hated hatred;
+by Faber, the Girondist, to whom conscience stood higher than the
+arguments of the patriots; by Adam Lux, who compassionately<a name="page_310" id="page_310"></a> asked his
+fanatical opponent, "N'es tu pas fatigu� de ta baine"; by Teulier, and
+by all the great characters through whom during more than two decades he
+had been giving expression to his outlook upon the struggle of the day.
+He was unperturbed at standing alone against almost the entire nation.
+He recalled Chamfort's saying, "There are times when public opinion is
+the worst of all possible opinions." The immeasurable wrath, the
+hysterical frenzy of his opponents, confirmed his conviction that he was
+right, for he felt that their clamor for force betrayed their sense of
+the weakness of their own arguments. Smilingly he contemplated their
+artificially inflamed anger, addressing them in the words of his own
+Clerambault: "You say that yours is the better way? The only good way?
+Very well, take your own path, and leave me to take mine. I make no
+attempt to compel you to follow me. I merely show you which way I am
+going. What are you so excited about? Perhaps at the bottom of your
+hearts you are afraid that my way is the right one?"<a name="page_311" id="page_311"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIII-f" id="CHAPTER_XIII-f"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br />
+FRIENDS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>S soon as he had uttered his first words, a void formed round this
+brave man. As Verhaeren finely phrased it, he positively loved to
+encounter danger, whereas most people shun danger. His oldest friends,
+those who had known his writings and his character from youth upwards,
+left him in the lurch; prudent folk quietly turned their backs on him;
+newspaper editors and publishers refused him hospitality. For the
+moment, Rolland seemed to be alone. But, as he had written in <i>Jean
+Christophe</i>, "A great soul is never alone. Abandoned by friends, such a
+one makes new friends, and surrounds himself with a circle of that
+affection of which he is himself full."</p>
+
+<p>Necessity, the touchstone of conscience, had deprived him of friends,
+but had also brought him friends. It is true that their voices were
+hardly audible amid the clangor of the opponents. The war-makers had
+control of all the channels of publicity. They roared hatred through the
+megaphones of the press. Friends could do no more than give expression
+to a few cautious words in such petty periodicals as could slip through
+the meshes of the censorship. Enemies formed a compact mass, flowing to
+the attack in a huge wave (whose waters were<a name="page_312" id="page_312"></a> ultimately to be dispersed
+in the morass of oblivion); his friends crystallized slowly and secretly
+around his ideas, but they were steadfast. His enemies were a regiment
+advancing fiercely to the attack at the word of command; his friends
+were a fellowship, working tranquilly, and united only through love.</p>
+
+<p>The friends in Paris had the hardest task. It was barely possible for
+them to communicate with him openly. Half of their letters to him and
+half of his replies were lost on the frontier. As from a beleaguered
+fortress, they hailed the liberator, the man who was freely proclaiming
+to the world the ideals which they were forbidden to utter. Their only
+possible way of defending their ideas was to defend the man. In
+Rolland's own fatherland, Am�d�e Dunois, Fernand Despr�s, Georges Pioch,
+Renaitour, Rouanet, Jacques Mesnil, Gaston Thiesson, Marcel Martinet,
+and S�v�rine, boldly championed him against calumny. A valiant woman,
+Marcelle Capy, raised the standard, naming her book <i>Une voix de femme
+dans la m�l�e</i>. Separated from him by the blood-stained sea, they looked
+towards him as towards a distant lighthouse upon the rock, and showed
+their brothers the signal of hope.</p>
+
+<p>In Geneva there formed round him a group of young writers, disciples and
+friends, winning strength from his strength. P. J. Jouve author of <i>Vous
+�tes des hommes</i> and <i>Danse des morts</i>, glowing with anger and with love
+of goodness, suffering intensely at witnessing the injustice of the
+world, Olivier redivivus, gave expression in his poems to his hatred for
+force. Ren� Arcos,<a name="page_313" id="page_313"></a> who like Jouve had realized all the horror of war
+and who hated war no less intensely, had a clearer comprehension of the
+dramatic moment, was more thoughtful than Jouve, but equally simple and
+kindhearted. Arcos extolled the European ideal; Charles Baudouin the
+ideal of eternal goodness. Franz Masereel, the Belgian artist, developed
+his humanist plaint in a series of magnificent woodcuts. Guilbeaux,
+zealot for the social revolution, ever ready to fight like a gamecock
+against authority, founded his monthly review "demain," which was a
+faithful representative of the European spirit for a time, until it
+succumbed because of its passion for the Russian revolution. Charles
+Baudouin founded the monthly review, "Le Carmel," providing a city of
+refuge for the persecuted European spirit, and a platform upon which the
+poets and imaginative writers of all lands could assemble under the
+banner of humanity. Jean Debrit in "La Feuille" combated the
+partisanship of the Latin Swiss press and attacked the war. Claude de
+Maguet founded "Les Tablettes," which, through the boldness of its
+contributors and through the drawings of Masereel, became the most
+vigorous periodical in Switzerland. A little oasis of independence came
+into existence, and hither the breezes from all quarters wafted
+greetings from the distance. Here alone was it possible to breathe a
+European air.</p>
+
+<p>The most remarkable feature of this circle was that, thanks to Rolland,
+enemy brethren were not excluded from spiritual fellowship. Whereas
+everywhere else people were infected with the hysteria of mass hatred<a name="page_314" id="page_314"></a>
+or were terrified lest they should expose themselves to suspicion, and
+therefore avoided their sometime intimates of enemy countries like the
+pestilence should they chance to meet them in the streets of some
+neutral city, at a time when relatives were afraid to exchange letters
+of enquiry regarding the life or death of those of their own blood,
+Rolland would not for a moment deny his German friends. Never, indeed,
+had he shown more love to those among them who remained faithful, at an
+epoch when to love them was dangerous. He made himself known to them in
+public, and wrote to them freely. His words concerning these friendships
+will never be forgotten: "Yes, I have German friends; just as I have
+French, English, and Italian friends; just as I have friends among the
+members of every race. They are my wealth, which I am proud of, and
+which I seek to preserve. If a man has been so fortunate as to encounter
+loyal souls, persons with whom he can share his most intimate thoughts,
+persons with whom he is connected by brotherly ties, these ties are
+sacred, and the hour of trial is the last of hours in which they should
+be rent asunder. How cowardly would be the refusal to recognize these
+friends, in deference to the impudent demand of a public opinion which
+has no rights over our feelings.... How painful, how tragical, these
+friendships are at such a moment, the letters will show when they are
+published. But it is precisely by means of such friendships that we can
+defend ourselves against hatred, more murderous than war, for it poisons
+the<a name="page_315" id="page_315"></a> wounds of war, and harms the hater equally with the object of
+hate."</p>
+
+<p>Immeasurable is the debt which friends and numberless unseen companions
+in adversity owe to Rolland for his brave and free attitude. He set an
+example to all those who, though they shared his sentiments, were
+isolated in obscurity, and who needed some such point of crystallization
+before their thoughts and feelings could be consolidated. It was above
+all for those who were not yet sure of themselves that this archetypal
+personality provided so splendid a stimulus. Rolland's steadfastness put
+younger men to shame. In his company we were stronger, freer, more
+genuine, more unprejudiced. Human loving kindness, transfigured by his
+ardor, radiated like a flame. What bound us together was not that we
+chanced to think alike, but a passionate exaltation, which often became
+a positive fanaticism for brotherhood. We foregathered in defiance of
+public opinion and in defiance of the laws of the belligerent states,
+exchanging confidences without reserve; our comradeship exposed us to
+all sorts of suspicions; these things served but to draw us closer
+together, and in many memorable hours we felt with a veritable
+intoxication the unprecedented quality of our friendship. We were but a
+couple of dozen who thus came together in Switzerland; Frenchmen,
+Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians. We few were the only ones
+among the hundreds of millions who could look one another in the face
+without hatred, exchanging our innermost thoughts.<a name="page_316" id="page_316"></a> This little troop
+was all that then constituted Europe. Our unity, a grain of dust in the
+storm which was raging through the world, was perhaps the seed of the
+coming fraternity. How strong, how happy, how grateful did we often
+feel. For without Rolland, without the genius of his friendship, without
+the connecting link constituted by his disposition, we should never have
+attained to freedom and security. Each of us loved him in a different
+way, and all of us regarded him with equal veneration. To the French, he
+was the purest spiritual expression of their homeland; to us, he was the
+wonderful counterpart of the best in our own world. In this circle that
+formed round Rolland there was the sense of fellowship which has always
+characterized a religious community in the making. The hostility between
+our respective nations, and the consciousness of danger, fired our
+friendship to the pitch of exaggeration; while the example of the
+bravest and freest man we had ever known, brought out all that was best
+in us. When we were near him, we felt ourselves to be in the heart of
+true Europe. Whoever was able to know Rolland's inmost essence,
+acquired, as in the ancient saga, new energy for the wrestle with brute
+force.<a name="page_317" id="page_317"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIV-f" id="CHAPTER_XIV-f"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br />
+THE LETTERS</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span>LL that Rolland gave in those days to his friends and collaborators of
+the European fellowship, all that he gave by his immediate proximity,
+was but a part of his nature. For beyond these personal limits, he
+diffused a consolidating and helpful influence. Whoever turned to him
+with a question, an anxiety, a distress, or a suggestion, received an
+answer. In hundreds upon hundreds of letters he spread the message of
+brotherhood, splendidly fulfilling the vow he had made a quarter of a
+century earlier, at the time when Tolstoi's letter had brought him
+spiritual healing. In Rolland's self there had come to life, not only
+Jean Christophe the believer, but likewise Leo Tolstoi, the great
+consoler.</p>
+
+<p>Unknown to the world, he shouldered a stupendous burden during the five
+years of the war. For whoever found himself in revolt against the time
+and in conflict with the prevailing miasma of falsehood, whoever needed
+counsel in a matter of conscience, whoever wanted aid, knew where he
+could turn for what he sought. Who else in Europe inspired such
+confidence? The unknown friends of Jean Christophe, the nameless
+brothers of<a name="page_318" id="page_318"></a> Olivier, hidden in out-of-the-way parts, knowing no one to
+whom they could whisper their doubts&mdash;in whom could they better confide
+than in this man who had first brought them tidings of goodness? They
+sent him requests, submitted proposals, disclosed the turmoil of their
+consciences. Soldiers wrote to him from the trenches; mothers penned
+letters to him in secret. Many of the writers did not venture to give
+their names, merely wishing to send a message of sympathy and to
+inscribe themselves citizens of that invisible "republic of free souls"
+which the author of <i>Jean Christophe</i> had founded amid the warring
+nations. Rolland accepted the infinite labor of being the centralizing
+point and administrator of all these distresses and plaints, of being
+the recipient of all these confessions, of being the consoler of a world
+divided against itself. Wherever there was a stirring of European, of
+universally human sentiment, Rolland did his best to receive and sustain
+it; he was the crossways towards which all these roads converged. At the
+same time he was continuously in communication with leading
+representatives of the European faith, with those of all lands who had
+remained loyal to the free spirit. He studied the periodicals of the day
+for messages of reconciliation. Wherever a man or a work was devoted to
+the reconsolidation of Europe, Rolland's help was ready.</p>
+
+<p>These hundreds and thousands of letters combine to form an ethical
+achievement such as has not been paralleled by any previous writer. They
+brought happiness to countless solitary souls, strength to the wavering,
+hope<a name="page_319" id="page_319"></a> to the despairing. Never was the poet's mission more nobly
+fulfilled. Considered as works of art, these letters, many of which have
+already been published, are among the finest and maturest of Rolland's
+literary creations. To bring solace is the most intimate purpose of his
+art. Here, when speaking as man to man he can give himself without
+stint, he displays a rhythmical energy, an ardor of lovingkindness,
+which makes many of the letters rank with the loveliest poems of our
+time. The sensitive modesty which often makes him reserved in
+conversation, was no longer a hindrance. The letters are frank
+confessions, wherein his free spirit converses freely with its fellows,
+disclosing the author's goodness, his passionate emotion. That which is
+so generously poured forth for the benefit of unknown correspondents, is
+the most intimate essence of his nature. Like Colas Breugnon he can say:
+"Voil� mon plus beau travail: les �mes que j'ai sculpt�es."<a name="page_320" id="page_320"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XV-f" id="CHAPTER_XV-f"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br />
+THE COUNSELOR</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">D</span>URING these years, many people, young for the most part, came to
+Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing
+that their convictions were opposed to war, they ought to refuse
+military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and
+following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they
+should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether
+they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their
+country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought
+spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed
+to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed
+principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working
+moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.</p>
+
+<p>To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your
+conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no
+ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to
+another. Each must create truth for himself, according <a name="page_321" id="page_321"></a>to his own
+model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should
+seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He
+who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he
+follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple
+imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention
+to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate
+his ideal and save his inner freedom&mdash;provided always he acts in
+accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential
+was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot
+desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who
+claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other
+maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong,
+the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept
+away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the
+crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical
+instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a
+Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of
+serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died
+for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth
+is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own.
+Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism,
+serves humanity. "He who would be useful to<a name="page_322" id="page_322"></a> others, must above all
+remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave."
+Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself
+believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is
+cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie.
+There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner
+experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are
+the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind,
+must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a
+moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in
+consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under
+modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion.
+"A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of
+self-sacrifice."</p>
+
+<p>Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such
+free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any
+man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of
+the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our
+present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever
+broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked
+within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania
+were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had
+asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier
+as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians<a name="page_323" id="page_323"></a> would
+have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments,
+a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt,
+could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom
+of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the
+recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience
+should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one
+recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for
+mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and
+strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation
+of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the
+intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a
+despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons
+who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the
+collective impulse."</p>
+
+<p>Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands
+that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own
+conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks
+clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by
+words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire
+generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the
+world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which
+he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it
+was the moral simplicity of his own example.<a name="page_324" id="page_324"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVI-f" id="CHAPTER_XVI-f"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br />
+THE SOLITARY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OLLAND'S life was now in touch with the life of the whole world. It
+radiated influence in all directions. Yet how lonely was this man during
+the five years of voluntary exile. He dwelt apart at Villeneuve by the
+lake of Geneva. His little room resembled that in which he had lived in
+Paris. Here, too, were piles of books and pamphlets; here was a plain
+deal table; here was a piano, the companion of his hours of relaxation.
+His days, and often his nights were spent at work. He seldom went for a
+walk, and rarely received a visitor, for his friends were cut off from
+him, and even his parents and his sister could only get across the
+frontier about once a year. But the worst feature of this loneliness was
+that it was loneliness in a glass house. He was continually spied upon:
+his least words were listened for by eavesdroppers; provocative agents
+sought him out, proclaiming themselves revolutionists and sympathizers.
+Every letter was read before it reached him; every word he spoke over
+the telephone was recorded; every interview was kept under observation.
+Romain Rolland in his glass prison-house was the captive of unseen
+powers.<a name="page_325" id="page_325"></a></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 381px;">
+<a href="images/illp_324.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_324_thumb.jpg" width="381" height="550" alt="Rolland&#39;s Mother" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Rolland&#39;s Mother</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It seems hardly credible to-day that during the last two years of the
+war Romain Rolland, to whose words the world is now eager to listen,
+should have had no facility for expressing his ideas in the newspapers,
+no publisher for his books, no possibility of printing anything beyond
+an occasional review article. His homeland had repudiated him; he was
+the "fuoruscito" of the middle ages, was placed under a ban. The more
+unmistakably he proclaimed his spiritual independence, the less did he
+find himself regarded as a welcome guest in Switzerland. He was
+surrounded by an atmosphere of secret suspicion. By degrees, open
+attacks had been replaced by a more dangerous form of persecution. A
+gloomy silence was established around his name and works. His earlier
+companions had more and more withdrawn from him. Many of the new
+friendships had been dissolved, for the younger men in especial were
+devoting their interest to political questions instead of to things of
+the spirit. The more stormy the outside world, the more oppressive the
+stillness of Rolland's existence. He had no wife as helpmate. What to
+him was the best of all companionship, the companionship of his own
+writings, was now unattainable, for he had no freedom of publication in
+France. His country was closed to him, his place of refuge was beset
+with a hundred eyes. Most homeless among the homeless, he lived, as his
+beloved Beethoven had said, "in the air," lived in the realm of the
+ideal, in invisible Europe. Nothing shows better the energy of his
+living goodness<a name="page_326" id="page_326"></a> than that he was no whit embittered by his experience,
+and that the ordeal has served but to strengthen his faith. For this
+utter solitude among men was a true fellowship with mankind.<a name="page_327" id="page_327"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVII-f" id="CHAPTER_XVII-f"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br />
+THE DIARY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span>HERE was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse
+daily&mdash;his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the
+war, Rolland recorded his sentiments, his secret thoughts, and the
+messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned
+conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added
+to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than
+twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally
+hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors
+would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts.
+He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole
+remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to
+contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate
+views.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this
+document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual
+history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and
+freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired
+moments are those when he is most personal.<a name="page_328" id="page_328"></a> Consequently, just as the
+letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior
+to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human
+document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the
+war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what
+Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes,
+applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of
+personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was
+delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought
+help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and
+commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and
+loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in
+travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith.
+These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that
+faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the
+inexorable creditor we name Life.<a name="page_329" id="page_329"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII-f" id="CHAPTER_XVIII-f"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br />
+THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">R</span>OLLAND opened his campaign against hatred almost immediately after the
+war began. For more than a year he continued to deliver his message in
+opposition to the frenzied screams of rancor arising from all lands. His
+efforts proved futile. The war-current rose yet higher, the stream being
+fed by new and ever new blood flowing from innocent victims. Again and
+again some additional country became involved in the carnage. At length,
+as the clamor still grew louder, Rolland paused for a moment to take
+breath. He felt that it would be madness were he to continue the attempt
+to outcry the cries of so many madmen.</p>
+
+<p>After the publication of <i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e</i>, Rolland withdrew from
+public participation in the controversies with which the essays had been
+concerned. He had spoken his word; he had sown the wind and had reaped
+the whirlwind. He was neither weary in well-doing nor was he weak in
+faith, but he realized that it was useless to speak to a world which
+would not listen. In truth he had lost the sublime illusion with which
+he had been animated at the outset, the belief that men<a name="page_330" id="page_330"></a> desire reason
+and truth. To his intelligence now grown clearer it was plain that men
+dread truth more than anything else in the world. He began, therefore,
+to settle accounts with his own mind by writing a satirical romance, and
+by other imaginative creations, while continuing his vast private
+correspondence. Thus for a time he was out of the hurly-burly. But after
+a year of silence, when the crimson flood continued to swell, and when
+falsehood was raging more furiously than ever, he felt it his duty to
+reopen the campaign. "We must repeat the truth again and again," said
+Goethe to Schermann, "for the error with which truth has to contend is
+continually being repreached, not by individuals, but by the mass."
+There was so much loneliness in the world that it had become necessary
+to form new ties. Signs of discontent and revolt in the various lands
+were more plentiful. More numerous, too, were the brave men in active
+revolt against the fate which was being forced on them. Rolland felt
+that it was incumbent upon him to give what support he could to these
+dispersed fighters, and to inspirit them for the struggle.</p>
+
+<p>In the first essay of the new series, <i>La route en lacets qui monte</i>,
+Rolland explained the position he had reached in December, 1916. He
+wrote: "If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith
+to which I gave expression in <i>Above the Battle</i> has been shaken (it
+stands firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to
+speak to him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical
+insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of
+obstinacy,<a name="page_331" id="page_331"></a> pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their
+minds because they do not wish to see the light. But we, as between
+brothers of all the nations; as between those who have known how to
+defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their faith in human
+solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid silence,
+oppression, and grief&mdash;we do well to exchange, as this year draws to a
+close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one another that
+during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning, that it
+never has been and never will be extinguished. In the abyss of suffering
+into which Europe is plunged, those who wield the pen must be careful
+never to add an additional pang to the mass of pangs already endured,
+and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the burning flood of hate.
+Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits which, athwart the
+mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavoring to break a trail for
+others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are courageously
+attempting in their respective lands to make their fellow-countrymen
+aware of their own faults.... My task is different, for it is to remind
+the hostile brethren of Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their
+best, to recall to them reasons for hoping that there will one day be a
+wiser and more loving humanity."</p>
+
+<p>The essays of the new series appeared, for the most part, in various
+minor reviews, seeing that the more influential and widely circulated
+periodicals had long since closed their columns to Rolland's pen. When
+we study them as a whole, in the collective volume entitled <i>Les<a name="page_332" id="page_332"></a>
+pr�curseurs</i>, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been
+replaced by intense compassion, this corresponding to the change which
+had taken place at the fighting front. In all the armies, during the
+third year of the war, the fanatical impetus of the opening phases had
+vanished, and the men were now animated by a tranquil but stubborn
+sentiment of duty. Rolland is perhaps even more impassioned and more
+revolutionary in his outlook, and yet the essays are characterized by
+greater gentleness than of old. What he writes is no longer at grips
+with the war, but seems to soar above the war. His gaze is fixed upon
+the distance; his mind ranges down the centuries in search of like
+experiences; looking for consolation, he endeavors to discover a meaning
+in the meaningless. He recurs to the idea of Goethe, that human progress
+is effected by a spiral ascent. At a higher level men return to a point
+only a little above the old. Evolution and reversion go hand in hand.
+Thus he attempts to show that even at this tragical hour we can discern
+intimations of a better day.</p>
+
+<p>The essays comprising <i>Les pr�curseurs</i> no longer attack adverse
+opinions and the war. They merely draw our attention to the existence in
+all countries of persons who are fighting for a very different ideal, to
+the existence of those heralds of spiritual unity whom Nietzsche speaks
+of as "the pathfinders of the European soul." It is too late to hope for
+anything from the masses. In the address <i>Aux peuples assassin�s</i>, he
+has nothing but pity for the millions, for those who, with no will of
+their own, must be the mute instruments of others'<a name="page_333" id="page_333"></a> aims, for those
+whose sacrifice has no other meaning than the beauty of self-sacrifice.
+His hope now turns exclusively towards the elite, towards the few who
+have remained free. These can bring salvation to the world by splendid
+spiritual imagery wherein all truth is mirrored. For the nonce, indeed,
+their activities seem unavailing, but their labors remain as a permanent
+record of their omnipresence. Rolland provides masterly analyses of the
+work of such contemporary writers; he adds silhouettes from earlier
+times; and he gives a portrait of Tolstoi, the great apostle of the
+doctrine of human freedom, with an account of the Russian teacher's
+views on war.</p>
+
+<p>To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the
+volume <i>Les pr�curseurs</i>, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918,
+entitled <i>Emp�docle d'Agrigente et l'�ge de la haine</i>. The great sage of
+classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his
+first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows
+that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of
+carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal
+oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history
+invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as
+inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of
+happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the
+time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages
+have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness<a name="page_334" id="page_334"></a>
+of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to
+hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible.</p>
+
+<p>Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of
+hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those
+who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the
+infinite.<a name="page_335" id="page_335"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XIX-f" id="CHAPTER_XIX-f"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br />
+LILULI</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">D</span>URING these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European,
+had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb.
+To many it may seem strange that Rolland's first imaginative work to be
+written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should
+have been a farcical comedy, <i>Liluli</i>. Yet this lightness of mood sprang
+from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when
+contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world,
+turned to irony as a means of abreaction&mdash;to employ a term introduced by
+the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric
+spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all
+Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from
+the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to
+bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to
+maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath
+remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be
+shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.</p>
+
+<p><i>Liluli</i> is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy,<a name="page_336" id="page_336"></a> or
+rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the
+world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having
+become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost
+more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the
+time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more
+pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of
+1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the
+mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"),
+wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable,
+there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe.
+France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly
+forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight
+on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built
+across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so
+pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation
+progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more
+farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy,
+the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form
+of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols
+of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to
+seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is
+fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it
+were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and
+finally<a name="page_337" id="page_337"></a> mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the
+scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in
+cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being
+a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being
+the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all
+her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare
+to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is
+a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own
+intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear
+testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it
+furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great
+Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and
+of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth
+is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split
+your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will
+never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void.
+Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be
+gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the
+roar of laughter which will set me free?"</p>
+
+<p>In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating
+laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be
+possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense
+against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new
+work maintains the rhythm of <i>Colas<a name="page_338" id="page_338"></a> Breugnon</i>, with its vibrant rhymes,
+and although in <i>Liluli</i> as in <i>Colas Breugnon</i> there is a strain of
+raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of
+chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days
+of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from
+a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart
+overfull. In <i>Colas Breugnon</i> we find the geniality, the joviality, of a
+broad laugh; in <i>Liluli</i> the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a
+fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and
+kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world
+are heaped between the old France of <i>Colas Breugnon</i> and the new France
+of <i>Liluli</i>. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder
+caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of
+the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the
+blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the
+war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my
+feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering
+throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of
+laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter
+irony.<a name="page_339" id="page_339"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XX-f" id="CHAPTER_XX-f"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><br />
+CLERAMBAULT</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">L</span><i>ILULI</i>, the tragi-comedy, was an outcry, a groan, a painful burst of
+mockery; it was an elementary gesture of reaction against suffering that
+was almost physical. But the author's serious, tranquil, and enduring
+settlement of accounts with the times is his novel, <i>Clerambault,
+l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre</i>, which was slowly
+brought to completion in the space of four years. It is not
+autobiography, but a transcription of Rolland's ideas. Like Jean
+Christophe, it is simultaneously the biography of an imaginary
+personality and a comprehensive picture of the age. Matter is here
+collected that is elsewhere dispersed in manifestoes and letters.
+Artistically, it is the subterranean link between Rolland's manifold
+activities. Amid the hindrances imposed by his public duties, and amid
+the difficulties deriving from other outward circumstances, the author
+built the work upwards out of the depths of sorrow to the heights of
+consolation. It was not completed until the war was over, when Rolland
+had returned to Paris in the summer of 1920.</p>
+
+<p>Just as little as <i>Jean Christophe</i> can <i>Clerambault</i> properly be termed
+a novel. It is something less than<a name="page_340" id="page_340"></a> a novel, and at the same time a
+great deal more. It describes the development, not of a man, but of an
+idea. As in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, so here, we have a philosophy presented,
+but not as something ready-made, complete, a finished datum. In company
+with a human being, we rise stage by stage from error and weakness
+towards clarity. In a sense it is a religious book, the history of a
+conversion, of an illumination. It is a modern legend of the saints in
+the form of the life history of a simple citizen. In a word, as the
+sub-title phrases it, we have here the story of a conscience. The
+ultimate significance of the book is freedom, the attainment of
+self-knowledge, but raised to the heroic plane inasmuch as knowledge
+becomes action. The scene is played in the intimate recesses of a man's
+nature, where he is alone with truth. In the new book, therefore, there
+is no countertype, as Olivier was the countertype to Jean Christophe;
+nor do we find in <i>Clerambault</i> what was in truth the countertype of
+<i>Jean Christophe</i>, external life. Clerambault's countertype,
+Clerambault's antagonist, is himself; is the old, the earlier, the weak
+Clerambault; is the Clerambault with whom the new, the knowing, the true
+man has to wrestle, whom the new Clerambault has to overcome. The hero's
+heroism is not displayed, as was that of Jean Christophe, in a struggle
+with the forces of the visible world. Clerambault's war is waged in the
+invisible realm of thought.</p>
+
+<p>At the outset, therefore, Rolland designed to call the book "un
+roman-m�ditation." It was to have been entitled "L'un contre tous," this
+being an adaptation of La<a name="page_341" id="page_341"></a> Bo�tie's title <i>Contr'un</i>. The proposed name
+was, however, ultimately abandoned for fear of misunderstanding. The
+spiritual character of the new work recalls a long-forgotten tradition,
+the meditations of the old French moralists, the sixteenth century
+stoics who during a time of war-madness endeavored in besieged Paris to
+maintain their intellectual serenity by engaging in Platonic dialogues.
