CHAPTER XI
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HATRED
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 reluctantly in the newspapers. Undismayed, Rolland resolutely continued his work. He wished to cut a clearing into which a few sunbeams of reason might shine through the gloomy and suffocating atmosphere. His next essays aimed at illuminating an open space of such a character. Especially notable were Inter Arma Caritas (October 30, 1914); Les idoles (December 4, 1914); Notre prochain l'ennemi (March 15, 1915); Le meutre des élites (June 14, 1915). These were attempts to give a voice to the silent. "Let us help the victims! It is true that we cannot do very much. In the everlasting struggle between good and evil, the balance is unequal. We require a century for the upbuilding of that which a day destroys. Nevertheless, the frenzy lasts no more than a day, and the patient labor of reconstruction is our daily bread. This work goes on even during an hour when the world is perishing around us."
The poet had at length come to understand his task. It is useless to attack the war directly. Reason can effect nothing against the elemental forces. But he regards it as his predestined duty to combat throughout the war everything that the passions of men lead them to undertake for the deliberate increase of horror, to combat the spiritual poison of the war. The most atrocious feature of the present struggle, one which distinguishes it from all previous wars, is this deliberate poisoning. That which in earlier days was accepted with simple resignation as a disastrous visitation like the plague, was now presented in a heroic light, as a sign of "the grandeur of the age." An ethic of force, an ethic of destruction, was being preached. The mass struggle of the nations was being purposely inflamed to become the mass hatred of individuals. Rolland, therefore, was not, as many have supposed, attacking the war; he was attacking the ideology of the war, the artificial idolization of brutality. As far as the individual was concerned, he attacked the readiness to accept a collective morality constructed solely for the duration of the war; he attacked the surrender of conscience in face of the prevailing universalization of falsehood; he attacked the suspension of inner freedom which was advocated until the war should be over.
His words, therefore, are not directed against the masses, not against the peoples. These know not what they do; they are deceived; they are dumb driven cattle. The diffusion of lying has made it easy for them to hate. "Il est si commode de haïr sans comprendre." The fault lies with the inciters, with the manufacturers of lies, with the intellectuals. They are guilty, seven times guilty, because, thanks to their education and experience, they cannot fail to know the truth which nevertheless they repudiate; because from weakness, and in many cases from calculation, they have surrendered to the current of uninstructed opinion, instead of using their authority to deflect this current into better channels. Of set purpose, instead of defending the ideals they formerly espoused, the ideals of humanity and international unity, they have revived the ideas of the Spartans and of the Homeric heroes, which have as little place in our time as have spears and plate-armor in these days of machine-gun warfare. Heretofore, to the great spirits of all time, hatred has seemed a base and contemptible accompaniment of war. The thoughtful among the non-combatants put it away from them with loathing; the warriors rejected the sentiment upon grounds of chivalry. Now, hatred is not merely supported with all the arguments of logic, science, and poesy; but is actually, in defiance of gospel teaching, raised to a place among the moral duties, so that every one who resists the feeling of collective hatred is branded as a traitor. Against these enemies of the free spirit, Rolland takes up his parable: "Not only have they done nothing to lessen reciprocal misunderstanding; not only have they done nothing to limit the diffusion of hate; on the contrary, with few exceptions, they have done everything in their power to make hatred more widespread and more venomous. In large part, this war is their war. By their murderous ideologies they have led thousands astray. With criminal self-confidence, unteachable in their arrogance, they have driven millions to death, sacrificing their fellows to the phantoms which they, the intellectuals, have created." The persons to whom blame attaches are those who know, or who might have known; but who, from sloth, cowardice, or weakness, from desire for fame or for some other personal advantage, have given themselves over to lying.
The hatred breathed by the intellectuals was a falsehood. Had it been a truth, had it been a genuine passion, those who were inspired with this feeling would have ceased talking and would themselves have taken up arms. Most people are moved either by hatred or by love, not by abstract ideas. For this reason, the attempt to sow dissension among millions of unknown individuals, the attempt to "perpetuate" hatred, was a crime against the spirit rather than against the flesh. It was a deliberate falsification to include leaders and led, drivers and driven, in a single category; to generalize Germany as an integral object for hatred. We must join one fellowship or the other, that of the truthtellers or that of the liars, that of the men of conscience or that of the men of phrase. Just as in Jean Christophe, Rolland, in order to show forth the universally human fellowship, had distinguished between the true France and the false, between the old Germany and the new; so now in wartime did he draw attention to the ominous resemblance between the war fanatics in both camps, and to the heroic isolation of those who were above the battle in all the belligerent lands. Thus did he endeavor to fulfill Tolstoi's dictum, that it is the function of the imaginative writer to strengthen the ties that bind men together. In Rolland's comedy Liluli, the "cerveaux enchaînés," dressed in various national uniforms, dance the same Indian war-dance under the lash of Patriotism, the negro slave-driver. There is a terrible resemblance between the German professors and those of the Sorbonne. All of them turn the same logical somersaults; all join in the same chorus of hate.
But the fellowship to which Rolland wishes to draw our attention, is the fellowship of solace. It is true that the humanizing forces are not so well organized as the forces of destruction. Free opinion is gagged, whereas falsehood bellows through the megaphones of the press. Truth has to be sought out with painful labor, for the state makes it its business to hide truth. Nevertheless, those who search perseveringly can discover truth among all nations and among all races. In these essays, Rolland gives many examples, drawn equally from French and from German sources, showing that even in the trenches, nay, that especially in the trenches, thousands upon thousands are animated with brotherly feelings. He publishes letters from German soldiers, side by side with letters from French soldiers, all couched in the same phraseology of human friendliness. He tells of the women's organizations for helping the enemy, and shows that amid the cruelty of arms the same lovingkindness is displayed on both sides. He publishes poems from either camp, poems which exhale a common sentiment. Just as in his Vie des hommes illustres he had wished to show the sufferers of the world that they were not alone, but that the greatest minds of all epochs were with them, so now does he attempt to convince those who amid the general madness are apt to regard themselves as outcasts because they do not share the fire and fury of the newspapers and the professors, that they have everywhere silent brothers of the spirit. Once more, as of old, he wishes to unite the invisible community of the free. "I feel the same joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They show that the warmth of life persists below the surface, and that soon nothing will prevent its rising again." Undismayed he continues on his "humble pélérinage," endeavoring "to discover, beneath the ruins, the hearts of those who have remained faithful to the old ideal of human brotherhood. What a melancholy joy it is to come to their aid." For the sake of this consolation, for the sake of this hope, he gives a new significance even to war, which he has hated and dreaded from early childhood. "To war we owe one painful benefit, in that it has served to bring together those of all nations who refuse to share the prevailing sentiments of national hatred. It has steeled their energies, has inspired them with an indefatigable will. How mistaken are those who imagine that the ideas of human brotherhood have been stifled.... Not for a moment do I doubt the coming unity of the European fellowship. That unity will be realized. The war is but its baptism of blood."
