Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work

Son but n'était pas le succès; son but était la foi.

Jean Christophe, "La Révolte."

CHAPTER I

THE WORK AND THE EPOCH

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 of an entire country, a faith that springs from the disillusionment of a humiliated nation. The shadow of 1870 was cast across the youth of the French author. The significance and greatness of his work taken as a whole depend upon the way in which it constitutes a spiritual bridge between one great war and the next. It arises from a blood-stained earth and a storm-tossed horizon on one side, reaching across on the other to the new struggle and the new spirit.

It originates in gloom. A land defeated in war is like a man who has lost his god. Divine ecstasy is suddenly replaced by dull exhaustion; a fire that blazed in millions is extinguished, so that nothing but ash and cinder remain. There is a sudden collapse of all values. Enthusiasm has become meaningless; death is purposeless; the deeds, which but yesterday were deemed heroic, are now looked upon as follies; faith is a fraud; belief in oneself, a pitiful illusion. The impulse to fellowship fades; every one fights for his own hand, evades responsibility that he may throw it upon his neighbor, thinks only of profit, utility, and personal advantage. Lofty aspirations are killed by an infinite weariness. Nothing is so utterly destructive to the moral energy of the masses as a defeat; nothing else degrades and weakens to the same extent the whole spiritual poise of a nation.

Such was the condition of France after 1870; the country was mentally tired; it had become a land without a leader. The best among its imaginative writers could give no help. They staggered for a while, as if stunned by the bludgeoning of the disaster. Then, as the first effects passed off, they reëntered their old paths which led them into a purely literary field, remote and ever remoter from the destinies of their nation. It is not within the power of men already mature to make headway against a national catastrophe. Zola, Flaubert, Anatole France, and Maupassant, needed all their strength to keep themselves erect on their own feet. They could give no support to their nation. Their experiences had made them skeptical; they no longer possessed sufficient faith to give a new faith to the French people. But the younger writers, those who had no personal memories of the disaster, those who had not witnessed the actual struggle and had merely grown up amid the spiritual corpses left upon the battlefield, those who looked upon the ravaged and tormented soul of France, could not succumb to the influences of this weariness. The young cannot live without faith, cannot breathe in the moral stagnation of a materialistic world. For them, life and creation mean the lighting up of faith, that mystically burning faith which glows unquenchably in every new generation, glows even among the tombs of the generation which has passed away. To the newcomers, the defeat is no more than one of the primary factors of their experience, the most urgent of the problems their art must take into account. They feel that they are naught unless they prove able to restore this France, torn and bleeding after the struggle. It is their mission to provide a new faith for this skeptically resigned people. Such is the task for their robust energies, such the goal of their aspiration. Not by chance do we find that among the best in defeated nations a new idealism invariably springs to life; that the poets of such peoples have but one aim, to bring solace to their nation that the sense of defeat may be assuaged.

How can a vanquished nation be solaced? How can the sting of defeat be soothed? The writer must be competent to divert his readers' thoughts from the present; he must fashion a dialectic of defeat which shall replace despair by hope. These young authors endeavored to bring help in two different ways. Some pointed towards the future, saying: "Cherish hatred; last time we were beaten, next time we shall conquer." This was the argument of the nationalists, and there is significance in the fact that it was predominantly voiced by the sometime companions of Rolland, by Maurice Barrès, Paul Claudel, and Péguy. For thirty years, with the hammers of verse and prose, they fashioned the wounded pride of the French nation that it might become a weapon to strike the hated foe to the heart. For thirty years they talked of nothing but yesterday's defeat and to-morrow's triumph. Ever afresh did they tear open the old wound. Again and again, when the young were inclining towards reconciliation, did these writers inflame their minds anew with exhortations in the heroic vein. From hand to hand they passed the unquenchable torch of revenge, ready and eager to fling it into Europe's powder barrel.

The other type of idealism, that of Rolland, less clamant and long ignored, looked in a very different direction for solace, turning its gaze not towards the immediate future but towards eternity. It did not promise a new victory, but showed that false values had been used in estimating defeat. For writers of this school, for the pupils of Tolstoi, force is no argument for the spirit, the externals of success provide no criterion of value for the soul. In their view, the individual does not conquer when the generals of his nation march to victory through a hundred provinces; the individual is not vanquished when the army loses a thousand pieces of artillery. The individual gains the victory, only when he is free from illusion, and when he has no part in any wrong committed by his nation. In their isolation, those who hold such views have continually endeavored to induce France, not indeed to forget her defeat, but to make of that defeat a source of moral greatness, to recognize the worth of the spiritual seed which has germinated on the blood-drenched battlefields. Of such a character, in Jean Christophe, are the words of Olivier, the spokesman of all young Frenchmen of this way of thinking. Speaking to his German friend, he says: "Fortunate the defeat, blessed the disaster! Not for us to disavow it, for we are its children.... It is you, my dear Christopher, who have refashioned us.... The defeat, little as you may have wished it, has done us more good than evil. You have rekindled the torch of our idealism, have given a fresh impetus to our science, and have reanimated our faith.... We owe to you the reawakening of our racial conscience.... Picture the young Frenchmen who were born in houses of mourning under the shadow of defeat; who were nourished on gloomy thoughts; who were trained to be the instruments of a bloody, inevitable, and perhaps useless revenge. Such was the lesson impressed upon their minds from their earliest years: they were taught that there is no justice in this world; that might crushes right. A revelation of this character will either degrade a child's soul for ever, or will permanently uplift it." And Rolland continues: "Defeat refashions the elite of a nation, segregating the single-minded and the strong, and making them more single-minded and stronger than before; but the others are hastened by defeat down the path leading to destruction. Thus are the masses of the people ... separated from the elite, leaving these free to continue their forward march."

For Rolland this elite, reconciling France with the world, will in days to come fulfil the mission of his nation. In ultimate analysis, his thirty years' work may be regarded as one continuous attempt to prevent a new war—to hinder the revival of the horrible cleavage between victory and defeat. His aim has been, not to teach a new national pride, but to inculcate a new heroism of self-conquest, a new faith in justice.

