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 god. 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 mass 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 masses, the inertia of the mass 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 passive 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 glass 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 glass prison-house was the captive of unseen powers.
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 impassioned 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 document 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 dispassionate views.
It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this document, 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 document 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 manuscript 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.