Thus does the good Samaritan, the healer of souls, endeavor to bring to the despairing that hope which is the bread of life. Perchance Rolland speaks with a confidence that runs somewhat in advance of his innermost convictions. But he only who realized the intense yearnings of the innumerable persons who at that date were imprisoned in their respective fatherlands, barred in the cages of the censorships, he alone can realize the value to such poor captives of Rolland's manifestoes of faith, words free from hatred, bringing at length a message of brotherhood.
CHAPTER XII
OPPONENTS
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 combatants are to-day united in one thing only, in their hatred for those who refuse to join in any hymn of hate. Whoever does not share the common delirium, is suspect. And nowadays, when justice cannot spare the time for thorough investigation, every suspect is considered tantamount to a traitor. He who undertakes in wartime to defend peace on earth, must realize that he is staking his faith, his name, his tranquillity, his repute, and even his friendships. But of what value would be a conviction on behalf of which a man would take no risks?" Rolland was likewise aware that the most dangerous of all positions is that between the fronts, but this certainty of danger was but a tonic to his conscience. "If it be really needful, as the proverb assures us, to prepare for war in time of peace, it is no less needful to prepare for peace in time of war. In my view, the latter role is assigned to those who stand outside the struggle, and whose mental life has brought them into unusually close contact with the world-all. I speak of the members of that little lay church, of those who have been exceptionally well able to maintain their faith in the unity of human thought, of those for whom all men are sons of the same father. If it should chance that we are reviled for holding this conviction, the reviling is in truth an honor to us, and we may be satisfied to know that we shall earn the approbation of posterity."
It is plain that Rolland is forearmed against opposition. Nevertheless, the fierceness of the onslaughts exceeded all expectation. The first rumblings of the storm came from Germany. The passage in the Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, "are you the sons of Goethe or of Attila," and similar utterances, aroused angry echoes. A dozen or so professors and scribblers hastened to "chastise" French arrogance. In the columns of "Die Deutsche Rundschau," a narrow-minded pangerman disclosed the great secret that under the mask of neutrality Jean Christophe had been a most dangerous French attack upon the German spirit.
French champions were no less eager to enter the lists as soon as the publication of the essay Au-dessus de la mêlée was reported. Difficult as it seems to realize the fact to-day, the French newspapers were forbidden to reprint this manifesto, but fragments became known to the public in the attacks wherein Rolland was pilloried as an antipatriot. Professors at the Sorbonne and historians of renown did not shrink from leveling such accusations. Soon the campaign was systematized. Newspaper articles were followed by pamphlets, and ultimately by a large volume from the pen of a carpet hero. This book was furnished with a thousand proofs, with photographs, and quotations; it was a complete dossier, avowedly intended to supply materials for a prosecution. There was no lack of the basest calumnies. It was asserted that since the beginning of the war Rolland had joined the German society "Neues Vaterland"; that he was a contributor to German newspapers; that his American publisher was a German agent. In one pamphlet he was accused of deliberately falsifying dates. Yet more incriminatory charges could be read between the lines. With the exception of a few newspapers of advanced tendencies and comparatively small circulation, the whole of the French press combined to boycott Rolland. Not one of the Parisian journals ventured to publish a reply to the charges. A professor triumphantly announced: "Cet auteur ne se lit plus en France." His former associates withdrew in alarm from the tainted member of the flock. One of his oldest friends, the "ami de la première heure," to whom Rolland had dedicated an earlier work, deserted at this decisive hour, and canceled the publication of a book upon Rolland which was already in type. The French government likewise began to watch Rolland closely, dispatching agents to collect "materials." A number of "defeatist" trails were obviously aimed in part at Rolland, whose essay was publicly stigmatized as "abominable" by Lieutenant Mornet, the tiger of these prosecutions. Nothing but the authority of his name, the inviolability of his public life, and the fact that he was a lonely fighter (this making it impossible to show that he had any suspect associations), frustrated the well-prepared plan to put Rolland in the dock among adventurers and petty spies.
All this lunacy is incomprehensible unless we reconstruct the forcing-house atmosphere of that year. It is difficult to-day, even from a study of all the pamphlets and books bearing on the question, to grasp the way in which Rolland's fellow-countrymen had become convinced that he was an antipatriot. From his own writings, it is impossible for the most fanciful brain to extract the ingredients for a "cas Rolland." From a study of his own writings alone it is impossible to understand the frenzy felt by all the intellectuals of France towards this lonely exile, who tranquilly and with a full sense of responsibility continued to develop his ideas.
In the eyes of the patriots, Rolland's first crime was that he openly discussed the moral problems of the war. "On ne discute pas la patrie." The first axiom of war ethics is that those who cannot or will not shout with the crowd must hold their peace. Soldiers must never be taught to think; they must only be incited to hate. A lie which promotes enthusiasm is worth more in wartime than the best of truths. In imitation of the principles of the Catholic church, reflection, doubt, is deemed a crime against the infallible dogma of the fatherland. It was enough that Rolland should wish to turn things over in his mind, instead of unquestioningly affirming the current political theses. Thereby he abandoned the "attitude française"; thereby he was stamped as "neutre." In those days "neutre" was a good rime to "traître."
Rolland's second crime was that he desired to be just to all mankind, that he continued to regard the enemy as human beings, that among them he distinguished between guilty and not guilty, that he had as much compassion for German sufferers as for French, that he did not hesitate to refer to the Germans as brothers. The dogma of patriotism prescribed that for the duration of the war the feelings of humanitarianism should be stifled. Justice should be put away on the top shelf, to keep company there, until victory had been secured, with the divine command, Thou shalt not kill. One of the pamphlets against Rolland bears as its motto, "Pendant une guerre tout ce qu'on donne de l'amour à l'humanité, on le vole à la patrie"—though it must be observed that from the outlook of those who share Rolland's views, the order of the terms might well be inverted.
