Saga Symphonic of Romain Rolland

ON the twenty-ninth of this month Romain Rolland will be sixty years old. His life has been a Symphony Eroica. When has forerunner been worse hated or better loved? It is with his life as with his art — so habitually does he conceive on the grand scale as to permit of nothing halfway. The work will have to be fizzle or masterpiece. Who dare leave the hall midway in the finale and assign to a life-symphony of such proportions its permanent station in Valhalla? Giorgio Vasari tells of a young sculptor who was fretting over the fall of light and shadow across his statue, anxious that the work might be seen to advantage. Michelangelo, overhearing him, remarked dryly that it was the light of the public square that would decide the matter.

I

A frail lad, fair-haired and blue-eyed, of the old Gallic type from that region where it remains purest, — the Burgundian Nivernais, — is born and reared in a drowsy country-house beside a sluggish canal amid the rich torpor of rural sights and sounds. He is son of a notary from a family of notaries, and of a mother dowered with intellectuality and a grave and quiet piety. It is a family, on the father’s side, sired out of revolutionists, at least one of whom was possessed with a passion for jotting down everything he saw, heard, or experienced — the familiar ‘Notebook habit’ of artists, authors, and composers instinctively rifling life’s orchard-blossoms of their honey. At least one of these Notebooks — describing the fall of the Bastille— is extant.

The boy finds a set of Shakespeare in the garret. It strikes the first match to the bonfire of his ambition. He is one of those youngsters who, far from taking things for granted as they are, find their busy young brains buzzing with queer questionings and their clean young hearts seething with secret conflicts. His mother teaches him the piano. Beethoven becomes his other demigod. His local high-schooling completed, the family — father and mother and sister — at resolute sacrifice move to Paris that the children may have the best schooling obtainable. There, on hard wooden benches, in a suffocating hall on Sunday afternoons at popular orchestral concerts, the boy finds his third Promethean — Richard Wagner. A season in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a celebrated high-school in the heart of Paris, and, in 1886, at the age of twenty, Rolland passes the entrance examinations to the École Normale Supérieure, matriculating in the departments of history and geography.

It was just at the moment when Tolstoy’s voice was ringing through the moral void of Europe. At the École Normale, Rolland had become a leading spirit in one of those obscure bands of youthful idealists who seem to themselves and to the world to mean so little and who end by meaning so much. Dissatisfied with the pessimism of Ibsen and the egoism of Nietzsche, revolted by the materialism of Zola and the cynicism of Maupassant, they turned toward Russia, where a cry of hope was ascending from the blackness of the pit. Then befell one of those lucky misfortunes. Suddenly young Rolland’s living hero launched lightnings against his three demigods. Tolstoy published his What Is To Be Done ? Shakespeare a toady? Beethoven an intellectual sensualist? Wagner a pandar? Tolstoy the artist had become Tolstoy the prophet. This may have been an orderly development for Tolstoy, — the matter is open to dispute, — but how about a young artist-thinker still toiling to acquire his technical proficiency? What was to be done?

From his Parisian attic young Rolland, scarcely crediting his own presumption, wrote to his prophet. Months passed. Silence. If the boy thought of his letter at all it was with that hot shame which vexes us after a youthful ardor which has exceeded the world’s heavy-lidded view of decorum. Then, on October 14, 1887, came a letter from Tolstoy, thirtyeight pages, in French, a veritable treatise, beginning ‘Dear Brother ―.’ The old man had read the boy’s letter with tears, and had set himself, in loving humility, to relieve the youngster’s bewilderment and pain. He said, in sum, that the precondition of every true calling is not love for art but love for mankind. That alone is of value which binds men together. Those only who love their fellow creatures can hope as artists to do anything worth doing.

Tolstoy’s remarks on Shakespeare and Beethoven may or may not have been happy. The tenderness and humility of his writing such an essayletter to an obscure youth betoken one of those acts which are the stamp of a great soul and a great Christian, to whom in very deed all men are brothers. The creative spirit, like nature, produces thousands of seeds for one that it ever brings to fruition. But spare not the sowing and neither shall the harvest be stinted. The great believers know this law and trust it. Tolstoy’s letter to that young Frenchman begot his spiritual successor.

