Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work

by Stefan Zweig

For Rolland this elite, reconciling France with the world, will in days to come fulfil the mission of his nation. In ultimate analysis, his thirty years' work may be regarded as one continuous attempt to prevent a new war—to hinder the revival of the horrible cleavage between victory and defeat. His aim has been, not to teach a new national pride, but to inculcate a new heroism of self-conquest, a new faith in justice.

Thus from the same source, from the darkness of defeat, there have flowed two different streams of idealism. In speech and writing, an invisible struggle has been waged for the soul of the new generation. The facts of history turned the scale in favor of Maurice Barrès. The year 1914 marked the defeat of the ideas of Romain Rolland. Thus defeat was not merely an experience imposed on him in youth, for defeat has likewise been the tragic substance of his years of mature manhood. But it has always been his peculiar talent to create out of defeat the strongest of his works, to draw from resignation new ardors, to derive from disillusionment a passionate faith. He has ever been the poet of the vanquished, the consoler of the despairing, the dauntless guide towards that world where suffering is transmuted into positive values and where misfortune becomes a source of strength. That which was born out of a tragical time, the experience of a nation under the heel of destiny, Rolland has made available for all times and all nations.

CHAPTER II
THE WILL TO GREATNESS

ROLLAND realized his mission early in his career. The hero of one of his first writings, the Girondist Hugot in Le triomphe de la raison, discloses the author's own ardent faith when he declares: "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on earth."

This will to greatness lies hidden at the heart of all personal greatness. What distinguishes Romain Rolland from others, what distinguishes the beginner of those days and the fighter of the thirty years that have since elapsed, is that in art he never creates anything isolated, anything with a purely literary or casual scope. Invariably his efforts are directed towards the loftiest moral aims; he aspires towards eternal forms; strives to fashion the monumental. His goal is to produce a fresco, to paint a comprehensive picture, to achieve an epic completeness. He does not choose his literary colleagues as models, but takes as examples the heroes of the ages. He tears his gaze away from Paris, from the movement of contemporary life, which he regards as trivial. Tolstoi, the only modern who seems to him poietic, as the great men of an earlier day were poietic, is his teacher and master. Despite his humility, he cannot but feel that his own creative impulse makes him more closely akin to Shakespeare's historical plays, to Tolstoi's War and Peace, to Goethe's universality, to Balzac's wealth of imagination, to Wagner's promethean art, than he is akin to the activities of his contemporaries, whose energies are concentrated upon material success. He studies his exemplars' lives, to draw courage from their courage; he examines their works, in order that, using their measure, he may lift his own achievements above the commonplace and the relative. His zeal for the absolute is almost a religion. Without venturing to compare himself with them, he thinks always of the incomparably great, of the meteors that have fallen out of eternity into our own day. He dreams of creating a Sistine of symphonies, dramas like Shakespeare's histories, an epic like War and Peace; not of writing a new Madame Bovary or tales like those of Maupassant. The timeless is his true world; it is the star towards which his creative will modestly and yet passionately aspires. Among latter-day Frenchmen none but Victor Hugo and Balzac have had this glorious fervor for the monumental; among the Germans none has had it since Richard Wagner; among contemporary Englishmen, none perhaps but Thomas Hardy.

Neither talent nor diligence suffices unaided to inspire such an urge towards the transcendent. A moral force must be the lever to shake a spiritual world to its foundations. The moral force which Rolland possesses is a courage unexampled in the history of modern literature. The quality that first made his attitude on the war manifest to the world, the heroism which led him to take his stand alone against the sentiments of an entire epoch, had, to the discerning, already been made apparent in the writings of the inconspicuous beginner a quarter of a century earlier. A man of an easy-going and conciliatory nature is not suddenly transformed into a hero. Courage, like every other power of the soul, must be steeled and tempered by many trials. Among all those of his generation, Rolland had long been signalized as the boldest by his preoccupation with mighty designs. Not merely did he dream, like ambitious schoolboys, of Iliads and pentalogies; he actually created them in the fevered world of to-day, working in isolation, with the dauntless spirit of past centuries. Not one of his plays had been staged, not a publisher had accepted any of his books, when he began a dramatic cycle as comprehensive as Shakespeare's histories. He had as yet no public, no name, when he began his colossal romance, Jean Christophe. He embroiled himself with the theaters, when in his manifesto Le théâtre du peuple he censured the triteness and commercialism of the contemporary drama. He likewise embroiled himself with the critics, when, in La foire sur la place, he pilloried the cheapjackery of Parisian journalism and French dilettantism with a severity which had been unknown westward of the Rhine since the publication of Balzac's Les illusions perdues. This young man whose financial position was precarious, who had no powerful associates, who had found no favor with newspaper editors, publishers, or theatrical managers, proposed to remold the spirit of his generation, simply by his own will and the power of his own deeds. Instead of aiming at a neighboring goal, he always worked for a distant future, worked with that religious faith in greatness which was displayed by the medieval architects—men who planned cathedrals for the honor of God, recking little whether they themselves would survive to see the completion of their designs. This courage, which draws its strength from the religious elements of his nature, is his sole helper. The watchword of his life may be said to have been the phrase of William the Silent, prefixed by Rolland as motto to Aërt: "I have no need of approval to give me hope; nor of success, to brace me to perseverance."

