Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work

The surge of the Heart's energies would not break in a mist of foam, nor be subtilized into Spirit, did not the rock of Fate, from the beginning of days, stand ever silent in th...

The first fifty years of Romain Rolland's life were passed in inconspicuous and almost solitary labors. Thenceforward, his name was to become a storm center of European discussi...

Romain Rolland was born on January 29, 1866, a year of strife, the year when Sadowa was fought. His native town was Clamecy, where another imaginative writer, Claude Tillier, au...

The boy was still too young to feel the magic of Paris. To his dreamy nature, the clamorous and brutal materialism of the city seemed strange and almost hostile. Far on into lif...

Rolland's childhood was passed amid the rural landscapes of Burgundy. His school life was spent in the roar of Paris. His student years involved a still closer confinement in ai...

School days were over. The old problem concerning the choice of profession came up anew for discussion. Although science had proved enriching, although it had aroused enthusiasm...

From every quarter, voices were calling: the French homeland, German music, Tolstoi's exhortation, Shakespeare's ardent appeal, the will to art, the need for earning a livelihoo...

The two years in Italy, a time of free receptivity and creative enjoyment, were over. A summons now came from Paris; the Normal School, which Rolland had left as pupil, required...

The form of Rolland's career, no less than the substance of his inner life, was decisively fashioned by these two years in Italy. As happened in Goethe's case, so in that with w...

Rolland was now a man of thirty, with his energies at their prime. He was inspired with a restrained passion for activity. In all times and scenes, alike in the past and in the...

For a brief season the Parisian public was familiar with Romain Rolland's name as that of a musical expert and a promising dramatist. Thereafter for years he disappeared from vi...

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...

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...

Thus does Rolland's life pass from obscurity into the light of day. Progress is slow, but the impulsion comes from powerful energies. The movement towards the goal is not always...

Romain Rolland's work cannot be understood without an understanding of the epoch in which that work came into being. For here we have a passion that springs from the weariness o...

Rolland realized his mission early in his career. The hero of one of his first writings, the Girondist Hugot in _Le triomphe de la raison_, discloses the author's own ardent fai...

The will to greatness involuntarily finds expression in characteristic forms. Rarely does Rolland attempt to deal with any isolated topic, and he never concerns himself about a...

The young man of twenty-two, just liberated from the walls of the Parisian seminary, fired with the genius of music and with that of Shakespeare's enthralling plays, had in Ital...

Twenty years after their first composition, republishing the forgotten dramas of his youth under the title _Les tragédies de la foi_ (1913), Rolland alluded in the preface to th...

This epic of King Louis IX is a drama of religious exaltation, born of the spirit of music, an adaptation of the Wagnerian idea of elucidating ancestral sagas in works of art. I...

_Aërt_ was written a year later than _Saint Louis_; more explicitly than the pious epic does it aim at restoring faith and idealism to the disheartened nation. _Saint Louis_ is...

With whole-souled faith the young poet uttered his first dramatic appeals in the heroic form, being mindful of Schiller's saying that fortunate epochs could devote themselves to...

"The old era is finished; the new era is beginning." Rolland, writing in the "Revue dramatique" in 1900, opened his appeal with these words by Schiller. The summons was twofold,...

What kind of plays do the people want? It wants "good" plays, in the sense in which the word "good" is used by Tolstoi when he speaks of "good books." It wants plays which are e...

The task is set. Who shall accomplish it? Romain Rolland answers by putting his hand to the work. The hero in him shrinks from no defeat; the youth in him dreads no difficulty....

Planning this "Iliad of the French People" for the people's theater, Rolland designed it as a decalogy, as a time sequence of ten dramas somewhat after the manner of Shakespeare...

Of the four completed revolutionary dramas, _Le 14 Juillet_ stands first in point of historic time. Here we see the Revolution as one of the elements of nature. No conscious tho...

_Danton_ deals with a decisive moment of the Revolution, the waterparting between the ascent and the decline. What the masses had created as elemental forces, were now being tur...

_Le triomphe de la raison_ is no more than a fragment of the great fresco. But it is inspired with the central thought round which Rolland's ideas turn. In it for the first time...

In _Le triomphe de la raison_, men to whom conscience is supreme were confronted with a vital decision. They had to choose between their country and freedom, between the interes...