II

From the École Normale, on a traveling scholarship, Rolland went for two years to Italy. ‘History and geography ‘ — Rome and the golden purity of the Italian landscape — enchanted him. He sketched a cycle of dramas on the Renaissance. Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug — still a valiant revolutionary idealist after seventy years of it as friend and comrade of Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Wagner, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen — identified Rolland as one of the confraternity under his disguise as a French youth of twenty-three. She deliberately set herself to confirm in him a high life-purpose, as seal and consecration of which she finally took him to Bayreuth for one of the Wagnerian festivals.

This strange blend of artist, scholar, and musician is obliged to invent his own profession. On June 19, 1895, his doctorate thesis, ‘The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,’ is sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne — the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body, and definitely intended as a corrective to the disdain with which music, in comparison with the other arts, had always been treated by the University. His ensuing professorship of history, at the Normal School, Rolland daringly manœuvres into one of history in terms of music, which procedure he maintains when the Normal School is later assimilated into the Sorbonne.

Now come the dozen or fifteen years which make or break the man vowed to a generous and creative career. Poverty, obscurity, failure. This is the great school of free spirits in which life teaches indifference to the opinion of contemporaries. Rolland’s fifteen years are fairly typical. A mind of the first rank is revolutionary as a fish swims. Rolland flings himself into an enterprise to rescue the drama from boulevard adultery, bring her back to her humble working-class home, and make an honest woman of her. The project is to found a People’s Theatre and through it to reanimate the ideals of the masses. Rolland writes several plays in a still uncompleted cycle of the French Revolution. The crusade fails. His professorship remains, meanwhile, his bread labor. But what for that plus-quantity of life, that overand-above toil in contribution to an ideal, done without thought of money, fame, or any other material reward? Seldom has David faced Goliath with a smaller stone or a sling more slender. As a deliberate venture of faith, to set an example and to rehabilitate French idealism, Rolland joins with a group of friends in writing and editing the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. There is no advertising, and little circulation save among students and a few intellectuals; it is not for sale in the ordinary places. Let us see if merit can still make its way without the modern ballyhoo. For ten years all of Rolland’s works appear in these obscure pages — JeanChristophe, the plays, and those heroic biographies of Michelangelo and Beethoven which so magically kindle a fellow feeling for greatness on the hearthstones of common life. Not a cent does he receive for these writings.

Life’s battles appear to be three —property, sex, and religion. Rolland’s early share in the property-revolution is signified by his crusade to democratize the drama. Mid-career in this he meets with one of those catastrophies of sex which seem a painfully indispensable ordeal in the life-discipline of an artist. Remain Rolland’s marriage comes to a brusque and disastrous end, concerning which, with a self-control grotesquely foreign to American usage, his biographers preserve a becoming reticence.

On the threshold of middle life, unknown and impecunious, his plays failures, his first volumes stillborn, his domestic life in ashes, — all but cleaned out, one would be tempted to say, — he is just gathering his forces. He is a blade forged and whetted. Now, with the base alloy of personal careerism burnt and hammered out of him, he is ready for use.

Stillschweigen und Einsamkeit — silence and solitude. For ten years he vanishes. He has climbed above the mists that cling round the breast of the Mount of Vision. His Mount of Vision is outwardly prosaic—two attic rooms amid the roar of Paris on the Boulevard Montparnasse, with a view over roofs to the trees of a venerable convent garden; a bedroom and a study, this last walled, heaped, and strown with books, its furniture a writing-table, two chairs, a stove, a cabinet piano, and a bust of Beethoven. It is one of life’s little ironies that those who create live in one room, or two at most, while those who own and enjoy live in — let us say—several. The score gets evened. Those who enjoy perish. Those who create live. Here, among his newspaper cuttings, his indefatigable transcripts from reviews, his manuscripts, and his music, with five hours for sleep, his recreation being to write letters instead of books, to read philosophy instead of poetry, or to sit at the piano instead of at his writing-table, he toils for the next ten years. Ten years, like ‘by and by,’ in Hamlet’s dictum, ‘is easily said.’

