第14章 THE WORK AND THE EPOCH

Son but n'était pas le succès;

son but était la foi.

Jean Christophe,

"La Révolte."

ROMAIN ROLLAND'S work cannot be understood without an understanding of the epoch in which that work came into being. For here we have a passion that springs from the weariness of an entire country, a faith that springs from the disillusionment of a humiliated nation. The shadow of 1870 was cast across the youth of the French author.The significance and greatness of his work taken as a whole depend upon the way in which it constitutes a spiritual bridge between one great war and the next. It arises from a blood-stained earth and a storm-tossed horizon on one side, reaching across on the other to the new struggle and the new spirit.

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

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

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

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

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

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