1898
INLe 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 loupsembodies a variation of the same theme. Here the choice has to be made between the fatherland and justice.
The subject has already been mooted inDanton. 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 bowsbefore the argument, sacrificing honor to expediency, the law to his fatherland.
InLes 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 inLe triomphe de la raisonthat 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 obedientcitizen of the state, was the reflection of the actual happenings during the days when it was written. InLes 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 whathe 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.
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 révolutionremained a fragment. ARobespierre, which was to be the spiritual counterpart ofDanton, already sketched in broad outline, was left unfinished. The other segments of the great dramatic cycle have neverbeen 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 likeIphigeniaandTasso. 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."
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 viendrais 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. InLe triomphe de la raison, the problem was one of freedom versus the fatherland; inLes loupsit was one ofjustice 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 inLes loups, are the author's spiritual brethren, the children of his belief that the individual's will is stronger than his secularenvironment. 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.
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 dominantliterary 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 realistthey 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 theDrames philosophiques, among whichL'abbesse de JouarreandLe prêtre de Nemiexercised 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 themost 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 geometryof 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 humanunderstanding 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.
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.
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.
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 peuplehad 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 tolive, 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 domesticcares, 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.
LIKE the revolutionary dramas, the new creative cycle was preluded by a manifesto, a new call to greatness. The preface toBeethovenproclaims: "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 arestronger 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.
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," entitledLes 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."
Romain Rolland at the Time of Writing BeethovenRomain Rolland at the Time of Writing Beethoven
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 ignoredit. 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'sBeethoven. The book did not bring its author success; but it brought something better, a public which henceforward paid close attention to his work, and accompaniedJean Christophein 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.
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 wasgnawing 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"—melancholyis 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."
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 fleefrom 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.
ON the cover of theBeethoven, 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 likewiseremained 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 haveall 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 hisfellows—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.