Various

“ My love of mankind is individual. I am patriotic only about what I admire, and my devotion to humanity burns as brightly for Europe as for America. It flames up swiftly for Mexico if I am painting the peon there; it warms towards the bull fighter of Spain if in spite of its cruelty there is that element in his art which I find beautiful; it intensifies before the Irish peasant whose love, poetry, simplicity, and humor have enriched my existence just as completely as though these people were of my own country and my own hearthstone. ”

“ Rolland meets it with an averted glance in his far-seeing luminous eyes, eyes which quietly and steadily look towards new works and new horizons.
From all corners of the world he hears: that he has given to the time the book most brimming with the whole seething life of the time; that he has given men the book most permeated with the essence of music and Orphean effects; that he has created an entire human race, a race in which all ages of life and degrees of development, in which women as well as men are equally convincing in truth to life ”

“ Rolland has attempted neither to explain life nor defend it. The leit-motiv of his great symphonic work is Beethoven’s thought: “Durch Leiden Freude,”—“Through suffering joy comes.” We can, so he says, neither understand life in all its plenitude of contradictions nor ennoble it in all its brutality in any way other than by living it one’s self in the fullest and highest meaning of the word. Music, the all-unifying art, love, the all-embracing condition of the soul, are the two highest attitudes of devotion to God, who is life. ”

“ The sordid bread and butter difficulties to be faced by one standing wholly alone, the scathing force of public opinion, the pain of others which, when you love them, is pain to you,—these are realities which only the truly big souls dare to face. For most of us the spirit of revolt is too diffuse even to demand action, and for most of the rest action is too divine a consummation to be compassed by our weak human spirit. ”

“ Romain Rolland indicated the reason when he said: “In order to fashion a theatre for the people, we must first have a people; a people with a freedom of the soul able to enjoy art; a people with leisure; a people not oppressed by misery or incessant toil; a people not brutalized by every superstition and fanaticism from right and left; a people lord over itself and victor in the battle fought out from day to day.” ”

“ Rolland is far from the Christian asceticism that diluted the wine of Tolstoy. But along with Tolstoy, with Guyau, with Nietzsche, he demands an art that possesses life’s consummate vigor; that is itself the richest life, the highest intensity of power. In other words: the ethical ideal and the aesthetic are at heart the same thing; the fundamental principle of art and religion is solidarity; the sense of beauty is at the same time the most intensive and the most expansive of feelings, and so—like the love of humanity—the great fraternizing power. ”

“ And in the words of another:
“You are always thinking of what you can keep or lose. Only think of what you can give. Live; be like the water that flows.... The world would not exist without that happiness of beings, of flowers in the sun, that joy of giving one’s life to the point of exhaustion—which is also a joy of dying continually!”
“It is elder brother to Jean Christophe,” Rolland says, “less robust but not less faithful,” who uttered these words, which comprise Rolland’s creed in its most succinct formula. ”

“ And he is the artist running wild in the china-closet of the past. Have you anything sacred, old whiskers? Have you something labelled right and something labelled wrong? Show it to him. He will do for it. He is the eternal monster killing the dead.
There is no beauty but youth. There is no beauty in age. Ho! you doddering banality with the superior tolerance in your stutter, you are decomposing on your feet. Age is soiled. Age is dirty. Age drips with the phlegm of life. Age is the unclean residue in the cup. ”

“ But, pardon the frankness of one who has watched the careers of many writers in the past fifty years, you are headed now either for the lake or a padded cell. God forbid you reach either. Let an old man say that the only way to find life is to lose it. Forget it and reach out a hand to the poor, the sick, the suffering, and the sinning. Happiness comes only in forgetfulness of self and ministering to others. It is never the result of a theory but of action. ”

“ To me he is quite the most wonderful man among American artists; so very big yet simple as a child; so very human yet utterly unconscious of his humanity. He is much like Whitman only more tender, more subtle. To Henri life is his art. That’s what makes him truly great. That’s what made him go to the Ferrer School and awaken talent and even genius where no one else would have seen anything to awaken. As a teacher Henri is perhaps even greater than as a painter. ”

“ Youth has found in him contempt for mere fine phrases, for declamation, and received from him Goethe’s conception of creation: “In the beginning was action.” They have heard him proclaim that nationalism that is loyalty to the best in the essence of the French nation: love of truth and justice, desire for freedom and fraternity, devotion to its ideal values and above all the dream of happiness for all mankind. This dream that among us Teutons is content to sleep, is among Frenchmen an ever restless disturbance of the blood. ”

“ Pleasure, enlightenment, energy, says Rolland, are what the theatre should furnish the people. Neither the classic drama, which bores the workingman to death by presenting to him les parties mortes de l’ame, nor the present drama, which injures or lowers him by setting him in a fever of sordid passions, is fit for a people’s theatre. It must furnish the best drama of the present time, the spectacle in which the serious aspect of the time is reflected, or scenes from those earlier phases in which the spirit of struggle and of devotion lived ”

“ World fame is a curious thing. Sometimes it is attained quickly through glorifying friends: a path to fame that often early avenges itself,—that is more dangerous even than the fame that the attacks of enemies furnish. Sometimes fame is won with one blow, by an exceptional work; again it is prepared for in silence and then suddenly rushes forth with the roar of a great torrent formed by many small streams. The last is the case with Romain Rolland. ”

