Читать книгу Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work - Stefan Zweig - Страница 7

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THE boy was still too young to feel the magic of Paris. To his dreamy nature, the clamorous and brutal materialism of the city seemed strange and almost hostile. Far on into life he was to retain from these hours a hidden dread, a hidden shrinking from the fatuity and soullessness of great towns, an inexplicable feeling that there was a lack of truth and genuineness in the life of the capital. His parents sent him to the Lyceum of Louis the Great, a celebrated high school in the heart of Paris. Many of the ablest and most distinguished sons of France, have been among the boys who, humming like a swarm of bees, emerge daily at noon from the great hive of knowledge. He was introduced to the items of French classical education, that he might become "un bon perroquet Cornélien." His vital experiences, however, lay outside the domain of this logical poesy or poetical logic; his enthusiasms drew him, as heretofore, towards a poesy that was really alive, and towards music. Nevertheless, it was at school that he found his first companion.

By the caprice of chance, for this friend likewise fame was to come only after twenty years of silence. Romain Rolland and his intimate Paul Claudel (author of Annonce faite à Marie), the two greatest imaginative writers in contemporary France, who crossed the threshold of school together, were almost simultaneously, twenty years later, to secure a European reputation. During the last quarter of a century, the two have followed very different paths in faith and spirit, have cultivated widely divergent ideals. Claudel's steps have been directed towards the mystic cathedral of the Catholic past; Rolland has moved through France and beyond, towards the ideal of a free Europe. At that time, however, in their daily walks to and from school, they enjoyed endless conversations, exchanging thoughts upon the books they had read, and mutually inflaming one another's youthful ardors. The bright particular star of their heaven was Richard Wagner, who at that date was casting a marvelous spell over the mind of French youth. In Rolland's case it was not simply Wagner the artist who exercised this influence, but Wagner the universal poietic personality.

School days passed quickly and somewhat joylessly. Too sudden had been the transition from the romanticist home to the harshly realist Paris. To the sensitive lad, the city could only show its teeth, display its indifference, manifest the fierceness of its rhythm. These qualities, this Maelstrom aspect, aroused in his mind something approaching to alarm. He yearned for sympathy, cordiality, soaring aspirations; now as before, art was his savior, "glorious art, in so many gray hours." His chief joys were the rare afternoons spent at popular Sunday concerts, when the pulse of music came to thrill his heart—how charmingly is not this described in Antoinette! Nor had Shakespeare lost power in any degree, now that his figures, seen on the stage, were able to arouse mingled dread and ecstasy. The boy gave his whole soul to the dramatist. "He took possession of me like a conqueror; I threw myself to him like a flower. At the same time, the spirit of music flowed over me as water floods a plain; Beethoven and Berlioz even more than Wagner. I had to pay for these joys. I was, as it were, intoxicated for a year or two, much as the earth becomes supersaturated in time of flood. In the entrance examination to the Normal School I failed twice, thanks to my preoccupation with Shakespeare and with music." Subsequently, he discovered a third master, a liberator of his faith. This was Spinoza, whose acquaintance he made during an evening spent alone at school, and whose gentle intellectual light was henceforward to illumine Rolland's soul throughout life. The greatest of mankind have ever been his examples and companions.

When the time came for him to leave school, a conflict arose between inclination and duty. Rolland's most ardent wish was to become an artist after the manner of Wagner, to be at once musician and poet, to write heroic musical dramas. Already there were floating through his mind certain musical conceptions which, as a national contrast to those of Wagner, were to deal with the French cycle of legends. One of these, that of St. Louis, he was in later years indeed to transfigure, not in music, but in winged words. His parents, however, considered such wishes premature. They demanded more practical endeavors, and recommended the Polytechnic School. Ultimately a happy compromise was found between duty and inclination. A decision was made in favor of the study of the mental and moral sciences. In 1886, at a third trial, Rolland brilliantly passed the entrance examination to the Normal School. This institution, with its peculiar characteristics and the special historic form of its social life, was to stamp a decisive imprint upon his thought and his destiny.