III

The finest flowers of our gray North belong to the late-blooming variety. The twenties to drudge at mastering technical skill; the thirties to mature experience; then the forties and fifties for the golden afternoons of summer and autumn that ripen and garner harvest and vintage. Had Romain Rolland been killed by the motor car which struck him down in 1910, the world would have heard little more of it at the time than that an obscure author, formerly a professor at the Sorbonne, had met with a fatal accident. Yet Jean-Christophe was nearly completed, and in two years more Rolland was a European figure. Had he been willing to prostitute his talent he could have cashed in on it long before to the tune of fame and money. Fame is a bad wife but a good housemaid. Time after time he showed the loud-mouthed wench the door, until at last she came back meek, prepared to behave and make herself useful.

Goethe conceived his Faust as a youth of twenty and finished it at eighty. The seedling idea of music for Schiller’s Ode to Joy came to Beethoven in 1793 as a youth of twenty-three. It became the culmination of his Choral Symphony in 1824, three years before his death. Wagner began his epic cycle of the Nibelungen midway in his thirties, and finished it a quarter of a century later. There seems to be some law whereby such heroic endeavors, in art and in life, begin as a purpose, more or less vague, in youth, to gather strength and precision with advancing maturity. With little more than a secret resolution to stead it, the soul battles its way through years of hurly-burly to find, some day, on the hither side of youth and plus one or two shocking scars, that somehow, after all, in spite of all, or because of all, the purpose is fulfilling itself. To those who will not surrender, life — in one sort or another — surrenders. It can, of course, kill such people. It cannot beat them.

The conception of Jean-Christophe as a European work came to Rolland as a youth of twenty-three one evening during a walk on the Janiculum in the period of his friendship with Malwida von Meysenbug. Its outlines were sketched in 1895; the opening chapters were written during the summer of 1897 in a Swiss village. Then, like a composer following themes as dictated from within, he wrote several of the chapters of the fifth and ninth books. In such a work the creative daimon slumbers and reawakens. It was after Rolland’s retirement from the theatre of externals that the work gathered flood tide. Then befell the miracle. Every loss suddenly turned to gain. Griefs and misfortunes were seen to have been indispensable experience. The habit — almost the mania — of collecting newspaper cuttings, articles from reviews, notes, studies, music, pursued for years more by instinct than from any definite aim, unexpectedly befriended him. All magically this material arranged itself for the growing work. He discovered that for years he had been preparing himself unwittingly for this specific task. Nothing had been lost, nothing wasted; and, mindful of how surely this law of creative purpose works from top to bottom of the human scale, one is prompted to add that for stalwart souls nothing ever is.

When the epic arrived at its fifth book, — that scorching blast at the fetor of French society, — a publisher was found willing to undertake it.

Before the French original was completed, translations of the earlier volumes into English, German, and Spanish had made Rolland an international figure. The posture of contemptuous silence was one which the French press found it no longer possible to maintain. By June 5, 1913, when the French Academy awarded Jean-Christophe the Grand Prix, Romain Rolland was already in a position to be able to dispense with that and any other official decoration. The herd instinct of society is a good watchdog. It barks ferociously at each newcomer. Let the newcomer decline to be intimidated and the dog ends by wagging its tail and licking his hand — if not his boot. This is nothing against the dog. It is merely the difference between a dog and a man.

IV

Thus, at forty-seven, the seer came down from his Mount of Vision carrying his tables of prophecy — the spiritual unity of the Western world. He had written a European book, perhaps the one European book since Faust. For fifteen years he had toiled in solitude and obscurity to image the heroic protagonist of a new age and generation. Has ever life more terribly or more thrillingly taken a man at his word? Hardly were the thinking and writing done when he was himself summoned to be the figure he had thought and written.

