Romain Rolland Part 2

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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 Maupa.s.sant, 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 pa.s.sions 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 partic.i.p.ation. 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 ent.i.ty. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 partic.i.p.ators 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 m.u.f.fled roar, as of a distant storm, rising from the Boulevard Montparna.s.se.

Often a gla.s.s 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 ma.n.u.scripts. 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 pa.s.s through his mind, whether spontaneously arising or coming from without; he records the airs of past and recent times, noting them down in ma.n.u.script books; he makes extracts from newspapers, drafts plans for future work; his thriftily collected h.o.a.rd 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 s.p.a.ce 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 succ.u.mbed 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, un.o.btrusively. "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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.s from obscurity into the light of day.