The ears of the people were deaf. Rolland's work seemed to have been fruitless. Not one of the dramas was played for more than a few nights. Most of them were buried after a sin...

Once only has Rolland been tempted to resume dramatic composition. (Parenthetically I may mention a minor play of the same period, _La Montespan_, which does not belong to the s...

We have seen that Rolland's plays form a whole, which for comprehensiveness may compared with the work of Shakespeare, Schiller, or Hebbel. Recent stage performances in Germany...

I prepare myself by the study of history and the practice of writing. So doing, I welcome always in my soul the memory of the best and most renowned of men. For whenever the enf...

At twenty years of age, and again at thirty years of age, in his early works, Rolland had wished to depict enthusiasm as the highest power of the individual and as the creative...

Like the revolutionary dramas, the new creative cycle was preluded by a manifesto, a new call to greatness. The preface to _Beethoven_ proclaims: "The air is fetid. Old Europe i...

Beethoven, the master of masters, is the first figure sculptured on the heroic frieze of the invisible temple. From Rolland's earliest years, since his beloved mother had initia...

Beethoven is for Rolland the most typical of the controllers of sorrow. Born to enjoy the fullness of life, it seemed to be his mission to reveal its beauties. Then destiny, rui...

The biographies of Beethoven and Michelangelo were fashioned out of the superabundance of life. They were calls to heroism, odes to energy. The biography of Tolstoi, written som...

On the cover of the _Beethoven_, the first of Rolland's biographies, was an announcement of the lives of a number of heroic personalities. There was to be a life of Mazzini. Wit...

It is really astonishing to note how the epic and the philosophical are here compressed within the same work. In respect of form we have so beautiful a whole. Reaching outwards,...

Upon the last page of his great work, Rolland relates the well-known legend of St. Christopher. The ferryman was roused at night by a little boy who wished to be carried across...

Romain Rolland was now in his fortieth year. His life seemed to be a field of ruins. The banners of his faith, the manifestoes to the French people and to humanity, had been tor...

Jean Christophe had long been beckoning the poet from a distance. The first message had come to the lad in the Normal School. During those years, young Rolland had planned the w...

What, then, is _Jean Christophe_? Can it be properly spoken of as a romance? This book, which is as comprehensive as the world, an orbis pictus of our generation, cannot be desc...

As a romance, _Jean Christophe_ has no prototype in literature; but the characters in the book have prototypes in real life. Rolland the historian does not hesitate to borrow so...

An abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In _Jean Christophe_, music is the form as well as the conten...

_Jean Christophe_ took the form of a book of life rather than that of a romance of art, for Rolland does not make a specific distinction between poietic types of men and those d...

Art has many forms, but its highest form is always that which is most intimately akin to nature in its laws and its manifestations. True genius works elementally, works naturall...

Jean Christophe is the portrait of an artist. But every form and every formula of art and the artist must necessarily be one-sided. Rolland, therefore, introduces to Christophe...

Jean Christophe is creative action; Olivier is creative thought; a third form is requisite to complete the cycle of existence, that of Grazia, creative being, who secures fulfil...

Notwithstanding the intimate relationships described in the previous chapters, the path of Jean Christophe the artist is a lonely one. He walks by himself, pursuing an isolated...

Young Headstrong, looking upon his fellow men with passion and prejudice, fails to understand their natures; at first he contemplates the families of mankind, the nations, with...

The picture of France in the great romance is notable because we are here shown a country from a twofold outlook, from without and from within, from the perspective of a German...

In this romance, Germany likewise is viewed in a twofold aspect; but whereas France is seen first from without, with the eyes of a German, and then from within, with the eyes of...

Jean Christophe is growing old and weary when he comes to know the third country that will form part of the future European synthesis. He had never felt drawn towards Italy. As...

In the three diversified nations, by each of which Christophe is now attracted, now repelled, he finds a unifying element, adapted to each nation, but not completely merged ther...

Thus the entire human herd is penned within ring after ring of hurdles, which the life-force must break down if it would win to freedom. We have the hurdle of the fatherland, wh...

Jean Christophe has reached the further shore. He has stridden across the river of life, encircled by roaring waves of music. Safely carried across seems the heritage which he h...

