In 1886, along with his school comrades, he became acquainted with Tolstoy. In his book on Tolstoy, Rolland says, “He was the purest light that illumined our youth, the cheering star in the twilight of the end of the century—our only real friend in contemporary European art.” It was Tolstoy’s intoxicating adoration of life that enraptured the young Frenchmen as well as the young Northerners. It was the realism in Tolstoy’s art that “opened the portals to life”; it was the mysticism in Tolstoy’s nature that opened their ears to “the music of the soul for which they longed” ... “Tolstoy was to our generation what Werther was to the youth of the eighteenth century.”
“But,” wrote Rolland in a letter, “the most potent influence in my life was and continues to be—music. It has been an ever-flowing spring, not only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life. For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I understand the German soul, it is due to music.”
Romain Rolland is familiar, alike, with the old German masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with those of most recent times. Jean Christophe, the world’s greatest novel concerning a musician and music, is therefore written by a thoroughly-trained connoisseur and practitioner of music; a man who demonstrates that, for his own and for his hero’s individual culture, music is the most profound determining influence.
Even though Romain Rolland differs from Tolstoy in questions pertaining to his conception of music, still it is in Tolstoy’s spirit that he glorifies in this form of art its universal breadth, its power—beyond national boundaries and personal limitations—to unite mankind in and through the joy of beauty, which is one of the highest conditions of the soul.
One aspect of Romain Rolland’s literary work is a direct expression of his profound belief in the ethical mission of art. He participated ardently in the movement, instituted at the close of the last century, that purposed to educate the workingman by means of elevated amusements, especially plays. But Rolland did not, like Tolstoy, seek to awaken love of mankind; he wanted to strengthen power of action and heroism. Rolland has recently published the second edition of a book in which he has collected his controversial articles, written at the time when he and a group of friends hoped to create a new theatre for the awakening people, and thus contribute to the encouragement of that energy of action necessary to the solution of the great problems the time presents.
Pleasure, enlightenment, energy, says Rolland, are what the theatre should furnish the people. Neither the classic drama, which bores the workingman to death by presenting to him les parties mortes de l’ame, nor the present drama, which injures or lowers him by setting him in a fever of sordid passions, is fit for a people’s theatre. It must furnish the best drama of the present time, the spectacle in which the serious aspect of the time is reflected, or scenes from those earlier phases in which the spirit of struggle and of devotion lived; in other words, it must furnish a virile and wholesome art.
The heroes of the French Revolution were Rolland’s inspiration for the drama, and he utilized the struggles of the time of the Revolution for spectacles and folk festivals. At that time he wrote and produced for the people’s theatre: Le 14 Juillet, Danton, Les Loups, Le triomphe de la raison. The last he has recently published, together with two other early dramas, St. Louis and Aërt. They are all, as he himself says, devoted to religious enthusiasm; for God, for country, for reason.
He wished to set these pictures of struggling devotion against the cowardice of thought and cowardice of will that he saw everywhere around him. He voiced his own sentiment and that of his young kindred spirits in the words of one of his heroes, who was condemned to death:
“Life will be what I will. I have anticipated victory, but I shall be victorious.” And in the words of another:
“You are always thinking of what you can keep or lose. Only think of what you can give. Live; be like the water that flows.... The world would not exist without that happiness of beings, of flowers in the sun, that joy of giving one’s life to the point of exhaustion—which is also a joy of dying continually!”