In 1913, from the two attic rooms in the Boulevard Montparnasse, he had become comrade and comforter to a vast, heterogeneous band of lonely and aspiring souls scattered over every country of Europe and North America. They wrote to him, and he, remembering Leo the wellbeloved, shouldered the crushing task of answering their letters with his own hand. How can one utter the depths of love and gratitude that welled up to him from these far corners and spiritual waste places? So long as he had lived, since such a life as his had been possible, anything beautiful and heroic was possible. One could joyfully risk everything and make a try for his ideal, knowing that, however it might seem to fail, it was bound to succeed. Were the children of the Exodus, who had set out on a high errand toward the Promised Land, dancing round the Golden Calf? Did a capitalist society insult every decent impulse of the human soul? Here was a voice, not of the past but of to-day, proclaiming that men were never meant to live in such squalors, and need not. Hosannah!

Something more than a year of this. Then, one August morning of 1914, a world in flames. ‘The spiritual unity of Europe’? It was hate. With the dying Beethoven, one was ready to exclaim: ‘Plaudite, amici, comœdia finita est! ‘ The Mount of Vision? It was cannon smoke. The tables of prophecy? Götterdämmerung. The Golden Calf? It was the blood-drenched Moloch of capitalist imperialism armed by modern science with an enginery of slaughter well-nigh capable of exterminating the human race. ‘Applaud, friends, applaud! The comedy is finished!’ And so an end of Jean-Christophes!

An end? Well, no — not quite, perhaps. An end for this generation, certainly. The Jean-Christophes of 1914 had been conscripted to rip out one another’s vitals with the bayonet and to blast off one another’s faces with T. N. T. But up in a Swiss town is a solitary, shattered man, no longer young. Just yesterday he completed one life-work, and, even in the moment when a scoffing world had ceased jeering to acclaim it great and good, he has seen it smashed by the first volley of cannon, and finds himself, at fortyeight, called to pick up his tools again and start another. ‘The spiritual unity of the Western world’? It was at that moment the grain of wheat shut in the mummied hand of dead Pharaoh. Romain Rolland’s life-work was the dead body. His faith was the solitary seed.

With what cunning the creative daimon husbands its forces. That the war should have found Romain Rolland in Switzerland and above the military age would, to eyes that are holden, seem like the merest luck of coincidence. But in the rhythm of the spirit ‘luck’ is fore-ordering and ‘coincidence ‘ law, —

A sharp inner conflict, a tragic selfsearching, and Romain Rolland saw what was wanted of him. It was to remain in Switzerland where thought and speech would be, in comparison with belligerent countries, free. Then began what, I suppose, the future will account one of the most prodigious feats of mind and spirit that our time has beheld: one man, alone of all the commanding figures of his age, taking thought, not for his own country solely, but for Europe — and this in an hour when Europe was taking thought of nothing except fratricide. Above the Battle appeared in September 1914. Worthies who had never given the future of Europe a thought were outraged that a thinker who had spent his life endeavoring to reconcile its conflicts should decline, at the first stroke of the drum, to cheer for murder.

And now Siegfried encounters the Dragon Fafner of Hate Cavern. He has been warned: —

The chagrin of having been forced, two years previously, to recognize as one of the foremost figures of European letters a man whom it had ignored added venom to the cloaca maxima of abuse vomited upon him by the French press. It spread to Allied countries, even to the United States. An American newspaper correspondent in Paris, who had written in 1913 about what a great man Romain Rolland was, wrote in 1914 about what a bad man he was. I saved the article. In years to come it would be a curiosity. It is. Here is its concluding sentence: ‘Romain Rolland is to-day the moral inferior of the humblest poilu in the trenches.’

The moral inferior, meanwhile, was working as a volunteer, twelve hours a day, in the Civil Prisoners’ Service of the Red Cross of Geneva, reuniting families, relieving material distress, and, when all else failed, writing letters of consolation. He was spied on by agents provocateurs, his every caller noted, his every telephone conversation recorded. So ferocious had been the campaign of falsehood against him that he lived in constant peril of some fanatic’s bullet. In the autumn of 1916 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature — $40,000. The occasion was seized on with gloating. ‘Swedish Academy? Ha! More German propaganda!’ The French press talked of ‘Judas and his thirty pieces of silver.’ Judas gave his thirty pieces of silver to war sufferers. ‘Ah, yes. The heroic pose! Even worse taste, if possible.’