The third crime, the offense which seemed most unpardonable of all, and the one most dangerous to the state, was that Rolland refused to regard a military victory as likely to furnish the elixir of morality, to promote spiritual regeneration, to bring justice upon earth. Rolland's sin lay in holding that a just and bloodless peace, a complete reconciliation, a fraternal union of the European nations, would be more fruitful of blessing than an enforced peace, which could only sow the dragon's teeth of hatred and of new wars. In France at this date, those who wished to fight the war to a finish, to fight until the enemy had been utterly crushed, coined the term "defeatist" for those who desired peace to be based upon a reasonable understanding. Thus was paralleled the German terminology, which spoke of "Flaumachern" (slackers) and of "Schmachfriede" (shameful peace). Rolland, who had devoted the whole of his life to the elucidation of moral laws higher than those of force, was stigmatized as one who would poison the morale of the armies, as "l'initiateur du défaitisme." To the militarists, he seemed to be the last representative of "dying Renanism," to be the center of a moral power, and for this reason they endeavored to represent his ideas as nonsensical, to depict him as a Frenchman who desired the defeat of France. Yet his words stood unchallenged: "I wish France to be loved. I wish France to be victorious, not through force; not solely through right (even that would be too harsh); but through the superiority of a great heart. I wish that France were strong enough to fight without hatred; strong enough to regard even those whom she must strike down, as her brothers, as erring brothers, to whom she must extend her fullest sympathy as soon as she has put it beyond their power to injure her." Rolland made no attempt to answer even the most calumnious of attacks. He quietly let the invectives pass, knowing that the thought which he felt himself commissioned to announce, was inviolable and imperishable. Never had he fought men, but only ideas. The hostile ideas, in this case, had long since been answered by the figures of his own creation. They had been answered by Olivier, the free Frenchman who hated hatred; by Faber, the Girondist, to whom conscience stood higher than the arguments of the patriots; by Adam Lux, who compassionately asked his fanatical opponent, "N'es tu pas fatigué de ta baine"; by Teulier, and by all the great characters through whom during more than two decades he had been giving expression to his outlook upon the struggle of the day. He was unperturbed at standing alone against almost the entire nation. He recalled Chamfort's saying, "There are times when public opinion is the worst of all possible opinions." The immeasurable wrath, the hysterical frenzy of his opponents, confirmed his conviction that he was right, for he felt that their clamor for force betrayed their sense of the weakness of their own arguments. Smilingly he contemplated their artificially inflamed anger, addressing them in the words of his own Clerambault: "You say that yours is the better way? The only good way? Very well, take your own path, and leave me to take mine. I make no attempt to compel you to follow me. I merely show you which way I am going. What are you so excited about? Perhaps at the bottom of your hearts you are afraid that my way is the right one?"
CHAPTER XIII
FRIENDS
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 danger. His oldest friends, those who had known his writings and his character from youth upwards, left him in the lurch; prudent folk quietly turned their backs on him; newspaper editors and publishers refused him hospitality. For the moment, Rolland seemed to be alone. But, as he had written in Jean Christophe, "A great soul is never alone. Abandoned by friends, such a one makes new friends, and surrounds himself with a circle of that affection of which he is himself full."
Necessity, the touchstone of conscience, had deprived him of friends, but had also brought him friends. It is true that their voices were hardly audible amid the clangor of the opponents. The war-makers had control of all the channels of publicity. They roared hatred through the megaphones of the press. Friends could do no more than give expression to a few cautious words in such petty periodicals as could slip through the meshes of the censorship. Enemies formed a compact mass, flowing to the attack in a huge wave (whose waters were ultimately to be dispersed in the morass of oblivion); his friends crystallized slowly and secretly around his ideas, but they were steadfast. His enemies were a regiment advancing fiercely to the attack at the word of command; his friends were a fellowship, working tranquilly, and united only through love.
The friends in Paris had the hardest task. It was barely possible for them to communicate with him openly. Half of their letters to him and half of his replies were lost on the frontier. As from a beleaguered fortress, they hailed the liberator, the man who was freely proclaiming to the world the ideals which they were forbidden to utter. Their only possible way of defending their ideas was to defend the man. In Rolland's own fatherland, Amédée Dunois, Fernand Desprès, Georges Pioch, Renaitour, Rouanet, Jacques Mesnil, Gaston Thiesson, Marcel Martinet, and Sévérine, boldly championed him against calumny. A valiant woman, Marcelle Capy, raised the standard, naming her book Une voix de femme dans la mêlée. Separated from him by the blood-stained sea, they looked towards him as towards a distant lighthouse upon the rock, and showed their brothers the signal of hope.
In Geneva there formed round him a group of young writers, disciples and friends, winning strength from his strength. P. J. Jouve author of Vous êtes des hommes and Danse des morts, glowing with anger and with love of goodness, suffering intensely at witnessing the injustice of the world, Olivier redivivus, gave expression in his poems to his hatred for force. René Arcos, who like Jouve had realized all the horror of war and who hated war no less intensely, had a clearer comprehension of the dramatic moment, was more thoughtful than Jouve, but equally simple and kindhearted. Arcos extolled the European ideal; Charles Baudouin the ideal of eternal goodness. Franz Masereel, the Belgian artist, developed his humanist plaint in a series of magnificent woodcuts. Guilbeaux, zealot for the social revolution, ever ready to fight like a gamecock against authority, founded his monthly review "demain," which was a faithful representative of the European spirit for a time, until it succumbed because of its passion for the Russian revolution. Charles Baudouin founded the monthly review, "Le Carmel," providing a city of refuge for the persecuted European spirit, and a platform upon which the poets and imaginative writers of all lands could assemble under the banner of humanity. Jean Debrit in "La Feuille" combated the partisanship of the Latin Swiss press and attacked the war. Claude de Maguet founded "Les Tablettes," which, through the boldness of its contributors and through the drawings of Masereel, became the most vigorous periodical in Switzerland. A little oasis of independence came into existence, and hither the breezes from all quarters wafted greetings from the distance. Here alone was it possible to breathe a European air.
The most remarkable feature of this circle was that, thanks to Rolland, enemy brethren were not excluded from spiritual fellowship. Whereas everywhere else people were infected with the hysteria of mass hatred or were terrified lest they should expose themselves to suspicion, and therefore avoided their sometime intimates of enemy countries like the pestilence should they chance to meet them in the streets of some neutral city, at a time when relatives were afraid to exchange letters of enquiry regarding the life or death of those of their own blood, Rolland would not for a moment deny his German friends. Never, indeed, had he shown more love to those among them who remained faithful, at an epoch when to love them was dangerous. He made himself known to them in public, and wrote to them freely. His words concerning these friendships will never be forgotten: "Yes, I have German friends; just as I have French, English, and Italian friends; just as I have friends among the members of every race. They are my wealth, which I am proud of, and which I seek to preserve. If a man has been so fortunate as to encounter loyal souls, persons with whom he can share his most intimate thoughts, persons with whom he is connected by brotherly ties, these ties are sacred, and the hour of trial is the last of hours in which they should be rent asunder. How cowardly would be the refusal to recognize these friends, in deference to the impudent demand of a public opinion which has no rights over our feelings.... How painful, how tragical, these friendships are at such a moment, the letters will show when they are published. But it is precisely by means of such friendships that we can defend ourselves against hatred, more murderous than war, for it poisons the wounds of war, and harms the hater equally with the object of hate."
