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Romain Rolland at the Normal School

Although during these years Rolland's chief interest was directed towards philosophy, although he was a diligent student of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, of the Cartesians, and of Spinoza, nevertheless, during the second year of his course, he chose, or was intelligently guided to choose, history and geography as his principal subjects. The choice was a fortunate one, and was decisive for the development of his artistic life. Here he first came to look upon universal history as an eternal ebb and flow of epochs, wherein yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow comprise but a single living entity. He learned to take broad views. He acquired his pre-eminent capacity for vitalizing history. On the other hand, he owes to this same strenuous school of youth his power for contemplating the present from the detachment of a higher cultural sphere. No other imaginative writer of our time possesses anything like so solid a foundation in the form of real and methodical knowledge in all domains. It may well be, moreover, that his incomparable capacity for work was acquired during these years of seclusion.

Here in the Prytaneum (Rolland's life is full of such mystical word plays) the young man found a friend. He also was in the future to be one of the leading spirits of France, one who, like Claudel and Rolland himself, was not to attain widespread celebrity until the lapse of a quarter of a century. We should err were we to consider it the outcome of pure chance that the three greatest representatives of idealism, of the new poetic faith in France, Paul Claudel, André Suarès, and Charles Péguy, should in their formative years have been intimate friends of Romain Rolland, and that after long years of obscurity they should almost at the same hour have acquired extensive influence over the French nation. In their mutual converse, in their mysterious and ardent faith, were created the elements of a world which was not immediately to become visible through the formless vapors of time. Though not one of these friends had as yet a clear vision of his goal, and though their respective energies were to lead them along widely divergent paths, their mutual reactions strengthened the primary forces of passion and of steadfast earnestness to become a sense of all-embracing world community. They were inspired with an identical mission to devote their lives, renouncing success and pecuniary reward, that by work and appeal they might help to restore to their nation its lost faith. Each one of these four comrades, Rolland, Suarès, Claudel, and Péguy, has from a different intellectual standpoint brought this revival to his nation.

As in the case of Claudel at the Lyceum, so now with Suarès at the Normal School, Rolland was drawn to his friend through the love which they shared for music, and especially for the music of Wagner. A further bond of union was the passion both had for Shakespeare. "This passion," Rolland has written, "was the first link in the long chain of our friendship. Suarès was then, what he has again become to-day after traversing the numerous phases of a rich and manifold nature, a man of the Renaissance. He had the very soul, the stormy temperament, of that epoch. With his long black hair, his pale face, and his burning eyes, he looked like an Italian painted by Carpaccio or Ghirlandajo. As a school exercise he penned an ode to Cesare Borgia. Shakespeare was his god, as Shakespeare was mine; and we often fought side by side for Shakespeare against our professors." But soon came a new passion which partially replaced that for the great English dramatist. There ensued the "Scythian invasion," an enthusiastic affection for Tolstoi, which was likewise to be lifelong. These young idealists were repelled by the trite naturalism of Zola and Maupassant. They were enthusiasts who looked for life to be sustained at a level of heroic tension. They, like Flaubert and Anatole France, could not rest content with a literature of self gratification and amusement. Now, above these trivialities, was revealed the figure of a messenger of God, of one prepared to devote his life to the ideal. "Our sympathies went out to him. Our love for Tolstoi was able to reconcile all our contradictions. Doubtless each one of us loved him from different motives, for each one of us found himself in the master. But for all of us alike he opened a gate into an infinite universe; for all he was a revelation of life." As always since earliest childhood, Rolland was wholly occupied in the search for ultimate values, for the hero, for the universal artist.

During these years of hard work at the Normal School, Rolland devoured book after book, writing after writing. His teachers, Brunetière, and above all Gabriel Monod, already recognized his peculiar gift for historical description. Rolland was especially enthralled by the branch of knowledge which Jakob Burckhardt had in a sense invented not long before, and to which he had given the name of "history of civilization"—the spiritual picture of an entire era. As regards special epochs, Rolland's interest was notably aroused by the wars of religion, wherein the spiritual elements of faith were permeated with the heroism of personal sacrifice. Thus early do the motifs of all his creative work shape themselves! He drafted a whole series of studies, and simultaneously planned a more ambitious work, a history of the heroic epoch of Catherine de Medici. In the scientific field, too, our student was boldly attacking ultimate problems, drinking in ideas thirstily from all the streamlets and rivers of philosophy, natural science, logic, music, and the history of art. But the burden of these acquirements was no more able to crush the poet in him than the weight of a tree is able to crush its roots. During stolen hours he made essays in poetry and music, which, however, he has always kept hidden from the world. In the year 1888, before leaving the Normal School to face the experiences of actual life, he wrote Credo quia verum. This is a remarkable document, a spiritual testament, a moral and philosophical confession. It remains unpublished, but a friend of Rolland's youth assures us that it contains the essential elements of his untrammeled outlook on the world. Conceived in the Spinozist spirit, based not upon "Cogito ergo sum" but upon "Cogito ergo est," it builds up the world, and thereon establishes its god. For himself accountable to himself alone, he is to be freed in future from the need for metaphysical speculation. As if it were a sacred oath, duly sworn, he henceforward bears this confession with him into the struggle; if he but remain true to himself, he will be true to his vow. The foundations have been deeply dug and firmly laid. It is time now to begin the superstructure.

Such were his activities during these years of study. But through them there already looms a dream, the dream of a romance, the history of a single-hearted artist who bruises himself against the rocks of life. Here we have the larval stage of Jean Christophe, the first twilit sketch of the work to come. But much weaving of destiny, many encounters, and an abundance of ordeals will be requisite, ere the multicolored and impressive imago will emerge from the obscurity of these first intimations.