Thus from the same source, from the darkness of defeat, there have flowed two different streams of idealism. In speech and writing, an invisible struggle has been waged for the soul of the new generation. The facts of history turned the scale in favor of Maurice Barrès. The year 1914 marked the defeat of the ideas of Romain Rolland. Thus defeat was not merely an experience imposed on him in youth, for defeat has likewise been the tragic substance of his years of mature manhood. But it has always been his peculiar talent to create out of defeat the strongest of his works, to draw from resignation new ardors, to derive from disillusionment a passionate faith. He has ever been the poet of the vanquished, the consoler of the despairing, the dauntless guide towards that world where suffering is transmuted into positive values and where misfortune becomes a source of strength. That which was born out of a tragical time, the experience of a nation under the heel of destiny, Rolland has made available for all times and all nations.

CHAPTER II

THE WILL TO GREATNESS

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 faith when he declares: "Our first duty is to be great, and to defend greatness on earth."

This will to greatness lies hidden at the heart of all personal greatness. What distinguishes Romain Rolland from others, what distinguishes the beginner of those days and the fighter of the thirty years that have since elapsed, is that in art he never creates anything isolated, anything with a purely literary or casual scope. Invariably his efforts are directed towards the loftiest moral aims; he aspires towards eternal forms; strives to fashion the monumental. His goal is to produce a fresco, to paint a comprehensive picture, to achieve an epic completeness. He does not choose his literary colleagues as models, but takes as examples the heroes of the ages. He tears his gaze away from Paris, from the movement of contemporary life, which he regards as trivial. Tolstoi, the only modern who seems to him poietic, as the great men of an earlier day were poietic, is his teacher and master. Despite his humility, he cannot but feel that his own creative impulse makes him more closely akin to Shakespeare's historical plays, to Tolstoi's War and Peace, to Goethe's universality, to Balzac's wealth of imagination, to Wagner's promethean art, than he is akin to the activities of his contemporaries, whose energies are concentrated upon material success. He studies his exemplars' lives, to draw courage from their courage; he examines their works, in order that, using their measure, he may lift his own achievements above the commonplace and the relative. His zeal for the absolute is almost a religion. Without venturing to compare himself with them, he thinks always of the incomparably great, of the meteors that have fallen out of eternity into our own day. He dreams of creating a Sistine of symphonies, dramas like Shakespeare's histories, an epic like War and Peace; not of writing a new Madame Bovary or tales like those of Maupassant. The timeless is his true world; it is the star towards which his creative will modestly and yet passionately aspires. Among latter-day Frenchmen none but Victor Hugo and Balzac have had this glorious fervor for the monumental; among the Germans none has had it since Richard Wagner; among contemporary Englishmen, none perhaps but Thomas Hardy.

Neither talent nor diligence suffices unaided to inspire such an urge towards the transcendent. A moral force must be the lever to shake a spiritual world to its foundations. The moral force which Rolland possesses is a courage unexampled in the history of modern literature. The quality that first made his attitude on the war manifest to the world, the heroism which led him to take his stand alone against the sentiments of an entire epoch, had, to the discerning, already been made apparent in the writings of the inconspicuous beginner a quarter of a century earlier. A man of an easy-going and conciliatory nature is not suddenly transformed into a hero. Courage, like every other power of the soul, must be steeled and tempered by many trials. Among all those of his generation, Rolland had long been signalized as the boldest by his preoccupation with mighty designs. Not merely did he dream, like ambitious schoolboys, of Iliads and pentalogies; he actually created them in the fevered world of to-day, working in isolation, with the dauntless spirit of past centuries. Not one of his plays had been staged, not a publisher had accepted any of his books, when he began a dramatic cycle as comprehensive as Shakespeare's histories. He had as yet no public, no name, when he began his colossal romance, Jean Christophe. He embroiled himself with the theaters, when in his manifesto Le théâtre du peuple he censured the triteness and commercialism of the contemporary drama. He likewise embroiled himself with the critics, when, in La foire sur la place, he pilloried the cheapjackery of Parisian journalism and French dilettantism with a severity which had been unknown westward of the Rhine since the publication of Balzac's Les illusions perdues. This young man whose financial position was precarious, who had no powerful associates, who had found no favor with newspaper editors, publishers, or theatrical managers, proposed to remold the spirit of his generation, simply by his own will and the power of his own deeds. Instead of aiming at a neighboring goal, he always worked for a distant future, worked with that religious faith in greatness which was displayed by the medieval architects—men who planned cathedrals for the honor of God, recking little whether they themselves would survive to see the completion of their designs. This courage, which draws its strength from the religious elements of his nature, is his sole helper. The watchword of his life may be said to have been the phrase of William the Silent, prefixed by Rolland as motto to Aërt: "I have no need of approval to give me hope; nor of success, to brace me to perseverance."

CHAPTER III

THE CREATIVE CYCLES

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 mere episode in feeling or in history. His creative imagination is attracted solely by elemental phenomena, by the great "courants de foi," whereby with mystical energy a single idea is suddenly carried into the minds of millions of individuals; whereby a country, an epoch, a generation, will become kindled like a firebrand, and will shed light over the environing darkness. He lights his own poetic flame at the great beacons of mankind, be they individuals of genius or inspired epochs, Beethoven or the Renaissance, Tolstoi or the Revolution, Michelangelo or the Crusades. Yet for the artistic control of such phenomena, widely ranging, deeply rooted in the cosmos, overshadowing entire eras, more is requisite than the raw ambition and fitful enthusiasm of an adolescent. If a mental state of this nature is to fashion anything that shall endure, it must do so in boldly conceived forms. The cultural history of inspired and heroic periods, cannot be limned in fugitive sketches; careful grounding is indispensable. Above all does this apply to monumental architecture. Here we must have a spacious site for the display of the structures, and terraces from which a general view can be secured.

