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 muffled roar, as of a distant storm, rising from the Boulevard Montparnasse. Often a glass 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 manuscripts. 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 pass through his mind, whether spontaneously arising or coming from without; he records the airs of past and recent times, noting them down in manuscript books; he makes extracts from newspapers, drafts plans for future work; his thriftily collected hoard 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 space 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 Elysées, 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 succumbed 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.