Then came a message from afar, a message from the beloved hand of Leo Tolstoi. The whole generation honored the Russian as a leader, looked up to him as the embodied symbol of truth. In this year was published Tolstoi's booklet What is to be Done?, containing a fierce indictment of art. Contemptuously he shattered all that was dearest to Rolland. Beethoven, to whom the young Frenchman daily addressed a fervent prayer, was termed a seducer to sensuality. Shakespeare was a poet of the fourth rank, a wastrel. The whole of modern art was swept away like chaff from the threshing-floor; the heart's holy of holies was cast into outer darkness. This tract, which rang through Europe, could be dismissed with a smile by those of an older generation; but for the young men who revered Tolstoi as their one hope in a lying and cowardly age, it stormed through their consciences like a hurricane. The bitter necessity was forced upon them of choosing between Beethoven and the holy one of their hearts. Writing of this hour, Rolland says: "The goodness, the sincerity, the absolute straightforwardness of this man made of him for me an infallible guide in the prevailing moral anarchy. But at the same time, from childhood's days, I had passionately loved art. Music, in especial, was my daily food; I do not exaggerate in saying that to me music was as much a necessary of life as bread." Yet this very music was stigmatized by Tolstoi, the beloved teacher, the most human of men; was decried as "an enjoyment that leads men to neglect duty." Tolstoi contemned the Ariel of the soul as a seducer to sensuality. What was to be done? The young man's heart was racked. Was he to follow the sage of Yasnaya Polyana, to cut away from his life all will to art; or was he to follow the innermost call which would lead him to transfuse the whole of his life with music and poesy? He must perforce be unfaithful, either to the most venerated among artists, or to art itself; either to the most beloved among men or to the most beloved among ideas.
In this state of mental cleavage, the student now formed an amazing resolve. Sitting down one day in his little attic, he wrote a letter to be sent into the remote distances of Russia, a letter describing to Tolstoi the doubts that perplexed his conscience. He wrote as those who despair pray to God, with no hope for a miracle, no expectation of an answer, but merely to satisfy the burning need for confession. Weeks elapsed, and Rolland had long since forgotten his hour of impulse. But one evening, returning to his room, he found upon the table a small packet. It was Tolstoi's answer to the unknown correspondent, thirty-eight pages written in French, an entire treatise. This letter of October 14, 1887, subsequently published by Péguy as No. 4 of the third series of "Cahiers de la quinzaine," began with the affectionate words, "Cher Frère." First was announced the profound impression produced upon the great man, to whose heart this cry for help had struck. "I have received your first letter. It has touched me to the heart. I have read it with tears in my eyes." Tolstoi went on to expound his ideas upon art. That alone is of value, he said, which binds men together; the only artist who counts is the artist who makes a sacrifice for his convictions. The precondition of every true calling must be, not love for art, but love for mankind. Those only who are filled with such a love can hope that they will ever be able, as artists, to do anything worth doing.
These words exercised a decisive influence upon the future of Romain Rolland. But the doctrine summarized above has been expounded by Tolstoi often enough, and expounded more clearly. What especially affected our novice was the proof of the sage's readiness to give human help. Far more than by the words was Rolland moved by the kindly deed of Tolstoi. This man of world-wide fame, responding to the appeal of a nameless and unknown youth, a student in a back street of Paris, had promptly laid aside his own labors, had devoted a whole day, or perhaps two days, to the task of answering and consoling his unknown brother. For Rolland this was a vital experience, a deep and creative experience. The remembrance of his own need, the remembrance of the help then received from a foreign thinker, taught him to regard every crisis of conscience as something sacred, and to look upon the rendering of aid as the artist's primary moral duty. From the day he opened Tolstoi's letter, he himself became the great helper, the brotherly adviser. His whole work, his human authority, found its beginnings here. Never since then, however pressing the demands upon his time, has he failed to bear in mind the help he received. Never has he refused to render help to any unknown person appealing out of a genuinely troubled conscience. From Tolstoi's letter sprang countless Rollands, bringing aid and counsel throughout the years. Henceforward, poesy was to him a sacred trust, one which he has fulfilled in the name of his master. Rarely has history borne more splendid witness to the fact that in the moral sphere no less than in the physical, force never runs to waste. The hour when Tolstoi wrote to his unknown correspondent has been revived in a thousand letters from Rolland to a thousand unknowns. An infinite quantity of seed is to-day wafted through the world, seed that has sprung from this single grain of kindness.