Immeasurable is the debt which friends and numberless unseen companions in adversity owe to Rolland for his brave and free attitude. He set an example to all those who, though they shared his sentiments, were isolated in obscurity, and who needed some such point of crystallization before their thoughts and feelings could be consolidated. It was above all for those who were not yet sure of themselves that this archetypal personality provided so splendid a stimulus. Rolland's steadfastness put younger men to shame. In his company we were stronger, freer, more genuine, more unprejudiced. Human loving kindness, transfigured by his ardor, radiated like a flame. What bound us together was not that we chanced to think alike, but a passionate exaltation, which often became a positive fanaticism for brotherhood. We foregathered in defiance of public opinion and in defiance of the laws of the belligerent states, exchanging confidences without reserve; our comradeship exposed us to all sorts of suspicions; these things served but to draw us closer together, and in many memorable hours we felt with a veritable intoxication the unprecedented quality of our friendship. We were but a couple of dozen who thus came together in Switzerland; Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Austrians, and Italians. We few were the only ones among the hundreds of millions who could look one another in the face without hatred, exchanging our innermost thoughts. This little troop was all that then constituted Europe. Our unity, a grain of dust in the storm which was raging through the world, was perhaps the seed of the coming fraternity. How strong, how happy, how grateful did we often feel. For without Rolland, without the genius of his friendship, without the connecting link constituted by his disposition, we should never have attained to freedom and security. Each of us loved him in a different way, and all of us regarded him with equal veneration. To the French, he was the purest spiritual expression of their homeland; to us, he was the wonderful counterpart of the best in our own world. In this circle that formed round Rolland there was the sense of fellowship which has always characterized a religious community in the making. The hostility between our respective nations, and the consciousness of danger, fired our friendship to the pitch of exaggeration; while the example of the bravest and freest man we had ever known, brought out all that was best in us. When we were near him, we felt ourselves to be in the heart of true Europe. Whoever was able to know Rolland's inmost essence, acquired, as in the ancient saga, new energy for the wrestle with brute force.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LETTERS
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 beyond these personal limits, he diffused a consolidating and helpful influence. Whoever turned to him with a question, an anxiety, a distress, or a suggestion, received an answer. In hundreds upon hundreds of letters he spread the message of brotherhood, splendidly fulfilling the vow he had made a quarter of a century earlier, at the time when Tolstoi's letter had brought him spiritual healing. In Rolland's self there had come to life, not only Jean Christophe the believer, but likewise Leo Tolstoi, the great consoler.
Unknown to the world, he shouldered a stupendous burden during the five years of the war. For whoever found himself in revolt against the time and in conflict with the prevailing miasma of falsehood, whoever needed counsel in a matter of conscience, whoever wanted aid, knew where he could turn for what he sought. Who else in Europe inspired such confidence? The unknown friends of Jean Christophe, the nameless brothers of Olivier, hidden in out-of-the-way parts, knowing no one to whom they could whisper their doubts—in whom could they better confide than in this man who had first brought them tidings of goodness? They sent him requests, submitted proposals, disclosed the turmoil of their consciences. Soldiers wrote to him from the trenches; mothers penned letters to him in secret. Many of the writers did not venture to give their names, merely wishing to send a message of sympathy and to inscribe themselves citizens of that invisible "republic of free souls" which the author of Jean Christophe had founded amid the warring nations. Rolland accepted the infinite labor of being the centralizing point and administrator of all these distresses and plaints, of being the recipient of all these confessions, of being the consoler of a world divided against itself. Wherever there was a stirring of European, of universally human sentiment, Rolland did his best to receive and sustain it; he was the crossways towards which all these roads converged. At the same time he was continuously in communication with leading representatives of the European faith, with those of all lands who had remained loyal to the free spirit. He studied the periodicals of the day for messages of reconciliation. Wherever a man or a work was devoted to the reconsolidation of Europe, Rolland's help was ready.
These hundreds and thousands of letters combine to form an ethical achievement such as has not been paralleled by any previous writer. They brought happiness to countless solitary souls, strength to the wavering, hope to the despairing. Never was the poet's mission more nobly fulfilled. Considered as works of art, these letters, many of which have already been published, are among the finest and maturest of Rolland's literary creations. To bring solace is the most intimate purpose of his art. Here, when speaking as man to man he can give himself without stint, he displays a rhythmical energy, an ardor of lovingkindness, which makes many of the letters rank with the loveliest poems of our time. The sensitive modesty which often makes him reserved in conversation, was no longer a hindrance. The letters are frank confessions, wherein his free spirit converses freely with its fellows, disclosing the author's goodness, his passionate emotion. That which is so generously poured forth for the benefit of unknown correspondents, is the most intimate essence of his nature. Like Colas Breugnon he can say: "Voilà mon plus beau travail: les âmes que j'ai sculptées."
CHAPTER XV
THE COUNSELOR
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 war, they ought to refuse military service, in accordance with the teaching of Tolstoi, and following the example of the conscientious objectors; or whether they should obey the biblical precept, Resist not evil. They enquired whether they should take an open stand against the injustices committed by their country, or whether they should endure in silence. Others besought spiritual counsel in their troubles of conscience. All who came seemed to imagine that they were coming to one who possessed a maxim, a fixed principle concerning conduct in relation to the war, a wonder-working moral elixir which he could dispense in suitable doses.
To all these enquiries Rolland returned the same answer: "Follow your conscience. Seek out your own truth and realize it. There is no ready-made truth, no rigid formula, which one person can hand over to another. Each must create truth for himself, according to his own model. There is no other rule of moral conduct than that a man should seek his own light and should be guided by it even against the world. He who lays down his arms and accepts imprisonment, does rightly when he follows the inner light, and is not prompted by vanity or by simple imitativeness. He likewise is right, who takes up arms with no intention to use them in earnest, who thus cheats the state that he may propagate his ideal and save his inner freedom—provided always he acts in accordance with his own nature." Rolland declared that the one essential was that a man should believe in his own faith. He approved the patriot desirous of dying for his country, and he approved the anarchist who claimed freedom from all governmental authority. There was no other maxim than that of faith in one's own faith. The only man who did wrong, the only man who acted falsely, was he who allowed himself to be swept away by another's ideals, he who, influenced by the intoxication of the crowd, performed actions which conflicted with his own nature. A typical instance was that of Ludwig Frank, the socialist, the advocate of a Franco-German understanding, who, deciding to serve his party instead of serving his own ideal, volunteered at the outbreak of the war, and died for the ideals of his opponent, for the ideals of militarism.
There is but one truth, such was Rolland's answer to all. The only truth is that which a man finds within himself and recognizes as his very own. Any other would-be truth is self-deception. What appears to be egoism, serves humanity. "He who would be useful to others, must above all remain free. Even love avails nothing, if the one who loves be a slave." Death for the fatherland is worthless unless he who sacrifices himself believes in his fatherland as in a god. To evade military service is cowardice in one who lacks courage to proclaim himself a sanspatrie. There are no true ideas other than those which spring from inner experience; there are no deeds worth doing other than those which are the outcome of fully responsible reflection. He who would serve mankind, must not blindly obey the arguments of a stranger. We cannot regard as a moral act anything which is done simply through imitativeness, or in consequence of another's persuasion, or (as almost universally under modern war stresses) through the suggestive influence of mass illusion. "A man's first duty is to be himself, to remain himself, at the cost of self-sacrifice."
