2
An Oceanic Sensibility

It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of "eternity," a feeling of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, "oceanic."
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) opens with a comment about the role of the writer in society. In fact, Freud had Romain Rolland specifically in mind when he reflected on the uneasiness of man in modern civilization:

There are a few men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold admiration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. One might easily be inclined to suppose that it is after all only a minority which appreciates these great men, while the large majority cares nothing for them.^[1]

Freud composed these lines at a midpoint in the period between the two world wars. He presented Romain Rolland as someone who used authentic standards of judgment and sought neither power, position, nor money for himself. Freud pointed to the Frenchman's unique cultural achievements as distinctly contrary to the daily activities of the multitudes. Romain Rolland's "greatness" consisted of mastering the process of cultural affirmation, in a context of miscomprehension, indifference, even hostility from large sectors of the society. He participated in cultural production while appreciating the widely divergent ideas and contrasting methods of inquiry of others also involved in the work of civilization.^[2]

For Freud, Romain Rolland's sensibility blended artistic intuition with intellectual rigor and psychological probity with encyclopedic erudition. His writings were pleasing and exalting to his readers. His plays, novels, biographies, and essays were recurrent sources of consolation. Freud recognized that Romain Rolland's idealism

was not sentimental, passive, or mystified. Nor did it spring from a naive faith in the omnipotence of ideas or in the soothing but illusory ideals of beauty. Rather, it was anchored in struggle and adversity. He had the courage of his convictions—an attribute that was especially telling when he was confronted directly or challenged in a crisis. He affirmed idealistically the possibility that love and good will could be extended to all of humanity.^[3]

Freud did not customarily compose tributes to living European intellectuals. Romain Rolland received this homage precisely because he asked profound, if elusive, questions. Just as he understood the limits of available knowledge, so too did he recommend further research and reflection to expand what was knowable. Romain Rolland's living presence as a writer could not be ignored. His ideas escaped facile labels, simplistic categories, or mechanistic refutations. His audience lived with or against his perceptions, welcoming the invitation to enter into dialogue with him. To read his works was to confront one's own cultural assumptions, to rethink one's methods of analysis. Thus, Freud's deepest acknowledgment to Romain Rolland was in taking seriously his critical perspective. Many European intellectuals of the interwar period reacted as Freud did to Romain Rolland's writings, whether in the form of a public debate or in private forms of self-clarification.^[4]

Freud had sent Romain Rolland a copy of The Future of an Illusion in 1927. Romain Rolland replied in a letter on 5 December 1927, coining the phrase "oceanic feeling" and describing it in evocative, vitalistic imagery:

Your analysis of religions is fair. But I would have liked to see you analyze spontaneous religious feeling or, more exactly, religious sensation . . . .

I understand by that—quite independently of all dogma, of all Credo, of every Church organization, of every Holy Book, of all hope in a personal survival, etc.—the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the "eternal" (which may very well not be eternal, but simply without perceptible limits, and in that way oceanic). The sensation is, as a matter of fact, subjective in character. . . .

I, myself, am familiar with this sensation. Throughout my whole life I have never lacked it; and I have always found it a source of vital renewal. In this sense I can say that I am profoundly "religious"—without this constant state (like an underground bed of water which I feel surfacing under the bark) in any way harming my critical faculties and my freedom to exercise them—even if against the immediacy of

this internal experience. Thus I carry on simultaneously, freely and smoothly, a "religious" life (in the sense of this prolonged sensation) and a life of critical reason (which is without illusion). . . .

I add that this "oceanic" feeling has nothing to do with my personal aspirations. Personally, I aspire to eternal rest; survival has no attraction for me. But the sensation that I feel is thrust upon me as a fact. It is a contact .^[5]

Spontaneous religious sensation, he told Freud, was a prolonged intuitive feeling of contact with immense forces. The oceanic feeling was connected with an energy that surpassed traditional categories of time, space, and causality. It transcended limits, empirical boundaries, and scientific definitions. It had nothing to do with organized religion or faith in personal salvation. It promised to be a spontaneous source of action and thought that might regenerate decadent Europe and the underdeveloped nations of the world.

The oceanic feeling was an intimate sensation of identity with one's surroundings, of sublime connection to other people, to one's entire self, to nature, and to the universe as an indivisible whole. It ended the separation of the self from the outside world and from others, and it allowed the individual to participate in higher spiritual realms. Romain Rolland attributed the sensation to a primeval force in all people, nothing less than the divine inner core of existence. It had the quality of perpetual birth; it was an idea-force that could mediate between human beings as they were and as they could become. Because the sensation fostered relatedness among individuals, it could break down the barriers of class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, culture, and generation and so lead to universal fraternity in the distant future. The oceanic sensation represented an indestructible moral aspect of humanity's spiritual nature. It was the basis of religious experience: spontaneous, innate, and omnipresent. It propelled the individual to make amorous bonds with other humans and the universe. Romain Rolland asserted that the oceanic sensation contained enormous imaginative possibilities, providing the artist with reservoirs of inspiration and unconscious sources of creativity. It unified the works of literature, music, and humanistic culture. Exploration of the oceanic feeling could lead to new forms of self-discovery and self-mastery, to the purification of ideas, and to insights about the nonrational foundations of being. Not simply a fantasy, this sort

of mysticism was a form of knowledge that operated through the emotions.