That is why, in all his works, Rolland needs so much room. He desires to be just to every epoch as to every individual. He never wishes to display a chance section, but would fain exhibit the entire cycle of happenings. He would fain depict, not episodes of the French revolution, but the Revolution as a whole; not the history of Jean Christophe Krafft, the individual modern musician, but the history of contemporary Europe. He aims at presenting, not only the central force of an era, but likewise the manifold counterforces; not the action alone, but the reaction as well. For Rolland, breadth of scope is a moral necessity rather than an artistic. Since he would be just in his enthusiasm, since in the parliament of his work he would give every idea its spokesman, he is compelled to write many-voiced choruses. That he may exhibit the Revolution in all its aspects, its rise, its troubles, its political activities, its decline, and its fall, he plans a cycle of ten dramas. The Renaissance needs a treatment hardly less extensive. Jean Christophe must have three thousand pages. To Rolland, the intermediate form, the variety, seems no less important than the generic type. He is aware of the danger of dealing exclusively with types. What would Jean Christophe be worth to us, if with the figure of the hero there were merely contrasted that of Olivier as a typical Frenchman; if we did not find subsidiary figures, good and evil, grouped in numberless variations around the symbolic dominants. If we are to secure a genuinely objective view, many witnesses must be summoned; if we are to form a just judgment, the whole wealth of facts must be taken into consideration. It is this ethical demand for justice to the small no less than to the great which makes spacious forms essential to Rolland. This is why his creative artistry demands an all-embracing outlook, a cyclic method of presentation. Each individual work in these cycles, however circumscribed it may appear at the first glance, is no more than a segment, whose full significance becomes apparent only when we grasp its relationship to the focal thought, to justice as the moral center of gravity, as a point whence all ideas, words, and actions appear equidistant from the center of universal humanity. The circle, the cycle, which unrestingly environs all its wealth of content, wherein discords are harmoniously resolved—to Rolland, ever the musician, this symbol of sensory justice is the favorite and wellnigh exclusive form.

The work of Romain Rolland during the last thirty years comprises five such creative cycles. Too extended in their scope, they have not all been completed. The first, a dramatic cycle, which in the spirit of Shakespeare was to represent the Renaissance as an integral unit much as Gobineau desired to represent it, remained a fragment. Even the individual dramas have been cast aside by Rolland as inadequate. The Tragédies de la foi form the second cycle; the Théâtre de la révolution forms the third. Both are unfinished, but the fragments are of imperishable value. The fourth cycle, the Vie des hommes illustres, a cycle of biographies planned to form as it were a frieze round the temple of the invisible God, is likewise incomplete. The ten volumes of Jean Christophe alone succeed in rounding off the full circle of a generation, uniting grandeur and justice in the foreshadowed concord.

Above these five creative cycles there looms another and later cycle, recognizable as yet only in its beginning and its end, its origination and its recurrence. It will express the harmonious connection of a manifold existence with a lofty and universal life-cycle in Goethe's sense, a cycle wherein life and poesy, word and writing, character and action, themselves become works of art. But this cycle still glows in the process of fashioning. We feel its vital heat radiating into our mortal world.

CHAPTER IV

THE UNKNOWN DRAMATIC CYCLE. 1890-1895

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 Italy his first experience of the world as a sphere of freedom. He had learned history from documents and syllabuses. Now history looked at him with living eyes out of statues and figures; the Italian cities, the centuries, seemed to move as if on a stage under his impassioned gaze. Give them but speech, these sublime memories, and history would become poesy, the past would grow into a peopled tragedy. During his first hours in the south he was in a sublime intoxication. Not as historian but as poet did he first see Rome and Florence.

"Here," he said to himself in youthful fervor, "here is the greatness for which I have yearned. Here, at least, it used to be, in the days of the Renaissance, when these cathedrals grew heavenward amid the storms of battle, and when Michelangelo and Raphael were adorning the walls of the Vatican, what time the popes were no less mighty in spirit than the masters of art—for in that epoch, after centuries of interment with the antique statues, the heroic spirit of ancient Greece had been revived in a new Europe." His imagination conjured up the superhuman figures of that earlier day; and of a sudden, Shakespeare, the friend of his first youth, filled his mind once more. Simultaneously, as I have already recounted, witnessing a number of performances by Ernesto Rossi, he came to realize his own dramatic talent. Not now, as of old, in the Clamecy loft, was he chiefly allured by the gentle feminine figures. The strongest appeal, to his early manhood, was exercised by the fierceness of the more powerful characters, by the penetrating truth of a knowledge of mankind, by the stormy tumult of the soul. In France, Shakespeare is hardly known at all by stage presentation, and but very little in prose translation. Rolland, however, now attained as intimate an acquaintanceship with Shakespeare as had been possessed a hundred years earlier, almost at the same age, by Goethe when he conceived his Oration on Shakespeare. This new inspiration showed itself in a vigorous creative impulse. Rolland penned a series of dramas dealing with the great figures of the past, working with the fervor of the beginner, and with that sense of newly acquired mastery which was felt by the Germans of the Sturm und Drang era.

These plays remained unpublished, at first owing to the disfavor of circumstances, but subsequently because the author's ripening critical faculty made him withhold them from the world. The first, entitled Orsino, was written at Rome in 1890. Next, in the halcyon clime of Sicily, he composed Empedocles, uninfluenced by Hölderlin's ambitious draft, of which Rolland heard first from Malwida von Meysenbug. In the same year, 1891, he wrote Gli Baglioni. His return to Paris did not interrupt this outpouring, for in 1892 he wrote two plays, Caligula, and Niobé. From his wedding journey to the beloved Italy in 1893 he returned with a new Renaissance drama, Le siège de Mantoue. This is the only one of the early plays which the author acknowledges to-day, though by an unfortunate mischance the manuscript has been lost. At length turning his attention to French history, he wrote Saint Louis (1893), the first of his Tragédies de la foi. Next came Jeanne de Piennes (1894), which remains unpublished.... Aërt (1895), the second of the Tragédies de la foi, was the first of Rolland's plays to be staged. There now (1896-1902) followed the four dramas of the Théâtre de la révolution. In 1900 he wrote La Montespan and Les trois amoureuses.

Thus before the era of the more important works there were composed no less than twelve dramas, equaling in bulk the entire dramatic output of Schiller, Kleist, or Hebbel. The first eight of these were never either printed or staged. Except for the appreciation by his confidant Malwida von Meysenbug in Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin (a connoisseur's tribute to their artistic merits), not a word has ever been said about them.