Then a curious thing happened. Let us call it the ‘Book of Catacombs.’ More than one American radical has told me that, in the midst of savage persecutions by government and press, they have found themselves secretly befriended, often by the very reporters assigned to write the attacks, or by the underofficials delegated to the prosecution. They would receive clandestine messages and anonymous telephone calls giving them timely warning or valuable advice. Something of this sort befell Romain Rolland. As the weeks went on he found himself once more in two attic rooms, this time in a Swiss hotel, father confessor to what remained of an international mind. From every country — belligerent and neutral - tortured souls, no matter what sorry façade they were obliged to maintain even with their nearest of kin, poured out their hearts to him. Often the writers were so highly placed as not to dare sign their names: men whose souls abhorred what their family responsibilities and social positions seemed to require their hands to do. They told him their sufferings, their self-loathing, their despairs, their hopes, their love for him, their faith in him. Romain Rolland, by the allpowerful law of the spirit, had become custodian of the European conscience. These letters and documents he recorded. They are put away in a safe place. And one day they will be published as a testament to the future. Little as he may seem to have had to do with the writing of such pages, it is quite possible that they may rank as his greatest work.

V

Above the Battle and The Forerunners now read like axioms. In 1915 and 1916 they read like treason. Once a telephone is invented, anyone can use it. Not everyone can invent a telephone. Yet these two volumes of essays were merely Rolland’s journalistic day-labor of the period. Almost alone of European writers, the electrical current of his creative faculty kept on flowing without interruption throughout the flashes and crashes of that ghastly thunderstorm. Clérambault, ‘the history of a free conscience in war time,’ was begun in 1916 and finished in 1920. This composite portrait of war psychology, the whole of modern society for its canvas, is one of those books which assuredly ought to be written provided anyone can be found able and willing to write it. Clérambault is a cool and desperate feat of surgery for cancer of the soul. (Whether surgery can save the patient is still uncertain.) I picture men of the future reading this book with the pity and horror of Dante, his features lit by the nether flame-glare, peering over into the abyss of Malebolge.

In a letter of the war period Rolland wrote: ‘It seems to me that our age needs the whip of a Molière or a Ben Jonson.’ That whip he produced. It is Liluli. This Aristophanic satire could have been conceived only by a man so steeped in his intellectual material and so tortured by the spectacle of human blindness and misery that he could not help but write it. The seal of effortless creation is all over the play. It quite evidently wrote itself. Its argument is as perfect an anarchist fable as the libretto of Siegfried. Like Wagner, from long meditation on the central facts of human society and from harsh experience of them, he hit upon a seedling allegory so universally true that, follow it whichsoever way he would, he found himself always in the realm of universal truth-to-life. And then, to balm the hurt mind after that peal of ironic laughter, like cool hands on an aching forehead, came the infinite pity and tenderness of the idyll, Pierre et Luce.

Shortly after the war appeared Colas Breugnon. It had been written in an abrupt seizure of creative energy, all in the holiday mood of release from the prolonged strain of Jean-Christophe ‘scherzo intermezzo,’ as Stephan Zweig neatly calls it. The book was in type when the storm burst over Europe. Those years were no time for such an explosion of Gallic glee. But in 1919 It came most gratefully. This Chaucerian April of laughter and tears seems to me Rolland’s most perfect work, and I should not be surprised if it ended by being his most popular one. (The present English translation of it is butchery. ‘ Rabelais for fiveo’clock tea!’ exclaimed the author when he saw it.)

The French original is such a spring of gayety and tenderness, lyric poetry and smiling irony, as wells up only out of the ancestral deeps of a seasoned race and an old culture. This seventeenth-century wood-carver is an artist in common life, a robust soul taking the ups and downs of average existence. Here are disappointment in love, a nagging wife, a burned house, illness, mutilation of his finest craftsmanship, social upheaval, financial ruin, war, physical disablement, and at last dependency in the house of his children. Yet here also is immense relish for every savor of life, sweet or sour—delight in the simplest sights and sounds of nature; huge gusto of eating, drinking, and sociability; a hungry mind that can find refuge from outer broils in the pages of a book; the great gift of laughter, even at one’s own discomfiture; and, above all, a life that knows the beauty and dignity of humble creative work. All this melody sings above a solid ground-bass of shrewd political satire and sound social philosophy. The hint is a broad one. It is a book which tells common people the half-dozen home truths whereby common life may be lived well, and all so genially and wittily that no one can feel himself in the least preached at. ‘There it is, neighbor. Take it or leave it.’