CHAPTER VI
ROME
FROM every quarter, voices were calling: the French homeland, German music, Tolstoi's exhortation, Shakespeare's ardent appeal, the will to art, the need for earning a livelihood. While Rolland was still hesitating, his decision had again to be postponed through the intervention of chance, the eternal friend of artists.
Every year the Normal School provides traveling scholarships for some of its best pupils. The term is two years. Archeologists are sent to Greece, historians to Rome. Rolland had no strong desire for such a mission; he was too eager to face the realities of life. But fate is apt to stretch forth her hand to those who are coy. Two of his fellow students had refused the Roman scholarship, and Rolland was chosen to fill the vacancy almost against his will. To his inexperience, Rome still seemed nothing more than dead past, a history in shreds and patches, a dull record which he would have to piece together from inscriptions and parchments. It was a school task; an imposition, not life. Scanty were his expectations when he set forth on pilgrimage to the eternal city.
The duty imposed on him was to arrange documents in the gloomy Farnese Palace, to cull history from registers and books. For a brief space he paid due tribute to this service, and in the archives of the Vatican he compiled a memoir upon the nuncio Salviati and the sack of Rome. But ere long his attention was concentrated upon the living alone. His mind was flooded by the wonderfully clear light of the Campagna, which reduces all things to a self-evident harmony, making life appear simple and giving it the aspect of pure sensation. For many, the gentle grace of the artist's promised land exercises an irresistible charm. The memorials of the Renaissance issue to the wanderer a summons to greatness. In Italy, more strongly than elsewhere, does it seem that art is the meaning of human life, and that art must be man's heroic aim. Throwing aside his theses, the young man of twenty, intoxicated with the adventure of love and of life, wandered for months in blissful freedom through the lesser cities of Italy and Sicily. Even Tolstoi was forgotten, for in this region of sensuous presentation, in the dazzling south, the voice from the Russian steppes, demanding renunciation, fell upon deaf ears. Of a sudden, however, Shakespeare, friend and guide of Rolland's childhood, resumed his sway. A cycle of the Shakespearean dramas, presented by Ernesto Rossi, displayed to him the splendor of elemental passion, and aroused an irresistible longing to transfigure, like Shakespeare, history in poetic form. He was moving day by day among the stone witnesses to the greatness of past centuries. He would recall those centuries to life. The poet in him awakened. In cheerful faithlessness to his mission, he penned a series of dramas, catching them on the wing with that burning ecstacy which inspiration, coming unawares, invariably arouses in the artist. Just as England is presented in Shakespeare's historical plays, so was the whole Renaissance epoch to be reflected in his own writings. Light of heart, in the intoxication of composition he penned one play after another, without concerning himself as to the earthly possibilities for staging them. Not one of these romanticist dramas has, in fact, ever been performed. Not one of them is to-day accessible to the public. The maturer critical sense of the artist has made him hide them from the world. He has a fondness for the faded manuscripts simply as memorials of the ardors of youth.