"Brugnon, mauvais garçon, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"--"Que veux tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'empêche pas de souffrir; mais souffrir n'empêchera jamais un bon...

At length, in this arduous career, came a period of repose. The great ten-volume novel had been finished; the work of European scope had been completed. For the first time Romai...

It seemed at first to Rolland as if a stranger, though one from his native province and of his own blood, had come cranking into his life. He felt as though, out of the clear Fr...

Romain Rolland had looked upon _Colas Breugnon_ as an intermezzo, as an easy occupation, which should, for a change, enable him to enjoy the delights of irresponsible creation....

_Jean Christophe_ was the deliberate divergence from a generation. _Colas Breugnon_ is another divergence, unconsciously effected; a divergence from the traditional France, heed...

One who is aware of values which he regards as a hundredfold more precious than the wellbeing of the "fatherland," of society, of the kinships of blood and race, values which st...

The events of August 2, 1914, broke Europe into fragments. Therewith collapsed the faith which the brothers in the spirit, Jean Christophe and Olivier, had been building with th...

We do not detract from the moral services of Romain Rolland, but we may perhaps excuse to some extent his opponents, when we insist that Rolland had excelled all contemporary im...

At the outbreak of the war, Romain Rolland was in Vevey, a small and ancient city on the lake of Geneva. With few exceptions he spent his summers in Switzerland, the country in...

In Rolland's view it was the artist's duty to serve his fatherland by conscientious service to all mankind, to play his part in the struggle by waging war against the suffering...

No one had been more perfectly forearmed than Romain Rolland. The closing chapters of _Jean Christophe_ foretell the coming mass illusion. Never for a moment had he entertained...

Romain Rolland had never been personally acquainted with Gerhart Hauptmann. He was familiar with the German's writings, and admired their passionate participation in all that is...

Having written to Gerhart Hauptmann, the German, Rolland almost simultaneously addressed himself to Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian, who had been an enthusiast for European unity,...

As on so many previous occasions in his life of action, this man of inviolable faith had issued to the world an appeal for fellowship, and had issued it once more in vain. The w...

The struggle had to be waged by means of newspaper articles. Since Rolland was attacking prevalent falsehoods, and their public expression in the form of lying phrases, he had p...

On September 22, 1914, the essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was published in "_Le Journal de Genève_." After the preliminary skirmish with Gerhart Hauptmann, came this declaration...

The essay _Au-dessus de la mêlée_ was the first stroke of the woodman's axe in the overgrown forest of hatred; thereupon, a roaring echo thundered from all sides, reverberating...

From the first, Rolland knew perfectly well that in a time when party feeling runs high, no task can be more ungrateful than that of one who advocates impartiality. "The combata...

As soon as he had uttered his first words, a void formed round this brave man. As Verhaeren finely phrased it, he positively loved to encounter danger, whereas most people shun...

All that Rolland gave in those days to his friends and collaborators of the European fellowship, all that he gave by his immediate proximity, was but a part of his nature. For b...

During these years, many people, young for the most part, came to Rolland for advice in matters of conscience. They asked whether, seeing that their convictions were opposed to...

Rolland's life was now in touch with the life of the whole world. It radiated influence in all directions. Yet how lonely was this man during the five years of voluntary exile....

There was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse daily--his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the war, Rolland recorded his sentiments...

Rolland opened his campaign against hatred almost immediately after the war began. For more than a year he continued to deliver his message in opposition to the frenzied screams...

During these five years, the ethicist, the philanthropist, the European, had been speaking to the nations, but the poet had apparently been dumb. To many it may seem strange tha...

_Liluli_, the tragi-comedy, was an outcry, a groan, a painful burst of mockery; it was an elementary gesture of reaction against suffering that was almost physical. But the auth...

For five years Romain Rolland was at war with the madness of the times. At length the fiery chains were loosened from the racked body of Europe. The war was over, the armistice...

Despite all disillusionments, Romain Rolland, the indomitable, continued his addresses to the ultimate court of appeal, to the spirit of fellowship. On the day when peace was si...

Strange has been the rhythm of this man's life, surging again and again in passionate waves against the time, sinking once more into the abyss of disappointment, but never faili...