For the new generation the book is a document of the spiritual history of the time. For the serious-minded portion of the French youth, Rolland has possessed an influence comparable with his own description of Tolstoy’s influence upon himself and the young generation with him. Youth has learned from him that the fleeting fashionable attitude toward the great souls or ideas that Paris shapes is sterile; that it is only by devotion that a spiritual growth can be attained; that skepticism in the face of all greatness is poverty, but admiration and love “is the way, to the most potent, the richest, life.” Youth has found in him contempt for mere fine phrases, for declamation, and received from him Goethe’s conception of creation: “In the beginning was action.” They have heard him proclaim that nationalism that is loyalty to the best in the essence of the French nation: love of truth and justice, desire for freedom and fraternity, devotion to its ideal values and above all the dream of happiness for all mankind. This dream that among us Teutons is content to sleep, is among Frenchmen an ever restless disturbance of the blood. And it is only by occasionally letting his blood flow for these dreams that he feels he is living up to his highest ideals. This Youth for whom each new part of Jean Christophe has been a great event, despises with Rolland the estheticism that turns from life. This youth has learned to distinguish between great art and the work of those who think they are creating art but are only making arts. But above all, at a time of reaction toward the Christian “faith”—a reaction that has been justified by the fact that science has not been able to “explain” life nor “vindicate” it—they receive a new fountain of living water. Rolland has attempted neither to explain life nor defend it. The leit-motiv of his great symphonic work is Beethoven’s thought: “Durch Leiden Freude,”—“Through suffering joy comes.” We can, so he says, neither understand life in all its plenitude of contradictions nor ennoble it in all its brutality in any way other than by living it one’s self in the fullest and highest meaning of the word. Music, the all-unifying art, love, the all-embracing condition of the soul, are the two highest attitudes of devotion to God, who is life.
More Rolland knows not. And more than he knows the veracious man does not say.
“I cannot,” he writes, “give any metaphysical credo. For, in the first place, I will never deceive myself by saying I know that which I do not know—which, at the most, I can imagine or hope. In the second place, I will never confine myself within the limits of any belief. For I hope to develop until my last day; I wish to reserve for myself unlimited freedom of intellectual transformation and renewal. I have many gods in my Pantheon; but my chief godhead is Liberty. At present I do not separate the essence of the human soul from that of the divine spirit, of which the former is a part. But I hardly believe that this divine spirit fills the universe. It seeks, certainly, to fill the world and guide it; but nothing indicates that it will succeed. Even in this regard I reserve space for liberty. Pure monism does not satisfy me. I am more inclined to a dualism such as the ancient Empedocles believed in. I have an unbounded admiration for the pre-Socratic philosophers, the sages of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Indeed my first work, written at Rome, twenty years ago, was a drama with Empedocles as hero. The struggle between two principles is manifest to me in the whole history of the world, material as well as moral history. The question is whether there is not a third principle, in which the other two are included or harmonized. A trinity therefore—it is singular how this form forces itself upon the human mind—but a trinity very different from the Christian conception of the trinity, since it comprises a father and two striving brothers: a triad that approaches the antique cosmogony of which we find a reflection in Hesiod, in Chaos, Gaea, and Eros. If I live I shall go deeper into ancient thought. Those ancient philosophers lived in more intimate contact with nature than any of their successors, and, moreover, collected the thousand-year-old wisdom of the whole Orient.”
Besides this personal utterance of Rolland himself, a French friend of his, intimate with his thought, has given me permission to communicate the following statement of the trend of Rolland’s thought:
The liberty of his mind, his lucidity, his keen penetration, render him incapable of accepting the least dogma or the least constraint. It is impossible to conceive of anything that could have upon such a mind, not to say a direct hold, but even an appreciable influence. That mind is alone, magnificently alone, as independent as if the world were just born. Moreover, he is quite as far from all revealed religions as from all systems. He would in no wise admit that the Christian or any other religion is more closely related to the past, and Darwinism or any scientism whatever more to the future. He would see, in these diverse ways of viewing life, forms of the human mind which return at periodic intervals and of which one no more than the other is an absolute progress in which he does not believe. Only by his very nature, he is antimaterialistic. He believes in the duality of soul and body in an absolute, organic manner. He hopes sincerely to quit this body and go to live a larger and fuller life. No personal immortality! He cannot endure the thought. That would be the continuation of this captivity in a limited personality, which to him appears stifling. He feels that he is also going to live in God, not understanding by that word any anthropomorphic god, but a fountain of universal life. He loves to plunge, through time and space, into a meditation in which he totally forgets his personality, and wherein he finds a sort of intoxication. He has uttered this admirable and terrible sentence: “Sometimes I feel no difference between my friends absent or present, living or dead.” To ask such a being if he is of the past or of the future would have no significance; he is beyond the compass of time.
I have met Rolland only through letters. But some words concerning his personality, as it had affected another poet, I can communicate here in conclusion:
“The confident grasp replete with experience, the modest ripeness ... in his being; the benignity, the unprecedented purity in all his purpose ... are beneficent.... Everything is genuine, developed with will and consciousness: a man who has improved steadily.... From him emanates a gentle plenitude, consummate in action, like that of a star at twilight.”
When world renown comes to such a man, it has not much to say to him. Rolland meets it with an averted glance in his far-seeing luminous eyes, eyes which quietly and steadily look towards new works and new horizons.
From all corners of the world he hears: that he has given to the time the book most brimming with the whole seething life of the time; that he has given men the book most permeated with the essence of music and Orphean effects; that he has created an entire human race, a race in which all ages of life and degrees of development, in which women as well as men are equally convincing in truth to life; that he has given a work overflowing with ideas, with philosophy of life, with vital help, by exhibiting a great human life in all its weakness and in all its strength. And assuredly this will give him joy.
But he will feel proud only when the word comes that his French heart longs to hear: The people that has given to the world such a work is not, as its enemies say, going to destruction. That nation is ever potent with the energy of life.