With a single exception. One of the plays was read on a classical occasion by one of the greatest French actors of the day, but the reminiscence is a painful one. Gabriel Monod, who from being Rolland's teacher had become his friend, noting Malwida von Meysenbug's enthusiasm, gave three of Rolland's pieces to Mounet-Sully, who was delighted with them. The actor submitted them to the Comédie Française, and in the reading committee he fought desperately on behalf of the unknown, whose dramatic talent was more obvious to him, the comedian, than it was to the men of letters. Orsino and Gli Baglioni were ruthlessly rejected, but Niobé was read to the committee. This was a momentous incident in Rolland's life; for the first time, fame seemed close at hand. Mounet-Sully read the play. Rolland was present. The reading took two hours, and for a further two minutes the young author's fate hung in the balance. Not yet, however, was celebrity to come. The drama was refused, to relapse into oblivion. It was not even accorded the lesser grace of print; and of the dozen or so dramatic works which the dauntless author penned during the next decade, not one found its way on to the boards of the national theater.

We know no more than the names of these early works, and are unable to judge their worth. But when we study the later plays we may deduce the conclusion that in the earlier ones a premature flame, raging too hotly, burned itself out. If the dramas which first appeared in the press charm us by their maturity and concentration, they depend for these qualities upon the fate which left their predecessors unknown. Their calm is built upon the passion of those which were sacrificed unborn; they owe their orderly structure to the heroic zeal of their martyred brethren. All true creation grows out of the dark humus of rejected creations. Of none is it more true than of Romain Rolland that his work blossoms upon the soil of renunciation.

CHAPTER V

THE TRAGEDIES OF FAITH

Saint Louis. Aërt. 1895-1898

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 the tragical melancholy of the epoch in which they were composed. "At that time," he writes, "we were much further from our goal, and far more isolated." The elder brothers of Jean Christophe and Olivier, "less robust though not less fervent in the faith," had found it harder to defend their beliefs, to maintain their idealism at its lofty level, than did the youth of the new day; living in a stronger France, a freer Europe. Twenty years earlier, the shadow of defeat still lay athwart the land. These heroes of the French spirit had been compelled, even within themselves, to fight the evil genius of the race, to combat doubts as to the high destinies of their nation, to struggle against the lassitude of the vanquished. Then was to be heard the cry of a petty era lamenting its vanished greatness; it aroused no echo from the stage or from the people; it wasted itself in the unresponsive skies—and yet it was the expression of an undying faith in life.

Closely akin to this ardor is the faith voiced by Rolland's dramatic cycle, though the plays deal with such different epochs, and are so diverse in the range of their ideas. He wishes to depict the "courants de foi," the mysterious streams of faith, at a time when a flame of spiritual enthusiasm is spreading through an entire nation, when an idea is flashing from mind to mind, involving unnumbered thousands in the storm of an illusion; when the calm of the soul is suddenly ruffled by heroic tumult; when the word, the faith, the ideal, though ever invisible and unattainable, transfuses the inert world and lifts it towards the stars. It matters nothing in ultimate analysis what idea fires the souls of men; whether the idea be that of Saint Louis for the holy sepulcher and Christ's realm, or that of Aërt for the fatherland, or that of the Girondists for freedom. The ostensible goal is a minor matter; the essence of such movements is the wonder-working faith; it is this which assembles a people for crusades into the east, which summons thousands to death for the nation, which makes leaders throw themselves willingly under the guillotine. "Toute la vie est dans l'essor," the reality of life is found in its impetus, as Verhaeren says; that alone is beautiful which is created in the enthusiasm of faith. We are not to infer that these early heroes, born out of due time, must have succumbed to discouragement since they failed to reach their goal; one and all they had to bow their souls to the influences of a petty time. That is why Saint Louis died without seeing Jerusalem; why Aërt, fleeing from bondage, found only the eternal freedom of death; why the Girondists were trampled beneath the heels of the mob. These men had the true faith, that faith which does not demand realization in this world. In widely separated centuries, and against different storms of time, they were the banner bearers of the same ideal, whether they carried the cross or held the sword, whether they wore the cap of liberty or the visored helm. They were animated with the same enthusiasm for the unseen; they had the same enemy, call it cowardice, call it poverty of spirit, call it the supineness of a weary age. When destiny refused them the externals of greatness, they created greatness in their own souls. Amid unheroic environments they displayed the perennial heroism of the undaunted will; the triumph of the spirit which, when animated with faith, can prove victorious over time.

The significance, the lofty aim, of these early plays, was their intention to recall to the minds of contemporaries the memory of forgotten brothers in the faith, to arouse for the service of the spirit and not for the ends of brute force that idealism which ever burgeons from the imperishable seed of youth. Already we discern the entire moral purport of Rolland's later work, the endeavor to change the world by the force of inspiration. "Tout est bien qui exalte la vie." Everything which exalts life is good. This is Rolland's confession of faith, as it is that of his own Olivier. Ardor alone can create vital realities. There is no defeat over which the will cannot triumph; there is no sorrow above which a free spirit cannot soar. Who wills the unattainable, is stronger than destiny; even his destruction in this mortal world is none the less a mastery of fate. The tragedy of his heroism kindles fresh enthusiasm, which seizes the standard as it slips from his grasp, to raise it anew and bear it onward through the ages.

CHAPTER VI

SAINT LOUIS

1894

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. It was originally designed as an opera. Rolland actually composed an overture to the work; but this, like his other musical compositions, remains unpublished. Subsequently he was satisfied with lyrical treatment in place of music. We find no touch of Shakespearean passion in these gentle pictures. It is a heroic legend of the saints, in dramatic form. The scenes remind us of a phrase of Flaubert's in La légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, in that they are "written as they appear in the stained-glass windows of our churches." The tints are delicate, like those of the frescoes in the Panthéon, where Puvis de Chavannes depicts another French saint, Sainte Geneviève watching over Paris. The soft moonlight playing on the saint's figure in the frescoes is identical with the light which in Rolland's drama shines like a halo of goodness round the head of the pious king of France.