The most momentous experience of these years spent in Italy was the formation of a new friendship. Rolland never sought people out. In essence he is a solitary, one who loves best to live among his books. Yet from the mystical and symbolical outlook it is characteristic of his biography that each epoch of his youth brought him into contact with one or other of the leading personalities of the day. In accordance with the mysterious laws of attraction, he has been drawn ever and again into the heroic sphere, has associated with the mighty ones of the earth. Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven were the stars of his childhood. During school life, Suarès and Claudel became his intimates. As a student, in an hour when he was needing the help of sages, he followed Renan; Spinoza freed his mind in matters of religion; from afar came the brotherly greeting of Tolstoi. In Rome, through a letter of introduction from Monod, he made the acquaintance of Malwida von Meysenbug, whose whole life had been a contemplation of the heroic past. Wagner, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Herzen, and Kossuth were her perennial intimates. For this free spirit, the barriers of nationality and language did not exist. No revolution in art or politics could affright her. "A human magnet," she exercised an irresistible appeal upon great natures. When Rolland met her she was already an old woman, a lucid intelligence, untroubled by disillusionment, still an idealist as in youth. From the height of her seventy years, she looked down over the past, serene and wise. A wealth of knowledge and experience streamed from her mind to that of the learner. Rolland found in her the same gentle illumination, the same sublime repose after passion, which had endeared the Italian landscape to his mind. Just as from the monuments and pictures of Italy he could reconstruct the figures of the Renaissance heroes, so from Malwida's confidential talk could he reconstruct the tragedy in the lives of the artists she had known. In Rome he learned a just and loving appreciation for the genius of the present. His new friend taught him what in truth he had long ere this learned unawares from within, that there is a lofty level of thought and sensation where nations and languages become as one in the universal tongue of art. During a walk on the Janiculum, a vision came to him of the work of European scope he was one day to write, the vision of Jean Christophe.
Wonderful was the friendship between the old German woman and the Frenchman of twenty-three. Soon it became difficult for either of them to say which was more indebted to the other. Romain owed so much to Malwida, in that she had enabled him to form juster views of some of her great contemporaries; while Malwida valued Romain, because in this enthusiastic young artist she discerned new possibilities of greatness. The same idealism animated both, tried and chastened in the many-wintered woman, fiery and impetuous in the youth. Every day Rolland came to visit his venerable friend in the Via della Polveriera, playing to her on the piano the works of his favorite masters. She, in turn, introduced him to Roman society. Gently guiding his restless nature, she led him towards spiritual freedom. In his essay To the Undying Antigone, Rolland tells us that to two women, his mother, a sincere Christian, and Malwida von Meysenbug, a pure idealist, he owes his awakening to the full significance of art and of life. Malwida, writing in Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin a quarter of a century before Rolland had attained celebrity, expressed her confident belief in his coming fame. We cannot fail to be moved when we read to-day the description of Rolland in youth: "My friendship with this young man was a great pleasure to me in other respects besides that of music. For those advanced in years, there can be no loftier gratification than to rediscover in the young the same impulse towards idealism, the same striving towards the highest aims, the same contempt for all that is vulgar or trivial, the same courage in the struggle for freedom of individuality.... For two years I enjoyed the intellectual companionship of young Rolland.... Let me repeat, it was not from his musical talent alone that my pleasure was derived, though here he was able to fill what had long been a gap in my life. In other intellectual fields I found him likewise congenial. He aspired to the fullest possible development of his faculties; whilst I myself, in his stimulating presence, was able to revive youthfulness of thought, to rediscover an intense interest in the whole world of imaginative beauty. As far as poesy is concerned, I gradually became aware of the greatness of my young friend's endowments, to be finally convinced of the fact by the reading of one of his dramatic poems." Speaking of this early work, she prophetically declared that the writer's moral energy might well be expected to bring about a regeneration of French imaginative literature. In a poem, finely conceived but a trifle sentimental, she expressed her thankfulness for the experience of these two years. Malwida had recognized Romain as her European brother, just as Tolstoi had recognized a disciple. Twenty years before the world had heard of Rolland, his life was moving on heroic paths. Greatness cannot be hid. When any one is born to greatness, the past and the present send him images and figures to serve as exhortation and example. From every country and from every race of Europe, voices rise to greet the man who is one day to speak for them all.