“ For it is only she who hath died. It is only she whom I loved with all my soul. Though my heart scatter tears over the dark day they are the tears of plenty. For her death hath enriched me.
For the autumn is come again speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the trees and to me things I have never heard before; things that her white breasts never told me; things that her burning lips never said to me; wild, sad things that the flame from whence my songs once leaped never held for me.
The dull silvered poplar leaves float in the air like dead butterflies, and they are beautiful. ”

“ For the serious-minded portion of the French youth, Rolland has possessed an influence comparable with his own description of Tolstoy’s influence upon himself and the young generation with him. Youth has learned from him that the fleeting fashionable attitude toward the great souls or ideas that Paris shapes is sterile; that it is only by devotion that a spiritual growth can be attained; that skepticism in the face of all greatness is poverty, but admiration and love “is the way, to the most potent, the richest, life.” ”

“ In other novels concerning geniuses the writers assert incessantly that they are geniuses; here the genius evinces himself through his being. One does not read a book, one lives a life—and a life of the highest value, the existence that great spirit creates: that of the genius, who out of the flaming chaos of his nature forms a cosmos. An “educational novel,” of which the world’s literature thus far possesses only one such in Wilhelm Meister, and, in a measure, in Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich.... I have lived more intensely with Jean Christophe than with most living people. ”

“ Even though Romain Rolland differs from Tolstoy in questions pertaining to his conception of music, still it is in Tolstoy’s spirit that he glorifies in this form of art its universal breadth, its power—beyond national boundaries and personal limitations—to unite mankind in and through the joy of beauty, which is one of the highest conditions of the soul. ”

“ And is Witla a supreme type, a distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and not artist in his “sins.”
There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to their wives? ”

“ His eye possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it. Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God, yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. ”

“ Ho, you didactic formulator, debauched with facts, man is born a butterfly and crawls to his grave a worm. Man is born young and dies old. Man is born wise and dies a fool. The ideas of youth are his wings. Do you see the lightning maze of colors forever flashing over your head? It is youth. ”

“ Perhaps you can speak the truth that is only part truth. Yes, that is often done by virtuous people and by clever people. But to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to place your soul naked before either God or man,—that, my friend, is impossible. I have listened to women lie. Sometimes it is only necessary to watch. And it is the same with a man.
What? A man will tell the truth before God? You are quite wrong. A man will lie to himself and he will lie to his God. I know. I listened to a man lie to God. I will tell you the story.
The man’s name was Henry Spencer. ”

“ It has been an ever-flowing spring, not only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life. For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I understand the German soul, it is due to music. ”

“ In his high lighted type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a magician.
Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent, orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing; that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red, golden color of youth.
And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start from the critics. ”

“ To revive the energy of action of the French Revolution in order to continue thus the work interrupted in 1794; to set in motion the great passions, not for the purpose of arousing chauvinistic or revolutionary fanaticism, but in order to kindle anew the universal feeling of solidarity—this was the hope of Rolland and his friends for the future of France.
“This hope,” he says, “was one of the purest and holiest forces in our young lives.” Rolland, therefore, calls his Théâtre du peuple a document of the time, because it “reflects the artistic ideas and hopes of a whole generation.” ”

“ The truth? The human ego is too weak for truth. What do you say, my friend?
We carry faithfully what we are given, on hard shoulders, over rough mountains! And when perspiring, we are told: “Yea, life is hard to bear!” But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason is that he carrieth too many strange things on his shoulders. Like the camel he kneeleth down and alloweth the heavy load to be put on his back.—Nietzsche.
Romain Rolland Ellen Key
(Authorized translation from the Swedish by Mamah Bouton Borthwick. Copyright, 1914.) ”

“ Youth, the flower before it has decayed into the mellow moss of age. Youth that knows not itself or the world. Youth that laughs at tears and weeps at laughter. Youth that paints queer pictures at which the critics smile. Illogical youth; arrogant youth; forever annoying the world’s stagnation. Youth capering like a fawn in the altar places of the holy. ”

“ This Youth for whom each new part of Jean Christophe has been a great event, despises with Rolland the estheticism that turns from life. This youth has learned to distinguish between great art and the work of those who think they are creating art but are only making arts. ”

“ The reconstruction of the army has become the all-important issue. Without naming the potential enemy, all parties, except the Socialists, agreed that Russia must concentrate her forces on the building up in the fastest possible time of an enormous, efficient, modern army. The majority of the people differed with the government, however, on one point, as to who should carry out the great task. The people have had little confidence in the capability of the bureaucracy for self-reformation; they have applied to them the Russian saying, “Only the grave can change the hunchback.” ”

“ The idealism that will not recognize the truth is cowardice; there is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is—and to love it.”
So without hesitation, Rolland points out weaknesses in Michael Angelo’s life, and inconsistencies in Tolstoy’s. He sees in both great specimens of the “type that will pass away”; the Christian—those who “have had their refuge in God and the everlasting life when this life has gone against them; those whose faith has often been expression for deficient belief in life, in the future, in themselves; a lack of courage and a lack of gladness.” ”

“ He would see, in these diverse ways of viewing life, forms of the human mind which return at periodic intervals and of which one no more than the other is an absolute progress in which he does not believe. Only by his very nature, he is antimaterialistic. He believes in the duality of soul and body in an absolute, organic manner. He hopes sincerely to quit this body and go to live a larger and fuller life. No personal immortality! He cannot endure the thought. ”