Romain Rolland

“ No other work of Tolstoy's presents in such abundance the soul of childhood and of youth; and each youthful spirit is a strain of music, pure as a spring, full of a touching and penetrating grace, like a melody of Mozart's. Of such are the young Nikolas Rostoff, Sonia, and poor little Petia.
Most exquisite of all is Natasha. Dear little girl!—fantastic, full of laughter, her heart full of affection, we see her grow up before us, we follow her through life, with the tenderness one would feel for a sister—who that has read of her does not feel that he has known her?... ”

“ I believe that the meaning of life for each one of us is only to increase the love within him; I believe that this development of our power of loving will reward us in this life with a happiness which will increase day by day, and with a more perfect felicity in the other world. I believe that this increase of love will contribute, more than any other factor, to founding the kingdom of God upon earth; that is, to replacing an organisation of life in which division, deceit, and violence are omnipotent, by a new order in which concord, truth, and brotherhood will reign. ”

“ All ends in death.... Death—what horror!"
Among these idle, insipid, untruthful souls, capable of every aberration, of every crime, certain saner natures are prominent: genuine natures by their clumsy candour, like Pierre Besoukhov; by their deeply rooted independence, their Old Russian peculiarities, like Marie Dmitrievna; by the freshness of their youth, like the little Rostoffs: natures full of goodness and resignation, like the Princess Marie; and those who, like Prince Andrei, are not good, but proud, and are tormented by an unhealthy existence. ”

“ They are lost in this forest of life. The reader must stand aloof, upon a height; he must attain the view of the unobstructed horizon, the vast circle of forest and meadow; then he will catch the Homeric spirit of the work, the calm of eternal laws, the awful rhythm of the breathing of Destiny, the sense of [Pg 88] the whole of which every detail makes a part; and the genius of the artist, supreme over the whole, like the God of Genesis who broods upon the face of the waters. ”

“ The moon is mounting; suspended in the limpid sky, she fills all space with her light; the splendour of the moonlit water grows yet more brilliant, the shadows grow blacker, the light more transparent.... And to me, an obscure and earthy creature, already soiled with every human passion, but endowed with all the stupendous power of love, it seemed at that moment that all nature, the moon, and I myself were one and the same. ”

“ Nature, and the embrace of her vague tenderness: the evening at the Opera, the unfamiliar world of art, in which reason grows confused; the folly of the heart, and the folly of the body yearning for love; the misery that floods the soul; the divine pity which watches over the dying lover.... One cannot evoke these pitiful memories without emotion; such emotion as one would feel in speaking of a dear and beloved woman. How such a creation shows the weakness of the female types in almost the whole of contemporary drama and fiction! Life itself has been captured ”

“ Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts "abstract love"?
"The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal love for those who are—somewhere, out of sight.... To love those we do not know, those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing! There is no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so pleased with ourselves! The conscience is fooled.—No. We must love our neighbours—those we live with, and who are in our way and embarrass us." ”

“ There is no true art but that which strives for this union. The highest art is that which accomplishes it directly by the power of love; but there is another art which participates in the same task, by attacking, with the weapons of scorn and indignation, all that opposes this fraternity. Such are the novels of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and the paintings of Millet. But even though it fail to attain these heights, all art which represents daily life with sympathy and truth brings men nearer together. ”

“ The worst of it is that often they do know what they do; they feel all the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do otherwise. There broods over the book the sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality which weighs upon those who suffer and those who cause that suffering: the director of the prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his jailer's life as of the pianoforte exercises of the pale, sickly daughter with the dark circles beneath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a rhapsody of Liszt ”

“ It is true, in fact, that the glory of War and Peace resides in the resurrection of a complete historical period, with its national migrations, its warfare of peoples. Its true heroes are these peoples; and behind them, as behind the heroes of Homer, the gods who lead them; the forces, invisible, "infinitely small, which direct the masses," the breath of the Infinite. These gigantic conflicts, in which a hidden destiny hurls the blind nations together, have a mythical grandeur. Our thoughts go beyond the Iliad: we are reminded of the Hindu epics. ”

“ The circle of ideas in which art moves and has its being is a narrow one. It is not in those ideas that his might resides, but in his expression of them; in the personal accent, the imprint of the artist, the colour and savour of his life.
Whether Tolstoy's ideas were or were not borrowed—a matter to be presently considered—never yet had a voice like to his resounded throughout Europe. How else can we explain the thrill of emotion which we all of us felt upon hearing that psychic music, that harmony for which we had so long waited, and of which we felt the need? ”

“ He asked himself why these millions of men and women escaped this despair: why they did not kill themselves. He then perceived that they were living not by the light of reason, but without even thinking of reason; they were living by faith. What was this faith which knew nothing of reason?
"Faith is the energy of life. One cannot live without faith. The ideas of religion were elaborated in the infinite remoteness of human thought. The replies given by faith to Life the sphinx contain the deepest wisdom of humanity." ”

“ As in the intervals of a drama we hear the occasional music of the orchestra, so these scenes of battle are interrupted by wide glimpses of nature; deep perspectives of light; the symphony of the day dawning upon the splendid landscape, in the midst of which thousands are agonising. ”