The music of Parsifal seems to sound faintly through the work. We trace the lineaments of Parsifal himself in this monarch, to whom knowledge comes not through sympathy but through goodness, and who finds the aptest phrase to explain his own title to fame, saying: "Pour comprendre les autres, il ne faut qu'aimer"—To understand others, we need only love. His leading quality is gentleness, but he has so much of it that the strong grow weak before him; he has nothing but his faith, but this faith builds mountains of action. He neither can nor will lead his people to victory; but he makes his subjects transcend themselves, transcend their own inertia and the apparently futile venture of the crusade, to attain faith. Thereby he gives the whole nation the greatness which ever springs from self-sacrifice. In Saint Louis, Rolland for the first time presents his favorite type, that of the vanquished victor. The king never reaches his goal, but "plus qu'il est écrasé par les choses plus il semble les dominer davantage"—the more he seems to be crushed by things, the more does he dominate them. When, like Moses, he is forbidden to set eyes on the promised land, when it proves to be his destiny "de mourir vaincu," to die conquered, as he draws his last breath on the mountain slope his soldiers at the summit, catching sight of the city which is the goal of their aspirations, raise an exultant shout. Louis knows that to one who strives for the unattainable the world can never give victory, but "il est beau lutter pour l'impossible quand l'impossible est Dieu"—it is glorious to fight for the unattainable when the unattainable is God. For the vanquished in such a struggle, the highest triumph is reserved. He has stirred up the weak in soul to do a deed whose rapture is denied to himself; from his own faith he has created faith in others; from his own spirit has issued the eternal spirit.

Rolland's first published work exhales the atmosphere of Christianity. Humility conquers force, faith conquers the world, love conquers hatred; these eternal truths which have been incorporated in countless sayings and writings from those of the primitive Christians down to those of Tolstoi, are repeated once again by Rolland in the form of a legend of the saints. In his later works, however, with a freer touch, he shows that the power of faith is not tied to any particular creed. The symbolical world, which is here used as a romanticist vehicle in which to enwrap his own idealism, is replaced by the environment of modern days. Thus we are taught that from Saint Louis and the crusades it is but a step to our own soul, if it desire "to be great and to defend greatness on earth."

CHAPTER VII

AËRT

1898

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 a heroic legend, a tender reminiscence of former greatness; Aërt is the tragedy of the vanquished, and a passionate appeal to them to awaken. The stage directions express this aim clearly: "The scene is cast in an imaginary Holland of the seventeenth century. We see a people broken by defeat and, which is much worse, debased thereby. The future presents itself as a period of slow decadence, whose anticipation definitively annuls the already exhausted energies.... The moral and political humiliations of recent years are the foundation of the troubles still in store."

Such is the environment in which Rolland places Aërt, the young prince, heir to vanished greatness. This Holland is, of course, symbolical of the Third Republic. Fruitless attempts are made, by the temptations of loose living, by various artifices, by the instilling of doubt, to break the captive's faith in greatness, to undermine the one power that still sustains the debile body and the suffering soul. The hypocrites of his entourage do their utmost, with luxury, frivolity, and lies, to wean him from what he considers his high calling, which is to prove himself worthy heir of a glorious past. He remains unshaken. His tutor, Maître Trojanus (a forerunner of Anatole France), all of whose qualities, kindliness, skepticism, energy, and wisdom, are but lukewarm, would like to make a Marcus Aurelius of his ardent pupil, one who thinks and renounces rather than one who acts. The lad proudly answers: "I pay due reverence to ideas, but I recognize something higher than they, moral grandeur." In a laodicean age, he yearns for action.

But action is force, struggle is blood. His gentle spirit desires peace; his moral will craves for the right. The youth has within him both a Hamlet and a Saint-Just, both a vacillator and a zealot. He is a wraithlike double of Olivier, already able to reckon up all values. The goal of Aërt's youthful passion is still indeterminate; this passion is nothing but a flame which wastes itself in words and aspirations. He does not make the deed come at his beckoning; but the deed takes possession of him, dragging the weakling down with it into the depths whence there is no other issue than by death. From degradation he finds a last rescue, a path to moral greatness, his own deed, done for the sake of all. Surrounded by the scornful victors, calling to him "Too late," he answers proudly, "Not too late to be free," and plunges headlong out of life.

This romanticist play is a piece of tragical symbolism. It reminds us a little of another youthful composition, the work of a poet who has now attained fame. I refer to Fritz von Unruh's Die Offiziere, in which the torment of enforced inactivity and repressed heroic will gives rise to warlike impulses as a means of spiritual enfranchisement. Like Unruh's hero, Aërt in his outcry proclaims the torpor of his companions, voices his oppression amid the sultry and stagnant atmosphere of a time devoid of faith. Encompassed by a gray materialism, during the years when Zola and Mirbeau were at the zenith of their fame, the lonely Rolland was hoisting the flag of the ideal over a humiliated land.

CHAPTER VIII

ATTEMPT TO REGENERATE THE FRENCH STAGE

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 service of beauty, whereas in times of weakness it was necessary to lean upon the examples of past heroism. Rolland had issued to his nation a summons to greatness. There was no answer. His conviction that a new impetus was indispensable remaining unshaken, Rolland looked for the cause of this lack of response. He rightly discerned it, not in his own work, but in the refractoriness of the age. Tolstoi, in his books and in the wonderful letter to Rolland, had been the first to make the young man realize the sterility of bourgeois art. Above all in the drama, its most sensual form of expression, that art had lost touch with the moral and emotional forces of life. A clique of busy playwrights had monopolized the Parisian stage. Their eternal theme was adultery, in its manifold variations. They depicted petty erotic conflicts, but never dealt with a universally human ethical problem. The audiences, badly counseled by the press, which deliberately fostered the public's intellectual lethargy, did not ask to be morally awakened, but merely to be amused and pleased. The theater was anything in the world other than "the moral institution" demanded by Schiller and championed by d'Alembert. No breath of passion found its way from such dramatic art as this into the heart of the nation; there was nothing but spindrift scattered over the surface by the breeze. A great gulf was fixed between this witty and sensuous amusement, and the genuinely creative and receptive energies of France.