+The war itself, however, was not to be the theme, for the free soul does
+not strive with the elements. The author's intention was to discuss the
+spiritual accompaniments of this war, for these to Rolland seemed as
+tragical as the destruction of millions of men. His concern was the
+destruction of the individual soul in the deluge produced by the
+overflowing of the mass soul. He wished to show how strenuous an effort
+must be made by any one who would escape from the tyranny of the herd
+instinct; to display the hateful enslavement of individuals by the
+revengeful, jealous, and authoritarian mentality of the crowd; to depict
+the terrific efforts which a man must make if he would avoid being
+sucked into the maelstrom of epidemic falsehood. He hoped to make it
+clear that what appears to be the simplest thing in the world is in
+reality the most difficult of tasks in these epochs of excessive
+solidarity, namely, for a man to remain what he really is, and not to
+become that which the levelling forces of the world, the fatherland, or
+some other artificial community, would fain make of him.</p>
+
+<p>Romain Rolland deliberately refrained from casting his hero in a heroic
+mold, the treatment thus differing<a name="page_342" id="page_342"></a> from what he had chosen in the case
+of Jean Christophe. Agenor Clerambault is an inconspicuous figure, a
+quiet fellow of little account, an author of no particular note, one of
+those persons whose literary work succeeds in pleasing a complaisant
+generation, though it has no significance for posterity. He has the
+nebulous idealism of mediocre minds; he hymns the praises of perpetual
+peace and international conciliation. His own tepid goodness makes him
+believe that nature is good, is man's wellwisher, desiring to lead
+mankind gently onward towards a more beautiful future. Life does not
+torment him with problems, and he therefore extols life amid the
+tranquil comforts of his bourgeois existence. Blessed with a kindly and
+somewhat simple-minded wife, and with two children, a son and a
+daughter, he may be considered a modern Theocritus wearing the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honor, singing the joyful present and the still more
+joyful future of our ancient cosmos.</p>
+
+<p>The quiet suburban household is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt with
+the news of the outbreak of war. Clerambault takes the train to Paris;
+and no sooner is he sprinkled with spray from the hot waves of
+enthusiasm, than all his ideals of international amity and perpetual
+peace vanish into thin air. He returns home a fanatic, oozing hate, and
+steaming with phrases. Under the influence of the tremendous storm he
+begins to sound his lyre: Theocritus has become Pindar, a war poet.
+Rolland gives a marvelously vivid description of something every one of
+us has witnessed, showing how Clerambault, like all persons of average
+nature, really<a name="page_343" id="page_343"></a> takes a delight in horrors, however unwilling he may be
+to admit it even to himself. He is rejuvenated, his life seems to move
+on wings; the enthusiasm of the masses stirs the almost extinguished
+flame of enthusiasm in his own breast; he is fired by the national fire;
+he is physically and mentally refreshed by the new atmosphere. Like so
+many other mediocrities, he secures in these days his greatest literary
+triumph. His war songs, precisely because they give such vigorous
+expression to the sentiments of the man in the street, become a national
+property. Fame and public favor are showered upon him, so that (at this
+time when millions of his fellows are perishing) he feels well,
+self-confident, alive as never before.</p>
+
+<p>His pride is increased, his joy of life accentuated, when his son Maxime
+leaves for the front filled with martial ardor. His first thought, a few
+months later, when the young man comes home on leave, is that Maxime
+should retail to him all the ecstasies of war. Strangely enough,
+however, the young soldier, whose eyes still burn with the sights he has
+seen, is unresponsive. Not wishing to mortify his father, he does not
+positively attempt to silence the latter's paeans, but for his part, he
+maintains silence. For days this muteness stands between them, and the
+father is unable to solve the riddle. He feels dumbly that his son is
+concealing something. But shame binds both their tongues. On the last
+day of the furlough, Maxime suddenly pulls himself together, and begins,
+<a name="page_344" id="page_344"></a>"Father, are you quite sure ...?" But the question remains unfinished,
+utterance is choked. Still silent, the young man returns to the
+realities of war.</p>
+
+<p>A few days later there is a fresh offensive. Maxime is reported missing.
+Soon his father learns that he is dead. Now Clerambault gropes for the
+meaning of those last words behind the silence, and is tormented by the
+thought of what was left unspoken. He locks himself into his room, and
+for the first time he is alone with his conscience. He begins to
+question himself in search of the truth, and throughout the long night
+he communes with his soul as he traverses the road to Damascus. Piece by
+piece he tears away the wrapping of lies with which he has enveloped
+himself, until he stands naked before his own criticism. Prejudices have
+eaten deep into his skin, so that the blood flows as he plucks them from
+him. They must all be surrendered; the prejudice of the fatherland, the
+prejudice of the herd, must go; in the end he recognizes that one thing
+only is true, one thing only sacred, life. A fever of enquiry consumes
+him; the old Adam perishes in the flame; when the day dawns he is a new
+man.</p>
+
+<p>He knows the truth now, and wishes to strengthen his own faith. He goes
+to some of his fellows and talks to them. Most of them do not understand
+him. Others refuse to understand him. Some, however, among whom Perrotin
+the academician is notable, are yet more alarming. They know the truth.
+To their penetrating vision the nature of the popular idols has long
+been plain. But they are cautious folk. They compress their lips and
+smile at one another like the augurs of<a name="page_345" id="page_345"></a> ancient Rome. Like Buddha, they
+take refuge in Nirvana, looking down calmly upon the madness of the
+world, tranquilly seated upon their pedestals of stone. Clerambault
+calls to mind that other Indian saint, who took a solemn vow that he
+would not withdraw from the world until he had delivered mankind from
+suffering. The truth still glows too fiercely within him; he feels as if
+it would stifle him as it strives to gush forth in volcanic eruption.
+Once again he plunges into the solitude of a wakeful night. Men's words
+have sounded empty. He listens to his conscience, and it speaks with the
+voice of his son. Truth knocks at the door of his soul, and he opens to
+truth. In this lonely night Clerambault begins to speak to his fellows;
+no longer to individuals, but to all mankind. For the first time the man
+of letters becomes aware of the poet's true mission, his responsibility
+for all persons and for everything. He knows that he is beginning a new
+war, he who alone must wage war for all. But the consciousness of truth
+is with him, his heroism has begun.</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive us, ye Dead," the dialogue of the country with its children, is
+published. At first no one heeds the pamphlet. But after a time it
+arouses public animosity. A storm of indignation bursts upon
+Clerambault, threatening to lay his life in ruins. Friends forsake him.
+Envy, which had long been crouching for a spring, now sends whole
+regiments to the attack. Ambitious colleagues seize the opportunity of
+proclaiming their patriotism in contrast with his deplorable sentiments.
+Worst of all for Clerambault in that his innocent<a name="page_346" id="page_346"></a> wife and daughter
+have to suffer on his account. They do not upbraid him, but he feels as
+if he had aimed a shaft against them. He who has hitherto sunned himself
+in the warmth of family life and has enjoyed the comforts of modest
+fame, is now absolutely alone.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless he continues on his course, although these stations of the
+cross become harder and harder. Rolland shows how Clerambault finds new
+friends, only to discover that they too fail to understand him. How his
+words are mutilated, his ideas misapplied. How he is overwhelmed to
+learn that his fellows, those whom he wishes to help, have no desire for
+truth, but are nourished by falsehood; that they are continually in
+search, not of freedom, but of some new form of slavery. (In these
+wonderful passages the reader is again and again reminded of
+Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.) He perseveres in his pilgrimage even
+when he has lost faith in his power to help his fellow men, for this is
+no longer his goal. He passes men by, marching onward towards the
+unseen, towards truth; his love for truth exposing him ever more
+pitilessly to the hatred of men. By degrees he becomes entangled in a
+net of calumnies; his troubles develop into a "Clerambault affair"; at
+length a prosecution is initiated. The state has recognized its enemy in
+the free man. But while the case is still in progress, the "defeatist"
+meets his fate from the pistol bullet of a fanatic. Clerambault's end
+recalls the opening of the world catastrophe with the assassination of
+Jaur�s.</p>
+
+<p>Never has the tragedy of conscience been more simply<a name="page_347" id="page_347"></a> and more
+poignantly depicted than in this account of the martyrdom of an average
+man. Rolland's ripe spiritual powers, his magical faculty for combining
+mastery with the human touch, are here at their highest. Never was his
+outlook over the world so extensive, never was the view so serene, as
+from this last summit. And yet, though we are thus led upwards to the
+consideration of the ultimate problems of the spirit, we start from the
+plain of everyday life. It is the soul of a commonplace man, the soul it
+might seem of a weakling, which moves through this long passion. Herein
+lies the marvel of the moral solace which the book conveys. Rolland was
+the first to recognize the defect of his previous writings, considered
+as means of helping the average man. In the heroic biographies, heroism
+is displayed only by those in whom the heroic soul is inborn, only by
+those whose flight is winged with genius. In <i>Jean Christophe</i>, the
+moral victory is a triumph of native energy. But in <i>Clerambault</i> we are
+shown that even the weakling, even the mediocre man, every one of us,
+can be stronger than the whole world if he have but the will. It is open
+to every man to be true, open to every man to win spiritual freedom, if
+he be at one with his conscience, and if he regard this fellowship with
+his conscience as of greater value than fellowship with men and with the
+age. For each man there is always time, for each man there is always
+opportunity, to become master of realities. A�rt, the first of Rolland's
+heroes to show himself greater than fate, speaks for us all when he
+says: "It is never too late to be free!"<a name="page_348" id="page_348"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XXI-f" id="CHAPTER_XXI-f"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><br />
+THE LAST APPEAL</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">F</span>OR five years Romain Rolland was at war with the madness of the times.
+At length the fiery chains were loosened from the racked body of Europe.
+The war was over, the armistice had been signed. Men were no longer
+murdering one another; but their evil passions, their hate, continued.
+Romain Rolland's prophetic insight celebrated a mournful triumph. His
+distrust of victory, his reiterated warnings that conquerors are
+merciless, were more than justified by the revengeful reality. "Victory
+in arms is disastrous to the ideal of an unselfish humanity. Men find it
+extraordinarily difficult to remain gentle in the hour of triumph."
+These forecasts were terribly fulfilled. Forgotten were all the fine
+words anent the victory of freedom and right. The Versailles conference
+devoted itself to the installation of a new regime of force and to the
+humiliation of a defeated enemy. What the idealism of simpletons had
+expected to be the end of all wars, proved, as the true idealists who
+look beyond men towards ideas had foreseen, the seed of fresh hatred and
+renewed acts of violence.</p>
+
+<p>Once again, at the eleventh hour, Rolland raised his<a name="page_349" id="page_349"></a> voice in an
+address to the man whom sanguine persons then regarded as the last
+representative of idealism, as the advocate of perfect justice. Woodrow
+Wilson, when he landed in Europe, was received by the exultant cries of
+millions. But the historian is aware "that universal history is but a
+succession of proofs that the conqueror invariably grows arrogant and
+thus plants the seed of new wars." Rolland felt that there was never
+greater need for a policy that should be moral, not militarist, that
+should be constructive, not destructive. The citizen of the world, the
+man who had endeavored to free the war from the stigma of hate, now
+tried to perform the same service on behalf of the peace. The European
+addressed the American in moving terms: "You alone, Monsieur le
+Pr�sident, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the
+policy of the nations, you alone enjoy world-wide moral authority. You
+inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate
+hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one
+another.... Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses,
+disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into
+excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the
+parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction.... Heir of
+George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a
+party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of
+the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full
+authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness
+and<a name="page_350" id="page_350"></a> in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The
+world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations
+and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future
+hail you by the name of Reconciler!"</p>
+
+<p>The prophet's voice was drowned by the clamors for revenge. Bismarckism
+triumphed. Literally fulfilled was the prophecy that the peace would be
+as inhuman as the war had been. Humanity could find no abiding place
+among men. When the regeneration of Europe might have been begun, the
+sinister spirit of conquest continued to prevail. "There are no victors,
+but only vanquished."<a name="page_351" id="page_351"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XXII-f" id="CHAPTER_XXII-f"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><br />
+DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">D</span>ESPITE all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued
+his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of
+fellowship. On the day when peace was signed, June 26, 1919, he
+published in "<i>L'Humanit�</i>" a manifesto composed by himself and
+subscribed by sympathizers of all nationalities. In a world falling to
+ruin, it was to be the cornerstone of the invisible temple, the refuge
+of the disillusioned. With masterly touch Rolland sums up the past, and
+displays it as a warning to the future. He issues a clarion call.</p>
+
+<p>"Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for
+five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the
+warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being
+reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union,
+and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly
+built than that which previously existed.</p>
+
+<p>"The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed
+their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the
+governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any
+reproaches.<a name="page_352" id="page_352"></a> We know the weakness of the individual mind and the
+elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
+moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in
+the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us
+for the future!</p>
+
+<p>"First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from
+the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and
+from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers,
+artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the
+plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal
+of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought
+reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
+logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding
+and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled,
+debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They
+have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance)
+they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or
+social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the
+fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and
+the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom
+of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their
+access of mania&mdash;now, Thought, which has been entangled in their
+struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.<a name="page_353" id="page_353"></a></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<a href="images/illp_352a.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_352a_thumb.jpg" width="550" height="342" alt="" title="" /></a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<a href="images/illp_352b.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_352b_thumb.jpg" width="550" height="380" alt="" title="" /></a>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<a href="images/illp_352c.jpg">
+<img src="images/illp_352c_thumb.jpg" width="550" height="434" alt="Original manuscript of The Declaration of the
+Independence of the Mind" title="" /></a>
+<span class="caption">Original manuscript of The Declaration of the
+Independence of the Mind</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy
+alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is
+we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to
+bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed
+sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to
+point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night.
+Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice;
+we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
+frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of
+race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we
+work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know
+the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which
+struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which
+continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and
+its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that
+they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their
+blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant&mdash;Mind, which is free, one and
+manifold, eternal."</p>
+
+<p>Many hundreds of persons have signed this manifesto, for leading spirits
+in every land accept the message and make it their own. The invisible
+republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established
+among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who
+wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only
+enemies are hatred and arrogance<a name="page_354" id="page_354"></a> between nations. Whoever makes his
+home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is
+the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforward he is an
+indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and
+the universal future.<a name="page_355" id="page_355"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII-f" id="CHAPTER_XXIII-f"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><br />
+ENVOY</h3>
+
+<p class="nind"><span class="letra">S</span>TRANGE has been the rhythm of this man's life, surging again and again
+in passionate waves against the time, sinking once more into the abyss
+of disappointment, but never failing to rise on the crest of faith
+renewed. Once again we see Romain Rolland as prototype of those who are
+magnificent in defeat. Not one of his ideals, not one of his wishes, not
+one of his dreams, has been realized. Might has triumphed over right,
+force over spirit, men over humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Yet never has his struggle been grander, and never has his existence
+been more indispensable, than during recent years; for it is his
+apostolate alone which has saved the gospel of crucified Europe; and
+furthermore he has rescued for us another faith, that of the imaginative
+writer as the spiritual leader, the moral spokesman of his own nation
+and of all nations. This man of letters has preserved us from what would
+have been an imperishable shame, had there been no one in our days to
+testify against the lunacy of murder and hatred. To him we owe it that
+even during the fiercest storm in history the sacred fire of brotherhood
+was never extinguished. The world of the spirit has no concern with<a name="page_356" id="page_356"></a> the
+deceptive force of numbers. In that realm, one individual can outweigh a
+multitude. For an idea never glows so brightly as in the mind of the
+solitary thinker; and in the darkest hour we were able to draw
+consolation from the signal example of this poet. One great man who
+remains human can for ever and for all men rescue our faith in
+humanity.<a name="page_357" id="page_357"></a></p>
+
+<h3>BIBLIOGRAPHY</h3>
+
+<p><a name="page_358" id="page_358"></a></p>
+
+<p><a name="page_359" id="page_359"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c">WORKS BY ROMAIN ROLLAND<br /><br />
+I<br /><br />
+CRITICAL STUDIES</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les origines du th��tre lyrique moderne. (Histoire de l'op�ra en Europe
+avant Lully et Scarlatti.) Fontemoing, Paris, 1895.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Cur ars picturae apud Italos XVI saeculi deciderit Fontemoing, Paris,
+1895.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Millet. Duckworth, London, 1902 (has appeared in English translation
+only).</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+s�rie IV, No. 10, Paris, 1903; Hachette, Paris, 1907; another edition
+with woodcuts by Perrichon, J. P. Laurens, P. A. Laurens, and Perrichon,
+published by Edouard Pelletan, Paris, 1909.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Le Th��tre du Peuple. Cahiers de la quinzaine, s�rie V, No. 4, Paris,
+1903; Hachette, Paris, 1908; enlarged edition, Hachette, Paris, 1913;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Paris als Musikstadt. Marquardt, Berlin, 1905 (has appeared in German
+translation only).</p>
+
+<p class="hang">La vie de Michel-Ange. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, s�rie VII, No. 18; s�rie VIII, No. 2, Paris, 1906; Hachette,
+Paris, 1907. Another edition in Les ma�tres de l'art series, Librairie
+de l'art, ancien et moderne, Plon, Paris, 1905.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musiciens d'autrefois, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. L'op�ra avant l'op�ra.
+2. Le premier op�ra jou� � Paris: L'Orf�o de Luigi Rossi. 3. Notes sur
+Lully. 4. <a name="page_360" id="page_360"></a>Gluck. 5. Gr�try. 6. Mozart.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. Berlioz. 2. Wagner:
+Siegfried; Tristan. 3. Saint-Sa�ns. 4. Vincent d'Indy. 5. Richard
+Strauss. 6. Hugo Wolf. 7. Don Lorenzo Perosi 8. Musique fran�aise et
+musique allemande. 9. Pell�as et M�lisande. 10. Le renouveau: esquisse
+du movement musical � Paris depuis 1870.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Paul Dupin. Mercure musical. S. J. M. 15/12, 1908.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Haendel. (Les ma�tres de la musique.) Alcan, Paris, 1910.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Tolstoi. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Hachette, Paris, 1911.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">L'humble vie h�roique. Pens�es choisies et pr�c�d�es d'une introduction
+par Alphonse S�ch�. Sansot, Paris, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Emp�docle d' Agrigente. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1917; La maison fran�aise
+d'art et edition, Paris, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Voyage musical aux pays du passe. With woodcuts by D. Glans. Edouard
+Joseph, Paris, 1919; Hachette, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Ecole des Hates Etudes Socials (1900-1910). Alcan, Paris, 1910.</p>
+
+<p class="c">II</p>
+
+<p class="c">POLITICAL STUDIES</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Ollendorff, Paris, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les pr�curseurs. L'Humanit�, Paris, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Aux peuples assassin�s. Jeunesses Socialistes Romandes, La
+Chaux-de-Fonds, 1917; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Aux peuples assassin�s (under the title: Civilisation). Privately
+printed, Paris, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Aux peuples assassin�s. As frontispiece a wood-engraving by Frans
+Masereel. Restricted circulation. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.<a name="page_361" id="page_361"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c">III</p>
+
+<p class="c">NOVELS</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. 15 parts 1904-1912. Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie V,
+Nos. 9 and 10; S�rie VI, No. 8; S�rie VIII, Nos. 4, 6, 9; S�rie IX, Nos.
+13, 14, 15; S�rie X, Nos. 9, 10; S�rie XI, Nos. 7, 8; S�rie XIII, Nos.
+5, 6; S�rie XIV, Nos. 2, 3; Paris, 1904 et seq.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. 10 vols. 1. L'aube. 2. Le matin. 3. L'adolescent 4 La
+r�volte. (1904-1907.)</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe � Paris. 1. La foire sur la place. 2. Antoinette. 3.
+Dans la maison. (1908-1910.)</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. La fin du voyage. 1. Les amies. 2. Le buisson ardent 3.
+La nouvelle journ�e. (1910-1912.) Ollendorff, Paris.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Ollendorff, Paris, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Pierre et Luce. Le Sablier, Geneva, 1920; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Clerambault. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c">IV</p>
+
+<p class="c">PREFACES</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Introduction to Une lettre in�dite de Tolstoi, Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+S�rie III, No. 9, Paris, 1902.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Haendel et le Messie. (Preface to Le Messie de G. F. Haendel by F�lix
+Raugel.) D�p�t de la Soci�t� co�p�rative des compositeurs de musique,
+Paris, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Stendhal et la musique. (Preface to La vie de Haydn in the complete
+edition of Stendhal's works.) Champion, Paris, 1913.<a name="page_362" id="page_362"></a></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Preface to Celles qui travaillent by Simone Bod�ve, Ollendorff, Paris,
+1913.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Preface to Une voix de femme dans la m�l�e by Marcelle Capy, Ollendorff,
+Paris, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Anthologie des po�tes contre la guerre. Le Sablier, Genera, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c">V</p>
+
+<p class="c">DRAMAS</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Saint Louis. (5 acts.) Revue de Paris, March-April, 1897.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">A�rt. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1898.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les loups. (3 acts.) Georges Bellais, Paris, 1898.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Le triomphe de la raison. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris,
+1899.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Danton. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1900; Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, S�rie II, No. 6, 1901.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Le quatorze juillet. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie III, No.
+11, Paris, 1902.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Le temps viendra. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, S�rie IV, No. 14,
+Paris, 1903; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les trois amoureuses. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">La Montespan. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Th��tre de la R�volution. Les loups. Danton. Le quatorze juillet.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les trag�dies de la foi. Saint Louis. A�rt. Le triomphe de la raison.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Liluli (with woodcuts by Frans Masereel). Le Sablier, Geneva, 1919;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.<a name="page_363" id="page_363"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c">TRANSLATIONS</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><span class="smcap">English</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Millet. Translated by Clementina Black. Duckworth, London, 1902.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Beethoven. Translated by F. Rothwell. Drane, London, 1907.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Beethoven. Translated by Constance Hull. With a brief analysis of the
+sonatas, symphonies, and the quartets, by A. Eaglefield Hull, and 24
+musical illustrations and 4 plates and an introduction by Edward
+Carpenter. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">The Life of Michael Angelo. Translated by Frederic Lees. Heinemann,
+London, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Tolstoy. Translated by Bernard Miall. Fisher Unwin, London, 1911.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Some Musicians of former Days. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul,
+Trench, Trubner, London, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Handel. Translated by A. Eaglefield Hull. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
+London, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musicians of To-day. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul, Trench,
+Trubner, London, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">The People's Theater. Translated by Barrett H. Clark. Holt, New York,
+1918; C. Allen &amp; Unwin, London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Go to the Ant. (Reflections on reading Auguste Sorel.) Translated by De
+Kay. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1919, New York.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by G. Lowes Dickinson,
+Bowes, Cambridge, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by Rev. Richards Roberts, M.
+A. Friends' Peace Committee, London, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Above the Battle. Translated by C. K. Ogden. G. Allen &amp; Unwin, London,
+1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><a name="page_364" id="page_364"></a>The Idols. Translated by C. K. Ogden. With a letter by R. Rolland to
+Dr. van Eeden on the rights of small nations. Bowes, Cambridge, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">The Forerunners. Translated by Eden &amp; Cedar Paul. G. Allen &amp; Unwin,
+London, 1920; Harcourt, Brace, U. S. A., 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">The Fourteenth of July and Danton: two plays of the French Revolution.
+Translated with a preface by Barrett H. Clarke. Holt, New York, 1918; G.
+Allen &amp; Unwin, London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Liluli. The Nation, London, Sept 20 to Nov. 29, 1919; Boni &amp; Liveright,
+New York, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean Christophe. Translated by Gilbert Cannan. Heinemann, London,
+1910-1913; Holt, New York, 1911-1913.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Clerambault. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York. 1921.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">German</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Beethoven. Translated by L. Langnese-Hug. Rascher, Zurich, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Michelangelo. Translated by W. Herzog. R�tten &amp; Loenig, Frankfort, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Michelangelo. Rascher, Zurich, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Tolstoi. Translated by W. Herzog. R�tten &amp; Loenig, Frankfort, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Den hingeschlachteten V�lkern, translated by Stefan Zweig. Rascher,
+Zurich, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�l�e. R�tten &amp; Loening, Frankfort.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les pr�curseurs. R�tten &amp; Loeing, Frankfort, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Johann Christof. Translated by Otto &amp; Erna Grautoff. R�tten &amp; Loening,
+Frankfort, 1912-1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Meister Breugnon. Translated by Otto &amp; Etna Grautoff. R�tten &amp; Loening,
+Frankfort, 1919.<a name="page_365" id="page_365"></a></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Clerambault. Translated by Stefan Zweig. R�tten &amp; Loening, Frankfort,
+1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Die W�lfe. Translated by W. Herzog. M�ller, Munich, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Danton. Translated by Lucy von Jacobi and W. Herzog. M�ller, Munich,
+1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Die Zeit wird kommen. Translated by Stefan Zweig. "Die Zw�lf B�cher,"
+Tal, Vienna, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Spanish</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven. Translated by J. R. Jimenez, � la Residentia de
+Estudiantes de Madrid, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Delgado &amp; Santonja, Madrid, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Translated by Toro y Gomez. Ollendorff, Paris-Madrid,
+1905-1910.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Agence de Librairie, Madrid, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Italian</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Avanti, Milan, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Aux peuples assassin�s. Translated by Monanni with drawings by Frans
+Masereel. Libreria Internationale, Zurich, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Translated by Cesare Alessandri. Sonzogno, Milan, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by Maria Venti Felice le Monnier,
+Florence. [In the press.]</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Russian</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Th��tre de la R�volution. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg, St.
+Petersburg. 1909.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Th��tre du Peuple. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg. St. Petersburg.
+1909.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Emp�docle d'Agrigente. [In the press.]</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Unauthorized translation in 4 vols. Vetcherni Zvon,
+Moscow, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Authorized translation by M. Tchlenoff.<a name="page_366" id="page_366"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Danish</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven. Branner, Copenhagen, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Tolstoi. Branner, Copenhagen, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Denmark &amp; Norway, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�l�e. Lios, Copenhagen, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Hagerup, Copenhagen, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Denmark &amp; Norway; Norstedt, Stockholm, 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Czech</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by M. Kalassova. Prague, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Danton. 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Polish</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven. Jacewski, Warsaw, 1913.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Translated by Edwige Sienkiewicz. Vols.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">I &amp; II, Bibljoteka Sfinska, Warsaw, 1910; the remaining vols., Maski,
+Cracow, 1917-19&mdash;.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Swedish</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Michelange. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Tolstoi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">H�ndel. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Millet. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.<a name="page_367" id="page_367"></a></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Musiciens d'autrefois. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Voyage musical au pays du pass�. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Au-dessus de la m�le�. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Les pr�curseurs. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Th��tre de la R�volution. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier,
+Stockholm. 1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Trag�dies de la foi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Le temps viendra. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Liluli. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm. 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1913-1917.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Clerambault In course of preparation. Bonnier, Stockholm.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Dutch</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Vie de Beethoven, Simon, Amsterdam, 1913.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Jean-Christophe. Brusse, Rotterdam, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">L'aube. Special edition, W. F. J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">Colas Breugnon. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Japanese</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Tolstoi Seichi Naruse, Tokyo, 1916. And many other unauthorized
+translations.<a name="page_368" id="page_368"></a></p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Greek</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang">Beethoven. Translated by Niramos. 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c">WORKS ON ROMAIN ROLLAND</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">French</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Jean Bonnerot.</i> Romain Rolland (Extraits de ses &oelig;uvres avec
+introduction biographique), Cahiers du Centre, Nevers, 1909.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Lucien Maury.</i> Figures litt�raires. Perrin, 1911.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>J. H. Retinger.</i> Histoire de la litt�rature fran�aise du romantisme �
+nos jours. B. Grasset, 1911.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Jules Bertaut.</i> Les romanciers du nouveau si�cle. Sansot, 1912.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Seippel.</i> Romain Rolland, l'homme et l'&oelig;uvre. Ollendorff, 1913.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Marc Elder.</i> Romain Rolland. Paris, 1914</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Robert Dreyfus.</i> Ma�tres contemporains. (P�guy, Claudel, Suar�s, Romain
+Rolland.) Paris, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Daniel Hal�vy.</i> Quelques nouveaux ma�tres. Cahiers du Centre. Figui�re,
+1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>G. Dwelshauvers.</i> Romain Rolland. Vue caract�ristique de l'homme et de
+l'&oelig;uvre. Ed. de la Belgique artistique et litt�raire, Brussels, 1913
+or 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Souday.</i> Les drames philosophiques de Romain Rolland. Emile Paul,
+Paris, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Max Hochst�tter.</i> Essai sur l'&oelig;uvre de Romain Rolland. Fischbacher,
+Paris; Georg &amp; Co., Geneva, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Henri Guilbeaux.</i> Pour Romain Rolland. Jeheber, Geneva, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Massis.</i> Romain Rolland contre la France. Floury, Paris, 1915.<a name="page_369" id="page_369"></a></p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>P. H. Loyson.</i> Etes-vous neutre devant le crime? Payot, Paris and
+Lausanne, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Renaitour et Loyson.</i> Dans la m�l�e. Ed. du Bonnet Rouge, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Isabelle Debran.</i> M. Romain Rolland initiateur du d�faitisme.
