Schiller’s words come to mind: Der Dichter ist der einzige wahre Mensch und der beste Philosoph ist nur eine Karikatur gegen ihn.[4] The poet is the only real Man and the best philosopher is only a caricature beside him.
Not only with his dramas of the Revolution did Romain Rolland endeavor to make his countrymen hero-worshippers; he also began a series of popular biographies aimed to present, not the great man’s work, but the personal powers and experiences that found expression in his work. He says in the preface: “Europe is poisoned with materialism and egotism; we must throw open the windows to get air: Respirons le souffle des heros. Let us breathe the breath of heroes.” He rejoices that he too has witnessed contemporary heroic deeds: the defense of the Boers and the vindication of Dreyfus. But he knows that it is “easier to kindle enthusiasm by heroes of the past,” heroes “who were great in heart.”
His hero-worship did not lead him, however, to glorification at the expense of truth. He utters the thought, profoundly true and all too little understood, that every lack of harmony between life and its laws depends—even in great spirits—not upon their greatness, but upon their weaknesses. “But these weaknesses render them not less worthy of our love.... The idealism that will not recognize the truth is cowardice; there is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is—and to love it.”
So without hesitation, Rolland points out weaknesses in Michael Angelo’s life, and inconsistencies in Tolstoy’s. He sees in both great specimens of the “type that will pass away”; the Christian—those who “have had their refuge in God and the everlasting life when this life has gone against them; those whose faith has often been expression for deficient belief in life, in the future, in themselves; a lack of courage and a lack of gladness.” “I know,” he continues, “of how many defeats your grievous victories are made, and therefore I pity you and admire you. You make the world more doleful but more beautiful. Praised be pain and praised be joy! Both are holy; they form the world and they broaden great souls: joy and pain are powers, are life, are God.”[5]
The three biographies that Rolland has thus far published are of Beethoven, Michael Angelo, and Tolstoy. In the first, it is the love of life and the courage of life; in the second, creative power and strength of belief; in the third, the ecstacy of life and the love of mankind, that he emphasizes. Such souls, he says, restore to us belief in life and in mankind, for from them “issues a current of social power and potent goodness.”
II.
Beethoven is Rolland’s own conception of life, and is nearest his heart. To that “soul of music, heroism, and goodness” Rolland has reared the only memorial worthy of Beethoven that art has created: Jean Christophe.
This book was published during the course of nine years. But long before it began to appear it had lived in and with its writer for the greater part of his life. In it Rolland has committed to writing his profound conception of the innermost being of a musical genius, and has done it in such a manner that one is firmly convinced of the truth of the revelations that one follows from the cradle to the grave. In other novels concerning geniuses the writers assert incessantly that they are geniuses; here the genius evinces himself through his being. One does not read a book, one lives a life—and a life of the highest value, the existence that great spirit creates: that of the genius, who out of the flaming chaos of his nature forms a cosmos. An “educational novel,” of which the world’s literature thus far possesses only one such in Wilhelm Meister, and, in a measure, in Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich.... I have lived more intensely with Jean Christophe than with most living people.[6]
World fame is a curious thing. Sometimes it is attained quickly through glorifying friends: a path to fame that often early avenges itself,—that is more dangerous even than the fame that the attacks of enemies furnish. Sometimes fame is won with one blow, by an exceptional work; again it is prepared for in silence and then suddenly rushes forth with the roar of a great torrent formed by many small streams. The last is the case with Romain Rolland.
When I read him in 1909, in Switzerland, I went shortly afterwards to Paris, where, at that time, he was not mentioned among the celebrated writers and where even his friends thought he dare not reckon his circle of readers larger than the ten or fifteen thousand faithful he possessed in the world of French-speaking readers. In Germany his circle was still narrower; in Sweden, he was unknown even by name.