Rolland did not fail to recognize the difficulty, the rarity, of such free acts. He recalled Emerson's saying: "Nothing is more rare in any man, than an act of his own." But was not the unfree, untrue thinking of the masses, the inertia of the mass conscience, the prime cause of our present troubles? Would the war between European brethren have ever broken out if every townsman, every countryman, every artist, had looked within to enquire whether the mines of Morocco and the swamps of Albania were truly precious to him? Would there have been a war if every one had asked himself whether he really hated his brothers across the frontier as vehemently as the newspapers and the professional politicians would have him believe? The herd instinct, the pattering of others' arguments, a blind enthusiasm on behalf of sentiments that were never truly felt, could alone render such a catastrophe possible. Nothing but the freedom of the largest possible number of individuals can save us from the recurrence of such a tragedy; nothing can save us but that conscience should be an individual and not a collective affair. That which each one recognizes to be true and good for himself, is true and good for mankind. "What the world needs before all to-day is free souls and strong characters. For to-day all paths seem to lead to an accentuation of herd life. We see a passive subordination to the church, the intolerant traditionalism of the fatherlands, socialist dreams of a despotic unity.... Mankind needs men who can show that the very persons who love mankind can, whenever necessary, declare war against the collective impulse."
Rolland therefore refuses to act as authority for others. He demands that every one should recognize the supreme authority of his own conscience. Truth cannot be taught; it must be lived. He who thinks clearly, and having done so acts freely, produces conviction, not by words but by his nature. Rolland has been able to help an entire generation, because from the height of his loneliness he has shown the world how a man makes an idea live for all time by loyalty to that which he has recognized as truth. Rolland's counsel was not word but deed; it was the moral simplicity of his own example.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SOLITARY
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. He dwelt apart at Villeneuve by the lake of Geneva. His little room resembled that in which he had lived in Paris. Here, too, were piles of books and pamphlets; here was a plain deal table; here was a piano, the companion of his hours of relaxation. His days, and often his nights were spent at work. He seldom went for a walk, and rarely received a visitor, for his friends were cut off from him, and even his parents and his sister could only get across the frontier about once a year. But the worst feature of this loneliness was that it was loneliness in a glass house. He was continually spied upon: his least words were listened for by eavesdroppers; provocative agents sought him out, proclaiming themselves revolutionists and sympathizers. Every letter was read before it reached him; every word he spoke over the telephone was recorded; every interview was kept under observation. Romain Rolland in his glass prison-house was the captive of unseen powers.
It seems hardly credible to-day that during the last two years of the war Romain Rolland, to whose words the world is now eager to listen, should have had no facility for expressing his ideas in the newspapers, no publisher for his books, no possibility of printing anything beyond an occasional review article. His homeland had repudiated him; he was the "fuoruscito" of the middle ages, was placed under a ban. The more unmistakably he proclaimed his spiritual independence, the less did he find himself regarded as a welcome guest in Switzerland. He was surrounded by an atmosphere of secret suspicion. By degrees, open attacks had been replaced by a more dangerous form of persecution. A gloomy silence was established around his name and works. His earlier companions had more and more withdrawn from him. Many of the new friendships had been dissolved, for the younger men in especial were devoting their interest to political questions instead of to things of the spirit. The more stormy the outside world, the more oppressive the stillness of Rolland's existence. He had no wife as helpmate. What to him was the best of all companionship, the companionship of his own writings, was now unattainable, for he had no freedom of publication in France. His country was closed to him, his place of refuge was beset with a hundred eyes. Most homeless among the homeless, he lived, as his beloved Beethoven had said, "in the air," lived in the realm of the ideal, in invisible Europe. Nothing shows better the energy of his living goodness than that he was no whit embittered by his experience, and that the ordeal has served but to strengthen his faith. For this utter solitude among men was a true fellowship with mankind.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DIARY
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, his secret thoughts, and the messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts. He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate views.
It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired moments are those when he is most personal. Consequently, just as the letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes, applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith. These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the inexorable creditor we name Life.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE FORERUNNERS AND EMPEDOCLES
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 of rancor arising from all lands. His efforts proved futile. The war-current rose yet higher, the stream being fed by new and ever new blood flowing from innocent victims. Again and again some additional country became involved in the carnage. At length, as the clamor still grew louder, Rolland paused for a moment to take breath. He felt that it would be madness were he to continue the attempt to outcry the cries of so many madmen.
After the publication of Au-dessus de la mêlée, Rolland withdrew from public participation in the controversies with which the essays had been concerned. He had spoken his word; he had sown the wind and had reaped the whirlwind. He was neither weary in well-doing nor was he weak in faith, but he realized that it was useless to speak to a world which would not listen. In truth he had lost the sublime illusion with which he had been animated at the outset, the belief that men desire reason and truth. To his intelligence now grown clearer it was plain that men dread truth more than anything else in the world. He began, therefore, to settle accounts with his own mind by writing a satirical romance, and by other imaginative creations, while continuing his vast private correspondence. Thus for a time he was out of the hurly-burly. But after a year of silence, when the crimson flood continued to swell, and when falsehood was raging more furiously than ever, he felt it his duty to reopen the campaign. "We must repeat the truth again and again," said Goethe to Schermann, "for the error with which truth has to contend is continually being repreached, not by individuals, but by the mass." There was so much loneliness in the world that it had become necessary to form new ties. Signs of discontent and revolt in the various lands were more plentiful. More numerous, too, were the brave men in active revolt against the fate which was being forced on them. Rolland felt that it was incumbent upon him to give what support he could to these dispersed fighters, and to inspirit them for the struggle.
In the first essay of the new series, La route en lacets qui monte, Rolland explained the position he had reached in December, 1916. He wrote: "If I have kept silence for a year, it is not because the faith to which I gave expression in Above the Battle has been shaken (it stands firmer than ever); but I am well assured that it is useless to speak to him who will not hearken. Facts alone will speak, with tragical insistence; facts alone will be able to penetrate the thick wall of obstinacy, pride, and falsehood with which men have surrounded their minds because they do not wish to see the light. But we, as between brothers of all the nations; as between those who have known how to defend their moral freedom, their reason, and their faith in human solidarity; as between minds which continue to hope amid silence, oppression, and grief—we do well to exchange, as this year draws to a close, words of affection and solace. We must convince one another that during the blood-drenched night the light is still burning, that it never has been and never will be extinguished. In the abyss of suffering into which Europe is plunged, those who wield the pen must be careful never to add an additional pang to the mass of pangs already endured, and never to pour new reasons for hatred into the burning flood of hate. Two ways remain open for those rare free spirits which, athwart the mountain of crimes and follies, are endeavoring to break a trail for others, to find for themselves an egress. Some are courageously attempting in their respective lands to make their fellow-countrymen aware of their own faults.... My task is different, for it is to remind the hostile brethren of Europe, not of their worst aspects but of their best, to recall to them reasons for hoping that there will one day be a wiser and more loving humanity."