+(Introduction de Diodore.) Geneva, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Jacques Servance.</i> R�ponse � Mme. Isabelle Debran. Comit� d'initiative
+en faveur d'une paix durable, Neuch�tel, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Charles Baudouin</i>, Romain Rolland calomni�. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Daniel Hal�vy.</i> Charles P�guy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Payot,
+Paris, 1918 et seq.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Colin.</i> Romain Rolland, Bruxelles, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>P. J. Jouve.</i> Romain Rolland vivant, Ollendorff, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Other Languages</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Otto Grautoff.</i> Romain Rolland, Frankfurt, 1914.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Winifred Stephens.</i> French Novelists of To-day. Second series. J. Lane,
+London and New York, 1915.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Albert L. Guerard.</i> Five Masters of French Romance. Scribner, New York,
+1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Dr. J. Ziegler.</i> Romain Rolland in "Johann Christof," �ber Juden und
+Judentum. v. Dr. Ziegler, Rabbiner in Karlsbad. Vienna, 1918.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Agnes Darmesteter.</i> Twentieth Century French Writers. London, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Blumenfeld.</i> Etude sur Romain Rolland, en langue yiddisch. Cahiers de
+litt�rature et d'art. Paris, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Albert Schinz.</i> French Literature of the War. Appleton, New York, 1920.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Pedro Cesare Dominici.</i> De Lutecia, Arte y Critica. Ollendorff, Madrid.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Papini.</i> Studii di Romain Rolland. Florence, 1916.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>F. F. Curtis.</i> Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreichs.
+Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1920.<a name="page_370" id="page_370"></a></p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Walter K�chler.</i> Vier Vortr�ge �ber R. Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Fritz
+v. Unruh. W�rzburg, 1919.</p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Music Connected With Romain Rolland's Writings</span></p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Dupin.</i> Jean-Christophe. (Trois pi�ces pour piano.)</p>
+
+<p class="hang">1. L'oncle Gottfried (dialogue avec Christophe).</p>
+
+<p class="hang">2. M�ditation sur un passage du "Matin."</p>
+
+<p class="hang">3. Berceuse de Louisa. Chant du P�lerin (piano et chant). Paroles de
+Paul Gerhardt Ed. Demets, Paris, 1907.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Dupin.</i> Jean-Christophe. (Suite pour quatuor � cordes.)</p>
+
+<p class="hang">1. La mort de l'oncle Gottfried.</p>
+
+<p class="hang">2. Bienvenue au petit Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Paul Dupin.</i> Pastorale, Sabine. 1. Dans le Jardinet. Piano et quatuor.
+Transcription pour piano et violon. Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.</p>
+
+<p class="hang"><i>Albert Doyen.</i> Le Triomphe de la Libert�. (Sc�ne finale du Quatorze
+Juillet). Prix de la ville de Paris, 1913. (Soli, Orchestre et Choeurs.)
+Ed. A. Leduc, Paris.<a name="page_371" id="page_371"></a></p>
+
+<h3><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h3>
+<p class="nind">
+<i>Above the Battle</i>, <a href="#page_266">266</a>, <a href="#page_290">290</a>, <a href="#page_291">291</a>, <a href="#page_293">293-6</a>, <a href="#page_297">297</a>, <a href="#page_305">305</a>, <a href="#page_329">329</a>.<br />
+Abbesse de Jouarre, l', <a href="#page_125">125</a>.<br />
+<i>A�rt</i>, <a href="#page_066">66</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_077">77-8</a>, <a href="#page_083">83-5</a>, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_112">112</a>.<br />
+A�rt, <a href="#page_077">77-8</a>, <a href="#page_083">83-5</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>, <a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_198">198</a>, <a href="#page_244">244</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_347">347</a>.<br />
+Antoinette, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_004">4</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_212">212</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+Arcos, Ren�, <a href="#page_312">312</a>, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Art, love of, and love of mankind, <a href="#page_020">20</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">epic quality in Rolland's, <a href="#page_063">63-66</a>, <a href="#page_067">67</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">moral force in Rolland's, <a href="#page_063">63</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tolstoi's views on, <a href="#page_018">18-20</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">universality of, <a href="#page_026">26</a>.</span><br />
+<i>Au-dessus de la m�l�e, see Above the Battle.</i><br />
+<i>Aux peuples assassin�s</i>, <a href="#page_332">332</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Bach, Friedemann, <a href="#page_173">173</a>.<br />
+Bach, Johann Sebastian, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>.<br />
+<i>Ballades fran�aises</i>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>.<br />
+Balzac, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>.<br />
+Barr�s, Maurice, <a href="#page_059">59</a>, <a href="#page_062">62</a>.<br />
+Baudouin, Charles, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+<i>Beethoven</i>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_137">137</a> ff, <a href="#page_140">140-3</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>.<br />
+Beethoven, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_019">19</a>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_045">45</a>, <a href="#page_067">67</a>, <a href="#page_104">104</a>, <a href="#page_140">140-143</a>, <a href="#page_144">144</a>, <a href="#page_145">145</a>, <a href="#page_147">147</a>, <a href="#page_148">148</a>, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_163">163</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_182">182</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_252">252</a>, <a href="#page_325">325</a>, <a href="#page_328">328</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">festival, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, influence of, on Rolland's childhood, <a href="#page_005">5</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jean Christophe's resemblance to, <a href="#page_173">173</a>.</span><br />
+<i>Beginnings of Opera, The</i>, <a href="#page_034">34</a>.<br />
+<i>Belgique sanglante, la</i>, <a href="#page_282">282</a>.<br />
+Berlioz, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>.<br />
+Bibliography, <a href="#page_357">357</a> ff.<br />
+Biographies, heroic, <a href="#page_133">133-53</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unwritten, <a href="#page_150">150-3</a>.</span><br />
+Bonn, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_140">140</a>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>.<br />
+Brahms, <a href="#page_174">174</a>.<br />
+Br�al, Michel, <a href="#page_035">35</a>.<br />
+Breugnon, Colas, in <i>Colas Breugnon</i>, <a href="#page_241">241-53</a>, <a href="#page_319">319</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">spiritual kinship of, with Jean Christophe, <a href="#page_244">244-48</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">see <i>Colas Breugnon</i>.</span><br />
+Bruneti�re, <a href="#page_016">16</a>.<br />
+Burckhardt, Jakob, <a href="#page_016">16</a>.<br />
+Byron, <a href="#page_275">275</a>.<br />
+<br />
+"<i>Cahiers de la quinzaine</i>," <a href="#page_020">20</a>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>.<br />
+<i>Caligula</i>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+"<i>Carmel, le</i>," <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Carnot, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+Claes, in <i>A�rt</i>, <a href="#page_087">87</a>.<br />
+Clamecy, birthplace of Rolland, <a href="#page_003">3</a>, <a href="#page_004">4</a>, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+Claudel, Paul, <a href="#page_089">89</a>, <a href="#page_044">44</a>, <a href="#page_059">59</a>.<br />
+<i>Clerambault, l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre</i>, <a href="#page_339">339-347</a>.<br />
+Clerambault, Agenor, in <i>Clerambault</i>, <a href="#page_310">310</a>, <a href="#page_339">339-347</a>.<br />
+Clerambault, Maxime, <a href="#page_343">343</a> ff.<br />
+Clifford, General, in <i>A Day Will Come</i>, <a href="#page_120">120</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>.<br />
+<i>Colas Breugnon</i>, <a href="#page_241">241-253</a>, <a href="#page_337">337</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as an artistic production, <a href="#page_249">249-51</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">gauloiseries in, <a href="#page_249">249-51</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of, <a href="#page_241">241-43</a>.<a name="page_372" id="page_372"></a></span><br />
+Com�die Fran�aise, <a href="#page_071">71</a>, <a href="#page_074">74</a>.<br />
+Conscience, story of, in Clerambault, <a href="#page_339">339-47</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>see</i> Freedom of conscience.</span><br />
+Corneille, <a href="#page_091">91</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Couthon, <a href="#page_099">99</a>.<br />
+<i>Credo quia verum</i>, <a href="#page_016">16</a>, <a href="#page_017">17</a>.<br />
+Corinne, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_211">211</a>.<br />
+Cycles, of Rolland, <a href="#page_067">67-71</a>.<br />
+<br />
+D'Alembert, <a href="#page_087">87</a>.<br />
+<i>Danse des morts</i>, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<i>Danton</i>, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_106">106-9</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.<br />
+Danton, <a href="#page_099">99</a>, <a href="#page_106">106-9</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_126">126</a>.<br />
+Debrit, Jean, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Debussy, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Declaration of the independence of the mind, <a href="#page_351">351-354</a>.<br />
+Decsey, Ernest, <a href="#page_174">174</a>.<br />
+Defeat, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy of life, <a href="#page_061">61</a>, <a href="#page_062">62</a>, <a href="#page_083">83</a> ff, <a href="#page_110">110</a> ff, <a href="#page_134">134</a> ff, <a href="#page_139">139</a>.<br />
+"Defeatism," <a href="#page_297">297-303</a>.<br />
+De Maguet, Claude, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+"<i>Demain</i>," <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Depr�s, Suzanne, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Desmoulins, <a href="#page_126">126</a>.<br />
+Despr�s, Fernand, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<i>Deutscher Musiker in Paris, Ein</i>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>.<br />
+"<i>Deutsche Rundschau, Die</i>," <a href="#page_305">305</a>.<br />
+<i>Don Carlos</i>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>.<br />
+Dostoievsky, <a href="#page_002">2</a>, <a href="#page_346">346</a>.<br />
+Doyen, <a href="#page_105">105</a>.<br />
+D'Oyron, in <i>The Wolves</i>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>.<br />
+Drama, and the masses, <i>see</i> People's Theater;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">erotic <i>vs.</i> political, <a href="#page_127">127</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Drama of the Revolution, <a href="#page_069">69</a>, <a href="#page_070">70</a>, <a href="#page_086">86-99</a>, <a href="#page_100">100-18</a>.</span><br />
+Dramatic writings, of Rolland, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_032">32</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_057">57-130</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">craftsmanship of, <a href="#page_127">127-130</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cycles, <a href="#page_067">67-71</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Drama of the Revolution, <a href="#page_100">100-130</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">People's Theater, <a href="#page_085">85-130</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">poems, <a href="#page_028">28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tragedies of faith, <a href="#page_076">76-85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unknown cycle, <a href="#page_071">71-75</a>.</span><br />
+<i>Drames philosophiques</i>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>.<br />
+Dreyfus affair, <a href="#page_038">38</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_119">119</a>, <a href="#page_133">133</a>.<br />
+Dunois, Am�d�e, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Duse, Eleanore, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Emp�docle d'Agrigente et l'�ge de la haine</i>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_333">333</a> ff.<br />
+<i>Etes-vous neutre devant le crime</i>, <a href="#page_283">283</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Faber, in <i>Le triomphe de la raison</i>, <a href="#page_111">111</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.<br />
+Faith, in Rolland's philosophy of life, <a href="#page_077">77-79</a>, <a href="#page_081">81</a> ff, <a href="#page_166">166-71</a>, <a href="#page_244">244</a> ff;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tragedies of, <a href="#page_076">76-85</a>.</span><br />
+Fellowship, of free spirits, during the war, <a href="#page_273">273</a> ff, <a href="#page_311">311-316</a>: <a href="#page_351">351</a>, <a href="#page_354">354</a>.<br />
+<i>F�tes de Beethoven, les</i>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>.<br />
+"<i>Feuille, la</i>," <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Flaubert, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_080">80</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>.<br />
+<i>Forerunners, The</i>, <a href="#page_290">290</a>, <a href="#page_339">339-334</a><br />
+Fort, Paul, <a href="#page_250">250</a>.<br />
+<i>Fourteenth of July, The</i>, <a href="#page_101">101-2</a>, <a href="#page_103">103-5</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>.<br />
+France, after 1870, <a href="#page_057">57</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">picture of, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_211">211-216</a></span><br />
+France, Anatole, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_084">84</a>, <a href="#page_169">169</a>.<br />
+Frank, C�sar, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Frank, Ludwig, <a href="#page_321">321</a>.<br />
+Freedom, of conscience, <a href="#page_287">287</a> ff, <a href="#page_257">257-9</a>, <a href="#page_119">119</a>, <a href="#page_274">274</a>, <a href="#page_285">285-8</a>, <a href="#page_298">298</a> ff, <a href="#page_320">320</a> ff, <a href="#page_339">339-47</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>vs.</i> the fatherland, <i>see The Triumph of Reason</i>.</span><br />
+French literature, state of, after 1870, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a> ff.<br />
+French Revolution, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_098">98</a> ff, <a href="#page_100">100-120</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>see</i> Drama of the<a name="page_373" id="page_373"></a></span>Revolution;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>also</i> People's Theater. French stage, after 1870, <a href="#page_086">86-89</a>.</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>Galeries des femmes de Shakespeare</i>, <a href="#page_006">6</a>.<br />
+Gamache, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+"Gauloiseries," <a href="#page_250">250</a>.<br />
+Generations, conflicting ideas of the <a href="#page_229">229-234</a>.<br />
+Geneva, during the   Great War, <a href="#page_268">268</a> ff.<br />
+Germany, picture of, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_217">217-220</a>.<br />
+Girondists, in <i>The Triumph of Reason</i>, <a href="#page_110">110</a> ff, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>.<br />
+<i>Gli Baglioni</i>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_074">74</a>.<br />
+Gluck, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_212">212</a>.<br />
+Goethe, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_097">97</a>, <a href="#page_118">118</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>, <a href="#page_211">211</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a>, <a href="#page_193">193</a>, <a href="#page_219">219</a>, <a href="#page_230">230</a>, <a href="#page_263">263</a>, <a href="#page_275">275</a>, <a href="#page_278">278</a>, <a href="#page_305">305</a>, <a href="#page_330">330</a>, <a href="#page_332">332</a>.<br />
+Gottfried, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>.<br />
+Grautoff, <a href="#page_166">166</a>, <a href="#page_168">168</a>.<br />
+Grazia, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_200">200-202</a>, <a href="#page_205">205</a>.<br />
+Greatness, will to, in Rolland's philosophy, <a href="#page_063">63</a>.<br />
+Great War, The, <a href="#page_001">1</a>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>, <a href="#page_257">257-355</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a>, <a href="#page_264">264</a> ff, <a href="#page_339">339-347</a>.<br />
+Greek tragedy, method of, <a href="#page_128">128</a> ff<br />
+<i>Gr�ne Heinrich, Der</i>, <a href="#page_169">169</a>.<br />
+Guilbeaux, Henri, <a href="#page_281">281</a>, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Haendel</i>, <a href="#page_034">34</a>.<br />
+Handel, <a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>.<br />
+Hatred Holland's campaign against, <a href="#page_297">297-304</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Verhaeren's attitude of, during the war, <a href="#page_281">281-4</a>.</span><br />
+Hauptmann, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_276">276</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolland's controversy with, <a href="#page_277">277-280</a>.</span><br />
+Hardy, Thomas, <a href="#page_064">64</a>.<br />
+Hassler in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>.<br />
+Hebbel, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_123">123</a>.<br />
+Hecht, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Heroes of suffering, <a href="#page_133">133-153</a>.<br />
+Heroic biographies, <a href="#page_133">133-153</a>.<br />
+Herzen, <a href="#page_026">26</a>.<br />
+Historical drama, <i>see</i> People's Theater.<br />
+History, and the People's Theater, <a href="#page_095">95</a> ff;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolland's conception of, <a href="#page_095">95</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">sense of, in early writings, <a href="#page_032">32</a>.</span><br />
+Hoche, General, <a href="#page_150">150</a>.<br />
+H�lderlin, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+Hugot, in <i>The Triumph of Reason</i>, <a href="#page_063">63</a>, <a href="#page_111">111</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>.<br />
+Hugo, Victor, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Idoles les</i>, <a href="#page_299">299</a>.<br />
+"Iliad of the French People," <i>see</i> People's Theater.<br />
+<i>Illusions perdues, les</i>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>.<br />
+<i>Inter Arma Caritas</i>, <a href="#page_297">297</a>.<br />
+<i>Iphigenia</i>, <a href="#page_118">118</a>.<br />
+Italy, picture of, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_221">221-3</a>.<br />
+Idealism, in Rolland's philosophy, <a href="#page_060">60</a> ff, <a href="#page_085">85</a>, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_166">166-71</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characterization of Germany, <a href="#page_211">211-216</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Italy, <a href="#page_222">222</a>.</span><br />
+Internationalism, <a href="#page_207">207-10</a>, <a href="#page_255">255</a>, <a href="#page_285">285-8</a>, <a href="#page_351">351-4</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>see Above the Battle</i>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fellowship, of free spirits;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hatred, Rolland's campaign against</span><br />
+Ibsen, <a href="#page_126">126</a> ff.<br />
+Italy, Rolland's sojourn in, <a href="#page_023">23-28</a>, <a href="#page_071">71</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Jaur�s, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_346">346</a>.<br />
+<i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_030">30</a>, <a href="#page_036">36</a>, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>, <a href="#page_070">70</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>, <a href="#page_157">157-237</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_300">300</a>, <a href="#page_305">305</a>, <a href="#page_311">311</a>, <a href="#page_318">318</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a>, <a href="#page_340">340</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as an educational romance, <a href="#page_166">166-71</a>;<a name="page_374" id="page_374"></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">characters of, <a href="#page_172">172-5</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">enigma of creative work, <a href="#page_181">181-7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">France, picture of, in, <a href="#page_211">211-16</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">generations, conflicting ideas of, in <a href="#page_229">229-34</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Germany, picture of, in, <a href="#page_217">217-220</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Italy, picture of, in <a href="#page_221">221-3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jews, the, in, <a href="#page_224">224-8</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">message of, <a href="#page_157">157-159</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">music, form and content of, <a href="#page_177">177-80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">origin of <a href="#page_162">162-5</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">writing of, <a href="#page_043">43-44</a>, <a href="#page_162">162-5</a>.</span><br />
+Jean Christophe, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_031">31</a>, <a href="#page_038">38</a>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_042">42</a>, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_097">97</a>, <a href="#page_153">153</a>, <a href="#page_157">157-237</a>, <a href="#page_241">241</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_258">258</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_317">317</a>, <a href="#page_336">336</a>, <a href="#page_340">340</a>, <a href="#page_342">342</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and Grazia, <a href="#page_200">200-1</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and his fellow men, <a href="#page_203">203-6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and his generation, <a href="#page_229">229-36</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the nations, <a href="#page_207">207-10</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">apostle of force, <a href="#page_189">189</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as the artist and creator, <a href="#page_188">188-94</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">character of, <a href="#page_172">172-75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">contrast to Olivier, <a href="#page_195">195</a> ff.</span><br />
+Jouve, <a href="#page_287">287</a>, <a href="#page_312">312</a>, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Justice, problem of, considered by Rolland in Dreyfus case, <a href="#page_039">39</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>vs.</i> the fatherland, <i>see The Wolves</i>.</span><br />
+<br />
+Kaufmann, Emil, <a href="#page_174">174</a>.<br />
+Keller, Gottfried, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>.<br />
+Kleist, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Kohn, Sylvain, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_212">212</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+Krafft, Jean Christophe, <i>see</i> Jean Christophe.<br />
+<br />
+Language, as obstacle to internationalism, <a href="#page_229">229</a> ff.<br />
+Lazare, Bernard, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>.<br />
+<i>Lebens Abend einer Idealistin, Der</i>, <a href="#page_027">27</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+<i>L�gende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier</i>, <a href="#page_080">80</a>.<br />
+Letters, of Rolland, during war, <a href="#page_317">317-19</a>.<br />
+L�vy-Coeur, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_205">205</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+<i>Le 14 Juillet</i>, <i>see Fourteenth of July, The</i>.<br />
+Liberty, characterization of France, <a href="#page_211">211-16</a>.<br />
+<i>Life of Michael Angelo, The</i>, <a href="#page_040">40</a>, <a href="#page_144">144-46</a>.<br />
+<i>Life of Timolien</i>, <a href="#page_131">131</a>.<br />
+<i>Liluli</i>, <a href="#page_300">300</a>, <a href="#page_335">335-338</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a>.<br />
+<i>Loups, les, see The Wolves.</i><br />
+Lux, Adams, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_111">111</a>, <a href="#page_112">112</a>, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.<br />
+Lyceum of Louis the Great, <a href="#page_008">8</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Madame Bovary, <a href="#page_064">64</a>.<br />
+Mahler, Gustave, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Mannheim, Judith, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_226">226</a>.<br />
+Marat, <a href="#page_101">101</a>.<br />
+Martinet, Marcel, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Masereel, Franz, <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+Maupassant, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_091">91</a>.<br />
+Mazzini, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_222">222</a>.<br />
+<i>Meistersinger, Die</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Mesnil, Jacques, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Meunier, <a href="#page_087">87</a>.<br />
+<i>Meutre des �lites, le</i>, <a href="#page_297">297</a>.<br />
+Meyerbeer, <a href="#page_212">212</a>.<br />
+Michelangelo, <a href="#page_067">67</a>, <a href="#page_071">71</a>, <a href="#page_144">144-6</a>, <a href="#page_147">147</a>, <a href="#page_148">148</a>, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_182">182</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>.<br />
+Michelet, <a href="#page_013">13</a>.<br />
+Millet, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>.<br />
+Mirbeau, <a href="#page_085">85</a>.<br />
+Moli�re, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Monod Gabriel, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_016">16</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+<i>Mon Oncle Benjamin</i>, <a href="#page_003">3</a>.<br />
+<i>Montespan, la</i>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_119">119</a>.<br />
+Mooch, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+Moreas, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+Mornet, Lieutenant, <a href="#page_306">306</a>.<br />
+Mounet-Sully, <a href="#page_074">74</a>.<br />
+Mozart, <a href="#page_005">5</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>.<br />
+Music, early influence of, on Rolland, <a href="#page_004">4</a>;<a name="page_375" id="page_375"></a><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">form and content in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_177">177-80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">part of Rolland's drama, <a href="#page_104">104</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolland's love of, <a href="#page_047">47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolland's philosophy of, <a href="#page_132">132-3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tolstoi's stigmatization of <a href="#page_019">19</a>.</span><br />
+<i>Musiciens d'autrefois</i>, <a href="#page_034">34</a>, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Nationalistic school of writers <a href="#page_059">59</a>, <a href="#page_060">60</a>, <a href="#page_062">62</a>.<br />
+Nationalism, <a href="#page_208">208</a> ff; <a href="#page_217">217-20</a>, <a href="#page_225">225</a>, <a href="#page_226">226</a>.<br />
+Naturalism, <a href="#page_015">15</a>.<br />
+"Neues Vaterland," <a href="#page_306">306</a>.<br />
+Nietzsche, <a href="#page_002">2</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_162">162</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>, <a href="#page_217">217-20</a>, <a href="#page_255">255</a>, <a href="#page_332">332</a>.<br />
+<i>Niob�</i>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_074">74</a>.<br />
+Nobel peace prize, <a href="#page_270">270</a>.<br />
+Normal School, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_011">11</a>, <a href="#page_012">12-17</a>, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_014">14</a>, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_029">29</a>, <a href="#page_032">32</a>, <a href="#page_162">162</a>.<br />
+<i>Notre prochain l'ennemi</i>, <a href="#page_297">297</a>.<br />
+Novalis, <a href="#page_169">169</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Offenbach, <a href="#page_212">212</a>.<br />
+Olivier, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_061">61</a>, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_076">76</a>, <a href="#page_078">78</a>, <a href="#page_084">84</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_179">179</a>, <a href="#page_195">195-9</a>, <a href="#page_200">200</a>, <a href="#page_201">201</a>, <a href="#page_205">205</a>, <a href="#page_214">214</a> ff, <a href="#page_220">220</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>, <a href="#page_225">225</a>, <a href="#page_233">233</a>, <a href="#page_244">244</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_264">264</a>, <a href="#page_267">267</a>, <a href="#page_283">283</a>, <a href="#page_309">309</a>, <a href="#page_318">318</a>, 336 <a href="#page_340">340</a>.<br />
+Olivier, Georges, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_233">233</a>.<br />
+<i>Offiziere, Die</i>, <a href="#page_085">85</a>.<br />
+<i>Oration on Shakespeare</i>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>.<br />
+<i>Orfeo</i>, <a href="#page_033">33</a>.<br />
+<i>Origines du th��tre lyrique moderne, les</i>, <a href="#page_032">32</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a>.<br />
+<i>Orsino</i>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_074">74</a>.<br />
+Oudon, Fran�oise, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_075">75</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Pacifism, <a href="#page_262">262</a> ff.<br />
+Paine, Thomas <a href="#page_009">9</a>, <a href="#page_007">7</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>.<br />
+Parsifal, <a href="#page_030">30</a>, <a href="#page_031">31</a>, <a href="#page_062">62</a>, <a href="#page_191">191</a>.<br />
+P�guy, Charles, <a href="#page_014">14</a>, <a href="#page_020">20</a>, <a href="#page_038">38</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_059">59</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>.<br />
+People's Theater, The, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_065">65</a>, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_088">88</a>, <a href="#page_094">94-97</a>.<br />
+Philippe, Charles Louis, <a href="#page_044">44</a>, <a href="#page_091">91</a>.<br />
+Philosophy of life, of Rolland, <i>see</i> Art of Rolland;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Conscience;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Defeat, significance of;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Faith;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Freedom of Conscience;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Greatness will to;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hatred, campaign against;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Idealism;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Internationalism;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Justice;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Struggle, element of;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Suffering, significance of.</span><br />
+Picquart, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>.<br />
+Perrotin, in <i>Clerambault</i>, <a href="#page_344">344</a>.<br />
+Pioch, Georges, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Polichinelle, in <i>Liluli</i>, <a href="#page_337">337</a>.<br />
+<i>Pr�curseurs, les, see The Forerunners.</i><br />
+<i>Pr�tre de Nemi, le</i>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>.<br />
+<i>Prinz von Homburg, Der</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Provenzale, Francesco, <a href="#page_034">34</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Quesnel, in <i>Les Loups</i>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Racine, <a href="#page_091">91</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+<i>R�uber, Die</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>.<br />
+Red Cross, in Switzerland, <a href="#page_268">268</a> ff, <a href="#page_269">269</a> ff.<br />
+Renaissance, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_068">68</a>, <a href="#page_071">71</a>.<br />
+Renaitour, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Renan, <a href="#page_012">12</a>, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_125">125</a> ff, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_196">196</a>, <a href="#page_214">214</a>, <a href="#page_309">309</a>.<br />
+"<i>Revue de l'art dramatique</i>," <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_088">88</a>.<br />
+"<i>Revue de Paris</i>," <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>.<br />
+Robespierre, <a href="#page_099">99</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_117">117</a>, <a href="#page_126">126</a>.<br />
+Rolland, Madeleine, <a href="#page_003">3</a>.<br />
+Rolland, Romain, academic life of, in Paris, <a href="#page_032">32-35</a>, <a href="#page_042">42</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">adolescence<a name="page_376" id="page_376"></a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of, <a href="#page_003">3-11</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">ancestry of, <a href="#page_003">3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and his epoch, <a href="#page_057">57-62</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">and the European spirit, <a href="#page_052">52</a>, <a href="#page_053">53</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">appeal to President Wilson, <a href="#page_348">348-50</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">as embodiment of European spirit, <a href="#page_052">52-3</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">art of, <a href="#page_063">63-6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">at Paris, <a href="#page_032">32-5</a>, <a href="#page_036">36</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">attitude of, during the war, <a href="#page_257">257-355</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">campaign of, against hatred <a href="#page_297">297-303</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">childhood of, <a href="#page_003">3-7</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">controversy of, with Hauptmann, <a href="#page_277">277-80</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">correspondence of, with Verhaeren <a href="#page_281">281-4</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">cycles of <a href="#page_067">67-75</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">diary of, during the war, <a href="#page_327">327-28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">drama of the revolution, <a href="#page_100">100-30</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">dramatic writings, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_028">28</a>, <a href="#page_057">57</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dreyfus case, <a href="#page_038">38-47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">fame, <a href="#page_049">49</a>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_051">51</a>, <a href="#page_048">48</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">father of, <a href="#page_006">6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">friendships, <a href="#page_013">13-15</a>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_026">26-28</a>, <a href="#page_311">311-316</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heroic biographies, <a href="#page_133">133-153</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">humanitarianism of, <a href="#page_307">307</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">idealism of, <a href="#page_060">60</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of, during the war, <a href="#page_320">320-326</a>, <a href="#page_355">355-6</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">influence of Tolstoi on, <a href="#page_019">19-22</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Jean Christophe, <a href="#page_157">157-237</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">letters of, during the war, <a href="#page_317">317-319</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">marriage of, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_041">41</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_134">134</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mass suggestion in writings of, <a href="#page_261">261</a>, <a href="#page_266">266</a>, <a href="#page_329">329-47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">mother of, <a href="#page_003">3</a>, <a href="#page_027">27</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">newspaper writing of <a href="#page_289">289-292</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">opponents of, during the war, <a href="#page_304">304-10</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">portrait of, <a href="#page_046">46</a>, <a href="#page_047">47</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">r�le of, in fellowship of free spirits during the war, <a href="#page_273">273</a> ff;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rome, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_028">28</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">schooling of <a href="#page_005">5-17</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">seclusion, <a href="#page_043">43</a>, <a href="#page_044">44</a>, <a href="#page_045">45-7</a>, <a href="#page_048">48-49</a>, <a href="#page_324">324</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">significance of life work, <a href="#page_002">2</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">tragedies of faith, <a href="#page_076">76-85</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">unwritten biographies, <a href="#page_150">150-153</a>.</span><br />