Before the war Europe debouched works of art, music, and literature in annual cycles. One dated the years by them. ‘The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?’ Light after light has gone out. ‘Night Falls On The Gods.’ The masterpieces that once came out of Europe in a flood are now hardly a runlet. That Romain Rolland should be one of the few whose stream of creative energy has not faltered is no accident. Hatred and the spirit that creates do not keep house together. Go down the list of names that were illustrious in art and letters in 1914. Of those who yelped with the pack during the war years how many have regained their spiritual estate? By a grisly law of recompense it would seem that just in so far as one abandons himself to the herd-passions of destruction is he abandoned by the power to create. From his very sufferings Romain Rolland has drawn strength. His love and compassion have kept the springs of his art replenished. His Christophe watched by the deathbed of the age that is gone; his Annette Rivère, heraldress of free women, watches by the birthbed of the new. And when, out of India, cradle of religions, came the political evangel of nonviolence, who more worthy could have been found to deliver to the blood-bolter’d West the new testament of Mahatma Gandhi than this great European whose forehead is so strangely spotless of the Cain-brand that will disfigure our age to all eternity?

The mills of the gods seem to have shifted gears. Exceeding small they still may grind; but grind slowly they certainly no longer do. Is it that the Machine Age devours grist faster than any preceding? Or is this the acceleration common to all ages of transition and revolution? In any case, the prophet no longer seems invariably obliged to wait a century for his vindication. Ramsay MacDonald, the hissed and hooted of 1914, is Premier of Britain in 1924. Romain Rolland, the hated and hounded of 1914, lives to see the thinking class come round shamefacedly to the position which he never abandoned. That he should never have abandoned it can now be seen to have been foreordained out of the whole character of his previous life-course. The courageous solitary who could disdain vulgar triumphs and keep his faith in the power of ideas while toiling year after year with those three good comrades — silence, solitude, and obscurity — was forging a blade which would not splinter when the moment came to cleave the anvil.

What we are watching here is the emergence of an international mind. It appears first in the highest and noblest thinkers. The thought which to-day is theirs alone to-morrow is everyone’s. Science, art, music, literature, education, sport, invention, commerce, industry — all are now international. Only statecraft lags behind. Why? Ask the owning classes. Statecraft— with the accent on the craft. Romain Rolland’s mind has been an Ararat of internationalism towering out of the European deluge of blood and fire.

VI

Music is the youngest of the arts. The Greeks could beat us at sculpture. The Middle Ages could beat us at architecture. The Renaissance could beat us at painting. The Elizabethans could beat us at poetry. The only art in which our age has surpassed is the art of sound. Literature has felt in turn the impact of all the others. And music has felt the impact of literature. The symphonic poem is one fruit of it. But, fifty years before Liszt, Beethoven liked to speak of his act of composition as ‘poetizing.’ Wagner attempted the conquest of both arts.

Now the symphonist speaks with a voice above voices. No writing of one line at a time for him! The web of sound he weaves may be twenty staves deep. A man of letters, understanding music, who would envy the composer this wealth and gorgeousness of utterance, was sure to come — some author who would turn in discontent from his little page of words arranged in single lines to cast about him for some means of approximating in prose the richness and emotional glow of the orchestral score. No longer would he be content to jot down the tinkling melody of mere narration. He would resolve to score thought in all the color and variety of sonorous instrumentation. Just as the occupational representation of Soviet Russia was the idea bound to appear in twentieth-century politics, so this conception of orchestral prose was an idea bound to appear in twentieth-century literature. It has begun with Romain Rolland. It still has far to go. Symphonic in scale Jean-Christophe assuredly is; but in structure it is only slightly so. Rolland has written the first great musical novel. The European saga of Wagner’s life overlapped the even more heroic European saga of Beethoven’s by fourteen years. Rolland’s life overlapped Wagner’s by seventeen. Prophets and sons of prophets. Rolland has taken these two titanic figures from the Promethean world of music, blended their fire and clay with that of a dozen other composers, — among them Bach, Handel, and Hugo Wolf, — and wrought the whole into a superb prose saga of the imagination. A European book in the sense that Faust was a European book it may or may not prove to be. Certainly it is the last will and testament of the age which perished on August 2, 1914.