Rolland, led by Tolstoi and accompanied by enthusiastic friends, realized the moral dangers of the situation. He perceived that dramatic art is worthless and destructive when it lives a life remote from the people. Unconsciously in Aërt he had heralded what he now formulated as a definite principle, that the people will be the first to understand genuinely heroic problems. The simple craftsman Claes in that play is the only member of the captive prince's circle who revolts against tepid submission, who burns at the disgrace inflicted on his fatherland. In other artistic forms than the drama, the titanic forces surging up from the depths of the people had already been recognized. Zola and the naturalists had depicted the tragical beauty of the proletariat; Millet and Meunier had given pictorial and sculptural representations of proletarians; socialism had unleashed the religious might of the collective consciousness. The theater alone, vehicle for the most direct working of art upon the common people, had been captured by the bourgeoisie, its tremendous possibilities for promoting a moral renascence being thereby cut off. Unceasingly did the drama practice the in-and-in breeding of sexual problems. In its pursuit of erotic trifles, it had over-looked the new social ideas, the most fundamental of modern times. It was in danger of decay because it no longer thrust its roots into the permanent subsoil of the nation. The anæmia of dramatic art, as Rolland recognized, could be cured only by intimate association with the life of the people. The effeminateness of the French drama must be replaced by virility through vital contact with the masses. "Seul la sève populaire peut lui rendre la vie et la santé." If the theater aspires to be national, it must not merely minister to the luxury of the upper ten thousand. It must become the moral nutriment of the common people, and must draw fertility from the folk-soul.

Rolland's work during the next few years was an endeavor to provide such a theater for the people. A few young men without influence or authority, strong only in the ardor and sincerity of their youthfulness, tried to bring this lofty idea to fruition, despite the utter indifference of the metropolis, and in defiance of the veiled hostility of the press. In their "Revue dramatique" they published manifestoes. They sought for actors, stages, and helpers. They wrote plays, formed committees, sent dispatches to ministers of state. In their endeavor to bridge the chasm between the bourgeois theater and the nation, they wrought with the fanatical zeal of the leaders of forlorn hopes. Rolland was their chief. His manifesto, Le théâtre du peuple, and his Théâtre de la révolution, are enduring monuments of an attempt which temporarily ended in defeat, but which, like all his defeats, has been transmuted, humanly and artistically, into a moral triumph.

CHAPTER IX

AN APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

“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, to the writers and to the people, that they should constitute a new unity, should form a people's theater. The stage and the plays were to belong to the people. Since the forces of the people are eternal and unalterable, art must accommodate itself to the people, not the people to art. This union must be perfected in the creative depths. It must not be a casual intimacy, but a permeation, a genetic wedding of souls. The people requires its own art, its own drama. As Tolstoi phrased it, the people must be the ultimate touchstone of all values. Its powerful, mystical, eternally religious energy of inspiration, must become more affirmative and stronger, so that art, which in its bourgeois associations has grown morbid and wan, can draw new vigor from the vigor of the people.

To this end it is essential that the people should no longer be a chance audience, transiently patronized by friendly managers and actors. The popular performances of the great theaters, such as have been customary in Paris since the issue of Napoleon's decree on the subject, do not suffice. Valueless also, in Rolland's view, are the attempts made from time to time by the Comédie Française to present to the workers the plays of such court poets as Corneille and Racine. The people do not want caviare, but wholesome fare. For the nourishment of their indestructible idealism they need an art of their own, a theater of their own, and, above all, works adapted to their sensibilities and to their intellectual tastes. When they come to the theater, they must not be made to feel that they are tolerated guests in a world of unfamiliar ideas. In the art that is presented to them they must be able to recognize the mainspring of their own energies.

More appropriate, in Rolland's opinion, are the attempts which have been made by isolated individuals like Maurice Pottecher in Bussang (Vosges) to provide a "théâtre du peuple," presenting to restricted audiences pieces easily understood. But such endeavors touch small circles only. The chasm in the gigantic metropolis between the stage and the real population remains unbridged. With the best will in the world, the twenty or thirty special representations are witnessed by no more than an infinitesimal proportion of the population. They do not signify a spiritual union, or promote a new moral impetus. Dramatic art has no permanent influence on the masses; and the masses, in their turn, have no influence on dramatic art. Though, in another literary sphere, Zola, Charles Louis Philippe, and Maupassant, began long ago to draw fertile inspiration from proletarian idealism, the drama has remained sterile and antipopular.

The people, therefore, must have its own theater. When this has been achieved, what shall we offer to the popular audiences? Rolland makes a brief survey of world literature. The result is appalling. What can the workers care for the classical pieces of the French drama? Corneille and Racine, with their decorous emotion, are alien to him; the subtleties of Molière are barely comprehensible. The tragedies of classical antiquity, the writings of the Greek dramatists, would bore the workers; Hugo's romanticism would repel, despite the author's healthy instinct for reality. Shakespeare, the universally human, is more akin to the folk-mind, but his plays must be adapted to fit them for popular presentation, and thereby they are falsified. Schiller, with Die Räuber and Wilhelm Tell, might be expected to arouse enthusiasm; but Schiller, like Kleist with Der Prinz von Homburg, is, for nationalist reasons, somewhat uncongenial to the Parisians. Tolstoi's The Dominion of Darkness and Hauptmann's Die Weber would be comprehensible enough, but their matter would prove somewhat depressing. While well calculated to stir the consciences of the guilty, among the people they would arouse feelings of despair rather than of hope. Anzengruber, a genuine folk-poet, is too distinctively Viennese in his topics. Wagner, whose Die Meistersinger Rolland regards as the climax of universally comprehensible and elevating art, cannot be presented without the aid of music.

However far he looks back into the past, Rolland can find no answer to his question. But he is not easily discouraged. To him disappointment is but a spur to fresh effort. If there are as yet no plays for the people's theater, it is the sacred duty of the new generation to provide what is lacking. The manifesto ends with a jubilant appeal: "Tout est à dire! Tout est à faire! A l'oeuvre!" In the beginning was the deed.