+Rossi, Ernesto, <a href="#page_024">24</a>.<br />
+Rossi, Luigi, <a href="#page_033">33</a>.<br />
+Rostand, <a href="#page_117">117</a>.<br />
+Rouanet, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Rousseau, <a href="#page_275">275</a>.<br />
+Roussin, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>.<br />
+<i>Route en lacets qui monte, la</i>, <a href="#page_330">330</a>.<br />
+<br />
+St. Christophe, <a href="#page_157">157</a>.<br />
+Saint-Just, <i>pseud.</i>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_084">84</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_126">126</a>.<br />
+<i>Saint Louis</i>, <a href="#page_077">77-8</a>, <a href="#page_080">80-82</a>, <a href="#page_083">83</a>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>, <a href="#page_244">244</a>.<br />
+Salviati, <a href="#page_024">24</a>.<br />
+Suar�s, Andr�, <a href="#page_014">14</a>, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>.<br />
+Scarlatti, Alessandro, <a href="#page_034">34</a>.<br />
+Schermann, <a href="#page_330">330</a>.<br />
+Scheurer, Kestner, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>.<br />
+Schiller, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_086">86</a>, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_090">90</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_097">97</a>, <a href="#page_100">100-1</a>, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>, <a href="#page_193">193</a>, <a href="#page_196">196</a>.<br />
+Schubert, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>.<br />
+Schulz, Prof. in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>.<br />
+Seippel, Paul, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>.<br />
+S�v�rine, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Shakespeare, <a href="#page_005">5</a>, <a href="#page_006">6</a>, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_014">14</a>, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_069">69</a>, <a href="#page_072">72</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_100">100</a>, <a href="#page_123">123</a>, <a href="#page_125">125</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>.<br />
+Sidonie, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_213">213</a>.<br />
+<i>Siege de Mantoue, le</i>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>.<br />
+Sorbonne, <a href="#page_032">32</a>, <a href="#page_033">33</a>.<br />
+<i>Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse</i>, <a href="#page_012">12</a>.<br />
+Spinoza, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_013">13</a>, <a href="#page_018">18</a>.<br />
+Stendhal, <a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>.<br />
+Strauss, Hugo, <a href="#page_035">35</a>.<br />
+Strindberg, <a href="#page_002">2</a>, <a href="#page_126">126</a> ff.<br />
+Struggle, element of, in Rolland's philosophy, <a href="#page_222">222</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a> ff.<br />
+Suffering, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy, <a href="#page_133">133-136</a>, <a href="#page_181">181-7</a>, <a href="#page_188">188-94</a>; <a href="#page_204">204</a> ff;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">heroes of <a href="#page_133">133-53</a>.</span><br />
+Switzerland, refuge of Rolland during the war, <a href="#page_264">264-7</a>.<a name="page_377" id="page_377"></a><br />
+<br />
+<i>"Tablettes, les,"</i> <a href="#page_313">313</a>.<br />
+<i>Tasso</i>, <a href="#page_118">118</a>.<br />
+Teulier, in <i>The Wolves</i>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_310">310</a>.<br />
+<i>Th��tre du peuple, le, see</i> People's Theatre.<br />
+Thiesson, Gaston, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+Tillier, Claude, <a href="#page_003">3</a>.<br />
+Tolstoi, <a href="#page_018">18</a>, <a href="#page_020">20</a>, <a href="#page_021">21</a>, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_053">53</a>, <a href="#page_060">60</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_067">67</a>, <a href="#page_082">82</a>, <a href="#page_086">86</a>, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_090">90</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_094">94</a>, <a href="#page_135">135</a>, <a href="#page_138">138</a>, <a href="#page_147">147-149</a>, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_170">170</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_182">182</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_255">255</a>, <a href="#page_265">265</a>, <a href="#page_300">300</a>, <a href="#page_317">317</a>, <a href="#page_320">320</a>, <a href="#page_333">333</a>.<br />
+<i>To the Undying Antigone</i>, <a href="#page_027">27</a>.<br />
+<i>Trag�dies de la foi, les, see Tragedies of Faith.</i><br />
+<i>Tragedies of Faith</i>, <a href="#page_069">69</a>, <a href="#page_076">76-83</a>, <a href="#page_076">76</a>.<br />
+"Tribunal of the spirit," <i>see</i> Fellowship.<br />
+<i>Triumph of Reason, The</i>, <a href="#page_063">63</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_102">102</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>, <a href="#page_119">119</a>.<br />
+<i>Trois Amoureuses, les</i>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>.<br />
+Truth, in <i>Liluli</i>, <a href="#page_337">337</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Unknown dramatic cycle, <a href="#page_071">71-75</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Verhaeren, <a href="#page_044">44</a>, <a href="#page_077">77</a>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_276">276</a>, <a href="#page_311">311</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rolland's&nbsp;  correspondence with, <a href="#page_281">281-84</a>.</span><br />
+<i>Vie de Beethoven, see Beethoven.</i><br />
+<i>Vie de Tolstoi, see Tolstoi.</i><br />
+<i>Vie de Michel-Ange, la, see Life of Michael Angelo, The.</i><br />
+<i>Vie des hommes illustres</i>, <a href="#page_301">301</a>.<br />
+Von Kerich, Frau, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>.<br />
+Von Meysenbug, Malwida, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_027">27</a>, <a href="#page_028">28</a>, <a href="#page_029">29</a>, <a href="#page_029">29-31</a>, <a href="#page_073">73</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_162">162</a>.<br />
+Von Unruh, Fritz, <a href="#page_085">85</a>.<br />
+<i>Vorreden Material im Nachlass</i>, <a href="#page_255">255</a>.<br />
+<i>Vous �tes des hommes</i>, <a href="#page_312">312</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Wagner, <a href="#page_002">2</a>, <a href="#page_009">9</a>, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_014">14</a>, <a href="#page_026">26</a>, <a href="#page_029">29</a>, <a href="#page_030">30</a>, <a href="#page_031">31</a>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_162">162</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_212">212</a>.<br />
+<i>Wahrheit und Dichtung</i>, <a href="#page_175">175</a>.<br />
+<i>War and Peace</i>, <a href="#page_064">64</a>, <a href="#page_170">170</a>.<br />
+War, dominant theme in Rolland's plays, <a href="#page_028">28</a>;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of the generations, <a href="#page_229">229-234</a>;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Rolland's writings, <a href="#page_260">260</a> ff.</span><br />
+<i>Weber, Die</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a>, <a href="#page_277">277</a>.<br />
+Weil, in <i>Jean Christophe</i>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.<br />
+<i>What is to be Done?</i> <a href="#page_018">18</a>.<br />
+<i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>, <a href="#page_168">168</a>.<br />
+William the Silent, <a href="#page_066">66</a>.<br />
+Wilson, President, <a href="#page_348">348-50</a>.<br />
+Wolf, Hugo, <a href="#page_035">35</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>.<br />
+Wolff's news agency, <a href="#page_277">277</a>.<br />
+<i>Wolves, The</i>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_102">102</a>, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>.<br />
+<br />
+Zola, <a href="#page_015">15</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_085">85</a>, <a href="#page_087">87</a>, <a href="#page_039">39</a>, <a href="#page_091">91</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,9748 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romain Rolland
+       The Man and His Work
+
+Author: Stefan Zweig
+
+Translator: Eden Paul
+            Cedar Paul
+
+Release Date: January 8, 2011 [EBook #34888]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMAIN ROLLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, University of Michigan Libraries
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+[Illustration: Romain Rolland after a drawing by Granie (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, AERT, 1895-1898               76
+
+VI. SAINT LOUIS. 1894                                                 80
+
+VII. AERT, 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 Granie (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.
+
+HOeLDERLIN.
+
+
+
+
+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
+Cornelien." 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 a 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,
+Jaures, 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, Andre Suares, and Charles
+Peguy, 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, Suares, Claudel, and Peguy, has from a
+different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.
+
+As in the case of Claudel at the Lyceum, so now with Suares 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. Suares 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, Brunetiere, 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 Peguy as No. 4 of the third
+series of "_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," began with the affectionate
+words, "Cher Frere." 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, Suares 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 theatre
+lyrique moderns_ (_Histoire de l'opera 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'eternelle 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'Opera_, 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 Breal, 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 Peguy'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 Peguy 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 Peguy, and
+with Suares 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, Peguy's, and
+Suares' 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. Jaures
+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 Suares, 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 Elysees,
+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
+succes n'etait pas son but; son but etait 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'etait pas le succes; son but etait la foi.
+
+     JEAN CHRISTOPHE, "_La Revolte_."
+
+
+
+
+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 reentered 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 Barres, Paul Claudel, and Peguy. 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 Barres. 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 theatre 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 _Aert_: "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
+_Tragedies de la foi_ form the second cycle; the _Theatre de la
+revolution_ 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 Hoelderlin'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 _Niobe_. From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he
+returned with a new Renaissance drama, _Le siege 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 _Tragedies de la foi_. Next came _Jeanne de
+Piennes_ (1894), which remains unpublished.... _Aert_ (1895), the second
+of the _Tragedies de la foi_, was the first of Rolland's plays to be
+staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the _Theatre
+de la revolution_. 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 Comedie Francaise,
+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 _Niobe_ 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. Aert. 1895-1898_
+
+
+Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten
+dramas of his youth under the title _Les tragedies 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 Aert 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 Aert, 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 legende 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
+Pantheon, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte
+Genevieve 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
+ecrase 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
+
+AERT
+
+1898
+
+
+_Aert_ 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; _Aert_ 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 Aert, 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, Maitre
+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 Aert'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, Aert 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 _Aert_ 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 anaemia 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
+seve populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la sante." 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 theatre du peuple_, and his _Theatre
+de la revolution_, 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 Comedie Francaise 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 "theatre 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
+Moliere 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
+Raeuber_ 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 a
+dire! Tout est a 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-Gene! "Tout est a faire! Tout est a 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
+'comedie 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 Floreal, 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'etat. 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 theatre
+de la revolution_.
+
+
+
+
+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 theatre de la revolution_, "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 "fetes galantes." We
+are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien
+regime; 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 "fetes 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 freres" 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 soule 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 Jaures characterize it, Jaures
+who himself resembled Danton in his power of oratory, introducing the
+work when it was staged at the Theatre 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 _Aert_, 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 a 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 Theatre de
+l'Oeuvre on May 18, 1898, was from first to last a political
+demonstration. Zola, Scheurer-Kestner, Peguy, 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
+theatre de la revolution_ 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. "Obeir a ma patrie? Obeir a 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 ou la liberte est
+menacee." Aert, 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 Aert 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 pretre 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 Treguier, 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, voila la fatalite 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 Aert, 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 theatre 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 fetes 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 Peguy 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 e 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 Elysees.
+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
+     aesthetic 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, Aert 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 domptee"; 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
+"comedie 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 gruene 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 Cesar 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; Francoise Oudon,
+the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds
+us of Suzanne Depres. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are
+purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles
+Louis Philippe and Charles Peguy; 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,
+Levy-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'opera 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
+pretexte a sa fecondite 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 genie
+veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le genie"--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, "transfigure 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 genie
+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 Aert, 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, reencounters, 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, Levy-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 facade, 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, Levy-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 aesthetic, 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 garcon, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"--"Que veux
+     tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'empeche pas de
+     souffrir; mais souffrir n'empechera jamais un bon Francais 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 Aert 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 francaises_ 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 sale" 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 etre connue et prouvee que par le sacrifice que
+     fait le savant et l'artiste de son repos et son bien-etre 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FOREARMED
+
+
+We do not detract from the moral services of Romain Rolland, but we may
+perhaps excuse to some extent his opponents, when we insist that Rolland
+had excelled all contemporary imaginative writers in the profundity of
+his preparatory studies of war and its problems. If to-day, in
+retrospect, we contemplate his writings, we marvel to note how, from the
+very first and throughout a long period of years, they combined to build
+up, as it were, a colossal pyramid, culminating in the point upon which
+the lightnings of war were to be discharged. For twenty years, the
+author's thought, his whole creative activity, had been unintermittently
+concentrated upon the contradictions between spirit and force, between
+freedom and the fatherland, between victory and defeat. Through a
+hundred variations he had pursued the same fundamental theme, treating
+it dramatically, epically, and in manifold other ways. There is hardly a
+problem relevant to this question which is not touched upon by
+Christophe and Olivier, by Aert and by the Girondists, in their
+discussions. Intellectually regarded, Rolland's writings are a
+maneuvering ground for all the incentives to war. He thus had his
+conclusions already drawn when others were beginning an attempt to come
+to terms with events. As historian, he had described the perpetual
+recurrence of war's typical accompaniments, had discussed the psychology
+of mass suggestion, and had shown the effects of wartime mentality upon
+the individual. As moralist and as citizen of the world, he had long ere
+this formulated his creed. We may say, in fact, that Rolland's mind had
+been in a sense immunized against the illusions of the crowd and against
+infection by prevalent falsehoods.
+
+Not by chance does an artist decide which problems he will consider. The
+dramatist does not make a "lucky selection" of his theme. The musician
+does not "discover" a beautiful melody, but already has it within him.
+It is not the artist who creates the problems, but the problems which
+create the artist; just as it is not the prophet who makes his prophecy,
+but the foresight which creates the prophet. The artist's choice is
+always pre-ordained. The man who has foreseen the essential problem of a
+whole civilization, of a disastrous epoch, must of necessity, in the
+decisive hour, play a leading part. He only who had contemplated the
+coming European war as an abyss towards which the mad hunt of recent
+decades, making light of every warning, had been speeding, only such a
+one could command his soul, could refrain from joining the bacchanalian
+rout, could listen unmoved to the throbbing of the war drums. Who but
+such a man could stand upright in the greatest storm of illusion the
+world has ever known?
+
+Thus it came to pass that not merely during the first hour of the war
+was Rolland in opposition to other writers and artists of the day. This
+opposition dated from the very inception of his career, and hence for
+twenty years he had been a solitary. The reason why the contrast between
+his outlook and that of his generation had not hitherto been
+conspicuous, the reason why the cleavage was not disclosed until the
+actual outbreak of war, lies in this, that Rolland's divergence was a
+matter not so much of mood as of character. Before the apocalyptic year,
+almost all persons of artistic temperament had recognized quite as
+definitely as Rolland had recognized that a fratricidal struggle between
+Europeans would be a crime, would disgrace civilization. With few
+exceptions, they were pacifists. It would be more correct to say that
+with few exceptions they believed themselves to be pacifists. For
+pacifism does not simply mean, to be a friend to peace, but to be a
+worker in the cause of peace, an [Greek: eirenopoios], as the New Testament has
+it. Pacifism signifies the activity of an effective will to peace, not
+merely the love of an easy life and a preference for repose. It
+signifies struggle; and like every struggle it demands, in the hour of
+danger, self-sacrifice and heroism. Now these "pacifists" we have just
+been considering had merely a sentimental fondness for peace; they were
+friendly towards peace, just as they were friendly towards ideas of
+social equality, towards philanthropy, towards the abolition of capital
+punishment. Such faith as they possessed was a faith devoid of passion.
+They wore their opinions as they wore their clothing, and when the time
+of trial came they were ready to exchange their pacifist ethic for the
+ethic of the war-makers, were ready to don a national uniform in matters
+of opinion. At bottom, they knew the right just as well as Rolland, but
+they had not the courage of their opinions. Goethe's saying to Eckermann
+applies to them with deadly force. "All the evils of modern literature
+are due to lack of character in individual investigators and writers."
+
+Thus Rolland did not stand alone in his knowledge, which was shared by
+many intellectuals and statesmen. But in his case, all his knowledge was
+tinged with religious fervor; his beliefs were a living faith; his
+thoughts were actions. He was unique among imaginative writers for the
+splendid vigor with which he remained true to his ideals when all others
+were deserting the standard; for the way in which he defended the
+European spirit against the raging armies of the sometime European
+intellectuals now turned patriots. Fighting as he had fought from youth
+upwards on behalf of the invisible against the world of reality, he
+displayed, as a foil to the heroism of the trenches, a higher heroism
+still. While the soldiers were manifesting the heroism of blood, Rolland
+manifested the heroism of the spirit, and showed the glorious spectacle
+of one who was able, amid the intoxication of the war-maddened masses,
+to maintain the sobriety and freedom of an unclouded mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+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 melee_,
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE SERVICE OF MAN
+
+
+In Rolland's view it was the artist's duty to serve his fatherland by
+conscientious service to all mankind, to play his part in the struggle
+by waging war against the suffering the war was causing and against the
+thousandfold torments entailed by the war. He rejected the idea of
+absolute aloofness. "An artist has no right to hold aloof while he is
+still able to help others." But this aid, this participation, must not
+take the form of fostering the murderous hatred which already animated
+the millions. The aim must be to unite the millions further, where
+unseen ties already existed, in their infinite suffering. He therefore
+took his part in the ranks of the helpers, not weapon in hand, but
+following the example of Walt Whitman, who, during the American Civil
+War, served as hospital assistant.
+
+Hardly had the first blows been struck when cries of anguish from all
+lands began to be heard in Switzerland. Thousands who were without news
+of fathers, husbands, and sons in the battlefields, stretched despairing
+arms into the void. By hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands,
+letters and telegrams poured into the little House of the Red Cross in
+Geneva, the only international rallying point that still remained.
+Isolated, like stormy petrels, came the first inquiries for missing
+relatives; then these inquiries themselves became a storm. The letters
+arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared for dealing with such an
+inundation of misery. The Red Cross had no space, no organization, no
+system, and above all no helpers.
+
+Romain Rolland was one of the first to offer personal assistance. The
+Musee Rath was quickly made available for the purposes of the Red Cross.
+In one of the small wooden cubicles, among hundreds of girls, women, and
+students, Rolland sat for more than eighteen months, engaged each day
+for from six to eight hours side by side with the head of the
+undertaking, Dr. Ferriere, to whose genius for organization myriads owe
+it that the period of suspense was shortened. Here Rolland filed
+letters, wrote letters, performed an abundance of detail work, seemingly
+of little importance. But how momentous was every word to the
+individuals whom he could help, for in this vast universe each suffering
+individual is mainly concerned about his own particular grain of
+unhappiness. Countless persons to-day, unaware of the fact, have to
+thank the great writer for news of their lost relatives. A rough stool,
+a small table of unpolished deal, the turmoil of typewriters, the bustle
+of human beings questioning, calling one to another, hastening to and
+fro--such was Romain Rolland's battlefield in this campaign against the
+afflictions of the war. Here, while other authors and intellectuals were
+doing their utmost to foster mutual hatred, he endeavored to promote
+reconciliation, to alleviate the torment of a fraction among the
+countless sufferers by such consolation as the circumstances rendered
+possible. He neither desired, nor occupied, a leading position in the
+work of the Red Cross; but, like so many other nameless assistants, he
+devoted himself to the daily task of promoting the interchange of news.
+His deeds were inconspicuous, and are therefore all the more memorable.
+
+When he was allotted the Nobel peace prize, he refused to retain the
+money for his own use, and devoted the whole sum to the mitigation of
+the miseries of Europe, that he might suit the action to the word, the
+word to the action. Ecce homo! Ecce poeta!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TRIBUNAL OF THE SPIRIT
+
+
+No one had been more perfectly forearmed than Romain Rolland. The
+closing chapters of _Jean Christophe_ foretell the coming mass illusion.
+Never for a moment had he entertained the vain hope of certain idealists
+that the fact (or semblance) of civilization, that the increase of human
+kindliness which we owe to two millenniums of Christianity, would make a
+future war, comparatively humane. Too well did he know as historian that
+in the initial outbursts of war passion the veneer of civilization and
+Christianity would be rubbed off; that in all nations alike the naked
+bestiality of human beings would be disclosed; that the smell of the
+shed blood would reduce them all to the level of wild beasts. He did not
+conceal from himself that this strange halitus is able to dull and to
+confuse even the gentlest, the kindliest, the most intelligent of souls.
+The rending asunder of ancient friendships, the sudden solidarity among
+persons most opposed in temperament now eager to abase themselves before
+the idol of the fatherland, the total disappearance of conscientious
+conviction at the first breath of the actualities of war--in _Jean
+Christophe_ these things were written no less plainly than when of old
+the fingers of the hand wrote upon the palace wall in Babylon.
+
+Nevertheless, even this prophetic soul had underestimated the cruel
+reality. During the opening days of the war, Rolland was horrified to
+note how all previous wars were being eclipsed in the atrocity of the
+struggle, in its material and spiritual brutality, in its extent, and in
+the intensity of its passion. All possible anticipations had been
+outdone. Although for thousands of years, by twos or variously allied,
+the peoples of Europe had almost unceasingly been warring one with
+another, never before had their mutual hatreds, as manifested in word
+and deed, risen to such a pitch as in this twentieth century after the
+birth of Christ. Never before in the history of mankind did hatred
+extend so widely through the populations; never did it rage so fiercely
+among the intellectuals; never before was oil pumped into the flames as
+it was now pumped from innumerable fountains and tubes of the spirit,
+from the canals of the newspapers, from the retorts of the professors.
+All evil instincts were fostered among the masses. The whole world of
+feeling, the whole world of thought, became militarized. The loathsome
+organization for the dealing of death by material weapons was yet more
+loathsomely reflected in the organization of national telegraphic
+bureaus to scatter lies like sparks over land and sea. For the first
+time, science, poetry, art, and philosophy became no less subservient to
+war than mechanical ingenuity was subservient. In the pulpits and
+professorial chairs, in the research laboratories, in the editorial
+offices and in the authors' studies, all energies were concentrated as
+by an invisible system upon the generation and diffusion of hatred. The
+seer's apocalyptic warnings were surpassed.
+
+A deluge of hatred and blood such as even the blood-drenched soil of
+Europe had never known, flowed from land to land. Romain Rolland knew
+that a lost world, a corrupt generation, cannot be saved from its
+illusions. A world conflagration cannot be extinguished by a word,
+cannot be quelled by the efforts of naked human hands. The only possible
+endeavor was to prevent others adding fuel to the flames, and with the
+lash of scorn and contempt to deter as far as might be those who were
+engaged in such criminal undertakings. It might be possible, too, to
+build an ark wherein what was intellectually precious in this suicidal
+generation might be saved from the deluge, might be made available for
+those of a future day when the waters of hatred should have subsided. A
+sign might be uplifted, round which the faithful could rally, building a
+temple of unity amid, and yet high above, the battlefields.
+
+Among the detestable organizations of the general staffs, mechanical
+ingenuity, lying, and hatred, Rolland dreamed of establishing another
+organization, a fellowship of the free spirits of Europe. The leading
+imaginative writers, the leading men of science, were to constitute the
+ark he desired; they were to be the sustainers of justice in these days
+of injustice and falsehood. While the masses, deceived by words, were
+raging against one another in blind fury, the artists, the writers, the
+men of science, of Germany, France, and England, who for centuries had
+been cooeperating for discoveries, advances, ideals, could combine to
+form a tribunal of the spirit which, with scientific earnestness, should
+devote itself to extirpating the falsehoods that were keeping their
+respective peoples apart. Transcending nationality, they could hold
+intercourse on a higher plane. For it was Rolland's most cherished hope
+that the great artists and great investigators would refuse to identify
+themselves with the crime of the war, would refrain from abandoning
+their freedom of conscience and from entrenching themselves behind a
+facile "my country, right or wrong." With few exceptions, intellectuals
+had for centuries recognized the repulsiveness of war. More than a
+thousand years earlier, when China was threatened by ambitious Mongols,
+Li Tai Peh had exclaimed: "Accursed be war! Accursed the work of
+weapons! The sage has nothing to do with these follies." The contention
+that the sage has naught to do with such follies seems to rise like an
+unenunciated refrain from all the utterances of western men of learning
+since Europe began to have a common life. In Latin letters (for Latin,
+the medium of intercourse, was likewise the symbol of supranational
+fellowship), the great humanists whose respective countries were at war
+exchanged their regrets, and offered mutual philosophical solace against
+the murderous illusions of their less instructed fellows. Herder was
+speaking for the learned Germans of the eighteenth century when he
+wrote: "For fatherland to engage in a bloody struggle with fatherland is
+the most preposterous, barbarism." Goethe, Byron, Voltaire, and
+Rousseau, were at one in their contempt for the purposeless butcheries
+of war. To-day, in Rolland's view, the leading intellectuals, the great
+scientific investigators whose minds would perforce remain unclouded,
+the most humane among the imaginative writers, could join in a
+fellowship whose members would renounce the errors of their respective
+nations. He did not, indeed, venture to hope that there would be a very
+large number of persons whose souls would remain free from the passions
+of the time. But spiritual force is not based upon numbers; its laws are
+not those of armies. In this field, Goethe's saying is applicable:
+"Everything great, and everything most worth having comes from a
+minority. It cannot be supposed that reason will ever become popular.
+Passion and sentiment may be popularized, the reason will always remain
+a privilege of the few." This minority, however, may acquire authority
+through spiritual force. Above all, it may constitute a bulwark against
+falsehood. If men of light and leading, free men of all nationalities,
+were to meet somewhere, in Switzerland perhaps, to make common cause
+against every injustice, by whomever committed, a sanctuary would at
+length be established, an asylum for truth which was now everywhere
+bound and gagged. Europe would have a span of soil for home; mankind
+would have a spark of hope. Holding mutual converse, these best of men
+could enlighten one another; and the reciprocal illumination on the part
+of such unprejudiced persons could not fail to diffuse its light over
+the world.
+
+Such was the mood in which Rolland took up his pen for the first time
+after the outbreak of war. He wrote an open letter to Hauptmann, to the
+author whom among Germans he chiefly honored for goodness and
+humaneness. Within the same hour he wrote to Verhaeren, Germany's
+bitterest foe. Rolland thus stretched forth both his hands, rightward
+and leftward, in the hope that he could bring his two correspondents
+together, so that at least within the domain of pure spirit there might
+be a first essay towards spiritual reconciliation, what time upon the
+battlefields the machine-guns with their infernal clatter were mowing
+down the sons of France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Austria-Hungary, and
+Russia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CONTROVERSY WITH GERHART HAUPTMANN
+
+
+Romain Rolland had never been personally acquainted with Gerhart
+Hauptmann. He was familiar with the German's writings, and admired their
+passionate participation in all that is human, loved them for the
+goodness with which the individual figures are intentionally
+characterized. On a visit to Berlin, he had called at Hauptmann's house,
+but the playwright was away. The two had never before exchanged letters.
+
+Nevertheless, Rolland decided to address Hauptmann as a representative
+German author, as writer of _Die Weber_ and as creator of many other
+figures typifying suffering. He wrote on August 29, 1914, the day on
+which a telegram issued by Wolff's agency, ludicrously exaggerating in
+pursuit of the policy of "frightfulness," had announced that "the old
+town of Louvain, rich in works of art, exists no more to-day." An
+outburst of indignation was assuredly justified, but Rolland endeavored
+to exhibit the utmost self-control. He began as follows: "I am not,
+Gerhart Hauptmann, one of those Frenchmen who regard Germany as a nation
+of barbarians. I know the intellectual and moral greatness of your
+mighty race. I know all that I owe to the thinkers of Old Germany; and
+even now, at this hour, I recall the example and the words of _our_
+Goethe--for he belongs to the whole of humanity--repudiating all
+national hatreds and preserving the calmness of his soul on those
+heights 'where we feel the happiness and the misfortunes of other
+peoples as our own.'" He goes on with a pathetic self-consciousness for
+the first time noticeable in the work of this most modest of writers.
