While at the Ecole Normale, Rolland was profoundly impressed by Wagner and by Tolstoy. In October, 1887, he was the happy and proud recipient of a letter from Tolstoy, saluting him as “Dear Brother,” which he published later, preceded by a fervid introduction, in “Les cahiers de la quinzaine.” “I loved Tolstoy profoundly,” he says in this introduction, “and I have never ceased to love him. For two or three years I lived enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought. I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karénina,’ and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ than with the works of any of the great French writers. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truthfulness, of this great man, were for me the surest of guides in the midst of the moral anarchy of the time.”
Shortly after being graduated from the Ecole Normale, Rolland was admitted to the French School of Archæology and History at Rome. Although prejudiced against Italy from his boyhood, he surrendered promptly and unconditionally not only to the splendor of the art enshrined in its monuments and museums, but to the ineffable charm of its landscape and its sky. “He took his revenge for the asceticism of the gray visions to which he had hitherto been condemned.... He was as a new man beginning life over.”
During his stay in Rome, he became a great favorite of the aged Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug, an extraordinary woman, who had known intimately and shared the hopes of all the European revolutionary movements from 1848 to 1870. Fräulein von Meysenbug’s “Memoirs,” wherein she gives her impressions of her illustrious friends, Kossuth, Mazzini, Hertzen, Ogareff, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Wagner, Lenbach, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, contains this reference to the protégé of her declining years: “I find in this young Frenchman Rolland the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound understanding of all the great intellectual issues that I have found in the superior men of other nationalities.”
To this period of Rolland’s life belong a number of historical plays,—“Les Baglioni,” “Le siège de Mantoue,” “Niobé,” “Caligula,” “Jeanne de Piennes,” “Orsino,”—which Fräulein von Meysenbug, not an entirely impartial judge, pronounced admirable, but which thus far their author has not seen fit to give to the world. They were inspired in a certain degree by Shakspere. “Despite Tolstoy, Wagner, etc.,” Rolland wrote to a friend, “Shakspere is the one artist I have most constantly preferred from my childhood. And if the Shakspere of the historical dramas is not the only Shakspere I love, he is at least the Shakspere who has influenced me most directly by opening up to me the horizons of this new artistic world and providing me with incomparable models.”
When Rolland returned to France, he had become not only an archæological and historical pundit, but under the influence of the ardent humanitarian Von Meysenbug and of the advanced artists, agitators, and reformers who gravitated about her, an insurgent and just a bit of a fanatic. He was consumed with generous ardor to edify and elevate his compatriots, who seemed to him crushed and degraded by subserviency to convention and tradition.
Thenceforth his every act was to be combative, was to possess an unequivocal social significance, was to count, if not for revolution, at least for radical reform. His thesis for the doctorate, “The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,” sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne, June 19, 1895, was the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body. It was intended as a protest against the disdain with which music, in contradistinction to painting, sculpture, and architecture, had always been treated by the university, and was a move to secure for music the consideration it deserves.
Rolland’s next moves were the organization (1898) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales of a department of music, in opening which he delivered a pithy and brilliant address on the place of music in general history; the unobtrusive but bold transformation (1903) of the course on the history of art, with which he had been intrusted by the Ecole Normale (in 1897), into a course on the history of music; and the stubborn maintenance of this iconoclastic orientation after the absorption of the Ecole Normale by the Sorbonne.
Rolland was also the leading spirit of a movement, so impassioned that it amounted to a veritable crusade, for the democratization of the drama, “for the creation,” to employ his rather ambitious phraseology, “of a new art for a new world.” He aspired to replace the contemporaneous stage by a stage more human and fraternal, that should edify and improve the masses on one hand, and emancipate and develop art on the other, and to found “a theater of, by, and for the people,” that should “share the bread of the people, their restlessness and anxieties, their battles and their hopes,” and that should be for them “a fountain-head of joy and of life.” In March, 1899, he signed, with Lucien Besnard, Maurice Pottecher, Louis Lumet, and Gabriel Trarieux, a somewhat turgid manifesto which ended thus: “Make no mistake. It is no mere literary experiment we are proposing. It is a question of life or death for art and for the people. For, if art is not opened to the people, it is doomed to disappear; and if the people do not discover the pathway of art, humanity abdicates its destinies.” To this propaganda, Rolland contributed a volume entitled “Le théâtre du peuple,” which contained both eloquent and grandiloquent passages, and a virile and highly colored, if slightly declamatory, tetralogy of the Revolution,—“Le quatorze juillet,” “Danton,” “Les loups,” “Le triomphe de la raison,”—designed to “resuscitate the forces of the past, reanimate its capacities for action, and rekindle the national faith and heroism with the flames of the republican epoch, in order that the work interrupted in 1794 may be resumed and completed by a people more mature and more fully aware of its destiny.” “Danton,” “Les loups,” and “Le triomphe de la raison” were given two or three performances each by dramatic societies of one sort or another; and “Le quatorze juillet” was finally produced by a regular theater (La Renaissance), but its run was short.
Rolland was a vehement Dreyfusard, with a special enthusiasm for Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. “He who can see injustice without trying to combat it is neither entirely an artist,” he observed, in this connection, “nor entirely a man”; and he protested vigorously against the British invasion of the Transvaal with a play, dedicated to “Civilization” and entitled “Le temps viendra,” in which he makes one of the characters say: “Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”
Sadly disillusioned by the triumph of might over right in South Africa, by the altogether shameless manner in which the righteous indignation of the sincere Dreyfusards was exploited by the professional politicians, and by the failure of his efforts to regenerate the stage, Rolland found fresh force and new courage in a study of the lives of heroes, the men who were great of heart in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, the noble souls who suffered for the sake of right; and always a propagandist, he straightway endeavored to found a cult of heroism, to persuade his fellows “to read in the eyes” of those sanctified by suffering, and in the histories of their careers, that “life is never greater, more fruitful, and more blessed than in affliction.” To this end he wrote a series of biographies of heroes (“Beethoven,” “Michelangelo,” “Tolstoy,” “Millet,” “Handel,” “Hugo Wolf,” etc.), which he presented to the French public and to the rest of the world with these ringing words: “The air is heavy about us. Old Europe is waxing torpid in an oppressive and vitiated atmosphere. A materialism devoid of grandeur cumbers thought and fetters the action of governments and of individuals. The world is dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism. The world is stifling. Fling the windows wide open! Let the free air rush in! Let us inhale the vivifying breath of the heroes!”