CHAPTER III
THE CREATIVE CYCLES

THE will to greatness involuntarily finds expression in characteristic forms. Rarely does Rolland attempt to deal with any isolated topic, and he never concerns himself about a mere episode in feeling or in history. His creative imagination is attracted solely by elemental phenomena, by the great "courants de foi," whereby with mystical energy a single idea is suddenly carried into the minds of millions of individuals; whereby a country, an epoch, a generation, will become kindled like a firebrand, and will shed light over the environing darkness. He lights his own poetic flame at the great beacons of mankind, be they individuals of genius or inspired epochs, Beethoven or the Renaissance, Tolstoi or the Revolution, Michelangelo or the Crusades. Yet for the artistic control of such phenomena, widely ranging, deeply rooted in the cosmos, overshadowing entire eras, more is requisite than the raw ambition and fitful enthusiasm of an adolescent. If a mental state of this nature is to fashion anything that shall endure, it must do so in boldly conceived forms. The cultural history of inspired and heroic periods, cannot be limned in fugitive sketches; careful grounding is indispensable. Above all does this apply to monumental architecture. Here we must have a spacious site for the display of the structures, and terraces from which a general view can be secured.

That is why, in all his works, Rolland needs so much room. He desires to be just to every epoch as to every individual. He never wishes to display a chance section, but would fain exhibit the entire cycle of happenings. He would fain depict, not episodes of the French revolution, but the Revolution as a whole; not the history of Jean Christophe Krafft, the individual modern musician, but the history of contemporary Europe. He aims at presenting, not only the central force of an era, but likewise the manifold counterforces; not the action alone, but the reaction as well. For Rolland, breadth of scope is a moral necessity rather than an artistic. Since he would be just in his enthusiasm, since in the parliament of his work he would give every idea its spokesman, he is compelled to write many-voiced choruses. That he may exhibit the Revolution in all its aspects, its rise, its troubles, its political activities, its decline, and its fall, he plans a cycle of ten dramas. The Renaissance needs a treatment hardly less extensive. Jean Christophe must have three thousand pages. To Rolland, the intermediate form, the variety, seems no less important than the generic type. He is aware of the danger of dealing exclusively with types. What would Jean Christophe be worth to us, if with the figure of the hero there were merely contrasted that of Olivier as a typical Frenchman; if we did not find subsidiary figures, good and evil, grouped in numberless variations around the symbolic dominants. If we are to secure a genuinely objective view, many witnesses must be summoned; if we are to form a just judgment, the whole wealth of facts must be taken into consideration. It is this ethical demand for justice to the small no less than to the great which makes spacious forms essential to Rolland. This is why his creative artistry demands an all-embracing outlook, a cyclic method of presentation. Each individual work in these cycles, however circumscribed it may appear at the first glance, is no more than a segment, whose full significance becomes apparent only when we grasp its relationship to the focal thought, to justice as the moral center of gravity, as a point whence all ideas, words, and actions appear equidistant from the center of universal humanity. The circle, the cycle, which unrestingly environs all its wealth of content, wherein discords are harmoniously resolved—to Rolland, ever the musician, this symbol of sensory justice is the favorite and wellnigh exclusive form.

The work of Romain Rolland during the last thirty years comprises five such creative cycles. Too extended in their scope, they have not all been completed. The first, a dramatic cycle, which in the spirit of Shakespeare was to represent the Renaissance as an integral unit much as Gobineau desired to represent it, remained a fragment. Even the individual dramas have been cast aside by Rolland as inadequate. The Tragédies de la foi form the second cycle; the Théâtre de la révolution forms the third. Both are unfinished, but the fragments are of imperishable value. The fourth cycle, the Vie des hommes illustres, a cycle of biographies planned to form as it were a frieze round the temple of the invisible God, is likewise incomplete. The ten volumes of Jean Christophe alone succeed in rounding off the full circle of a generation, uniting grandeur and justice in the foreshadowed concord.