What is more, Rolland’s creative process is the composer’s own. It overflows with inruptions of the unconscious. Here are pages that were written with eyes wide open, — pupils a little dilated perhaps, — intellectual faculties alert to full stretch, but all under possession of the not-me. Confine it to Jean-Christophe alone. For a mind attuned, the reading of this prose epic is like standing on a seaward crag to watch surf. One moment it will have the motion of fine intellectuality, but nothing more. The next, and it will speak with the flame-tongue of the Oversoul — power inexhaustible, prodigality of life, thought and style caught up into a star-swung rhythm . . . crash! of breaking wave; swirling cauldrons of foam-seethe, and the pang of some divine electricity flashing into brain and vitals direct from the universal; instants not of time but of eternity. No need to catalogue the pages where these moments occur. The heart knoweth. ‘Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.’

Music, therefore, has made its way into the matter of literature — but not yet into the manner. The sonata form is much more exactly applicable to literary form than men of letters as yet guess. The Wagnerian leitmotif is of course already in literature and, in forms more or less rudimentary, has been ever since the choric odes of Æschylus. Its terrific emotional power as applied to prose narrative and spoken drama has yet to be discovered. Shaw, one of the few authors who understand music, has given a hint of this in the phrase-refrains of Candida, though it is a question if he did not pick up the device quite as much from Ibsen as from Wagner. The peril of literature attempting to rival music in its own domain is of course obvious. That would be to bastardize the art of letters. But in the co-development of music and literature lies a natural and organic art-growth of the future. Artists consume form-material with terrific prodigality. Beethoven all but exhausted the symphony. Wagner, in applying the symphonic form to drama, all but exhausted the opera. What he did not do was conquer both music and literature. It was once thought that his librettos would stand alone as poetry. They do not. These twain arts are still awaiting the titan who can, in some sort or other, master them both. Of this new conquest Romain Rolland is precursor.

Such seems to me the unique position of Romain Rolland as artist. But lest anyone should think I am penning one installment the more of literary twaddle for the innocuous delectation of dilettante pundits, let me instantly add what I consider to be the dignified position of Romain Rolland as thinker. He is type and forerunner of the intellectual class renouncing the propertied class — a major symptom of our time and one which is causing the conscious elements among the propertied no end of secret panic. Yet valiantly as Rolland has mounted the barricades for the workers, he is no more bounden to them than to the plutocracy. It is one example the more of the artist containing all programmes but not contained by any one of them. To befriend humanity? Naturally. To battle for the oppressed? As a matter of course. But as artist, not as propagandist. Life is larger than any single programme, however large. Let the artist create in beauty and his beauty becomes a truth which liberates the oppressed, not in his own generation merely, but in all generations.

Does this mean that the artist should stand coldly aloof from the shindies of his day? Far from it! These shindies are his very school. Tolstoy’s polemics, Shaw’s prefaces, Rolland’s war-essays are croix-de-guerre in the very noblest sense of a cross-of-war. Wagner has thundered in the same index. And how the artolater-æsthetes hate to be reminded of Wagner’s socialism. ‘As if that has anything to do with his music! ‘

Only a middle class, and one sitting ever more precariously on the lid of domination, could have fallen into an error so grotesque as the idea of divorcing the artist from the social thinker. Yet when the artist comes, as artist, to create, all these brabbles over the bread of the body must be as they may. His concern now is with the bread of the spirit. He must put his trust in a higher rhythm. Let the spirit speak and the intellect be amanuensis only. On these higher reaches art is no longer constrained by the plot terrestrial, to give or take ringing blows on the windy plains of Troy. Art is become the procession of beacon fires flaming from peak to peak across the blue Ægean, heralding to watchers at Argos the final victory.