Читать книгу Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work - Stefan Zweig - Страница 11

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FROM every quarter, voices were calling: the French homeland, German music, Tolstoi's exhortation, Shakespeare's ardent appeal, the will to art, the need for earning a livelihood. While Rolland was still hesitating, his decision had again to be postponed through the intervention of chance, the eternal friend of artists.

Every year the Normal School provides traveling scholarships for some of its best pupils. The term is two years. Archeologists are sent to Greece, historians to Rome. Rolland had no strong desire for such a mission; he was too eager to face the realities of life. But fate is apt to stretch forth her hand to those who are coy. Two of his fellow students had refused the Roman scholarship, and Rolland was chosen to fill the vacancy almost against his will. To his inexperience, Rome still seemed nothing more than dead past, a history in shreds and patches, a dull record which he would have to piece together from inscriptions and parchments. It was a school task; an imposition, not life. Scanty were his expectations when he set forth on pilgrimage to the eternal city.

The duty imposed on him was to arrange documents in the gloomy Farnese Palace, to cull history from registers and books. For a brief space he paid due tribute to this service, and in the archives of the Vatican he compiled a memoir upon the nuncio Salviati and the sack of Rome. But ere long his attention was concentrated upon the living alone. His mind was flooded by the wonderfully clear light of the Campagna, which reduces all things to a self-evident harmony, making life appear simple and giving it the aspect of pure sensation. For many, the gentle grace of the artist's promised land exercises an irresistible charm. The memorials of the Renaissance issue to the wanderer a summons to greatness. In Italy, more strongly than elsewhere, does it seem that art is the meaning of human life, and that art must be man's heroic aim. Throwing aside his theses, the young man of twenty, intoxicated with the adventure of love and of life, wandered for months in blissful freedom through the lesser cities of Italy and Sicily. Even Tolstoi was forgotten, for in this region of sensuous presentation, in the dazzling south, the voice from the Russian steppes, demanding renunciation, fell upon deaf ears. Of a sudden, however, Shakespeare, friend and guide of Rolland's childhood, resumed his sway. A cycle of the Shakespearean dramas, presented by Ernesto Rossi, displayed to him the splendor of elemental passion, and aroused an irresistible longing to transfigure, like Shakespeare, history in poetic form. He was moving day by day among the stone witnesses to the greatness of past centuries. He would recall those centuries to life. The poet in him awakened. In cheerful faithlessness to his mission, he penned a series of dramas, catching them on the wing with that burning ecstacy which inspiration, coming unawares, invariably arouses in the artist. Just as England is presented in Shakespeare's historical plays, so was the whole Renaissance epoch to be reflected in his own writings. Light of heart, in the intoxication of composition he penned one play after another, without concerning himself as to the earthly possibilities for staging them. Not one of these romanticist dramas has, in fact, ever been performed. Not one of them is to-day accessible to the public. The maturer critical sense of the artist has made him hide them from the world. He has a fondness for the faded manuscripts simply as memorials of the ardors of youth.

The most momentous experience of these years spent in Italy was the formation of a new friendship. Rolland never sought people out. In essence he is a solitary, one who loves best to live among his books. Yet from the mystical and symbolical outlook it is characteristic of his biography that each epoch of his youth brought him into contact with one or other of the leading personalities of the day. In accordance with the mysterious laws of attraction, he has been drawn ever and again into the heroic sphere, has associated with the mighty ones of the earth. Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven were the stars of his childhood. During school life, Suarès and Claudel became his intimates. As a student, in an hour when he was needing the help of sages, he followed Renan; Spinoza freed his mind in matters of religion; from afar came the brotherly greeting of Tolstoi. In Rome, through a letter of introduction from Monod, he made the acquaintance of Malwida von Meysenbug, whose whole life had been a contemplation of the heroic past. Wagner, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Herzen, and Kossuth were her perennial intimates. For this free spirit, the barriers of nationality and language did not exist. No revolution in art or politics could affright her. "A human magnet," she exercised an irresistible appeal upon great natures. When Rolland met her she was already an old woman, a lucid intelligence, untroubled by disillusionment, still an idealist as in youth. From the height of her seventy years, she looked down over the past, serene and wise. A wealth of knowledge and experience streamed from her mind to that of the learner. Rolland found in her the same gentle illumination, the same sublime repose after passion, which had endeared the Italian landscape to his mind. Just as from the monuments and pictures of Italy he could reconstruct the figures of the Renaissance heroes, so from Malwida's confidential talk could he reconstruct the tragedy in the lives of the artists she had known. In Rome he learned a just and loving appreciation for the genius of the present. His new friend taught him what in truth he had long ere this learned unawares from within, that there is a lofty level of thought and sensation where nations and languages become as one in the universal tongue of art. During a walk on the Janiculum, a vision came to him of the work of European scope he was one day to write, the vision of Jean Christophe.

Wonderful was the friendship between the old German woman and the Frenchman of twenty-three. Soon it became difficult for either of them to say which was more indebted to the other. Romain owed so much to Malwida, in that she had enabled him to form juster views of some of her great contemporaries; while Malwida valued Romain, because in this enthusiastic young artist she discerned new possibilities of greatness. The same idealism animated both, tried and chastened in the many-wintered woman, fiery and impetuous in the youth. Every day Rolland came to visit his venerable friend in the Via della Polveriera, playing to her on the piano the works of his favorite masters. She, in turn, introduced him to Roman society. Gently guiding his restless nature, she led him towards spiritual freedom. In his essay To the Undying Antigone, Rolland tells us that to two women, his mother, a sincere Christian, and Malwida von Meysenbug, a pure idealist, he owes his awakening to the full significance of art and of life. Malwida, writing in Der Lebens Abend einer Idealistin a quarter of a century before Rolland had attained celebrity, expressed her confident belief in his coming fame. We cannot fail to be moved when we read to-day the description of Rolland in youth: "My friendship with this young man was a great pleasure to me in other respects besides that of music. For those advanced in years, there can be no loftier gratification than to rediscover in the young the same impulse towards idealism, the same striving towards the highest aims, the same contempt for all that is vulgar or trivial, the same courage in the struggle for freedom of individuality. … For two years I enjoyed the intellectual companionship of young Rolland. … Let me repeat, it was not from his musical talent alone that my pleasure was derived, though here he was able to fill what had long been a gap in my life. In other intellectual fields I found him likewise congenial. He aspired to the fullest possible development of his faculties; whilst I myself, in his stimulating presence, was able to revive youthfulness of thought, to rediscover an intense interest in the whole world of imaginative beauty. As far as poesy is concerned, I gradually became aware of the greatness of my young friend's endowments, to be finally convinced of the fact by the reading of one of his dramatic poems." Speaking of this early work, she prophetically declared that the writer's moral energy might well be expected to bring about a regeneration of French imaginative literature. In a poem, finely conceived but a trifle sentimental, she expressed her thankfulness for the experience of these two years. Malwida had recognized Romain as her European brother, just as Tolstoi had recognized a disciple. Twenty years before the world had heard of Rolland, his life was moving on heroic paths. Greatness cannot be hid. When any one is born to greatness, the past and the present send him images and figures to serve as exhortation and example. From every country and from every race of Europe, voices rise to greet the man who is one day to speak for them all.