The essays of the new series appeared, for the most part, in various minor reviews, seeing that the more influential and widely circulated periodicals had long since closed their columns to Rolland's pen. When we study them as a whole, in the collective volume entitled Les précurseurs, we realize that they emit a new tone. Anger has been replaced by intense compassion, this corresponding to the change which had taken place at the fighting front. In all the armies, during the third year of the war, the fanatical impetus of the opening phases had vanished, and the men were now animated by a tranquil but stubborn sentiment of duty. Rolland is perhaps even more impassioned and more revolutionary in his outlook, and yet the essays are characterized by greater gentleness than of old. What he writes is no longer at grips with the war, but seems to soar above the war. His gaze is fixed upon the distance; his mind ranges down the centuries in search of like experiences; looking for consolation, he endeavors to discover a meaning in the meaningless. He recurs to the idea of Goethe, that human progress is effected by a spiral ascent. At a higher level men return to a point only a little above the old. Evolution and reversion go hand in hand. Thus he attempts to show that even at this tragical hour we can discern intimations of a better day.
The essays comprising Les précurseurs no longer attack adverse opinions and the war. They merely draw our attention to the existence in all countries of persons who are fighting for a very different ideal, to the existence of those heralds of spiritual unity whom Nietzsche speaks of as "the pathfinders of the European soul." It is too late to hope for anything from the masses. In the address Aux peuples assassinés, he has nothing but pity for the millions, for those who, with no will of their own, must be the mute instruments of others' aims, for those whose sacrifice has no other meaning than the beauty of self-sacrifice. His hope now turns exclusively towards the elite, towards the few who have remained free. These can bring salvation to the world by splendid spiritual imagery wherein all truth is mirrored. For the nonce, indeed, their activities seem unavailing, but their labors remain as a permanent record of their omnipresence. Rolland provides masterly analyses of the work of such contemporary writers; he adds silhouettes from earlier times; and he gives a portrait of Tolstoi, the great apostle of the doctrine of human freedom, with an account of the Russian teacher's views on war.
To the same series of writings, although it is not included in the volume Les précurseurs, belongs Rolland's study dated April 15, 1918, entitled Empédocle d'Agrigente et l'âge de la haine. The great sage of classical Greece, to whom Rolland at the age of twenty had dedicated his first drama, now brings comfort to the man of riper years. Rolland shows that two and a half millenniums ago a poet writing during an epoch of carnage had recognized that the world was characterized by "an eternal oscillation from hatred to love, and from love to hatred"; that history invariably witnesses a whole era of struggle and hatred, and that as inevitably as the succession of the seasons there ensues a period of happier days. With a broad descriptive sweep, he indicates that from the time of the Sicilian philosopher to our own the wise men of all ages have known the truth, but have been powerless to cope with the madness of the world. Truth, nevertheless, passes down forever from hand to hand, being thus imperishable and indestructible.
Even across these years of resignation there shines a gentle light of hope, though manifest only to those who have eyes to see, only to those who can lift their gaze above their own troubles to contemplate the infinite.
CHAPTER XIX
LILULI
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 that Rolland's first imaginative work to be written since 1914, a work completed before the end of the war, should have been a farcical comedy, Liluli. Yet this lightness of mood sprang from the uttermost abysses of sorrow. Rolland, stricken to the soul when contemplating his powerlessness against the insanity of the world, turned to irony as a means of abreaction—to employ a term introduced by the psychoanalysts. From the pole of repressed emotion, the electric spark flashes across into the field of laughter. And here, as in all Rolland's works, the author's essential purpose is to free himself from the tyranny of a sensation. Pain grows to laughter, laughter to bitterness, so that in contrapuntal fashion the ego may be helped to maintain its equipoise against the heaviness of the time. When wrath remains powerless, the spirit of mockery is still in being, and can be shot like a fire-arrow across the darkening world.
Liluli is the satirical counterpart to an unwritten tragedy, or rather to the tragedy which Rolland did not need to write, since the world was living it. The satire produces the impression of having become, in course of composition, more bitter, more sarcastic, almost more cynical, than the author had originally designed. We feel that the time spirit intervened to make it more pungent, more stinging, more pitiless. At the culminating point, a scene penned in the summer of 1917, we behold the two friends who are misled by Liluli, the mischievous goddess of illusion (for her name signifies "l'illusion"), wrestling to their mutual destruction. In these two princes of fable, there recurs Rolland's earlier symbolism of Olivier and Jean Christophe. France and Germany here encounter one another, both hastening blindly forward under the leadership of the same illusion. The two nations fight on the bridge of reconciliation which in earlier days they had built across the abyss dividing them. In the conditions then prevailing, so pure a note of lyrical mourning could not be sustained. As its creation progressed, the comedy became more incisive, more pointed, more farcical. Everything that Rolland contemplated around him, diplomacy, the intellectuals, the war poets (presented here in the ludicrous form of dancing dervishes), those who pay lip-service to pacifism, the idols of fraternity, liberty, God himself, is distorted by his tearful eyes to seem grotesques and caricatures. All the madness of the world is fiercely limned in an outburst of derisive rage. Everything is, as it were, dissolved and decomposed in the acrid menstruum of mockery; and finally mockery itself, the spirit of crazy laughter, feels the scourge. Polichinelle, the dialectician of the piece, the rationalist in cap and bells, is reasonable to excess; his laughter is cowardly, being a mask for inaction. When he encounters Truth in fetters (Truth being the one figure in the comedy presented with touching seriousness in all her tragical beauty), Polichinelle, though he loves her, does not dare to take his stand by her side. In this pitiable world, even the sage is a coward; and in the strongest passage of the satire, Rolland's own intense feeling breaks forth against the one who knows but will not bear testimony. "You can laugh," exclaims Truth; "you can mock; but you do it furtively like a schoolboy. Like your forebears, the great Polichinelles, like Erasmus and Voltaire, the masters of free irony and of laughter, you are prudent, prudent in the extreme. Your great mouth is closed to hide your smiles.... Laugh away! Laugh your fill! Split your sides with laughter at the lies you catch in your nets; you will never catch Truth.... You will be alone with your laughter in the void. Then you will call upon me, but I shall not answer, for I shall be gagged.... When will there come the great and victorious laughter, the roar of laughter which will set me free?"
In this comedy we do not find any such great, victorious, and liberating laughter. Rolland's bitterness was too profound for that mood to be possible. The play breathes nothing but tragical irony, as a defense against the intensity of the author's own emotions. Although the new work maintains the rhythm of Colas Breugnon, with its vibrant rhymes, and although in Liluli as in Colas Breugnon there is a strain of raillery, nevertheless this satire of the war period, a tragi-comedy of chaos, contrasts strikingly with the work that deals with the happy days of "la douce France." In the earlier book, the cheerfulness springs from a full heart, but the humor of the later work arises from a heart overfull. In Colas Breugnon we find the geniality, the joviality, of a broad laugh; in Liluli the humor is ironical, bitter, breathing a fierce irreverence for all that exists. A world full of noble dreams and kindly visions has been destroyed, and the ruins of this perished world are heaped between the old France of Colas Breugnon and the new France of Liluli. Vainly does the farce move on to madder and ever madder caprioles; vainly does the wit leap and o'erleap itself. The sadness of the underlying sentiment continually brings us back with a thud to the blood-stained earth. There is nothing else written by him during the war, no impassioned appeal, no tragical adjuration, which, to my feeling, betrays with such intensity Romain Rolland's personal suffering throughout those years, as does this comedy with its wild bursts of laughter, its expression of the author's self-enforced mood of bitter irony.