CHAPTER X

THE PROGRAM

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 easy to understand without being commonplace; those which stimulate faith without leading the spirit astray; those which appeal, not to sensuality, not to the love of sight-seeing, but to the powerful idealistic instincts of the masses. These plays must not treat of minor conflicts; but, in the spirit of the antique tragedies, they must display man in the struggle with elemental forces, man as subject to heroic destiny. "Let us away with complicated psychologies, with subtle innuendoes, with obscure symbolisms, with the art of drawing-rooms and alcoves." Art for the people must be monumental. Though the people desires truth, it must not be delivered over to naturalism, for art which makes the masses aware of their own misery will never kindle the sacred flame of enthusiasm, but only the insensate passion of anger. If, next day, the workers are to resume their daily tasks with a heightened and more cheerful confidence, they need a tonic. Thus the evening must have been a source of energy, but must at the same time have sharpened the intelligence. Undoubtedly the drama should display the people to the people, not however in the proletarian dullness of narrow dwellings, but on the pinnacles of the past. Rolland therefore opines, following to a large extent in Schiller's footsteps, that the people's theater must be historical in scope. The populace must not merely make its own acquaintance on the stage, but must be brought to admire its own past. Here we see the motif to which Rolland continually returns, the need for arousing a passionate aspiration towards greatness. In its suffering, the people must learn to regain delight in its own self.

With marvelous vividness does the imaginative historian display the epic significance of history. The forces of the past are sacred by reason of the spiritual energy which is part of every great movement. Reasoning persons can hardly fail to be revolted when they observe the unwarranted amount of space allotted to anecdotes, accessories, the trifles of history, at the expense of its living soul. The power of the past must be awakened; the will to action must be steeled. Those who live to-day must learn greatness from their fathers and forefathers. "History can teach people to get outside themselves, to read in the souls of others. We discern ourselves in the past, in a mingling of like characters and differing lineaments, with errors and vices which we can avoid. But precisely because history depicts the mutable, does it give us a better knowledge of the unchanging."

What, he goes on to ask, have French dramatists hitherto brought the people out of the past? The burlesque figure of Cyrano; the gracefully sentimental personality of the duke of Reichstadt; the artificial conception of Madame Sans-Gène! "Tout est à faire! Tout est à dire!" The land of dramatic art still lies fallow. "For France, national epopee is quite a new thing. Our playwrights have neglected the drama of the French people, although that people has been perhaps, since the days of Rome, the most heroic in the world. Europe's heart was beating in the kings, the thinkers, the revolutionists of France. And great as this nation has been in all domains of the spirit, its greatness has been shown above all in the field of action. Herein lay its most sublime creation; here was its poem, its drama, its epos. France did what others dreamed of doing. France wrote no Iliads, but lived a dozen. The heroes of France wrought more splendidly than the poets. No Shakespeare sang their deeds; but Danton on the scaffold was the spirit of Shakespeare personified. The life of France has touched the loftiest summits of joy; it has plumbed the deepest abysses of sorrow. It has been a wonderful 'comédie humaine,' a series of dramas; each of its epochs a new poem." This past must be recalled to life; French historical drama must restore it to the French people. "The spirit which soars above the centuries, will thus soar for centuries to come. If we would engender strong souls, we must nourish them with the energies of the world." Rolland now expands the French ode into a European ode. "The world must be our theme, for a nation is too small." One hundred and twenty years earlier, Schiller had said: "I write as a citizen of the world. Early did I exchange my fatherland for mankind." Rolland is fired by Goethe's words: "National literature now means very little; the epoch of world literature is at hand." He utters the following appeal: "Let us make Goethe's prophesy a living reality! It is our task to teach the French to look upon their national history as a wellspring of popular art; but on no account should we exclude the sagas of other nations. Though it is doubtless our first duty to make the most of the treasures we have ourselves inherited, we must none the less find room on our stage for the great deeds of all races. Just as Anacharsis Cloots and Thomas Paine were chosen members of the Convention; just as Schiller, Klopstock, Washington, Priestley, Bentham, Pestalozzi, and Kosciuszko, are the heroes of our world; so should we inaugurate in Paris the epopee of the European people!"

Thus did Rolland's manifesto, passing far beyond the limits of the stage, become at its close his first appeal to Europe. Uttered by a solitary voice, it remained for the time unheeded and void of effect. Nevertheless the confession of faith had been spoken; it was indestructible; it could never pass away. Jean Christophe had proclaimed his message to the world.

CHAPTER XI

THE CREATIVE ARTIST

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. An epic of the French people is to be written. He does not hesitate to lay the foundations, though environed by the silence and indifference of the metropolis. As always, the impetus that drives him is moral rather than artistic. He has a sense of personal responsibility for an entire nation. By such productive, by such heroic idealism, alone, and not by a purely theoretical idealism, can idealism be engendered.

The theme is easy to find. Rolland turns to the greatest moment of French history, to the Revolution. He responds to the appeal of his revolutionary forefathers. On the 27th of Floréal, 1794, the Committee of Public Safety issued an invocation to authors "to glorify the chief happenings of the French revolution; to compose republican dramas; to hand down to posterity the great epochs of the French renascence; to inspire history with the firmness of character appropriate to the annals of a great nation defending its freedom against the onslaught of all the tyrants of Europe." On the 11th of Messidor, the Committee asked young authors "boldly to recognize the whole magnitude of the undertaking, and to avoid the easy and well-trodden paths of mediocrity." The signatories of these decrees, Danton, Robespierre, Carnot, and Couthon, have now become national figures, legendary heroes, monuments in public places. Where restrictions were imposed on poetic inspiration by undue proximity to the subject, there is now room for the imagination to expand, seeing that this history of the period is remote enough to give free play to the tragic muse. The documents just quoted issue a summons to the poet and the historian in Rolland; but the same challenge rings from within as a personal heritage. Boniard, one of his great-grandfathers on the paternal side, took part in the revolutionary struggle as "an apostle of liberty," and described in his diary the storming of the Bastille. More than half a century later, another relative was fatally stabbed in Clamecy during a rising against the coup d'état. The blood of revolutionary zealots runs in Rolland's veins, no less than the blood of religious devotees. A century after 1792, in the fervor of commemoration, he reconstructed the great figures of that glorious past. The theater in which the "French Iliads" were to be staged did not yet exist; no one had hitherto recognized Rolland as a literary force; actors and audience were alike lacking. Of all the requisites for the new creation, there existed solely his own faith and his own will. Building upon faith alone, he began to write Le théâtre de la révolution.