+Recognizing his mission, he lifts his voice above the controversies of
+the moment. "I have labored all my life to bring together the minds of
+our two nations; and the atrocities of this impious war in which, to the
+ruin of European civilization, they are involved, will never lead me to
+soil my spirit with hatred."
+
+Now Rolland sounds a more impassioned note. He does not hold Germany
+responsible for the war. "War springs from the weakness and stupidity of
+nations." He ignores political questions, but protests vehemently
+against the destruction of works of art, asking Hauptmann and his
+countrymen, "Are you the grandchildren of Goethe or of Attila?"
+Proceeding more quietly, he implores Hauptmann to refrain from any
+attempt to justify such things. "In the name of our Europe, of which you
+have hitherto been one of the most illustrious champions, in the name of
+that civilization for which the greatest of men have striven all down
+the ages, in the name of the very honor of your Germanic race, Gerhart
+Hauptmann, I adjure you, I challenge you, you and the intellectuals of
+Germany, among whom I reckon so many friends, to protest with the
+utmost energy against this crime which will otherwise recoil upon
+yourselves." Rolland's hope was that the Germans would, like himself,
+refuse to condone the excesses of the war-makers, would refuse to accept
+the war as a fatality. He hoped for a public protest from across the
+Rhine. Rolland was not aware that at this time no one in Germany had or
+could have any inkling of the true political situation. He was not aware
+that such a public protest as he desired was quite impossible.
+
+Gerhart Hauptmann's answer struck a fiercer note than Rolland's letter.
+Instead of complying with the Frenchman's plea, instead of repudiating
+the German militarist policy of frightfulness, he attempted, with
+sinister enthusiasm, to justify that policy. Accepting the maxim, "war
+is war," he, somewhat prematurely, defended the right of the stronger.
+"The weak naturally have recourse to vituperation." He declared the
+report of the destruction of Louvain to be false. It was, he said, a
+matter of life or death for Germany that the German troops should effect
+"their peaceful passage" through Belgium. He referred to the
+pronouncements of the general staff, and quoted, as the highest
+authority for truth, the words of "the Emperor himself."
+
+Therewith the controversy passed from the spiritual to the political
+plane. Rolland, embittered in his turn, rejected the views of Hauptmann,
+who was lending his moral authority to the support of Schlieffen's
+aggressive theories. Hauptmann, declared Rolland, was "accepting
+responsibility for the crimes of those who wield authority." Instead of
+promoting harmony, the correspondence was fostering discord. In reality
+the two had no common ground for discussion. The attempt was ill-timed,
+passion still ran too high; the mists of prevalent falsehood still
+obscured vision on both sides. The waters of the flood continued to
+rise, the infinite deluge of hatred and error. Brethren were as yet
+unable to recognize one another in the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH VERHAEREN
+
+
+Having written to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German, Rolland almost
+simultaneously addressed himself to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian, who
+had been an enthusiast for European unity, but had now become one of
+Germany's bitterest foes. Perhaps no one is better entitled than the
+present writer to bear witness that Verhaeren's hostility to Germany was
+a new thing. As long as peace lasted, the Belgian poet had known no
+other ideal than that of international brotherhood, had detested nothing
+more heartily than he detested international discord. Shortly before the
+war, in his preface to Henri Guilbeaux's anthology of German poetry,
+Verhaeren had spoken of "the ardor of the nations," which, he said, "in
+defiance of that other passion which tends to make them quarrel,
+inclines them towards mutual love." The German invasion of Belgium
+taught him to hate. His verses, which had hitherto been odes to creative
+force, were henceforward dithyrambs in favor of hostility.
+
+Rolland had sent Verhaeren a copy of his protest against the destruction
+of Louvain and the bombardment of Rheims cathedral. Concurring in this
+protest, Verhaeren wrote: "Sadness and hatred overpower me. The latter
+feeling is new in my experience. I cannot rid myself of it, although I
+am one of those who have always regarded hatred as a base sentiment.
+Such love as I can give in this hour is reserved for my country, or
+rather for the heap of ashes to which Belgium has been reduced."
+Rolland's answer ran as follows: "Rid yourself of hatred. Neither you
+nor we should give way to it. Let us guard against hatred even more than
+we guard against our enemies! You will see at a later date that the
+tragedy is more terrible than people can realize while it is actually
+being played.... So stupendous is this European drama that we have no
+right to make human beings responsible for it. It is a convulsion of
+nature.... Let us build an ark as did those who were threatened with the
+deluge. Thus we can save what is left of humanity." Without acrimony,
+Verhaeren rejected this adjuration. He deliberately chose to remain
+inspired with hatred, little as he liked the feeling. In _La Belgique
+sanglante_, he declared that hatred brought a certain solace, although,
+dedicating his work "to the man I once was," he manifested his yearning
+for the revival of his former sentiment that the world was a
+comprehensive whole. Vainly did Rolland return to the charge in a
+touching letter: "Greatly, indeed, must you have suffered, to be able to
+hate. But I am confident that in your case such a feeling cannot long
+endure, for souls like yours would perish in this atmosphere. Justice
+must be done, but it is not a demand of justice that a whole people
+should be held responsible for the crimes of a few hundred individuals.
+Were there but one just man in Israel, you would have no right to pass
+judgment upon all Israel. Surely it is impossible for you to doubt that
+many in Germany and Austria, oppressed and gagged, continue to suffer
+and struggle.... Thousands of innocent persons are being everywhere
+sacrificed to the crimes of politics! Napoleon was not far wrong when he
+said: 'Politics are for us what fate was for the ancients.' Never was
+the destiny of classical days more cruel. Let us refuse, Verhaeren, to
+make common cause with this destiny. Let us take our stand beside the
+oppressed, beside all the oppressed, wherever they may dwell. I
+recognize only two nations on earth, that of those who suffer, and that
+of those who cause the suffering."
+
+Verhaeren, however, was unmoved. He answered as follows: "If I hate, it
+is because what I saw, felt, and heard, is hateful.... I admit that I
+cannot be just, now that I am filled with sadness and burn with anger. I
+am not simply standing near the fire, but am actually amid the flames,
+so that I suffer and weep. I can no otherwise." He remained loyal to
+hatred, and indeed loyal to the hatred-for-hate of Romain Rolland's
+Olivier. Notwithstanding this grave divergence of view between Verhaeren
+and Rolland, the two men continued on terms of friendship and mutual
+respect. Even in the preface he contributed to Loyson's inflammatory
+book, _Etes-vous neutre devant le crime_, Verhaeren distinguished
+between the person and the cause. He was unable, he said, "to espouse
+Rolland's error," but he would not repudiate his friendship for
+Rolland. Indeed, he desired to emphasize its existence, seeing that in
+France it was already "dangerous to love Romain Rolland."
+
+In this correspondence, as in that with Hauptmann, two strong passions
+seemed to clash; but the opponents in reality remained out of touch.
+Here, likewise, the appeal was fruitless. Practically the whole world
+was given over to hatred, including even the noblest creative artists,
+and the finest among the sons of men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE EUROPEAN CONSCIENCE
+
+
+As on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of
+inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and
+had issued it once more in vain. The writers, the men of science, the
+philosophers, the artists, all took the side of the country to which
+they happened to belong; the Germans spoke for Germany, the Frenchmen
+for France, the Englishmen for England. No one would espouse the
+universal cause; no one would rise superior to the device, my country
+right or wrong. In every land, among those of every nation, there were
+to be found plenty of enthusiastic advocates, persons willing blindly to
+justify all their country's doings, including its errors and its crimes,
+to excuse these errors and crimes upon the plea of necessity. There was
+only one land, the land common to them all, Europe, motherland of all
+the fatherlands, which found no advocate, no defender. There was only
+one idea, the most self-evident to a Christian world, which found no
+spokesman--the idea of ideas, humanity.
+
+During these days, Rolland may well have recalled sacred memories of the
+time when Leo Tolstoi's letter came to give him a mission in life.
+Tolstoi had stood alone in the utterance of his celebrated outcry, "I
+can no longer keep silence." At that time his country was at war. He
+arose to defend the invisible rights of human beings, uttering a protest
+against the command that men should murder their brothers. Now his voice
+was no longer heard; his place was empty; the conscience of mankind was
+dumb. To Rolland, the consequent silence, the terrible silence of the
+free spirit amid the hurly-burly of the slaves, seemed more hateful than
+the roar of the cannon. Those to whom he had appealed for help had
+refused to answer the call. The ultimate truth, the truth of conscience,
+had no organized fellowship to sustain it. No one would aid him in the
+struggle for the freedom of the European soul, the struggle of truth
+against falsehood, the struggle of human lovingkindness against frenzied
+hate. Rolland once again was alone with his faith, more alone than
+during the bitterest years of solitude.
+
+But Rolland has never been one to resign himself to loneliness. In youth
+he had already felt that those who are passive while wrong is being done
+are as criminal as the very wrongdoer. "Ceux qui subissent le mal sont
+aussi criminels que ceux qui le font." Upon the poet, above all, it
+seemed to him incumbent to find words for thought, and to vivify the
+words by action. It is not enough to write ornamental comments upon the
+history of one's time. The poet must be part of the very being of his
+time, must fight to make his ideas realize themselves in action. "The
+elite of the intellect constitutes an aristocracy which would fain
+replace the aristocracy of birth. But the aristocracy of intellect is
+apt to forget that the aristocracy of birth won its privileges with
+blood. For hundreds of years men have listened to the words of wisdom,
+but seldom have they seen a sage offering himself up to the sacrifice.
+If we would inspire others with faith we must show that our own faith is
+real. Mere words do not suffice." Fame is a sword as well as a laurel
+crown. Faith imposes obligations. One who had made Jean Christophe utter
+the gospel of a free conscience, could not, when the world had fashioned
+his cross, play the part of Peter denying the Lord. He must take up his
+apostolate, be ready should need arise to face martyrdom. Thus, while
+almost all the artists of the day, in their "passion d'abdiquer," in
+their mad desire to shout with the crowd, were not merely extolling
+force and victory as the masters of the hour, but were actually
+maintaining that force was the very meaning of civilization, that
+victory was the vital energy of the world, Rolland stood forth against
+them all, proclaiming the might of the incorruptible conscience. "Force
+is always hateful to me," wrote Rolland to Jouve in this decisive hour.
+"If the world cannot get on without force, it still behooves me to
+refrain from making terms with force. I must uphold an opposing
+principle, one which will invalidate the principle of force. Each must
+play his own part; each must obey his own inward monitor." He did not
+fail to recognize the titanic nature of the struggle into which he was
+entering, but the words he had written in youth still resounded in his
+memory. "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on
+earth."
+
+Just as in those earlier days, when he had wished by means of his dramas
+to restore faith to his nation, when he had set up the images of the
+heroes as examples to a petty time, when throughout a decade of quiet
+effort he had summoned the people towards love and freedom, so now,
+Rolland set to work alone. He had no party, no newspaper, no influence.
+He had nothing but his passionate enthusiasm, and that indomitable
+courage to which the forlorn hope makes an irresistible appeal. Alone he
+began his onslaught upon the illusions of the multitude, when the
+European conscience, hunted with scorn and hatred from all countries and
+all hearts, had taken sanctuary in his heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE MANIFESTOES
+
+
+The struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since
+Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression
+in the form of lying phrases, he had perforce to fight them upon their
+own ground. But the vigor of his ideas, the breath of freedom they
+conveyed, and the authority of the author's name, made of these
+articles, manifestoes which spoke to the whole of Europe and aroused a
+spiritual conflagration. Like electric sparks given off from invisible
+wires, their energy was liberated in all directions, leading here to
+terrible explosions of hatred, throwing there a brilliant light into the
+depths of conscience, in every case producing cordial excitement in its
+contrasted forms of indignation and enthusiasm. Never before, perhaps,
+did newspaper articles exercise so stupendous an influence, at once
+inflammatory and purifying, as was exercised by these two dozen appeals
+and manifestoes issued in a time of enslavement and confusion by a
+lonely man whose spirit was free and whose intellect remained unclouded.
+
+From the artistic point of view the essays naturally suffer by
+comparison with Rolland's other writings, carefully considered and
+fully elaborated. Addressed to the widest possible public, but
+simultaneously hampered by consideration for the censorship (seeing that
+to Rolland it was all important that the articles published in the
+"_Journal de Geneve_" should be reproduced in the French press), the
+ideas had to be presented with meticulous care and yet at the same time
+to be hastily produced. We find in these writings marvelous and
+ever-memorable cries of suffering, sublime passages of indignation and
+appeal. But they are a discharge of passion, so that their stylistic
+merits vary much. Often, too, they relate to casual incidents. Their
+essential value lies in their ethical bearing, and here they are of
+incomparable merit. In relation to Rolland's previous work we find that
+they display, as it were, a new rhythm. They are characterized by the
+emotion of one who is aware that he is addressing an audience of many
+millions. The author was no longer speaking as an isolated individual.
+For the first time he felt himself to be the public advocate of the
+invisible Europe.
+
+Will those of a later generation, to whom the essays have been made
+available in the volumes _Au-dessus de la melee_ and _Les precurseurs_,
+be able to understand what they signified to the contemporary world at
+the time of their publication in the newspapers? The magnitude of a
+force cannot be measured without taking the resistance into account; the
+significance of an action cannot be understood without reckoning up the
+sacrifices it has entailed. To understand the ethical import, the heroic
+character, of these manifestoes, we must recall to mind the frenzy of
+the opening year of the war, the spiritual infection which was
+devastating Europe, turning the whole continent into a madhouse. It has
+already become difficult to realize the mental state of those days. We
+have to remember that maxims which now seem commonplace, as for instance
+the contention that we must not hold all the individuals of a nation
+responsible for the outbreak of a war, were then positively criminal,
+that to utter them was a punishable offense. We must remember that
+_Au-dessus de la melee_, whose trend already seems to us a matter of
+course, was officially denounced, that its author was ostracised, and
+that for a considerable period the circulation of the essays was
+forbidden in France, while numerous pamphlets attacking them secured
+wide circulation. In connection with these articles we must always evoke
+the atmospheric environment, must remember the silence of their appeal
+amid a vastly spiritual silence. To-day, readers are apt to think that
+Rolland merely uttered self-evident truths, so that we recall
+Schopenhauer's memorable saying: "On earth, truth is allotted no more
+than a brief triumph between two long epochs, in one of which it is
+scouted as paradoxical, while in the other it is despised as
+commonplace." To-day, for the moment at any rate, we may have entered
+into a period, when many of Rolland's utterances are accounted
+commonplace because, since he wrote, they have become the small change
+of thousands of other writers. Yet there was a day when each of these
+words seemed to cut like a whip-lash. The excitement they aroused gives
+us the historic measure of the need that they should be spoken. The
+wrath of Rolland's opponents, of which the only remaining record is a
+pile of pamphlets, bears witness to the heroism of him who was the first
+to take his stand "above the battle." Let us not forget that it was then
+the crime of crimes, "de dire ce qui est juste et humain." Men were
+still so drunken with the fumes of the first bloodshed that they would
+have been fain, as Rolland himself has phrased it, "to crucify Christ
+once again should he have risen; to crucify him for saying, Love one
+another."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+ABOVE THE BATTLE
+
+
+On September 22, 1914, the essay _Au-dessus de la melee_ was published
+in "_Le Journal de Geneve_." After the preliminary skirmish with Gerhart
+Hauptmann, came this declaration of war against hatred, this foundation
+stone of the invisible European church. The title, "Above the Battle,"
+has become at once a watchword and a term of abuse; but amid the
+discordant quarrels of the factions, the essay was the first utterance
+to sound a clear note of imperturbable justice, bringing solace to
+thousands.
+
+It is animated by a strange and tragical emotion, resonant of the hour
+when countless myriads were bleeding and dying, and among them many of
+Rolland's intimate friends. It is the outpouring of a riven heart, the
+heart of one who would fain move others, breathing as it does the heroic
+determination to try conclusions with a world that has fallen a prey to
+madness. It opens with an ode to the youthful fighters. "O young men
+that shed your blood for the thirsty earth with so generous a joy! O
+heroism of the world! What a harvest for destruction to reap under this
+splendid summer sun! Young men of all nations, brought into conflict by
+a common ideal, ... all of you, marching to your deaths, are dear to
+me.... Those years of skepticism and gay frivolity in which we in
+France grew up are avenged in you.... Conquerors or conquered, quick or
+dead, rejoice!" But after this ode to the faithful, to those who believe
+themselves to be discharging their highest duty, Rolland turns to
+consider the intellectual leaders of the nations, and apostrophises them
+thus: "For what are you squandering them, these living riches, these
+treasures of heroism entrusted to your hands? What ideal have you held
+up to the devotion of these youths so eager to sacrifice themselves?
+Mutual slaughter! A European war!" He accuses the leaders of taking
+cowardly refuge behind an idol they term fate. Those who understood
+their responsibilities so ill that they failed to prevent the war,
+inflame and poison it now that it has begun. A terrible picture. In all
+countries, everything becomes involved in the torrent; among all
+peoples, there is the same ecstasy for that which is destroying them.
+"For it is not racial passion alone which is hurling millions of men
+blindly one against another.... All the forces of the spirit, of reason,
+of faith, of poetry, and of science, all have placed themselves at the
+disposal of the armies in every state. There is not one among the
+leaders of thought in each country who does not proclaim that the cause
+of his people is the cause of God, the cause of liberty and of human
+progress." He mockingly alludes to the preposterous duels between
+philosophers and men of science; and to the failure of what professed to
+be the two great internationalist forces of the age, Christianity and
+socialism, to stand aloof from the fray. "It would seem, then, that
+love of our country can flourish only through the hatred of other
+countries and the massacre of those who sacrifice themselves in defense
+of them. There is in this theory a ferocious absurdity, a Neronian
+dilettantism, which revolts me to the very depths of my being. No! Love
+of my country does not demand that I should hate and slay those noble
+and faithful souls who also love theirs, but rather that I should honor
+them and seek to unite with them for our common good." After some
+further discussion of the attitude of Christians and of socialists
+towards the war, he continues: "There was no reason for war between the
+western nations; French, English, and German, we are all brothers and do
+not hate one another. The war-preaching press is envenomed by a
+minority, a minority vitally interested in the diffusion of hatred; but
+our peoples, I know, ask for peace and liberty, and for that alone." It
+was a scandal, therefore, that at the outbreak of the war the
+intellectual leaders should have allowed the purity of their thought to
+be besmirched. It was monstrous that intelligence should permit itself
+to be enslaved by the passions of a puerile and absurd policy of race.
+Never should we forget, in the war now being waged, the essential unity
+of all our fatherlands. "Humanity is a symphony of great collective
+souls. He who cannot understand it and love it until he has destroyed a
+part of its elements, is a barbarian.... For the finer spirits of
+Europe, there are two dwelling places: our earthly fatherland, and the
+City of God. Of the one we are the guests, of the other the builders....
+It is our duty to build the walls of this city ever higher and
+stronger, that it may dominate the injustice and the hatred of the
+nations. Then shall we have a refuge wherein the brotherly and free
+spirits from out all the world may assemble." This faith in a lofty
+ideal soars like a sea-mew over the ocean of blood. Rolland is well
+aware how little hope there is that his words can make themselves
+audible above the clamor of thirty million warriors. "I know that such
+thoughts have little chance of being heard to-day. I do not speak to
+convince. I speak only to solace my conscience. And I know that at the
+same time I shall solace the hearts of thousands of others who, in all
+lands, cannot and dare not speak for themselves." As ever, he is on the
+side of the weak, on the side of the minority. His voice grows stronger,
+for he knows that he is speaking for the silent multitude.
+
+[Illustration: Romain Rolland at the time of writing _Above the
+Battle_]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED
+
+
+The essay _Au-dessus de la melee_ was the first stroke of the woodman's
+axe in the overgrown forest of hatred; thereupon, a roaring echo
+thundered from all sides, reverberating reluctantly in the newspapers.
+Undismayed, Rolland resolutely continued his work. He wished to cut a
+clearing into which a few sunbeams of reason might shine through the
+gloomy and suffocating atmosphere. His next essays aimed at illuminating
+an open space of such a character. Especially notable were _Inter Arma
+Caritas_ (October 30, 1914); _Les idoles_ (December 4, 1914); _Notre
+prochain l'ennemi_ (March 15, 1915); _Le meutre des elites_ (June 14,
+1915). These were attempts to give a voice to the silent. "Let us help
+the victims! It is true that we cannot do very much. In the everlasting
+struggle between good and evil, the balance is unequal. We require a
+century for the upbuilding of that which a day destroys. Nevertheless,
+the frenzy lasts no more than a day, and the patient labor of
+reconstruction is our daily bread. This work goes on even during an hour
+when the world is perishing around us."
+
+The poet had at length come to understand his task. It is useless to
+attack the war directly. Reason can effect nothing against the elemental
+forces. But he regards it as his predestined duty to combat throughout
+the war everything that the passions of men lead them to undertake for
+the deliberate increase of horror, to combat the spiritual poison of the
+war. The most atrocious feature of the present struggle, one which
+distinguishes it from all previous wars, is this deliberate poisoning.
+That which in earlier days was accepted with simple resignation as a
+disastrous visitation like the plague, was now presented in a heroic
+light, as a sign of "the grandeur of the age." An ethic of force, an
+ethic of destruction, was being preached. The mass struggle of the
+nations was being purposely inflamed to become the mass hatred of
+individuals. Rolland, therefore, was not, as many have supposed,
+attacking the war; he was attacking the ideology of the war, the
+artificial idolization of brutality. As far as the individual was
+concerned, he attacked the readiness to accept a collective morality
+constructed solely for the duration of the war; he attacked the
+surrender of conscience in face of the prevailing universalization of
+falsehood; he attacked the suspension of inner freedom which was
+advocated until the war should be over.
+
+His words, therefore, are not directed against the masses, not against
+the peoples. These know not what they do; they are deceived; they are
+dumb driven cattle. The diffusion of lying has made it easy for them to
+hate. "Il est si commode de hair sans comprendre." The fault lies with
+the inciters, with the manufacturers of lies, with the intellectuals.
+They are guilty, seven times guilty, because, thanks to their education
+and experience, they cannot fail to know the truth which nevertheless
+they repudiate; because from weakness, and in many cases from
+calculation, they have surrendered to the current of uninstructed
+opinion, instead of using their authority to deflect this current into
+better channels. Of set purpose, instead of defending the ideals they
+formerly espoused, the ideals of humanity and international unity, they
+have revived the ideas of the Spartans and of the Homeric heroes, which
+have as little place in our time as have spears and plate-armor in these
+days of machine-gun warfare. Heretofore, to the great spirits of all
+time, hatred has seemed a base and contemptible accompaniment of war.
+The thoughtful among the non-combatants put it away from them with
+loathing; the warriors rejected the sentiment upon grounds of chivalry.
+Now, hatred is not merely supported with all the arguments of logic,
+science, and poesy; but is actually, in defiance of gospel teaching,
+raised to a place among the moral duties, so that every one who resists
+the feeling of collective hatred is branded as a traitor. Against these
+enemies of the free spirit, Rolland takes up his parable: "Not only have
+they done nothing to lessen reciprocal misunderstanding; not only have
+they done nothing to limit the diffusion of hate; on the contrary, with
+few exceptions, they have done everything in their power to make hatred
+more widespread and more venomous. In large part, this war is their war.
+By their murderous ideologies they have led thousands astray. With
+criminal self-confidence, unteachable in their arrogance, they have
+driven millions to death, sacrificing their fellows to the phantoms
+which they, the intellectuals, have created." The persons to whom blame
+attaches are those who know, or who might have known; but who, from
+sloth, cowardice, or weakness, from desire for fame or for some other
+personal advantage, have given themselves over to lying.
+
+The hatred breathed by the intellectuals was a falsehood. Had it been a
+truth, had it been a genuine passion, those who were inspired with this
+feeling would have ceased talking and would themselves have taken up
+arms. Most people are moved either by hatred or by love, not by abstract
+ideas. For this reason, the attempt to sow dissension among millions of
+unknown individuals, the attempt to "perpetuate" hatred, was a crime
+against the spirit rather than against the flesh. It was a deliberate
+falsification to include leaders and led, drivers and driven, in a
+single category; to generalize Germany as an integral object for hatred.
+We must join one fellowship or the other, that of the truthtellers or
+that of the liars, that of the men of conscience or that of the men of
+phrase. Just as in _Jean Christophe_, Rolland, in order to show forth
+the universally human fellowship, had distinguished between the true
+France and the false, between the old Germany and the new; so now in
+wartime did he draw attention to the ominous resemblance between the war
+fanatics in both camps, and to the heroic isolation of those who were
+above the battle in all the belligerent lands. Thus did he endeavor to
+fulfill Tolstoi's dictum, that it is the function of the imaginative
+writer to strengthen the ties that bind men together. In Rolland's
+comedy _Liluli_, the "cerveaux enchaines," dressed in various national
+uniforms, dance the same Indian war-dance under the lash of Patriotism,
+the negro slave-driver. There is a terrible resemblance between the
+German professors and those of the Sorbonne. All of them turn the same
+logical somersaults; all join in the same chorus of hate.
+
+But the fellowship to which Rolland wishes to draw our attention, is the
+fellowship of solace. It is true that the humanizing forces are not so
+well organized as the forces of destruction. Free opinion is gagged,
+whereas falsehood bellows through the megaphones of the press. Truth has
+to be sought out with painful labor, for the state makes it its business
+to hide truth. Nevertheless, those who search perseveringly can discover
+truth among all nations and among all races. In these essays, Rolland
+gives many examples, drawn equally from French and from German sources,
+showing that even in the trenches, nay, that especially in the trenches,
+thousands upon thousands are animated with brotherly feelings. He
+publishes letters from German soldiers, side by side with letters from
+French soldiers, all couched in the same phraseology of human
+friendliness. He tells of the women's organizations for helping the
+enemy, and shows that amid the cruelty of arms the same lovingkindness
+is displayed on both sides. He publishes poems from either camp, poems
+which exhale a common sentiment. Just as in his _Vie des hommes
+illustres_ he had wished to show the sufferers of the world that they
+were not alone, but that the greatest minds of all epochs were with
+them, so now does he attempt to convince those who amid the general
+madness are apt to regard themselves as outcasts because they do not
+share the fire and fury of the newspapers and the professors, that they
+have everywhere silent brothers of the spirit. Once more, as of old, he
+wishes to unite the invisible community of the free. "I feel the same
+joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing
+the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly
+March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They
+show that the warmth of life persists below the surface, and that soon
+nothing will prevent its rising again." Undismayed he continues on his
+"humble pelerinage," endeavoring "to discover, beneath the ruins, the
+hearts of those who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human
+brotherhood. What a melancholy joy it is to come to their aid." For the
+sake of this consolation, for the sake of this hope, he gives a new
+significance even to war, which he has hated and dreaded from early
+childhood. "To war we owe one painful benefit, in that it has served to
+bring together those of all nations who refuse to share the prevailing
+sentiments of national hatred. It has steeled their energies, has
+inspired them with an indefatigable will. How mistaken are those who
+imagine that the ideas of human brotherhood have been stifled.... Not
+for a moment do I doubt the coming unity of the European fellowship.
+That unity will be realized. The war is but its baptism of blood."
+
+Thus does the good Samaritan, the healer of souls, endeavor to bring to
+the despairing that hope which is the bread of life. Perchance Rolland
+speaks with a confidence that runs somewhat in advance of his innermost
+convictions. But he only who realized the intense yearnings of the
+innumerable persons who at that date were imprisoned in their respective
+fatherlands, barred in the cages of the censorships, he alone can
+realize the value to such poor captives of Rolland's manifestoes of
+faith, words free from hatred, bringing at length a message of
+brotherhood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+OPPONENTS
+
+
+From the first, Rolland knew perfectly well that in a time when party
+feeling runs high, no task can be more ungrateful than that of one who
+advocates impartiality. "The combatants are to-day united in one thing
+only, in their hatred for those who refuse to join in any hymn of hate.
+Whoever does not share the common delirium, is suspect. And nowadays,
+when justice cannot spare the time for thorough investigation, every
+suspect is considered tantamount to a traitor. He who undertakes in
+wartime to defend peace on earth, must realize that he is staking his
+faith, his name, his tranquillity, his repute, and even his friendships.