CHAPTER XX
CLERAMBAULT
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 author's serious, tranquil, and enduring settlement of accounts with the times is his novel, Clerambault, l'histoire d'une conscience libre pendant la guerre, which was slowly brought to completion in the space of four years. It is not autobiography, but a transcription of Rolland's ideas. Like Jean Christophe, it is simultaneously the biography of an imaginary personality and a comprehensive picture of the age. Matter is here collected that is elsewhere dispersed in manifestoes and letters. Artistically, it is the subterranean link between Rolland's manifold activities. Amid the hindrances imposed by his public duties, and amid the difficulties deriving from other outward circumstances, the author built the work upwards out of the depths of sorrow to the heights of consolation. It was not completed until the war was over, when Rolland had returned to Paris in the summer of 1920.
Just as little as Jean Christophe can Clerambault properly be termed a novel. It is something less than a novel, and at the same time a great deal more. It describes the development, not of a man, but of an idea. As in Jean Christophe, so here, we have a philosophy presented, but not as something ready-made, complete, a finished datum. In company with a human being, we rise stage by stage from error and weakness towards clarity. In a sense it is a religious book, the history of a conversion, of an illumination. It is a modern legend of the saints in the form of the life history of a simple citizen. In a word, as the sub-title phrases it, we have here the story of a conscience. The ultimate significance of the book is freedom, the attainment of self-knowledge, but raised to the heroic plane inasmuch as knowledge becomes action. The scene is played in the intimate recesses of a man's nature, where he is alone with truth. In the new book, therefore, there is no countertype, as Olivier was the countertype to Jean Christophe; nor do we find in Clerambault what was in truth the countertype of Jean Christophe, external life. Clerambault's countertype, Clerambault's antagonist, is himself; is the old, the earlier, the weak Clerambault; is the Clerambault with whom the new, the knowing, the true man has to wrestle, whom the new Clerambault has to overcome. The hero's heroism is not displayed, as was that of Jean Christophe, in a struggle with the forces of the visible world. Clerambault's war is waged in the invisible realm of thought.
At the outset, therefore, Rolland designed to call the book "un roman-méditation." It was to have been entitled "L'un contre tous," this being an adaptation of La Boëtie's title Contr'un. The proposed name was, however, ultimately abandoned for fear of misunderstanding. The spiritual character of the new work recalls a long-forgotten tradition, the meditations of the old French moralists, the sixteenth century stoics who during a time of war-madness endeavored in besieged Paris to maintain their intellectual serenity by engaging in Platonic dialogues. The war itself, however, was not to be the theme, for the free soul does not strive with the elements. The author's intention was to discuss the spiritual accompaniments of this war, for these to Rolland seemed as tragical as the destruction of millions of men. His concern was the destruction of the individual soul in the deluge produced by the overflowing of the mass soul. He wished to show how strenuous an effort must be made by any one who would escape from the tyranny of the herd instinct; to display the hateful enslavement of individuals by the revengeful, jealous, and authoritarian mentality of the crowd; to depict the terrific efforts which a man must make if he would avoid being sucked into the maelstrom of epidemic falsehood. He hoped to make it clear that what appears to be the simplest thing in the world is in reality the most difficult of tasks in these epochs of excessive solidarity, namely, for a man to remain what he really is, and not to become that which the levelling forces of the world, the fatherland, or some other artificial community, would fain make of him.
Romain Rolland deliberately refrained from casting his hero in a heroic mold, the treatment thus differing from what he had chosen in the case of Jean Christophe. Agenor Clerambault is an inconspicuous figure, a quiet fellow of little account, an author of no particular note, one of those persons whose literary work succeeds in pleasing a complaisant generation, though it has no significance for posterity. He has the nebulous idealism of mediocre minds; he hymns the praises of perpetual peace and international conciliation. His own tepid goodness makes him believe that nature is good, is man's wellwisher, desiring to lead mankind gently onward towards a more beautiful future. Life does not torment him with problems, and he therefore extols life amid the tranquil comforts of his bourgeois existence. Blessed with a kindly and somewhat simple-minded wife, and with two children, a son and a daughter, he may be considered a modern Theocritus wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, singing the joyful present and the still more joyful future of our ancient cosmos.
The quiet suburban household is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt with the news of the outbreak of war. Clerambault takes the train to Paris; and no sooner is he sprinkled with spray from the hot waves of enthusiasm, than all his ideals of international amity and perpetual peace vanish into thin air. He returns home a fanatic, oozing hate, and steaming with phrases. Under the influence of the tremendous storm he begins to sound his lyre: Theocritus has become Pindar, a war poet. Rolland gives a marvelously vivid description of something every one of us has witnessed, showing how Clerambault, like all persons of average nature, really takes a delight in horrors, however unwilling he may be to admit it even to himself. He is rejuvenated, his life seems to move on wings; the enthusiasm of the masses stirs the almost extinguished flame of enthusiasm in his own breast; he is fired by the national fire; he is physically and mentally refreshed by the new atmosphere. Like so many other mediocrities, he secures in these days his greatest literary triumph. His war songs, precisely because they give such vigorous expression to the sentiments of the man in the street, become a national property. Fame and public favor are showered upon him, so that (at this time when millions of his fellows are perishing) he feels well, self-confident, alive as never before.
His pride is increased, his joy of life accentuated, when his son Maxime leaves for the front filled with martial ardor. His first thought, a few months later, when the young man comes home on leave, is that Maxime should retail to him all the ecstasies of war. Strangely enough, however, the young soldier, whose eyes still burn with the sights he has seen, is unresponsive. Not wishing to mortify his father, he does not positively attempt to silence the latter's paeans, but for his part, he maintains silence. For days this muteness stands between them, and the father is unable to solve the riddle. He feels dumbly that his son is concealing something. But shame binds both their tongues. On the last day of the furlough, Maxime suddenly pulls himself together, and begins, "Father, are you quite sure ...?" But the question remains unfinished, utterance is choked. Still silent, the young man returns to the realities of war.
A few days later there is a fresh offensive. Maxime is reported missing. Soon his father learns that he is dead. Now Clerambault gropes for the meaning of those last words behind the silence, and is tormented by the thought of what was left unspoken. He locks himself into his room, and for the first time he is alone with his conscience. He begins to question himself in search of the truth, and throughout the long night he communes with his soul as he traverses the road to Damascus. Piece by piece he tears away the wrapping of lies with which he has enveloped himself, until he stands naked before his own criticism. Prejudices have eaten deep into his skin, so that the blood flows as he plucks them from him. They must all be surrendered; the prejudice of the fatherland, the prejudice of the herd, must go; in the end he recognizes that one thing only is true, one thing only sacred, life. A fever of enquiry consumes him; the old Adam perishes in the flame; when the day dawns he is a new man.