CHAPTER XII

THE DRAMA OF THE REVOLUTION

1898-1902

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's histories. "I wished," he writes in the 1909 preface to Le théâtre de la révolution, "in the totality of this work to exhibit as it were the drama of a convulsion of nature, to depict a social storm from the moment when the first waves began to rise above the surface of the ocean down to the moment when calm spread once more over the face of the waters." No by-play, no anecdotal trifling, was to mitigate the mighty rhythm of the primitive forces. "My leading aim was to purify the course of events, as far as might be, from all romanticist intrigue, which would serve only to encumber and belittle the movement. Above all I desired to throw light upon the great political and social interests on behalf of which mankind has been fighting for a hundred years." It is obvious that the work of Schiller is closely akin to the idealistic style of this people's theater. Comparing Rolland's technique with Schiller's, we may say that Rolland was thinking of a Don Carlos without the Eboli episodes, of a Wallenstein without the Thekla sentimentalities. He wished to show the people the sublimities of history, not to entertain the audience with anecdotes of popular heroes.

Thus conceived as a dramatic cycle, it was simultaneously, from the musician's outlook, to be a symphony, an "Eroica." A prelude was to introduce the whole, a pastoral in the style of the "fêtes galantes." We are at the Trianon, watching the light-hearted unconcern of the ancien régime; we are shown powdered and patched ladies, amorous cavaliers, dallying and chattering. The storm is approaching, but no one heeds it. Once again the age of gallantry smiles; the setting sun of the Grand Monarque seems to shine once more on the fading tints in the garden of Versailles.

Le 14 Juillet is the flourish of trumpets; it marks the opening of the storm. Danton is the critical climax; in the hour of victory comes the beginning of moral defeat, the fratricidal struggle. A Robespierre was to introduce the declining phase. Le triomphe de la raison shows the disintegration of the Revolution in the provinces; Les loups depicts a like decomposition in the army. Between two of the heroic plays, the author proposed to insert a love drama, describing the fate of Louvet, the Girondist. Wishing to visit his beloved in Paris, he leaves his hiding-place in Gascony, and is the only one to escape the death that overtakes his friends, who are all guillotined or torn to pieces by the wolves as they flee. The figures of Marat, Saint-Just, and Adam Lux, which are merely touched on in the extant plays, were to receive detailed treatment in the dramas that remain unwritten. Doubtless, too, the figure of Napoleon would have towered above the dying Revolution.

Opening with a musical and lyrical prelude, this symphonic composition was to end with a postlude. After the great storm, castaways from the shipwreck were to foregather in Switzerland, near Soleure. Royalists and regicides, Girondists and Montagnards, were to exchange reminiscences; a love episode between two of their children was to lend an idyllic touch to the aftermath of the European storm. Fragments only of this great design have been carried to completion, comprising the four dramas, Le 14 Juillet, Danton, Les loups, and Le triomphe de la raison. When these plays had been written, Rolland abandoned the scheme, to which the people, like the literary world and the stage, had given no encouragement. For more than a decade these tragedies have been forgotten. To-day, perchance, the awakening impulses of an age becoming aware of its own lineaments in the prophetic image of a world convulsion, may arouse in the author an impulse to complete what was so magnificently begun.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY

1902

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 thought has formed it; no leader has guided it. Like thunder from a clear sky comes the aimless discharge of the tensions that have accumulated among the people. The thunderbolt strikes the Bastille; the lightning flash illumines the soul of the entire nation. This piece has no heroes, for the hero of the play is the multitude. "Individuals are merged in the ocean of the people," writes Rolland in the preface. "He who limns a storm at sea, need not paint the details of every wave; he must show the unchained forces of the ocean. Meticulous precision is a minor matter compared with the impassioned truth of the whole." In actual fact, this drama is all tumultuous movement; individuals rush across the stage like figures on the cinematographic screen; the storming of the Bastille is not the outcome of a reasoned purpose, but of an overwhelming, an ecstatic impulse.

Le 14 Juillet, therefore, is not properly speaking a drama, and does not really seek to be anything of the kind. Consciously or unconsciously, Rolland aimed at creating one of those "fêtes populaires" which the Convention had encouraged, a people's festival with music and dancing, an epinikion, a triumphal ode. His work, therefore, is not suitable for the artificial environment of the boards, and should rather be played under the free heaven. Opening symphonically, it closes in exultant choruses for which the author gives definite directions to the composer. "The music must be, as it were, the background of a fresco. It must make manifest the heroical significance of the festival; it must fill in pauses as they can never be adequately filled in by a crowd of supernumeraries, for these, however much noise they make, fail to sustain the illusion of real life. This music should be inspired by that of Beethoven, which more powerfully than any other reflects the enthusiasms of the Revolution. Above all, it must breathe an ardent faith. No composer will effect anything great in this vein unless he be personally inspired by the soul of the people, unless he himself feel the burning passion that is here portrayed."

Rolland wishes to create an atmosphere of ecstatic rapture. Not by dramatic excitement, but by its opposite. The theater is to be forgotten; the multitude in the audience is to become spiritually at one with its image on the stage. In the last scene, when the phrases are directly addressed to the audience, when the stormers of the Bastille appeal to their hearers on behalf of the imperishable victory which leads men to break the yoke of oppression and to win brotherhood, this idea must not be a mere echo from the members of the audience, but must surge up spontaneously in their own hearts. The cry "tous frères" must be a double chorus of actors and spectators, for the latter, part of the "courant de foi," must share the intoxication of joy. The spark from their own past must rekindle in the hearts of to-day. It is manifest that words alone will not suffice to produce this effect. Hence Rolland wishes to superadd the higher spell of music, the undying goddess of pure ecstasy.

The audience of which he dreamed was not forthcoming; nor until twenty years had elapsed was he to find Doyen, the musician who was almost competent to fulfill his demands. The representation in the Gemier Theater on March 21, 1902, wasted itself in the void. His message never reached the people to whose ear it had been so vehemently addressed. Without an echo, almost pitifully, was this ode of joy drowned in the roar of the great city, which had forgotten the deeds of the past, and which failed to understand its own kinship to Rolland, the man who was recalling those deeds to memory.