Romain Rolland-1866-1944
Axelrad, Jacob
Romain Rolland-1866-1944 fascism Drove Him Out of the Ivory Tower By Jacob Axelrad ROMAIN ROLLAND—the name itself h*s th* lilt of music, th* rhythm of poetry. In hie life also there were the**...
...The world, wondering where he was, whether he was still alive, learned at last that he was in Vexelay, dead, and beyond tat power of further disillusion...
...Tht futuri might yet fulfill the promise of the sages* Peace might one day come to the children of men, a peace that wss without venom and without that "vile egoism" which wss no peace at all but a momentary interlude between wars...
...The answer of a Tel» stoy, the answer of a Gandhi, would never destroy the power of aril that was abroad in the world...
...Rom a in ROLLAND lived to change his pacifist views...
...Like all men who have lived by a grant vision—the vision of ? world mad* better and richer isr the common man everywhere—hia days were full of labor and suffering, his end lonely and tragic...
...But France was not ready, Beguiled, like him, by the siren aong Of peace, it could not stem the tide of blood, the hordes from across the Rhine...
...Culture, art, science, all were cast into the bonfire of a universal conflagration...
...They were not too alien from what he had learned from men and books, for the curious and ancient lore of the remote past, the marvels of the Italian Renaissance, and indeed of all history, revealed the eternally recurrent theme that ran through all of it, the theme of man's high hopes, his despairs, bio triumphs, and hia failures...
...Romain Rolland, in a letter to Premier Daladier declared himself ready for the task...
...The suffering of countless millions demanded set!on, force, unrelenting hatred for the monstrous assumptions of this new philosophy and unremitting ewbrt to suppress it...
...Be ? ye greater and happier than we...
...One volume followed another—books on music, on painting, on the drama, and books about those who mad* music, like Beethoven, and these who mads art, like Michelangelo...
...The world might yet redeem itself...
...That ia why, when the colossal conapiracy of the Dreyfus case broke on the world in all its stark splsndor, Romain Rolland cried out—as Anatols France and Jean Jaures also crisd out—"He who con see injuetke without trying to combat it, it neither entirely an artitt nor entirely a man...
...When, soon after, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his Jean Chrie-tophe, he turned th* money over to the International Red Croes for the same purpose...
...But tbe storm would pass, as he passed, ss all thinga paas...
...Komain Rolland waa fortunate, at least, in his birth...
...And his father moved the family to Paris so his son might hsve the education that ho himself had misted...
...The boy had a good mind...
...they were a living creed for thia man, and kie life was dedicated to making them the creed of all men...
...And then he labored to arrange what he had learned, so others too might learn it...
...The spectacle of Germany—now as in the past— once again indulging its propensity for homicide on a huge scale, moved him to revamp soma of his ideas on the land of Schiller and Goethe...
...Before he died he had, perhaps, another glimpse of the vision he had nurtured through nearly eight decades...
...And the old man who had apent hia life to avert it saw the tragedy that befell hia beloved homeland, and the world...
...One man, at least, eould remain Above the Battle...
...With mors deadly purpose and with greater abandon than the hosts of Ghengia Khan or Attila the Hun, they set about th* destruction of civilisation and the trampling of humanity...
...One could hope, one could have faith, though hope and faith were elender reeds in a time of storm...
...Sora was mass hysteria fed by paranoiacs and pervert* who would enslave thi ilsgdbjl with their "prudent and vile egoism...
...All that was for the elite...
...Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections...
...But that waa not enough...
...One of hia ancestors was an "Apostle of Reason" during the French Revolution...
...Reason was now of little help...
...Pacifism waa a snare, physical and spiritual isolationism was a delusion...
...He remained in Switzerland, working with the Red Crosa to heal the wounded and comfort the stricken...
...the Balkans were being rid of the pest...
...It was a clarion call for the brotherhood of man, and though soms harsh notes obtrude through its enormous length, it pieadi for that courage and sacrifice without which the moral nature, of man mutt remem forever dormant and fallow...
...His life had never been a myatery...
...And when th* task of rebuilding began, the plans of Romain Rolland, of those who had planned like him, might help to build a better structure, a finer edifice, a more enduring mansion for ell mankind...
...And then...
...He who bad portrayed its agony in Jeos Chrietophe and its hope in The Soul Enchanted, could do nothing but turn to his work, for in work alone, si Tchaikowaky said, was there any release "from tin miiiret de la vie humaino...
...We mult* die, Christophe, to be born again...
...In 1914 it was aflame with the fires of a "prudent and vile egoism...
...For sight years he wrote this story of Jean Christophe, and when it waa completed in 1912, it was an epic not only of one man but of all men, not only of one life but of all the lives that have dreamed and suffered and stood faat against the chill winds and the biting cold of defeat, humiliation, and despair...
...Here was a country thst was alwaya defending the fatherland by invading too fatherland of others...
...It was possible...
...He was a Socialist, a Frenchman who loved and honored the wisdom, the wit, the art, the liberty and toleaance of his homelsnd, yet believed profoundly that these virtues resided in all other lands also, if only they were allowed to blossom and grow in peace and honor and goodwill—if only the incubus of greed and self-seeking were removed from them...
...They had been thrown out of Belgium...
...From her, and from his early frienda Ernest Renan and I-eo Tolstoy, h* learned what no school waa equipped to teach him, the life of other peoples and othsr times, and more acutely, the life and the tints in which he was himself involved...
...Where he stood and what he wanted, for himself and for others, was known to his own countrymen and to all the world...
...The Huna had been thrown out r of France...
...The crucifixion of man was in the making...
...Perhaps—perhaps, the end was in sight...
...You men of today, march over us, trample us under your feet, and press onward...
...It was his lifelong conviction that a man, more especially a man of talent, an artist, has a duty not only to his art W oleo to humanity which makes art meaningful, to fight, to fight unceasingly, against whatever outrages that humanity...
...A leader, an artist, ia first a' human being...
...At Yeselay, close by his beloved Clamecy, where he was horn, ho, diod on December 80, 1944, the mystery of his fate sjt last resolved, the dust of many rumors at last settled...
...The norma of the now philosophy of Racism lay in the logic of meta, murder and mass-enslavement...
...Hia work in the Ecole Normale Superieure won him a scholarship in the French School in Rome and the friendship of a woman many years older than himself, Malwida von Meysenbug, who brought him to Richard Wagner in Bayreuth and introduced him to the work of Nietzsche, Maxxini and Hersen...
...The good, the true, and the beautiful were no mere words to be lightly rolled from the tongue...
...Ho warned against Injustice and cruelty and held them to be the responsibility not only of states and governments, but even more of the individual, whose false . and perverted values give ton* to a world that is "dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism...
...He wanted to reach a wider audience with his plea for idealism, with hi* story of the universality of human striving for it and the pitfalls that mark the long, agonising climb to a finer, richer life...
...For his trouble he was branded a traitor to his country, as others were branded in France, in England, in Germany—and in America, too, for raising their voices in pleaa for peace and goodwill" in the midst of madness ind desolation...
...From hia mother h* acquired th* love and the understanding of music...
...Romain Rolland, from hia Alpine perch in Geneva, pleaded for sanity, for decency, for peace...
...Goodwill and tolerance wore out of plana among madmen...
...The world was soon to prove how right he was...
...In hie life also there were the** qual ities, and in hi* work—hia •Mara, hia hiatoriaa of music, painting and th* thealer, his drams*, biographies and novel», they are implicit or professed...
...Before everything els*, he is a man, bound to his fellowmen by nil the impalpable ties of a common heritage and a common deatiny...
Vol. 28 • January 1945 • No. 4
