Romain Rolland Part 3

Progress is slow, but the impulsion comes from powerful energies. The movement towards the goal is not always obvious, and yet his life is a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.sion 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 const.i.tutes 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 G.o.d. 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 Maupa.s.sant, 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 succ.u.mb 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.suaged.

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sed 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 refas.h.i.+oned 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, 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 refas.h.i.+ons 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 pa.s.sionate faith. He has ever been the poet of the vanquished, the consoler of the despairing, the dauntless guide towards that world where suffering is trans.m.u.ted 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 Maupa.s.sant. The timeless is his true world; it is the star towards which his creative will modestly and yet pa.s.sionately 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociates, 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 G.o.d, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.p.a.cious 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 s.p.a.cious 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 circ.u.mscribed it may appear at the first glance, is no more than a segment, whose full significance becomes apparent only when we grasp its relations.h.i.+p 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 ill.u.s.tres_, a cycle of biographies planned to form as it were a frieze round the temple of the invisible G.o.d, 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 fas.h.i.+oning. 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 doc.u.ments 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 impa.s.sioned 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 acquaintances.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances, but subsequently because the author's ripening critical faculty made him withhold them from the world. The first, ent.i.tled _Orsino_, was written at Rome in 1890. Next, in the halcyon clime of Sicily, he composed _Empedocles_, uninfluenced by Holderlin'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 ma.n.u.script 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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sion 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.