+But of what value would be a conviction on behalf of which a man would
+take no risks?" Rolland was likewise aware that the most dangerous of
+all positions is that between the fronts, but this certainty of danger
+was but a tonic to his conscience. "If it be really needful, as the
+proverb assures us, to prepare for war in time of peace, it is no less
+needful to prepare for peace in time of war. In my view, the latter role
+is assigned to those who stand outside the struggle, and whose mental
+life has brought them into unusually close contact with the world-all. I
+speak of the members of that little lay church, of those who have been
+exceptionally well able to maintain their faith in the unity of human
+thought, of those for whom all men are sons of the same father. If it
+should chance that we are reviled for holding this conviction, the
+reviling is in truth an honor to us, and we may be satisfied to know
+that we shall earn the approbation of posterity."
+
+It is plain that Rolland is forearmed against opposition. Nevertheless,
+the fierceness of the onslaughts exceeded all expectation. The first
+rumblings of the storm came from Germany. The passage in the _Letter to
+Gerhart Hauptmann_, "are you the sons of Goethe or of Attila," and
+similar utterances, aroused angry echoes. A dozen or so professors and
+scribblers hastened to "chastise" French arrogance. In the columns of
+"_Die Deutsche Rundschau_," a narrow-minded pangerman disclosed the
+great secret that under the mask of neutrality _Jean Christophe_ had
+been a most dangerous French attack upon the German spirit.
+
+French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the
+publication of the essay _Au-dessus de la melee_ was reported. Difficult
+as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were
+forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the
+public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot.
+Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from
+leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper
+articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume
+from the pen of a carpet hero. This book was furnished with a thousand
+proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier,
+avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no
+lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning
+of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that
+he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher
+was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately
+falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between
+the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies
+and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press
+combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured
+to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced:
+"Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in
+alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends,
+the "ami de la premiere heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier
+work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a
+book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government
+likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect
+"materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part
+at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by
+Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the
+authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the
+fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show
+that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan
+to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies.
+
+All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the
+forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from
+a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp
+the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that
+he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the
+most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From
+a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the
+frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely
+exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued
+to develop his ideas.
+
+In the eyes of the patriots, Rolland's first crime was that he openly
+discussed the moral problems of the war. "On ne discute pas la patrie."
+The first axiom of war ethics is that those who cannot or will not shout
+with the crowd must hold their peace. Soldiers must never be taught to
+think; they must only be incited to hate. A lie which promotes
+enthusiasm is worth more in wartime than the best of truths. In
+imitation of the principles of the Catholic church, reflection, doubt,
+is deemed a crime against the infallible dogma of the fatherland. It was
+enough that Rolland should wish to turn things over in his mind, instead
+of unquestioningly affirming the current political theses. Thereby he
+abandoned the "attitude francaise"; thereby he was stamped as "neutre."
+In those days "neutre" was a good rime to "traitre."
+
+Rolland's second crime was that he desired to be just to all mankind,
+that he continued to regard the enemy as human beings, that among them
+he distinguished between guilty and not guilty, that he had as much
+compassion for German sufferers as for French, that he did not hesitate
+to refer to the Germans as brothers. The dogma of patriotism prescribed
+that for the duration of the war the feelings of humanitarianism should
+be stifled. Justice should be put away on the top shelf, to keep company
+there, until victory had been secured, with the divine command, Thou
+shalt not kill. One of the pamphlets against Rolland bears as its motto,
+"Pendant une guerre tout ce qu'on donne de l'amour a l'humanite, on le
+vole a la patrie"--though it must be observed that from the outlook of
+those who share Rolland's views, the order of the terms might well be
+inverted.
+
+The third crime, the offense which seemed most unpardonable of all, and
+the one most dangerous to the state, was that Rolland refused to regard
+a military victory as likely to furnish the elixir of morality, to
+promote spiritual regeneration, to bring justice upon earth. Rolland's
+sin lay in holding that a just and bloodless peace, a complete
+reconciliation, a fraternal union of the European nations, would be more
+fruitful of blessing than an enforced peace, which could only sow the
+dragon's teeth of hatred and of new wars. In France at this date, those
+who wished to fight the war to a finish, to fight until the enemy had
+been utterly crushed, coined the term "defeatist" for those who desired
+peace to be based upon a reasonable understanding. Thus was paralleled
+the German terminology, which spoke of "Flaumachern" (slackers) and of
+"Schmachfriede" (shameful peace). Rolland, who had devoted the whole of
+his life to the elucidation of moral laws higher than those of force,
+was stigmatized as one who would poison the morale of the armies, as
+"l'initiateur du defaitisme." To the militarists, he seemed to be the
+last representative of "dying Renanism," to be the center of a moral
+power, and for this reason they endeavored to represent his ideas as
+nonsensical, to depict him as a Frenchman who desired the defeat of
+France. Yet his words stood unchallenged: "I wish France to be loved. I
+wish France to be victorious, not through force; not solely through
+right (even that would be too harsh); but through the superiority of a
+great heart. I wish that France were strong enough to fight without
+hatred; strong enough to regard even those whom she must strike down, as
+her brothers, as erring brothers, to whom she must extend her fullest
+sympathy as soon as she has put it beyond their power to injure her."
+Rolland made no attempt to answer even the most calumnious of attacks.
+He quietly let the invectives pass, knowing that the thought which he
+felt himself commissioned to announce, was inviolable and imperishable.
+Never had he fought men, but only ideas. The hostile ideas, in this
+case, had long since been answered by the figures of his own creation.
+They had been answered by Olivier, the free Frenchman who hated hatred;
+by Faber, the Girondist, to whom conscience stood higher than the
+arguments of the patriots; by Adam Lux, who compassionately asked his
+fanatical opponent, "N'es tu pas fatigue de ta baine"; by Teulier, and
+by all the great characters through whom during more than two decades he
+had been giving expression to his outlook upon the struggle of the day.
+He was unperturbed at standing alone against almost the entire nation.
+He recalled Chamfort's saying, "There are times when public opinion is
+the worst of all possible opinions." The immeasurable wrath, the
+hysterical frenzy of his opponents, confirmed his conviction that he was
+right, for he felt that their clamor for force betrayed their sense of
+the weakness of their own arguments. Smilingly he contemplated their
+artificially inflamed anger, addressing them in the words of his own
+Clerambault: "You say that yours is the better way? The only good way?
+Very well, take your own path, and leave me to take mine. I make no
+attempt to compel you to follow me. I merely show you which way I am
+going. What are you so excited about? Perhaps at the bottom of your
+hearts you are afraid that my way is the right one?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+FRIENDS
+
+
+As soon as he had uttered his first words, a void formed round this
+brave man. As Verhaeren finely phrased it, he positively loved to
+encounter danger, whereas most people shun danger. His oldest friends,
+those who had known his writings and his character from youth upwards,
+left him in the lurch; prudent folk quietly turned their backs on him;
+newspaper editors and publishers refused him hospitality. For the
+moment, Rolland seemed to be alone. But, as he had written in _Jean
+Christophe_, "A great soul is never alone. Abandoned by friends, such a
+one makes new friends, and surrounds himself with a circle of that
+affection of which he is himself full."
+
+Necessity, the touchstone of conscience, had deprived him of friends,
+but had also brought him friends. It is true that their voices were
+hardly audible amid the clangor of the opponents. The war-makers had
+control of all the channels of publicity. They roared hatred through the
+megaphones of the press. Friends could do no more than give expression
+to a few cautious words in such petty periodicals as could slip through
+the meshes of the censorship. Enemies formed a compact mass, flowing to
+the attack in a huge wave (whose waters were ultimately to be dispersed
+in the morass of oblivion); his friends crystallized slowly and secretly
+around his ideas, but they were steadfast. His enemies were a regiment
+advancing fiercely to the attack at the word of command; his friends
+were a fellowship, working tranquilly, and united only through love.
+
+The friends in Paris had the hardest task. It was barely possible for
+them to communicate with him openly. Half of their letters to him and
+half of his replies were lost on the frontier. As from a beleaguered
+fortress, they hailed the liberator, the man who was freely proclaiming
+to the world the ideals which they were forbidden to utter. Their only
+possible way of defending their ideas was to defend the man. In
+Rolland's own fatherland, Amedee Dunois, Fernand Despres, Georges Pioch,
+Renaitour, Rouanet, Jacques Mesnil, Gaston Thiesson, Marcel Martinet,
+and Severine, boldly championed him against calumny. A valiant woman,
+Marcelle Capy, raised the standard, naming her book _Une voix de femme
+dans la melee_. Separated from him by the blood-stained sea, they looked
+towards him as towards a distant lighthouse upon the rock, and showed
+their brothers the signal of hope.
+
+In Geneva there formed round him a group of young writers, disciples and
+friends, winning strength from his strength. P. J. Jouve author of _Vous
+etes des hommes_ and _Danse des morts_, glowing with anger and with love
+of goodness, suffering intensely at witnessing the injustice of the
+world, Olivier redivivus, gave expression in his poems to his hatred for
+force. Rene Arcos, who like Jouve had realized all the horror of war
+and who hated war no less intensely, had a clearer comprehension of the
+dramatic moment, was more thoughtful than Jouve, but equally simple and
+kindhearted. Arcos extolled the European ideal; Charles Baudouin the
+ideal of eternal goodness. Franz Masereel, the Belgian artist, developed
+his humanist plaint in a series of magnificent woodcuts. Guilbeaux,
+zealot for the social revolution, ever ready to fight like a gamecock
+against authority, founded his monthly review "demain," which was a
+faithful representative of the European spirit for a time, until it
+succumbed because of its passion for the Russian revolution. Charles
+Baudouin founded the monthly review, "Le Carmel," providing a city of
+refuge for the persecuted European spirit, and a platform upon which the
+poets and imaginative writers of all lands could assemble under the
+banner of humanity. Jean Debrit in "La Feuille" combated the
+partisanship of the Latin Swiss press and attacked the war. Claude de
+Maguet founded "Les Tablettes," which, through the boldness of its
+contributors and through the drawings of Masereel, became the most
+vigorous periodical in Switzerland. A little oasis of independence came
+into existence, and hither the breezes from all quarters wafted
+greetings from the distance. Here alone was it possible to breathe a
+European air.
+
+The most remarkable feature of this circle was that, thanks to Rolland,
+enemy brethren were not excluded from spiritual fellowship. Whereas
+everywhere else people were infected with the hysteria of mass hatred
+or were terrified lest they should expose themselves to suspicion, and
+therefore avoided their sometime intimates of enemy countries like the
+pestilence should they chance to meet them in the streets of some
+neutral city, at a time when relatives were afraid to exchange letters
+of enquiry regarding the life or death of those of their own blood,
+Rolland would not for a moment deny his German friends. Never, indeed,
+had he shown more love to those among them who remained faithful, at an
+epoch when to love them was dangerous. He made himself known to them in
+public, and wrote to them freely. His words concerning these friendships
+will never be forgotten: "Yes, I have German friends; just as I have
+French, English, and Italian friends; just as I have friends among the
+members of every race. They are my wealth, which I am proud of, and
+which I seek to preserve. If a man has been so fortunate as to encounter
+loyal souls, persons with whom he can share his most intimate thoughts,
+persons with whom he is connected by brotherly ties, these ties are
+sacred, and the hour of trial is the last of hours in which they should
+be rent asunder. How cowardly would be the refusal to recognize these
+friends, in deference to the impudent demand of a public opinion which
+has no rights over our feelings.... How painful, how tragical, these
+friendships are at such a moment, the letters will show when they are
+published. But it is precisely by means of such friendships that we can
+defend ourselves against hatred, more murderous than war, for it poisons
+the wounds of war, and harms the hater equally with the object of
+hate."
+
+Immeasurable is the debt which friends and numberless unseen companions
+in adversity owe to Rolland for his brave and free attitude. He set an
+example to all those who, though they shared his sentiments, were
+isolated in obscurity, and who needed some such point of crystallization
+before their thoughts and feelings could be consolidated. It was above
+all for those who were not yet sure of themselves that this archetypal
+personality provided so splendid a stimulus. Rolland's steadfastness put
+younger men to shame. In his company we were stronger, freer, more
+genuine, more unprejudiced. Human loving kindness, transfigured by his
+ardor, radiated like a flame. What bound us together was not that we
+chanced to think alike, but a passionate exaltation, which often became
+a positive fanaticism for brotherhood. We foregathered in defiance of
+public opinion and in defiance of the laws of the belligerent states,
+exchanging confidences without reserve; our comradeship exposed us to
+all sorts of suspicions; these things served but to draw us closer
+together, and in many memorable hours we felt with a veritable
+intoxication the unprecedented quality of our friendship. We were but a
+couple of dozen who thus came together in Switzerland; Frenchmen,
+Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians. We few were the only ones
+among the hundreds of millions who could look one another in the face
+without hatred, exchanging our innermost thoughts. This little troop
+was all that then constituted Europe. Our unity, a grain of dust in the
+storm which was raging through the world, was perhaps the seed of the
+coming fraternity. How strong, how happy, how grateful did we often
+feel. For without Rolland, without the genius of his friendship, without
+the connecting link constituted by his disposition, we should never have
+attained to freedom and security. Each of us loved him in a different
+way, and all of us regarded him with equal veneration. To the French, he
+was the purest spiritual expression of their homeland; to us, he was the
+wonderful counterpart of the best in our own world. In this circle that
+formed round Rolland there was the sense of fellowship which has always
+characterized a religious community in the making. The hostility between
+our respective nations, and the consciousness of danger, fired our
+friendship to the pitch of exaggeration; while the example of the
+bravest and freest man we had ever known, brought out all that was best
+in us. When we were near him, we felt ourselves to be in the heart of
+true Europe. Whoever was able to know Rolland's inmost essence,
+acquired, as in the ancient saga, new energy for the wrestle with brute
+force.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LETTERS
+
+
+All that Rolland gave in those days to his friends and collaborators of
+the European fellowship, all that he gave by his immediate proximity,
+was but a part of his nature. For beyond these personal limits, he
+diffused a consolidating and helpful influence. Whoever turned to him
+with a question, an anxiety, a distress, or a suggestion, received an
+answer. In hundreds upon hundreds of letters he spread the message of
+brotherhood, splendidly fulfilling the vow he had made a quarter of a
+century earlier, at the time when Tolstoi's letter had brought him
+spiritual healing. In Rolland's self there had come to life, not only
+Jean Christophe the believer, but likewise Leo Tolstoi, the great
+consoler.
+
+Unknown to the world, he shouldered a stupendous burden during the five
+years of the war. For whoever found himself in revolt against the time
+and in conflict with the prevailing miasma of falsehood, whoever needed
+counsel in a matter of conscience, whoever wanted aid, knew where he
+could turn for what he sought. Who else in Europe inspired such
+confidence? The unknown friends of Jean Christophe, the nameless
+brothers of Olivier, hidden in out-of-the-way parts, knowing no one to
+whom they could whisper their doubts--in whom could they better confide
+than in this man who had first brought them tidings of goodness? They
+sent him requests, submitted proposals, disclosed the turmoil of their
+consciences. Soldiers wrote to him from the trenches; mothers penned
+letters to him in secret. Many of the writers did not venture to give
+their names, merely wishing to send a message of sympathy and to
+inscribe themselves citizens of that invisible "republic of free souls"
+which the author of _Jean Christophe_ had founded amid the warring
+nations. Rolland accepted the infinite labor of being the centralizing
+point and administrator of all these distresses and plaints, of being
+the recipient of all these confessions, of being the consoler of a world
+divided against itself. Wherever there was a stirring of European, of
+universally human sentiment, Rolland did his best to receive and sustain
+it; he was the crossways towards which all these roads converged. At the
+same time he was continuously in communication with leading
+representatives of the European faith, with those of all lands who had
+remained loyal to the free spirit. He studied the periodicals of the day
+for messages of reconciliation. Wherever a man or a work was devoted to
+the reconsolidation of Europe, Rolland's help was ready.
+
+These hundreds and thousands of letters combine to form an ethical
+achievement such as has not been paralleled by any previous writer. They
+brought happiness to countless solitary souls, strength to the wavering,
+hope to the despairing. Never was the poet's mission more nobly
+fulfilled. Considered as works of art, these letters, many of which have
+already been published, are among the finest and maturest of Rolland's
+literary creations. To bring solace is the most intimate purpose of his
+art. Here, when speaking as man to man he can give himself without
+stint, he displays a rhythmical energy, an ardor of lovingkindness,
+which makes many of the letters rank with the loveliest poems of our
+time. The sensitive modesty which often makes him reserved in
+conversation, was no longer a hindrance. The letters are frank
+confessions, wherein his free spirit converses freely with its fellows,
+disclosing the author's goodness, his passionate emotion. That which is
+so generously poured forth for the benefit of unknown correspondents, is
+the most intimate essence of his nature. Like Colas Breugnon he can say:
+"Voila mon plus beau travail: les ames que j'ai sculptees."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE COUNSELOR
+
+
+During these years, many people, young for the most part, came to
+Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing
+that their convictions were opposed to war, they ought to refuse
+military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and
+following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they
+should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether
+they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their
+country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought
+spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed
+to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed
+principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working
+moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.
+
+To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your
+conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no
+ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to
+another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own
+model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should
+seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He
+who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he
+follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple
+imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention
+to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate
+his ideal and save his inner freedom--provided always he acts in
+accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential
+was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot
+desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who
+claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other
+maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong,
+the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept
+away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the
+crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical
+instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a
+Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of
+serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died
+for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.
+
+There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth
+is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own.
+Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism,
+serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all
+remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave."
+Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself
+believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is
+cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie.
+There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner
+experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are
+the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind,
+must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a
+moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in
+consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under
+modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion.
+"A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of
+self-sacrifice."
+
+Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such
+free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any
+man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of
+the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our
+present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever
+broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked
+within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania
+were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had
+asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier
+as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians would
+have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments,
+a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt,
+could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom
+of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the
+recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience
+should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one
+recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for
+mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and
+strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation
+of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the
+intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a
+despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons
+who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the
+collective impulse."
+
+Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands
+that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own
+conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks
+clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by
+words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire
+generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the
+world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which
+he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it
+was the moral simplicity of his own example.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE SOLITARY
+
+
+Rolland's life was now in touch with the life of the whole world. It
+radiated influence in all directions. Yet how lonely was this man during
+the five years of voluntary exile. He dwelt apart at Villeneuve by the
+lake of Geneva. His little room resembled that in which he had lived in
+Paris. Here, too, were piles of books and pamphlets; here was a plain
+deal table; here was a piano, the companion of his hours of relaxation.
+His days, and often his nights were spent at work. He seldom went for a
+walk, and rarely received a visitor, for his friends were cut off from
+him, and even his parents and his sister could only get across the
+frontier about once a year. But the worst feature of this loneliness was
+that it was loneliness in a glass house. He was continually spied upon:
+his least words were listened for by eavesdroppers; provocative agents
+sought him out, proclaiming themselves revolutionists and sympathizers.
+Every letter was read before it reached him; every word he spoke over
+the telephone was recorded; every interview was kept under observation.
+Romain Rolland in his glass prison-house was the captive of unseen
+powers.
+
+[Illustration: Rolland's Mother]
+
+It seems hardly credible to-day that during the last two years of the
+war Romain Rolland, to whose words the world is now eager to listen,
+should have had no facility for expressing his ideas in the newspapers,
+no publisher for his books, no possibility of printing anything beyond
+an occasional review article. His homeland had repudiated him; he was
+the "fuoruscito" of the middle ages, was placed under a ban. The more
+unmistakably he proclaimed his spiritual independence, the less did he
+find himself regarded as a welcome guest in Switzerland. He was
+surrounded by an atmosphere of secret suspicion. By degrees, open
+attacks had been replaced by a more dangerous form of persecution. A
+gloomy silence was established around his name and works. His earlier
+companions had more and more withdrawn from him. Many of the new
+friendships had been dissolved, for the younger men in especial were
+devoting their interest to political questions instead of to things of
+the spirit. The more stormy the outside world, the more oppressive the
+stillness of Rolland's existence. He had no wife as helpmate. What to
+him was the best of all companionship, the companionship of his own
+writings, was now unattainable, for he had no freedom of publication in
+France. His country was closed to him, his place of refuge was beset
+with a hundred eyes. Most homeless among the homeless, he lived, as his
+beloved Beethoven had said, "in the air," lived in the realm of the
+ideal, in invisible Europe. Nothing shows better the energy of his
+living goodness than that he was no whit embittered by his experience,
+and that the ordeal has served but to strengthen his faith. For this
+utter solitude among men was a true fellowship with mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE DIARY
+
+
+There was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse
+daily--his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the
+war, Rolland recorded his sentiments, his secret thoughts, and the
+messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned
+conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added
+to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than
+twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally
+hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors
+would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts.
+He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole
+remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to
+contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate
+views.
+
+It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this
+document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual
+history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and
+freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired
+moments are those when he is most personal. Consequently, just as the
+letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior
+to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human
+document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the
+war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what
+Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes,
+applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of
+personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was
+delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought
+help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and
+commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and
+loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in
+travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith.
+These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that
+faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the
+inexorable creditor we name Life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES
+
+
+Rolland opened his campaign against hatred almost immediately after the
+war began. For more than a year he continued to deliver his message in
+opposition to the frenzied screams of rancor arising from all lands. His
+efforts proved futile. The war-current rose yet higher, the stream being
+fed by new and ever new blood flowing from innocent victims. Again and
+again some additional country became involved in the carnage. At length,
+as the clamor still grew louder, Rolland paused for a moment to take
+breath. He felt that it would be madness were he to continue the attempt
+to outcry the cries of so many madmen.
+
+After the publication of _Au-dessus de la melee_, Rolland withdrew from
+public participation in the controversies with which the essays had been
+concerned. He had spoken his word; he had sown the wind and had reaped
+the whirlwind. He was neither weary in well-doing nor was he weak in
+faith, but he realized that it was useless to speak to a world which
+would not listen. In truth he had lost the sublime illusion with which
+he had been animated at the outset, the belief that men desire reason
+and truth. To his intelligence now grown clearer it was plain that men
+dread truth more than anything else in the world. He began, therefore,
+to settle accounts with his own mind by writing a satirical romance, and
+by other imaginative creations, while continuing his vast private
+correspondence. Thus for a time he was out of the hurly-burly. But after
+a year of silence, when the crimson flood continued to swell, and when
+falsehood was raging more furiously than ever, he felt it his duty to
+reopen the campaign. "We must repeat the truth again and again," said
+Goethe to Schermann, "for the error with which truth has to contend is
+continually being repreached, not by individuals, but by the mass."
+There was so much loneliness in the world that it had become necessary
+to form new ties. Signs of discontent and revolt in the various lands
+were more plentiful. More numerous, too, were the brave men in active
+revolt against the fate which was being forced on them. Rolland felt
+that it was incumbent upon him to give what support he could to these
+dispersed fighters, and to inspirit them for the struggle.
+
+In the first essay of the new series, _La route en lacets qui monte_,
+Rolland explained the position he had reached in December, 1916. He
+wrote: "If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith
+to which I gave expression in _Above the Battle_ has been shaken (it
+stands firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to
+speak to him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical
+insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of
+obstinacy, pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their
+minds because they do not wish to see the light. But we, as between
+brothers of all the nations; as between those who have known how to
+defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their faith in human
+solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid silence,
+oppression, and grief--we do well to exchange, as this year draws to a
+close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one another that
+during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning, that it
+never has been and never will be extinguished. In the abyss of suffering
+into which Europe is plunged, those who wield the pen must be careful
+never to add an additional pang to the mass of pangs already endured,
+and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the burning flood of hate.
+Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits which, athwart the
+mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavoring to break a trail for
+others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are courageously
+attempting in their respective lands to make their fellow-countrymen
+aware of their own faults.... My task is different, for it is to remind
+the hostile brethren of Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their
+best, to recall to them reasons for hoping that there will one day be a
+wiser and more loving humanity."
+
+The essays of the new series appeared, for the most part, in various
+minor reviews, seeing that the more influential and widely circulated
+periodicals had long since closed their columns to Rolland's pen. When
+we study them as a whole, in the collective volume entitled _Les
+precurseurs_, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been
+replaced by intense compassion, this corresponding to the change which
+had taken place at the fighting front. In all the armies, during the
+third year of the war, the fanatical impetus of the opening phases had
+vanished, and the men were now animated by a tranquil but stubborn
+sentiment of duty. Rolland is perhaps even more impassioned and more
+revolutionary in his outlook, and yet the essays are characterized by
+greater gentleness than of old. What he writes is no longer at grips
+with the war, but seems to soar above the war. His gaze is fixed upon
+the distance; his mind ranges down the centuries in search of like
+experiences; looking for consolation, he endeavors to discover a meaning
+in the meaningless. He recurs to the idea of Goethe, that human progress
+is effected by a spiral ascent. At a higher level men return to a point
+only a little above the old. Evolution and reversion go hand in hand.
+Thus he attempts to show that even at this tragical hour we can discern
+intimations of a better day.
+
+The essays comprising _Les precurseurs_ no longer attack adverse
+opinions and the war. They merely draw our attention to the existence in
+all countries of persons who are fighting for a very different ideal, to
+the existence of those heralds of spiritual unity whom Nietzsche speaks
+of as "the pathfinders of the European soul." It is too late to hope for
+anything from the masses. In the address _Aux peuples assassines_, he
+has nothing but pity for the millions, for those who, with no will of
+their own, must be the mute instruments of others' aims, for those
+whose sacrifice has no other meaning than the beauty of self-sacrifice.
+His hope now turns exclusively towards the elite, towards the few who
+have remained free. These can bring salvation to the world by splendid
+spiritual imagery wherein all truth is mirrored. For the nonce, indeed,
+their activities seem unavailing, but their labors remain as a permanent
+record of their omnipresence. Rolland provides masterly analyses of the
+work of such contemporary writers; he adds silhouettes from earlier
+times; and he gives a portrait of Tolstoi, the great apostle of the
+doctrine of human freedom, with an account of the Russian teacher's
+views on war.
+
+To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the
+volume _Les precurseurs_, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918,
+entitled _Empedocle d'Agrigente et l'age de la haine_. The great sage of
+classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his
+first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows
+that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of
+carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal
+oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history
+invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as
+inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of
+happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the
+time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages
+have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness
+of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to
+hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible.
+
+Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of
+hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those
+who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the
+infinite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+LILULI
+
+
+During these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European,
+had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb.
+To many it may seem strange that Rolland's first imaginative work to be
+written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should
+have been a farcical comedy, _Liluli_. Yet this lightness of mood sprang
+from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when
+contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world,
+turned to irony as a means of abreaction--to employ a term introduced by
+the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric
+spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all
+Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from
+the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to
+bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to
+maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath
+remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be
+shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.
+
+_Liluli_ is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy, or
+rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the
+world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having
+become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost
+more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the
+time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more
+pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of
+1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the
+mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"),
+wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable,
+there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe.
+France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly
+forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight
+on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built
+across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so
+pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation
+progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more
+farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy,
+the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form
+of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols
+of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to
+seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is
+fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it
+were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and
+finally mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the
+scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in
+cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being
+a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being
+the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all
+her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare
+to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is
+a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own
+intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear
+testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it
+furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great
+Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and
+of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth
+is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split
+your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will
+never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void.
+Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be
+gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the
+roar of laughter which will set me free?"
+
+In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating
+laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be
+possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense
+against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new
+work maintains the rhythm of _Colas Breugnon_, with its vibrant rhymes,
+and although in _Liluli_ as in _Colas Breugnon_ there is a strain of
+raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of
+chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days
+of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from
+a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart
+overfull. In _Colas Breugnon_ we find the geniality, the joviality, of a
+broad laugh; in _Liluli_ the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a
+fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and
+kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world
+are heaped between the old France of _Colas Breugnon_ and the new France
+of _Liluli_. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder
+caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of
+the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the
+blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the
+war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my
+feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering
+throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of
+laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter
+irony.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+CLERAMBAULT
+
+
+_Liluli_, the tragi-comedy, was an outcry, a groan, a painful burst of
+mockery; it was an elementary gesture of reaction against suffering that
+was almost physical. But the author's serious, tranquil, and enduring
+settlement of accounts with the times is his novel, _Clerambault,
+l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_, which was slowly
+brought to completion in the space of four years. It is not
+autobiography, but a transcription of Rolland's ideas. Like Jean
+Christophe, it is simultaneously the biography of an imaginary
+personality and a comprehensive picture of the age. Matter is here
+collected that is elsewhere dispersed in manifestoes and letters.
