Romain Rolland Part 16

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 G.o.d. 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses, the inertia of the ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sive 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s prison-house was the captive of unseen powers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 impa.s.sioned 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 doc.u.ment 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 dispa.s.sionate views.

It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this doc.u.ment, 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 doc.u.ment 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 ma.n.u.script 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 ma.s.s."

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 inc.u.mbent 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 a.s.sured 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 ma.s.s 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 ent.i.tled _Les precurseurs_, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been replaced by intense compa.s.sion, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 ma.s.ses. In the address _Aux peuples a.s.sa.s.sines_, 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 a.n.a.lyses 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, ent.i.tled _Empedocle d'Agrigente et l'age de la haine_. The great sage of cla.s.sical 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, pa.s.ses 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 psychoa.n.a.lysts. 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 G.o.ddess 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, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble 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 impa.s.sioned 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 s.p.a.ce 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 circ.u.mstances, 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-t.i.tle 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 ent.i.tled "L'un contre tous," this being an adaptation of La Boetie's t.i.tle _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.