He knows the truth now, and wishes to strengthen his own faith. He goes to some of his fellows and talks to them. Most of them do not understand him. Others refuse to understand him. Some, however, among whom Perrotin the academician is notable, are yet more alarming. They know the truth. To their penetrating vision the nature of the popular idols has long been plain. But they are cautious folk. They compress their lips and smile at one another like the augurs of ancient Rome. Like Buddha, they take refuge in Nirvana, looking down calmly upon the madness of the world, tranquilly seated upon their pedestals of stone. Clerambault calls to mind that other Indian saint, who took a solemn vow that he would not withdraw from the world until he had delivered mankind from suffering. The truth still glows too fiercely within him; he feels as if it would stifle him as it strives to gush forth in volcanic eruption. Once again he plunges into the solitude of a wakeful night. Men's words have sounded empty. He listens to his conscience, and it speaks with the voice of his son. Truth knocks at the door of his soul, and he opens to truth. In this lonely night Clerambault begins to speak to his fellows; no longer to individuals, but to all mankind. For the first time the man of letters becomes aware of the poet's true mission, his responsibility for all persons and for everything. He knows that he is beginning a new war, he who alone must wage war for all. But the consciousness of truth is with him, his heroism has begun.
"Forgive us, ye Dead," the dialogue of the country with its children, is published. At first no one heeds the pamphlet. But after a time it arouses public animosity. A storm of indignation bursts upon Clerambault, threatening to lay his life in ruins. Friends forsake him. Envy, which had long been crouching for a spring, now sends whole regiments to the attack. Ambitious colleagues seize the opportunity of proclaiming their patriotism in contrast with his deplorable sentiments. Worst of all for Clerambault in that his innocent wife and daughter have to suffer on his account. They do not upbraid him, but he feels as if he had aimed a shaft against them. He who has hitherto sunned himself in the warmth of family life and has enjoyed the comforts of modest fame, is now absolutely alone.
Nevertheless he continues on his course, although these stations of the cross become harder and harder. Rolland shows how Clerambault finds new friends, only to discover that they too fail to understand him. How his words are mutilated, his ideas misapplied. How he is overwhelmed to learn that his fellows, those whom he wishes to help, have no desire for truth, but are nourished by falsehood; that they are continually in search, not of freedom, but of some new form of slavery. (In these wonderful passages the reader is again and again reminded of Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.) He perseveres in his pilgrimage even when he has lost faith in his power to help his fellow men, for this is no longer his goal. He passes men by, marching onward towards the unseen, towards truth; his love for truth exposing him ever more pitilessly to the hatred of men. By degrees he becomes entangled in a net of calumnies; his troubles develop into a "Clerambault affair"; at length a prosecution is initiated. The state has recognized its enemy in the free man. But while the case is still in progress, the "defeatist" meets his fate from the pistol bullet of a fanatic. Clerambault's end recalls the opening of the world catastrophe with the assassination of Jaurès.
Never has the tragedy of conscience been more simply and more poignantly depicted than in this account of the martyrdom of an average man. Rolland's ripe spiritual powers, his magical faculty for combining mastery with the human touch, are here at their highest. Never was his outlook over the world so extensive, never was the view so serene, as from this last summit. And yet, though we are thus led upwards to the consideration of the ultimate problems of the spirit, we start from the plain of everyday life. It is the soul of a commonplace man, the soul it might seem of a weakling, which moves through this long passion. Herein lies the marvel of the moral solace which the book conveys. Rolland was the first to recognize the defect of his previous writings, considered as means of helping the average man. In the heroic biographies, heroism is displayed only by those in whom the heroic soul is inborn, only by those whose flight is winged with genius. In Jean Christophe, the moral victory is a triumph of native energy. But in Clerambault we are shown that even the weakling, even the mediocre man, every one of us, can be stronger than the whole world if he have but the will. It is open to every man to be true, open to every man to win spiritual freedom, if he be at one with his conscience, and if he regard this fellowship with his conscience as of greater value than fellowship with men and with the age. For each man there is always time, for each man there is always opportunity, to become master of realities. Aërt, the first of Rolland's heroes to show himself greater than fate, speaks for us all when he says: "It is never too late to be free!"
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAST APPEAL
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 had been signed. Men were no longer murdering one another; but their evil passions, their hate, continued. Romain Rolland's prophetic insight celebrated a mournful triumph. His distrust of victory, his reiterated warnings that conquerors are merciless, were more than justified by the revengeful reality. "Victory in arms is disastrous to the ideal of an unselfish humanity. Men find it extraordinarily difficult to remain gentle in the hour of triumph." These forecasts were terribly fulfilled. Forgotten were all the fine words anent the victory of freedom and right. The Versailles conference devoted itself to the installation of a new regime of force and to the humiliation of a defeated enemy. What the idealism of simpletons had expected to be the end of all wars, proved, as the true idealists who look beyond men towards ideas had foreseen, the seed of fresh hatred and renewed acts of violence.
Once again, at the eleventh hour, Rolland raised his voice in an address to the man whom sanguine persons then regarded as the last representative of idealism, as the advocate of perfect justice. Woodrow Wilson, when he landed in Europe, was received by the exultant cries of millions. But the historian is aware "that universal history is but a succession of proofs that the conqueror invariably grows arrogant and thus plants the seed of new wars." Rolland felt that there was never greater need for a policy that should be moral, not militarist, that should be constructive, not destructive. The citizen of the world, the man who had endeavored to free the war from the stigma of hate, now tried to perform the same service on behalf of the peace. The European addressed the American in moving terms: "You alone, Monsieur le Président, among all those whose dread duty it now is to guide the policy of the nations, you alone enjoy world-wide moral authority. You inspire universal confidence. Answer the appeal of these passionate hopes! Take the hands which are stretched forth, help them to clasp one another.... Should this mediator fail to appear, the human masses, disarrayed and unbalanced, will almost inevitably break forth into excesses. The common people will welter in bloody chaos, while the parties of traditional order will fly to bloody reaction.... Heir of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, take up the cause, not of a party, not of a single people, but of all! Summon the representatives of the peoples to the Congress of Mankind! Preside over it with the full authority which you hold in virtue of your lofty moral consciousness and in virtue of the great future of America! Speak, speak to all! The world hungers for a voice which will overleap the frontiers of nations and of classes. Be the arbiter of the free peoples! Thus may the future hail you by the name of Reconciler!"
The prophet's voice was drowned by the clamors for revenge. Bismarckism triumphed. Literally fulfilled was the prophecy that the peace would be as inhuman as the war had been. Humanity could find no abiding place among men. When the regeneration of Europe might have been begun, the sinister spirit of conquest continued to prevail. "There are no victors, but only vanquished."