+Artistically, it is the subterranean link between Rolland's manifold
+activities. Amid the hindrances imposed by his public duties, and amid
+the difficulties deriving from other outward circumstances, the author
+built the work upwards out of the depths of sorrow to the heights of
+consolation. It was not completed until the war was over, when Rolland
+had returned to Paris in the summer of 1920.
+
+Just as little as _Jean Christophe_ can _Clerambault_ properly be termed
+a novel. It is something less than a novel, and at the same time a
+great deal more. It describes the development, not of a man, but of an
+idea. As in _Jean Christophe_, so here, we have a philosophy presented,
+but not as something ready-made, complete, a finished datum. In company
+with a human being, we rise stage by stage from error and weakness
+towards clarity. In a sense it is a religious book, the history of a
+conversion, of an illumination. It is a modern legend of the saints in
+the form of the life history of a simple citizen. In a word, as the
+sub-title phrases it, we have here the story of a conscience. The
+ultimate significance of the book is freedom, the attainment of
+self-knowledge, but raised to the heroic plane inasmuch as knowledge
+becomes action. The scene is played in the intimate recesses of a man's
+nature, where he is alone with truth. In the new book, therefore, there
+is no countertype, as Olivier was the countertype to Jean Christophe;
+nor do we find in _Clerambault_ what was in truth the countertype of
+_Jean Christophe_, external life. Clerambault's countertype,
+Clerambault's antagonist, is himself; is the old, the earlier, the weak
+Clerambault; is the Clerambault with whom the new, the knowing, the true
+man has to wrestle, whom the new Clerambault has to overcome. The hero's
+heroism is not displayed, as was that of Jean Christophe, in a struggle
+with the forces of the visible world. Clerambault's war is waged in the
+invisible realm of thought.
+
+At the outset, therefore, Rolland designed to call the book "un
+roman-meditation." It was to have been entitled "L'un contre tous," this
+being an adaptation of La Boetie's title _Contr'un_. The proposed name
+was, however, ultimately abandoned for fear of misunderstanding. The
+spiritual character of the new work recalls a long-forgotten tradition,
+the meditations of the old French moralists, the sixteenth century
+stoics who during a time of war-madness endeavored in besieged Paris to
+maintain their intellectual serenity by engaging in Platonic dialogues.
+The war itself, however, was not to be the theme, for the free soul does
+not strive with the elements. The author's intention was to discuss the
+spiritual accompaniments of this war, for these to Rolland seemed as
+tragical as the destruction of millions of men. His concern was the
+destruction of the individual soul in the deluge produced by the
+overflowing of the mass soul. He wished to show how strenuous an effort
+must be made by any one who would escape from the tyranny of the herd
+instinct; to display the hateful enslavement of individuals by the
+revengeful, jealous, and authoritarian mentality of the crowd; to depict
+the terrific efforts which a man must make if he would avoid being
+sucked into the maelstrom of epidemic falsehood. He hoped to make it
+clear that what appears to be the simplest thing in the world is in
+reality the most difficult of tasks in these epochs of excessive
+solidarity, namely, for a man to remain what he really is, and not to
+become that which the levelling forces of the world, the fatherland, or
+some other artificial community, would fain make of him.
+
+Romain Rolland deliberately refrained from casting his hero in a heroic
+mold, the treatment thus differing from what he had chosen in the case
+of Jean Christophe. Agenor Clerambault is an inconspicuous figure, a
+quiet fellow of little account, an author of no particular note, one of
+those persons whose literary work succeeds in pleasing a complaisant
+generation, though it has no significance for posterity. He has the
+nebulous idealism of mediocre minds; he hymns the praises of perpetual
+peace and international conciliation. His own tepid goodness makes him
+believe that nature is good, is man's wellwisher, desiring to lead
+mankind gently onward towards a more beautiful future. Life does not
+torment him with problems, and he therefore extols life amid the
+tranquil comforts of his bourgeois existence. Blessed with a kindly and
+somewhat simple-minded wife, and with two children, a son and a
+daughter, he may be considered a modern Theocritus wearing the ribbon of
+the Legion of Honor, singing the joyful present and the still more
+joyful future of our ancient cosmos.
+
+The quiet suburban household is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt with
+the news of the outbreak of war. Clerambault takes the train to Paris;
+and no sooner is he sprinkled with spray from the hot waves of
+enthusiasm, than all his ideals of international amity and perpetual
+peace vanish into thin air. He returns home a fanatic, oozing hate, and
+steaming with phrases. Under the influence of the tremendous storm he
+begins to sound his lyre: Theocritus has become Pindar, a war poet.
+Rolland gives a marvelously vivid description of something every one of
+us has witnessed, showing how Clerambault, like all persons of average
+nature, really takes a delight in horrors, however unwilling he may be
+to admit it even to himself. He is rejuvenated, his life seems to move
+on wings; the enthusiasm of the masses stirs the almost extinguished
+flame of enthusiasm in his own breast; he is fired by the national fire;
+he is physically and mentally refreshed by the new atmosphere. Like so
+many other mediocrities, he secures in these days his greatest literary
+triumph. His war songs, precisely because they give such vigorous
+expression to the sentiments of the man in the street, become a national
+property. Fame and public favor are showered upon him, so that (at this
+time when millions of his fellows are perishing) he feels well,
+self-confident, alive as never before.
+
+His pride is increased, his joy of life accentuated, when his son Maxime
+leaves for the front filled with martial ardor. His first thought, a few
+months later, when the young man comes home on leave, is that Maxime
+should retail to him all the ecstasies of war. Strangely enough,
+however, the young soldier, whose eyes still burn with the sights he has
+seen, is unresponsive. Not wishing to mortify his father, he does not
+positively attempt to silence the latter's paeans, but for his part, he
+maintains silence. For days this muteness stands between them, and the
+father is unable to solve the riddle. He feels dumbly that his son is
+concealing something. But shame binds both their tongues. On the last
+day of the furlough, Maxime suddenly pulls himself together, and begins,
+"Father, are you quite sure ...?" But the question remains unfinished,
+utterance is choked. Still silent, the young man returns to the
+realities of war.
+
+A few days later there is a fresh offensive. Maxime is reported missing.
+Soon his father learns that he is dead. Now Clerambault gropes for the
+meaning of those last words behind the silence, and is tormented by the
+thought of what was left unspoken. He locks himself into his room, and
+for the first time he is alone with his conscience. He begins to
+question himself in search of the truth, and throughout the long night
+he communes with his soul as he traverses the road to Damascus. Piece by
+piece he tears away the wrapping of lies with which he has enveloped
+himself, until he stands naked before his own criticism. Prejudices have
+eaten deep into his skin, so that the blood flows as he plucks them from
+him. They must all be surrendered; the prejudice of the fatherland, the
+prejudice of the herd, must go; in the end he recognizes that one thing
+only is true, one thing only sacred, life. A fever of enquiry consumes
+him; the old Adam perishes in the flame; when the day dawns he is a new
+man.
+
+He knows the truth now, and wishes to strengthen his own faith. He goes
+to some of his fellows and talks to them. Most of them do not understand
+him. Others refuse to understand him. Some, however, among whom Perrotin
+the academician is notable, are yet more alarming. They know the truth.
+To their penetrating vision the nature of the popular idols has long
+been plain. But they are cautious folk. They compress their lips and
+smile at one another like the augurs of ancient Rome. Like Buddha, they
+take refuge in Nirvana, looking down calmly upon the madness of the
+world, tranquilly seated upon their pedestals of stone. Clerambault
+calls to mind that other Indian saint, who took a solemn vow that he
+would not withdraw from the world until he had delivered mankind from
+suffering. The truth still glows too fiercely within him; he feels as if
+it would stifle him as it strives to gush forth in volcanic eruption.
+Once again he plunges into the solitude of a wakeful night. Men's words
+have sounded empty. He listens to his conscience, and it speaks with the
+voice of his son. Truth knocks at the door of his soul, and he opens to
+truth. In this lonely night Clerambault begins to speak to his fellows;
+no longer to individuals, but to all mankind. For the first time the man
+of letters becomes aware of the poet's true mission, his responsibility
+for all persons and for everything. He knows that he is beginning a new
+war, he who alone must wage war for all. But the consciousness of truth
+is with him, his heroism has begun.
+
+"Forgive us, ye Dead," the dialogue of the country with its children, is
+published. At first no one heeds the pamphlet. But after a time it
+arouses public animosity. A storm of indignation bursts upon
+Clerambault, threatening to lay his life in ruins. Friends forsake him.
+Envy, which had long been crouching for a spring, now sends whole
+regiments to the attack. Ambitious colleagues seize the opportunity of
+proclaiming their patriotism in contrast with his deplorable sentiments.
+Worst of all for Clerambault in that his innocent wife and daughter
+have to suffer on his account. They do not upbraid him, but he feels as
+if he had aimed a shaft against them. He who has hitherto sunned himself
+in the warmth of family life and has enjoyed the comforts of modest
+fame, is now absolutely alone.
+
+Nevertheless he continues on his course, although these stations of the
+cross become harder and harder. Rolland shows how Clerambault finds new
+friends, only to discover that they too fail to understand him. How his
+words are mutilated, his ideas misapplied. How he is overwhelmed to
+learn that his fellows, those whom he wishes to help, have no desire for
+truth, but are nourished by falsehood; that they are continually in
+search, not of freedom, but of some new form of slavery. (In these
+wonderful passages the reader is again and again reminded of
+Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.) He perseveres in his pilgrimage even
+when he has lost faith in his power to help his fellow men, for this is
+no longer his goal. He passes men by, marching onward towards the
+unseen, towards truth; his love for truth exposing him ever more
+pitilessly to the hatred of men. By degrees he becomes entangled in a
+net of calumnies; his troubles develop into a "Clerambault affair"; at
+length a prosecution is initiated. The state has recognized its enemy in
+the free man. But while the case is still in progress, the "defeatist"
+meets his fate from the pistol bullet of a fanatic. Clerambault's end
+recalls the opening of the world catastrophe with the assassination of
+Jaures.
+
+Never has the tragedy of conscience been more simply and more
+poignantly depicted than in this account of the martyrdom of an average
+man. Rolland's ripe spiritual powers, his magical faculty for combining
+mastery with the human touch, are here at their highest. Never was his
+outlook over the world so extensive, never was the view so serene, as
+from this last summit. And yet, though we are thus led upwards to the
+consideration of the ultimate problems of the spirit, we start from the
+plain of everyday life. It is the soul of a commonplace man, the soul it
+might seem of a weakling, which moves through this long passion. Herein
+lies the marvel of the moral solace which the book conveys. Rolland was
+the first to recognize the defect of his previous writings, considered
+as means of helping the average man. In the heroic biographies, heroism
+is displayed only by those in whom the heroic soul is inborn, only by
+those whose flight is winged with genius. In _Jean Christophe_, the
+moral victory is a triumph of native energy. But in _Clerambault_ we are
+shown that even the weakling, even the mediocre man, every one of us,
+can be stronger than the whole world if he have but the will. It is open
+to every man to be true, open to every man to win spiritual freedom, if
+he be at one with his conscience, and if he regard this fellowship with
+his conscience as of greater value than fellowship with men and with the
+age. For each man there is always time, for each man there is always
+opportunity, to become master of realities. Aert, the first of Rolland's
+heroes to show himself greater than fate, speaks for us all when he
+says: "It is never too late to be free!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE LAST APPEAL
+
+
+For five years Romain Rolland was at war with the madness of the times.
+At length the fiery chains were loosened from the racked body of Europe.
+The war was over, the armistice had been signed. Men were no longer
+murdering one another; but their evil passions, their hate, continued.
+Romain Rolland's prophetic insight celebrated a mournful triumph. His
+distrust of victory, his reiterated warnings that conquerors are
+merciless, were more than justified by the revengeful reality. "Victory
+in arms is disastrous to the ideal of an unselfish humanity. Men find it
+extraordinarily difficult to remain gentle in the hour of triumph."
+These forecasts were terribly fulfilled. Forgotten were all the fine
+words anent the victory of freedom and right. The Versailles conference
+devoted itself to the installation of a new regime of force and to the
+humiliation of a defeated enemy. What the idealism of simpletons had
+expected to be the end of all wars, proved, as the true idealists who
+look beyond men towards ideas had foreseen, the seed of fresh hatred and
+renewed acts of violence.
+
+Once again, at the eleventh hour, Rolland raised his voice in an
+address to the man whom sanguine persons then regarded as the last
+representative of idealism, as the advocate of perfect justice. Woodrow
+Wilson, when he landed in Europe, was received by the exultant cries of
+millions. But the historian is aware "that universal history is but a
+succession of proofs that the conqueror invariably grows arrogant and
+thus plants the seed of new wars." Rolland felt that there was never
+greater need for a policy that should be moral, not militarist, that
+should be constructive, not destructive. The citizen of the world, the
+man who had endeavored to free the war from the stigma of hate, now
+tried to perform the same service on behalf of the peace. The European
+addressed the American in moving terms: "You alone, Monsieur le
+President, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the
+policy of the nations, you alone enjoy world-wide moral authority. You
+inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate
+hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one
+another.... Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses,
+disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into
+excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the
+parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction.... Heir of
+George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a
+party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of
+the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full
+authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness
+and in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The
+world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations
+and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future
+hail you by the name of Reconciler!"
+
+The prophet's voice was drowned by the clamors for revenge. Bismarckism
+triumphed. Literally fulfilled was the prophecy that the peace would be
+as inhuman as the war had been. Humanity could find no abiding place
+among men. When the regeneration of Europe might have been begun, the
+sinister spirit of conquest continued to prevail. "There are no victors,
+but only vanquished."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE MIND
+
+
+Despite all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued
+his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of
+fellowship. On the day when peace was signed, June 26, 1919, he
+published in "_L'Humanite_" a manifesto composed by himself and
+subscribed by sympathizers of all nationalities. In a world falling to
+ruin, it was to be the cornerstone of the invisible temple, the refuge
+of the disillusioned. With masterly touch Rolland sums up the past, and
+displays it as a warning to the future. He issues a clarion call.
+
+"Brain workers, comrades, scattered throughout the world, kept apart for
+five years by the armies, the censorship, and the mutual hatred of the
+warring nations, now that barriers are falling and frontiers are being
+reopened, we issue to you a call to reconstitute our brotherly union,
+and to make of it a new union more firmly founded and more strongly
+built than that which previously existed.
+
+"The war has disordered our ranks. Most of the intellectuals placed
+their science, their art, their reason, at the service of the
+governments. We do not wish to formulate any accusations, to launch any
+reproaches. We know the weakness of the individual mind and the
+elemental strength of great collective currents. The latter, in a
+moment, swept the former away, for nothing had been prepared to help in
+the work of resistance. Let this experience, at least, be a lesson to us
+for the future!
+
+"First of all, let us point out the disasters that have resulted from
+the almost complete abdication of intelligence throughout the world, and
+from its voluntary enslavement to the unchained forces. Thinkers,
+artists, have added an incalculable quantity of envenomed hate to the
+plague which devours the flesh and the spirit of Europe. In the arsenal
+of their knowledge, their memory, their imagination, they have sought
+reasons for hatred, reasons old and new, reasons historical, scientific,
+logical, and poetical. They have labored to destroy mutual understanding
+and mutual love among men. So doing, they have disfigured, defiled,
+debased, degraded, Thought, of which they were the representatives. They
+have made it an instrument of the passions; and (unwittingly, perchance)
+they have made it a tool of the selfish interests of a political or
+social clique, of a state, a country, or a class. Now, when, from the
+fierce conflict in which the nations have been at grips, the victors and
+the vanquished emerge equally stricken, impoverished, and at the bottom
+of their hearts (though they will not admit it) utterly ashamed of their
+access of mania--now, Thought, which has been entangled in their
+struggles, emerges, like them, fallen from her high estate.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration: Original manuscript of _The Declaration of the
+Independence of the Mind_]
+
+"Arise! Let us free the mind from these compromises, from these unworthy
+alliances, from these veiled slaveries! Mind is no one's servitor. It is
+we who are the servitors of mind. We have no other master. We exist to
+bear its light, to defend its light, to rally round it all the strayed
+sheep of mankind. Our role, our duty, is to be a center of stability, to
+point out the pole star, amid the whirlwind of passions in the night.
+Among these passions of pride and mutual destruction, we make no choice;
+we reject them all. Truth only do we honor; truth that is free,
+frontierless, limitless; truth that knows naught of the prejudices of
+race or caste. Not that we lack interest in humanity. For humanity we
+work; but for humanity as a whole. We know nothing of peoples. We know
+the People, unique and universal; the People which suffers, which
+struggles, which falls and rises to its feet once more, and which
+continues to advance along the rough road drenched with its sweat and
+its blood; the People, all men, all alike our brothers. In order that
+they may, like ourselves, realize this brotherhood, we raise above their
+blind struggles the Ark of the Covenant--Mind, which is free, one and
+manifold, eternal."
+
+Many hundreds of persons have signed this manifesto, for leading spirits
+in every land accept the message and make it their own. The invisible
+republic of the spirit, the universal fatherland, has been established
+among the races and among the nations. Its frontiers are open to all who
+wish to dwell therein; its only law is that of brotherhood; its only
+enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his
+home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is
+the heir, not of one people but of all peoples. Henceforward he is an
+indweller in all tongues and in all countries, in the universal past and
+the universal future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+ENVOY
+
+
+Strange has been the rhythm of this man's life, surging again and again
+in passionate waves against the time, sinking once more into the abyss
+of disappointment, but never failing to rise on the crest of faith
+renewed. Once again we see Romain Rolland as prototype of those who are
+magnificent in defeat. Not one of his ideals, not one of his wishes, not
+one of his dreams, has been realized. Might has triumphed over right,
+force over spirit, men over humanity.
+
+Yet never has his struggle been grander, and never has his existence
+been more indispensable, than during recent years; for it is his
+apostolate alone which has saved the gospel of crucified Europe; and
+furthermore he has rescued for us another faith, that of the imaginative
+writer as the spiritual leader, the moral spokesman of his own nation
+and of all nations. This man of letters has preserved us from what would
+have been an imperishable shame, had there been no one in our days to
+testify against the lunacy of murder and hatred. To him we owe it that
+even during the fiercest storm in history the sacred fire of brotherhood
+was never extinguished. The world of the spirit has no concern with the
+deceptive force of numbers. In that realm, one individual can outweigh a
+multitude. For an idea never glows so brightly as in the mind of the
+solitary thinker; and in the darkest hour we were able to draw
+consolation from the signal example of this poet. One great man who
+remains human can for ever and for all men rescue our faith in
+humanity.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+I
+
+CRITICAL STUDIES
+
+Les origines du theatre lyrique moderne. (Histoire de l'opera en Europe
+avant Lully et Scarlatti.) Fontemoing, Paris, 1895.
+
+Cur ars picturae apud Italos XVI saeculi deciderit Fontemoing, Paris,
+1895.
+
+Millet. Duckworth, London, 1902 (has appeared in English translation
+only).
+
+Vie de Beethoven. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+serie IV, No. 10, Paris, 1903; Hachette, Paris, 1907; another edition
+with woodcuts by Perrichon, J. P. Laurens, P. A. Laurens, and Perrichon,
+published by Edouard Pelletan, Paris, 1909.
+
+Le Theatre du Peuple. Cahiers de la quinzaine, serie V, No. 4, Paris,
+1903; Hachette, Paris, 1908; enlarged edition, Hachette, Paris, 1913;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Paris als Musikstadt. Marquardt, Berlin, 1905 (has appeared in German
+translation only).
+
+La vie de Michel-Ange. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, serie VII, No. 18; serie VIII, No. 2, Paris, 1906; Hachette,
+Paris, 1907. Another edition in Les maitres de l'art series, Librairie
+de l'art, ancien et moderne, Plon, Paris, 1905.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. L'opera avant l'opera.
+2. Le premier opera joue a Paris: L'Orfeo de Luigi Rossi. 3. Notes sur
+Lully. 4. Gluck. 5. Gretry. 6. Mozart.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui, Hachette, Paris, 1908. 1. Berlioz. 2. Wagner:
+Siegfried; Tristan. 3. Saint-Saens. 4. Vincent d'Indy. 5. Richard
+Strauss. 6. Hugo Wolf. 7. Don Lorenzo Perosi 8. Musique francaise et
+musique allemande. 9. Pelleas et Melisande. 10. Le renouveau: esquisse
+du movement musical a Paris depuis 1870.
+
+Paul Dupin. Mercure musical. S. J. M. 15/12, 1908.
+
+Haendel. (Les maitres de la musique.) Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. (Vie des hommes illustres.) Hachette, Paris, 1911.
+
+L'humble vie heroique. Pensees choisies et precedees d'une introduction
+par Alphonse Seche. Sansot, Paris, 1912.
+
+Empedocle d' Agrigente. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1917; La maison francaise
+d'art et edition, Paris, 1918.
+
+Voyage musical aux pays du passe. With woodcuts by D. Glans. Edouard
+Joseph, Paris, 1919; Hachette, Paris, 1920.
+
+Ecole des Hates Etudes Socials (1900-1910). Alcan, Paris, 1910.
+
+
+II
+
+POLITICAL STUDIES
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Ollendorff, Paris, 1915.
+
+Les precurseurs. L'Humanite, Paris, 1919.
+
+Aux peuples assassines. Jeunesses Socialistes Romandes, La
+Chaux-de-Fonds, 1917; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Aux peuples assassines (under the title: Civilisation). Privately
+printed, Paris, 1918.
+
+Aux peuples assassines. As frontispiece a wood-engraving by Frans
+Masereel. Restricted circulation. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+III
+
+NOVELS
+
+Jean-Christophe. 15 parts 1904-1912. Cahiers de la quinzaine, Serie V,
+Nos. 9 and 10; Serie VI, No. 8; Serie VIII, Nos. 4, 6, 9; Serie IX, Nos.
+13, 14, 15; Serie X, Nos. 9, 10; Serie XI, Nos. 7, 8; Serie XIII, Nos.
+5, 6; Serie XIV, Nos. 2, 3; Paris, 1904 et seq.
+
+Jean-Christophe. 10 vols. 1. L'aube. 2. Le matin. 3. L'adolescent 4 La
+revolte. (1904-1907.)
+
+Jean-Christophe a Paris. 1. La foire sur la place. 2. Antoinette. 3.
+Dans la maison. (1908-1910.)
+
+Jean-Christophe. La fin du voyage. 1. Les amies. 2. Le buisson ardent 3.
+La nouvelle journee. (1910-1912.) Ollendorff, Paris.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Ollendorff, Paris, 1918.
+
+Pierre et Luce. Le Sablier, Geneva, 1920; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Clerambault. Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+IV
+
+PREFACES
+
+Introduction to Une lettre inedite de Tolstoi, Cahiers de la quinzaine,
+Serie III, No. 9, Paris, 1902.
+
+Haendel et le Messie. (Preface to Le Messie de G. F. Haendel by Felix
+Raugel.) Depot de la Societe cooeperative des compositeurs de musique,
+Paris, 1912.
+
+Stendhal et la musique. (Preface to La vie de Haydn in the complete
+edition of Stendhal's works.) Champion, Paris, 1913.
+
+Preface to Celles qui travaillent by Simone Bodeve, Ollendorff, Paris,
+1913.
+
+Preface to Une voix de femme dans la melee by Marcelle Capy, Ollendorff,
+Paris, 1916.
+
+Anthologie des poetes contre la guerre. Le Sablier, Genera, 1920.
+
+
+V
+
+DRAMAS
+
+Saint Louis. (5 acts.) Revue de Paris, March-April, 1897.
+
+Aert. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1898.
+
+Les loups. (3 acts.) Georges Bellais, Paris, 1898.
+
+Le triomphe de la raison. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris,
+1899.
+
+Danton. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1900; Cahiers de la
+quinzaine, Serie II, No. 6, 1901.
+
+Le quatorze juillet. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, Serie III, No.
+11, Paris, 1902.
+
+Le temps viendra. (3 acts.) Cahiers de la quinzaine, Serie IV, No. 14,
+Paris, 1903; Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+Les trois amoureuses. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+La Montespan. (3 acts.) Revue de l'art dramatique, Paris, 1904.
+
+Theatre de la Revolution. Les loups. Danton. Le quatorze juillet.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Les tragedies de la foi. Saint Louis. Aert. Le triomphe de la raison.
+Hachette, Paris, 1909 (now transferred to Ollendorff).
+
+Liluli (with woodcuts by Frans Masereel). Le Sablier, Geneva, 1919;
+Ollendorff, Paris, 1920.
+
+
+TRANSLATIONS
+
+ENGLISH
+
+Millet. Translated by Clementina Black. Duckworth, London, 1902.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by F. Rothwell. Drane, London, 1907.
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Constance Hull. With a brief analysis of the
+sonatas, symphonies, and the quartets, by A. Eaglefield Hull, and 24
+musical illustrations and 4 plates and an introduction by Edward
+Carpenter. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London, 1917.
+
+The Life of Michael Angelo. Translated by Frederic Lees. Heinemann,
+London, 1912.
+
+Tolstoy. Translated by Bernard Miall. Fisher Unwin, London, 1911.
+
+Some Musicians of former Days. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul,
+Trench, Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+Handel. Translated by A. Eaglefield Hull. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
+London, 1916.
+
+Musicians of To-day. Translated by Mary Blaiklock. Kegan Paul, Trench,
+Trubner, London, 1915.
+
+The People's Theater. Translated by Barrett H. Clark. Holt, New York,
+1918; C. Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Go to the Ant. (Reflections on reading Auguste Sorel.) Translated by De
+Kay. Atlantic Monthly, May, 1919, New York.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by G. Lowes Dickinson,
+Bowes, Cambridge, 1914.
+
+Above the Battlefield. With an introduction by Rev. Richards Roberts, M.
+A. Friends' Peace Committee, London, 1915.
+
+Above the Battle. Translated by C. K. Ogden. G. Allen & Unwin, London,
+1916.
+
+The Idols. Translated by C. K. Ogden. With a letter by R. Rolland to
+Dr. van Eeden on the rights of small nations. Bowes, Cambridge, 1915.
+
+The Forerunners. Translated by Eden & Cedar Paul. G. Allen & Unwin,
+London, 1920; Harcourt, Brace, U. S. A., 1920.
+
+The Fourteenth of July and Danton: two plays of the French Revolution.
+Translated with a preface by Barrett H. Clarke. Holt, New York, 1918; G.
+Allen & Unwin, London, 1919.
+
+Liluli. The Nation, London, Sept 20 to Nov. 29, 1919; Boni & Liveright,
+New York, 1920.
+
+Jean Christophe. Translated by Gilbert Cannan. Heinemann, London,
+1910-1913; Holt, New York, 1911-1913.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by K. Miller. Holt, New York. 1921.
+
+
+GERMAN
+
+Beethoven. Translated by L. Langnese-Hug. Rascher, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Michelangelo. Translated by W. Herzog. Ruetten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1918.
+
+Michelangelo. Rascher, Zurich, 1919.
+
+Tolstoi. Translated by W. Herzog. Ruetten & Loenig, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Den hingeschlachteten Voelkern, translated by Stefan Zweig. Rascher,
+Zurich, 1918.
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Ruetten & Loening, Frankfort.
+
+Les precurseurs. Ruetten & Loeing, Frankfort, 1920.
+
+Johann Christof. Translated by Otto & Erna Grautoff. Ruetten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1912-1918.
+
+Meister Breugnon. Translated by Otto & Etna Grautoff. Ruetten & Loening,
+Frankfort, 1919.
+
+Clerambault. Translated by Stefan Zweig. Ruetten & Loening, Frankfort,
+1920.
+
+Die Woelfe. Translated by W. Herzog. Mueller, Munich, 1914.
+
+Danton. Translated by Lucy von Jacobi and W. Herzog. Mueller, Munich,
+1919.
+
+Die Zeit wird kommen. Translated by Stefan Zweig. "Die Zwoelf Buecher,"
+Tal, Vienna, 1920.
+
+
+SPANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by J. R. Jimenez, a la Residentia de
+Estudiantes de Madrid, 1914.
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Delgado & Santonja, Madrid, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Toro y Gomez. Ollendorff, Paris-Madrid,
+1905-1910.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Agence de Librairie, Madrid, 1919.
+
+
+ITALIAN
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Avanti, Milan, 1916.
+
+Aux peuples assassines. Translated by Monanni with drawings by Frans
+Masereel. Libreria Internationale, Zurich, 1917.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Cesare Alessandri. Sonzogno, Milan, 1920.
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by Maria Venti Felice le Monnier,
+Florence. [In the press.]
+
+
+RUSSIAN
+
+Theatre de la Revolution. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg, St.
+Petersburg. 1909.
+
+Theatre du Peuple. Translated by Joseph Goldenberg. St. Petersburg.
+1909.
+
+Empedocle d'Agrigente. [In the press.]
+
+Jean-Christophe. Unauthorized translation in 4 vols. Vetcherni Zvon,
+Moscow, 1912.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Authorized translation by M. Tchlenoff.
+
+
+DANISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Branner, Copenhagen, 1915.
+
+Tolstoi. Branner, Copenhagen, 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Denmark & Norway, 1917.
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Lios, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Hagerup, Copenhagen, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Denmark & Norway; Norstedt, Stockholm, 1917.
+
+
+CZECH
+
+Vie de Michel-Ange. Translated by M. Kalassova. Prague, 1912.
+
+Danton. 1920.
+
+
+POLISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Jacewski, Warsaw, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Edwige Sienkiewicz. Vols.
+
+I & II, Bibljoteka Sfinska, Warsaw, 1910; the remaining vols., Maski,
+Cracow, 1917-19--.
+
+
+SWEDISH
+
+Vie de Beethoven. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Vie de Michelange. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1916.
+
+Vie de Tolstoi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Haendel. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Millet. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1916.
+
+Musiciens d'aujourd'hui. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Musiciens d'autrefois. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Voyage musical au pays du passe. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt,
+Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Au-dessus de la melee. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+1915.
+
+Les precurseurs. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Theatre de la Revolution. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier,
+Stockholm. 1917.
+
+Tragedies de la foi. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1917.
+
+Le temps viendra. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm.
+
+Liluli. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm. 1920.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Bonnier, Stockholm.
+1913-1917.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Translated by Mrs. Akermann, Norstedt, Stockholm. 1919.
+
+Clerambault In course of preparation. Bonnier, Stockholm.
+
+
+DUTCH
+
+Vie de Beethoven, Simon, Amsterdam, 1913.
+
+Jean-Christophe. Brusse, Rotterdam, 1915.
+
+L'aube. Special edition, W. F. J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, 1916.
+
+Colas Breugnon. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1919.
+
+
+JAPANESE
+
+Tolstoi Seichi Naruse, Tokyo, 1916. And many other unauthorized
+translations.
+
+
+GREEK
+
+Beethoven. Translated by Niramos. 1920.
+
+
+WORKS ON ROMAIN ROLLAND
+
+FRENCH
+
+_Jean Bonnerot._ Romain Rolland (Extraits de ses oeuvres avec
+introduction biographique), Cahiers du Centre, Nevers, 1909.
+
+_Lucien Maury._ Figures litteraires. Perrin, 1911.
+
+_J. H. Retinger._ Histoire de la litterature francaise du romantisme a
+nos jours. B. Grasset, 1911.
+
+_Jules Bertaut._ Les romanciers du nouveau siecle. Sansot, 1912.
+
+_Paul Seippel._ Romain Rolland, l'homme et l'oeuvre. Ollendorff, 1913.
+
+_Marc Elder._ Romain Rolland. Paris, 1914
+
+_Robert Dreyfus._ Maitres contemporains. (Peguy, Claudel, Suares, Romain
+Rolland.) Paris, 1914.
+
+_Daniel Halevy._ Quelques nouveaux maitres. Cahiers du Centre. Figuiere,
+1914.
+
+_G. Dwelshauvers._ Romain Rolland. Vue caracteristique de l'homme et de
+l'oeuvre. Ed. de la Belgique artistique et litteraire, Brussels, 1913
+or 1914.
+
+_Paul Souday._ Les drames philosophiques de Romain Rolland. Emile Paul,
+Paris, 1914.
+
+_Max Hochstaetter._ Essai sur l'oeuvre de Romain Rolland. Fischbacher,
+Paris; Georg & Co., Geneva, 1914.
+
+_Henri Guilbeaux._ Pour Romain Rolland. Jeheber, Geneva, 1915.
+
+_Massis._ Romain Rolland contre la France. Floury, Paris, 1915.
+
+_P. H. Loyson._ Etes-vous neutre devant le crime? Payot, Paris and
+Lausanne, 1916.
+
+_Renaitour et Loyson._ Dans la melee. Ed. du Bonnet Rouge, 1916.
+
+_Isabelle Debran._ M. Romain Rolland initiateur du defaitisme.
+(Introduction de Diodore.) Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Jacques Servance._ Reponse a Mme. Isabelle Debran. Comite d'initiative
+en faveur d'une paix durable, Neuchatel, 1916.
+
+_Charles Baudouin_, Romain Rolland calomnie. Le Carmel, Geneva, 1918.
+
+_Daniel Halevy._ Charles Peguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine. Payot,
+Paris, 1918 et seq.
+
+_Paul Colin._ Romain Rolland, Bruxelles, 1920.
+
+_P. J. Jouve._ Romain Rolland vivant, Ollendorff, 1920.
+
+
+OTHER LANGUAGES
+
+_Otto Grautoff._ Romain Rolland, Frankfurt, 1914.
+
+_Winifred Stephens._ French Novelists of To-day. Second series. J. Lane,
+London and New York, 1915.
+
+_Albert L. Guerard._ Five Masters of French Romance. Scribner, New York,
+1916.
+
+_Dr. J. Ziegler._ Romain Rolland in "Johann Christof," ueber Juden und
+Judentum. v. Dr. Ziegler, Rabbiner in Karlsbad. Vienna, 1918.
+
+_Agnes Darmesteter._ Twentieth Century French Writers. London, 1919.
+
+_Blumenfeld._ Etude sur Romain Rolland, en langue yiddisch. Cahiers de
+litterature et d'art. Paris, 1920.
+
+_Albert Schinz._ French Literature of the War. Appleton, New York, 1920.
+
+_Pedro Cesare Dominici._ De Lutecia, Arte y Critica. Ollendorff, Madrid.
+
+_Papini._ Studii di Romain Rolland. Florence, 1916.
+
+_F. F. Curtis._ Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreichs.
+Kiepenheuer, Potsdam, 1920.
+
+_Walter Kuechler._ Vier Vortraege ueber R. Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Fritz
+v. Unruh. Wuerzburg, 1919.
+
+
+MUSIC CONNECTED WITH ROMAIN ROLLAND'S WRITINGS
+
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Trois pieces pour piano.)
+
+1. L'oncle Gottfried (dialogue avec Christophe).
+
+2. Meditation sur un passage du "Matin."
+
+3. Berceuse de Louisa. Chant du Pelerin (piano et chant). Paroles de
+Paul Gerhardt Ed. Demets, Paris, 1907.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Jean-Christophe. (Suite pour quatuor a cordes.)
+
+1. La mort de l'oncle Gottfried.
+
+2. Bienvenue au petit Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Paul Dupin._ Pastorale, Sabine. 1. Dans le Jardinet. Piano et quatuor.
+Transcription pour piano et violon. Ed. Senart et Roudanez, Paris, 1908.
+
+_Albert Doyen._ Le Triomphe de la Liberte. (Scene finale du Quatorze
+Juillet). Prix de la ville de Paris, 1913. (Soli, Orchestre et Choeurs.)
+Ed. A. Leduc, Paris.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+_Above the Battle_, 266, 290, 291, 293-6, 297, 305, 329.
+
+Abbesse de Jouarre, l', 125.
+
+_Aert_, 66, 73, 77-8, 83-5, 87, 112.
+
+Aert, 77-8, 83-5, 121, 125, 161, 198, 244, 260, 347.
+
+Antoinette, in _Jean Christophe_, 4, 165, 175, 212, 224.
+
+Arcos, Rene, 312, 313.
+
+Art, love of, and love of mankind, 20;
+  epic quality in Rolland's, 63-66, 67 ff;
+  moral force in Rolland's, 63 ff;
+  Tolstoi's views on, 18-20;
+  universality of, 26.
+
+_Au-dessus de la melee, see Above the Battle._
+
+_Aux peuples assassines_, 332.
+
+
+Bach, Friedemann, 173.
+
+Bach, Johann Sebastian, 173, 245.
+
+_Ballades francaises_, 250.
+
+Balzac, 64, 65, 169, 177, 250.
+
+Barres, Maurice, 59, 62.
+
+Baudouin, Charles, 313.
+
+_Beethoven_, 50, 137 ff, 140-3, 150.
+
+Beethoven, 10, 18, 19, 40, 45, 67, 104, 140-143, 144, 145, 147, 148,
+151, 161, 163, 172, 174, 175, 182, 245, 252, 325, 328;
+  festival, 35, influence of, on Rolland's childhood, 5 ff;
+  Jean Christophe's resemblance to, 173.
+
+_Beginnings of Opera, The_, 34.
+
+_Belgique sanglante, la_, 282.
+
+Berlioz, 10, 150.
+
+Bibliography, 357 ff.
+
+Biographies, heroic, 133-53;
+  unwritten, 150-3.
+
+Bonn, 35, 140, 141.
+
+Brahms, 174.
+
+Breal, Michel, 35.
+
+Breugnon, Colas, in _Colas Breugnon_, 241-53, 319;
+  spiritual kinship of, with Jean Christophe, 244-48;
+  see _Colas Breugnon_.
+
+Brunetiere, 16.
+
+Burckhardt, Jakob, 16.
+
+Byron, 275.
+
+
+"_Cahiers de la quinzaine_," 20, 40, 43, 50, 143.
+
+_Caligula_, 73.
+
+"_Carmel, le_," 313.
+
+Carnot, 99.
+
+Claes, in _Aert_, 87.
+
+Clamecy, birthplace of Rolland, 3, 4, 99.
+
+Claudel, Paul, 89, 44, 59.
+
+_Clerambault, l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre_,
+339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Agenor, in _Clerambault_, 310, 339-347.
+
+Clerambault, Maxime, 343 ff.
+
+Clifford, General, in _A Day Will Come_, 120, 121, 125.
+
+_Colas Breugnon_, 241-253, 337;
+  as an artistic production, 249-51;
+  gauloiseries in, 249-51;
+  origin of, 241-43.
+
+Comedie Francaise, 71, 74.
+
+Conscience, story of, in Clerambault, 339-47;
+  _see_ Freedom of conscience.
+
+Corneille, 91, 92.
+
+Couthon, 99.
+
+_Credo quia verum_, 16, 17.
+
+Corinne, in _Jean Christophe_, 211.
+
+Cycles, of Rolland, 67-71.
+
+
+D'Alembert, 87.
+
+_Danse des morts_, 312.
+
+_Danton_, 41, 101, 106-9, 113, 117.
+
+Danton, 99, 106-9, 113, 126.
+
+Debrit, Jean, 313.
+
+Debussy, 35, 175.
+
+Declaration of the independence of the mind, 351-354.
+
+Decsey, Ernest, 174.
+
+Defeat, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 61, 62, 83 ff,
+110 ff, 134 ff, 139.
+
+"Defeatism," 297-303.
+
+De Maguet, Claude, 313.
+
+"_Demain_," 313.
+
+Depres, Suzanne, 175.
+
+Desmoulins, 126.
+
+Despres, Fernand, 312.
+
+_Deutscher Musiker in Paris, Ein_, 174.
+
+"_Deutsche Rundschau, Die_," 305.
+
+_Don Carlos_, 101.
+
+Dostoievsky, 2, 346.
+
+Doyen, 105.
+
+D'Oyron, in _The Wolves_, 114.
+
+Drama, and the masses, _see_ People's Theater;
+  erotic _vs._ political, 127 ff;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 69, 70, 86-99, 100-18.
+
+Dramatic writings, of Rolland, 25, 32, 39, 41, 57-130;
+  craftsmanship of, 127-130;
+  cycles, 67-71;
+  Drama of the Revolution, 100-130;
+  People's Theater, 85-130;
+  poems, 28;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unknown cycle, 71-75.
+
+_Drames philosophiques_, 125.
+
+Dreyfus affair, 38, 39, 106, 115, 119, 133.
+
+Dunois, Amedee, 312.
+
+Duse, Eleanore, 175.
+
+
+_Empedocle d'Agrigente et l'age de la haine_, 72, 333 ff.
+
+_Etes-vous neutre devant le crime_, 283.
+
+
+Faber, in _Le triomphe de la raison_, 111, 114, 309.
+
+Faith, in Rolland's philosophy of life, 77-79, 81 ff, 166-71, 244 ff;
+  tragedies of, 76-85.
+
+Fellowship, of free spirits, during the war, 273 ff, 311-316: 351, 354.
+
+_Fetes de Beethoven, les_, 141.
+
+"_Feuille, la_," 313.
+
+Flaubert, 37, 58, 80, 177.
+
+_Forerunners, The_, 290, 339-334
+
+Fort, Paul, 250.
+
+_Fourteenth of July, The_, 101-2, 103-5, 109.
+
+France, after 1870, 57;
+  picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 211-216
+
+France, Anatole, 58, 84, 169.
+
+Frank, Cesar, 175.
+
+Frank, Ludwig, 321.
+
+Freedom, of conscience, 287 ff, 257-9, 119, 274, 285-8, 298 ff, 320 ff,
+339-47;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Triumph of Reason_.
+
+French literature, state of, after 1870, 37, 58 ff.
+
+French Revolution, 68, 98 ff, 100-120, 121, 122;
+  _see_ Drama of the
+  Revolution;
+  _also_ People's Theater. French stage, after 1870, 86-89.
+
+
+_Galeries des femmes de Shakespeare_, 6.
+
+Gamache, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+"Gauloiseries," 250.
+
+Generations, conflicting ideas of the 229-234.
+
+Geneva, during the   Great War, 268 ff.
+
+Germany, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 217-220.
+
+Girondists, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 110 ff, 121, 129, 169, 260.
+
+_Gli Baglioni_, 73, 74.
+
+Gluck, 173, 175, 212.
+
+Goethe, 64, 72, 97, 118, 150, 155, 169, 175, 177, 180, 211, 184, 193,
+219, 230, 263, 275, 278, 305, 330, 332.
+
+Gottfried, in _Jean Christophe_, 204.
+
+Grautoff, 166, 168.
+
+Grazia, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 200-202, 205.
+
+Greatness, will to, in Rolland's philosophy, 63.
+
+Great War, The, 1, 65, 257-355, 253, 264 ff, 339-347.
+
+Greek tragedy, method of, 128 ff
+
+_Gruene Heinrich, Der_, 169.
+
+Guilbeaux, Henri, 281, 313.
+
+
+_Haendel_, 34.
+
+Handel, 150, 173, 175, 245.
+
+Hatred Holland's campaign against, 297-304;
+  Verhaeren's attitude of, during the war, 281-4.
+
+Hauptmann, 92, 276;
+  Rolland's controversy with, 277-280.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, 64.
+
+Hassler in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Hebbel, 73, 123.
+
+Hecht, in _Jean Christophe_, 175.
+
+Heroes of suffering, 133-153.
+
+Heroic biographies, 133-153.
+
+Herzen, 26.
+
+Historical drama, _see_ People's Theater.
+
+History, and the People's Theater, 95 ff;
+  Rolland's conception of, 95 ff;
+  sense of, in early writings, 32.
+
+Hoche, General, 150.
+
+Hoelderlin, 73.
+
+Hugot, in _The Triumph of Reason_, 63, 111, 114.
+
+Hugo, Victor, 37, 64, 92, 121.
+
+
+_Idoles les_, 299.
+
+"Iliad of the French People," _see_ People's Theater.
+
+_Illusions perdues, les_, 65.
+
+_Inter Arma Caritas_, 297.
+
+_Iphigenia_, 118.
+
+Italy, picture of, in _Jean Christophe_, 221-3.
+
+Idealism, in Rolland's philosophy, 60 ff, 85, 123, 166-71;
+  characterization of Germany, 211-216;
+  of Italy, 222.
+
+Internationalism, 207-10, 255, 285-8, 351-4;
+  _see Above the Battle_;
+  Fellowship, of free spirits;
+  Hatred, Rolland's campaign against
+
+Ibsen, 126 ff.
+
+Italy, Rolland's sojourn in, 23-28, 71.
+
+
+Jaures, 13, 41, 109, 346.
+
+_Jean Christophe_, 18, 30, 36, 49, 65, 70, 130, 143, 157-237, 165, 257,
+300, 305, 311, 318, 339, 340;
+  as an educational romance, 166-71;
+  characters of, 172-5;
+  enigma of creative work, 181-7;
+  France, picture of, in, 211-16;
+  generations, conflicting ideas of, in 229-34;
+  Germany, picture of, in, 217-220;
+  Italy, picture of, in 221-3;
+  Jews, the, in, 224-8;
+  message of, 157-159;
+  music, form and content of, 177-80;
+  origin of 162-5;
+  writing of, 43-44, 162-5.
+
+Jean Christophe, 26, 31, 38, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 65, 68, 76, 97, 153,
+157-237, 241, 246, 257, 258, 260, 317, 336, 340, 342;
+  and Grazia, 200-1;
+  and his fellow men, 203-6;
+  and his generation, 229-36;
+  and the nations, 207-10;
+  apostle of force, 189 ff;
+  as the artist and creator, 188-94;
+  character of, 172-75;
+  contrast to Olivier, 195 ff.
+
+Jouve, 287, 312, 313.
+
+Justice, problem of, considered by Rolland in Dreyfus case, 39;
+  _vs._ the fatherland, _see The Wolves_.
+
+
+Kaufmann, Emil, 174.
+
+Keller, Gottfried, 169, 177.
+
+Kleist, 73, 92.
+
+Kohn, Sylvain, in _Jean Christophe_, 212, 224.
+
+Krafft, Jean Christophe, _see_ Jean Christophe.
+
+
+Language, as obstacle to internationalism, 229 ff.
+
+Lazare, Bernard, 39, 143.
+
+_Lebens Abend einer Idealistin, Der_, 27, 73.
+
+_Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier_, 80.
+
+Letters, of Rolland, during war, 317-19.
+
+Levy-Coeur, in _Jean Christophe_, 175, 205, 224.
+
+_Le 14 Juillet_, _see Fourteenth of July, The_.
+
+Liberty, characterization of France, 211-16.
+
+_Life of Michael Angelo, The_, 40, 144-46.
+
+_Life of Timolien_, 131.
+
+_Liluli_, 300, 335-338, 339.
+
+_Loups, les, see The Wolves._
+
+Lux, Adams, 101, 111, 112, 309.
+
+Lyceum of Louis the Great, 8.
+
+
+Madame Bovary, 64.
+
+Mahler, Gustave, 35, 175.
+
+Mannheim, Judith, in _Jean Christophe_, 226.
+
+Marat, 101.
+
+Martinet, Marcel, 312.
+
+Masereel, Franz, 313.
+
+Maupassant, 13, 37, 58, 64, 91.
+
+Mazzini, 26, 150, 151, 222.
+
+_Meistersinger, Die_, 92.
+
+Mesnil, Jacques, 312.
+
+Meunier, 87.
+
+_Meutre des elites, le_, 297.
+
+Meyerbeer, 212.
+
+Michelangelo, 67, 71, 144-6, 147, 148, 151, 161, 182, 245.
+
+Michelet, 13.
+
+Millet, 87, 50.
+
+Mirbeau, 85.
+
+Moliere, 92.
+
+Monod Gabriel, 13, 16, 26, 73.
+
+_Mon Oncle Benjamin_, 3.
+
+_Montespan, la_, 73, 119.
+
+Mooch, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+Moreas, 175.
+
+Mornet, Lieutenant, 306.
+
+Mounet-Sully, 74.
+
+Mozart, 5, 173.
+
+Music, early influence of, on Rolland, 4;
+  form and content in _Jean Christophe_, 177-80;
+  part of Rolland's drama, 104 ff;
+  Rolland's love of, 47;
+  Rolland's philosophy of, 132-3;
+  Tolstoi's stigmatization of 19.
+
+_Musiciens d'autrefois_, 34, 35, 183.
+
+
+Nationalistic school of writers 59, 60, 62.
+
+Nationalism, 208 ff; 217-20, 225, 226.
+
+Naturalism, 15.
+
+"Neues Vaterland," 306.
+
+Nietzsche, 2, 26, 37, 162, 174, 177, 217-20, 255, 332.
+
+_Niobe_, 73, 74.
+
+Nobel peace prize, 270.
+
+Normal School, 10, 11, 12-17, 13, 14, 23, 29, 32, 162.
+
+_Notre prochain l'ennemi_, 297.
+
+Novalis, 169.
+
+
+Offenbach, 212.
+
+Olivier, in _Jean Christophe_, 61, 68, 76, 78, 84, 176, 179, 195-9, 200,
+201, 205, 214 ff, 220, 224, 225, 233, 244, 246, 257, 260, 264, 267, 283,
+309, 318, 336 340.
+
+Olivier, Georges, in _Jean Christophe_, 233.
+
+_Offiziere, Die_, 85.
+
+_Oration on Shakespeare_, 72.
+
+_Orfeo_, 33.
+
+_Origines du theatre lyrique moderne, les_, 32, 183.
+
+_Orsino_, 72, 74.
+
+Oudon, Francoise, in _Jean Christophe_, 75.
+
+
+Pacifism, 262 ff.
+
+Paine, Thomas 9, 7, 150.
+
+Parsifal, 30, 31, 62, 191.
+
+Peguy, Charles, 14, 20, 38, 39, 59, 115, 143.
+
+People's Theater, The, 41, 65, 133, 68, 88, 94-97.
+
+Philippe, Charles Louis, 44, 91.
+
+Philosophy of life, of Rolland, _see_ Art of Rolland;
+  Conscience;
+  Defeat, significance of;
+  Faith;
+  Freedom of Conscience;
+  Greatness will to;
+  Hatred, campaign against;
+  Idealism;
+  Internationalism;
+  Justice;
+  Struggle, element of;
+  Suffering, significance of.
+
+Picquart, 39, 115.
+
+Perrotin, in _Clerambault_, 344.
+
+Pioch, Georges, 312.
+
+Polichinelle, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+_Precurseurs, les, see The Forerunners._
+
+_Pretre de Nemi, le_, 125.
+
+_Prinz von Homburg, Der_, 92.
+
+Provenzale, Francesco, 34.
+
+
+Quesnel, in _Les Loups_, 114.
+
+
+Racine, 91, 92.
+
+_Raeuber, Die_, 92.
+
+Red Cross, in Switzerland, 268 ff, 269 ff.
+
+Renaissance, 24, 25, 68, 71.
+
+Renaitour, 312.
+
+Renan, 12, 13, 25, 37, 125 ff, 176, 196, 214, 309.
+
+"_Revue de l'art dramatique_," 35, 88.
+
+"_Revue de Paris_," 25, 141.
+
+Robespierre, 99, 101, 108, 113, 117, 126.
+
+Rolland, Madeleine, 3.
+
+Rolland, Romain, academic life of, in Paris, 32-35, 42;
+  adolescence
+  of, 3-11;
+  ancestry of, 3;
+  and his epoch, 57-62;
+  and the European spirit, 52, 53;
+  appeal to President Wilson, 348-50;
+  as embodiment of European spirit, 52-3;
+  art of, 63-6;
+  at Paris, 32-5, 36;
+  attitude of, during the war, 257-355;
+  campaign of, against hatred 297-303;
+  childhood of, 3-7;
+  controversy of, with Hauptmann, 277-80;
+  correspondence of, with Verhaeren 281-4;
+  cycles of 67-75;
+  diary of, during the war, 327-28;
+  drama of the revolution, 100-30;
+  dramatic writings, 25, 28, 57, 130;
+  Dreyfus case, 38-47;
+  fame, 49, 50, 51, 48;
+  father of, 6;
+  friendships, 13-15, 25, 26-28, 311-316;
+  heroic biographies, 133-153;
+  humanitarianism of, 307 ff;
+  idealism of, 60 ff;
+  influence of, during the war, 320-326, 355-6;
+  influence of Tolstoi on, 19-22;
+  Jean Christophe, 157-237;
+  letters of, during the war, 317-319;
+  marriage of, 35, 41, 73, 134;
+  mass suggestion in writings of, 261, 266, 329-47;
+  mother of, 3, 27;
+  newspaper writing of 289-292;
+  opponents of, during the war, 304-10;
+  portrait of, 46, 47;
+  role of, in fellowship of free spirits during the war, 273 ff;
+  Rome, 23, 28;
+  schooling of 5-17;
+  seclusion, 43, 44, 45-7, 48-49, 324;
+  significance of life work, 2;
+  tragedies of faith, 76-85;
+  unwritten biographies, 150-153.
+
+Rossi, Ernesto, 24.
+
+Rossi, Luigi, 33.
+
+Rostand, 117.
+
+Rouanet, 312.
+
+Rousseau, 275.
+
+Roussin, in _Jean Christophe_, 176.
+
+_Route en lacets qui monte, la_, 330.
+
+
+St. Christophe, 157.
+
+Saint-Just, _pseud._, 39, 84, 101, 108, 113, 126.
+
+_Saint Louis_, 77-8, 80-82, 83, 125, 244.
+
+Salviati, 24.
+
+Suares, Andre, 14, 15, 39.
+
+Scarlatti, Alessandro, 34.
+
+Schermann, 330.
+
+Scheurer, Kestner, 39, 115.
+
+Schiller, 73, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95, 97, 100-1, 123, 155, 193, 196.
+
+Schubert, 175, 180.
+
+Schulz, Prof. in _Jean Christophe_, 174, 204.
+
+Seippel, Paul, 50, 165, 172.
+
+Severine, 312.
+
+Shakespeare, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 15, 64, 69, 72, 92, 100, 123,
+125, 150.
+
+Sidonie, in _Jean Christophe_, 213.
+
+_Siege de Mantoue, le_, 73.
+
+Sorbonne, 32, 33.
+
+_Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse_, 12.
+
+Spinoza, 10, 13, 18.
+
+Stendhal, 169, 177.
+
+Strauss, Hugo, 35.
+
+Strindberg, 2, 126 ff.
+
+Struggle, element of, in Rolland's philosophy, 222, 246 ff.
+
+Suffering, significance of, in Rolland's philosophy, 133-136, 181-7,
+188-94; 204 ff;
+  heroes of 133-53.
+
+Switzerland, refuge of Rolland during the war, 264-7.
+
+
+_"Tablettes, les,"_ 313.
+
+_Tasso_, 118.
+
+Teulier, in _The Wolves_, 114, 115, 121, 310.
+
+_Theatre du peuple, le, see_ People's Theatre.
+
+Thiesson, Gaston, 312.
+
+Tillier, Claude, 3.
+
+Tolstoi, 18, 20, 21, 23, 15, 24, 53, 60, 64, 67, 82, 86, 87, 90, 92, 94,
+135, 138, 147-149, 151, 161, 165, 170, 175, 176, 182, 204, 245, 255,
+265, 300, 317, 320, 333.
+
+_To the Undying Antigone_, 27.
+
+_Tragedies de la foi, les, see Tragedies of Faith._
+
+_Tragedies of Faith_, 69, 76-83, 76.
+
+"Tribunal of the spirit," _see_ Fellowship.
+
+_Triumph of Reason, The_, 63, 101, 102, 113, 114, 119.
+
+_Trois Amoureuses, les_, 173.
+
+Truth, in _Liluli_, 337.
+
+
+Unknown dramatic cycle, 71-75.
+
+
+Verhaeren, 44, 77, 175, 276, 311;
+  Rolland's   correspondence with, 281-84.
+
+_Vie de Beethoven, see Beethoven._
+
+_Vie de Tolstoi, see Tolstoi._
+
+_Vie de Michel-Ange, la, see Life of Michael Angelo, The._
+
+_Vie des hommes illustres_, 301.
+
+Von Kerich, Frau, in _Jean Christophe_, 173, 204.
+
+Von Meysenbug, Malwida, 26, 27, 28, 29, 29-31, 73, 150, 162.
+
+Von Unruh, Fritz, 85.
+
+_Vorreden Material im Nachlass_, 255.
+
+_Vous etes des hommes_, 312.
+
+
+Wagner, 2, 9, 10, 14, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 64, 92, 162, 174, 212.
+
+_Wahrheit und Dichtung_, 175.
+
+_War and Peace_, 64, 170.
+
+War, dominant theme in Rolland's plays, 28;
+  of the generations, 229-234;
+  in Rolland's writings, 260 ff.
+
+_Weber, Die_, 92, 277.
+
+Weil, in _Jean Christophe_, 224.
+
+_What is to be Done?_ 18.
+
+_Wilhelm Meister_, 155, 168.
+
+William the Silent, 66.
+
+Wilson, President, 348-50.
+
+Wolf, Hugo, 35, 150, 174.
+
+Wolff's news agency, 277.
+
+_Wolves, The_, 39, 101, 102, 113, 114.
+
+
+Zola, 15, 58, 85, 87, 39, 91, 115, 177.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romain Rolland, by Stefan Zweig
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