Freud was thoroughly perplexed by Romain Rolland's description of the oceanic feeling. It did not neatly fit into the theoretical frame of his writings on religion. He confessed, "Your letter of December 5, 1927 containing your remarks about a feeling you describe as 'oceanic' has left me no peace."^[6]

Freud nonetheless offered a compelling analysis of the oceanic sensation and a penetrating insight into Romain Rolland's sensibility. He denied the hypothesis that the oceanic feeling was at the root of religious beliefs. The oceanic sensation was rather related to a primitive, preverbal period of ego development. The sublime feeling of fusion with the universe reflected sensations of early childhood, when the infant distinguished imperfectly between the self and the external world. With the ego's boundaries blurred or incorrectly drawn, the infant experienced an indissoluble bond with his surroundings. "Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it."^[7]

Freud suggested that the oceanic sensation recurred in adult life as a wishful fantasy, reassuring the individual about such disagreeable features of existence as mortality, the harshness of everyday life, and the compromises and accommodations necessary for survival. Oceanic feelings were powerful forms of consolation for the precariousness of human existence.

In the final analysis, Freud viewed the oceanic sensation as largely a regression to a childlike state in which the subject had no conception of self as differentiated from individuals or from the environment and in which an ecstatic feeling of well-being was experienced. It was related to the function of the ego whereby the self could be extended to embrace all of the world and humanity—a "limitless narcissism." Freud rejected mystical and idealist positions as irrational retreats from external reality. From the point of view of Freud's psychology and his value system, mysticism was a mystification. He wrote to Romain Rolland:

We seem to diverge rather far in the role we assign to intuition. Your mystics rely on it to teach them how to solve the riddle of the uni-

verse; we believe that it cannot reveal to us anything but primitive, instinctual impulses and attitudes—highly valuable for an embryology of the soul when correctly interpreted, but worthless for orientation in the alien, external world.^[8]

For Romain Rolland, however, the oceanic feeling was above all a bond that had nothing to do with knowing, desiring, or even believing. The oceanic feeling expressed his deepest longing for wholeness and for visceral relationships. Harmony, synthesis, reconciliation, infinity, and unity were other words chosen to express the oceanic. He used water imagery to condense this jubilant state of well-being into one symbol. At the border between mental and emotional life, Romain Rolland's oceanic sensibility was marked by a preoccupation with the epic, the unbounded, the universal, the ethical, the life-affirming aspects of existence:

I belong to a land of rivers. . . . Now of all rivers the most sacred is that which gushes out eternally from the depths of the soul and from its rocks and glaciers. Therein lies primeval Force and that is what I call religion. Everything belongs to this river of the Soul, flowing from the dark unplumbed reservoirs of our Being, the conscious, realized, and mastered Being. . . . From the source to the sea, from the sea to the source, everything consists of the same Energy, of the Being without beginning and without End.^[9]

Romain Rolland certainly had an oceanic sensibility. Three major agencies of the oceanic sensation can be identified in his prewar writings: the populist and socialist collectivity (the people); the musical or literary genius (the hero); and the healing power of European cultural integration (Europe). Romain Rolland's earliest experiments with intellectual engagement were objectifications of the oceanic feeling.

Romain Rolland's background was Catholic, provincial, and petit bourgeois. Descended from a line of notaries, Romain Rolland was born in the small, sleepy village of Clamecy on 29 January 1866. Clamecy is in Burgundy, 150 miles southeast of Paris. The Nivernais section of the Côte d'Or is noted for gentle green rolling hills, fine vineyards and mustard fields, Romanesque cathedrals and ruins. The long history of this picturesque and sweet countryside is an endless source of local pride and tradition.^[10]

Romain Rolland's provincial and lower-middle-class origins influenced his lifelong attitudes and cultural orientation. His parents were reliable and conscientious folk; like other notaries in small communities, they were respectable and conservative. Throughout his life, Romain Rolland maintained the traditional value of loyalty to family and intimate friends. He remained frugal and nonexperimental in his manner of living, considering such things as luxury, material comfort, and ostentatious display of wealth or social status superfluous. He had no use for fashion or fad. His domestic life was extremely orderly, simple, and unpretentious. Though intellectually curious, he had the French nineteenth-century reluctance to travel. From his provincial upbringing, Romain Rolland developed very mixed feelings about urban life and a deep suspicion of Paris. He preferred to live and to work in solitude, away from cities.^[11] During the crucial years covered by this study—1914 to 1939—he lived primarily in French Switzerland among the mountains. Their majesty inspired wonder in him and made him aware of an alpine boundlessness, another variation on the oceanic sensation.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke described Romain Rolland's domestic life as "a little spinsterish (I exaggerage, but a shade in that direction) and discreetly quiet."^[12] Romain Rolland remained conservative in life-style and dress (in his high white collar, dark tie, and dark suit he resembled a somber clergyman). Outwardly he radiated sobriety, earnestness, and austerity. Not a gregarious or frivolous man, he lived a reclusive existence. He was not a possessive individualist; besides his books and simple pieces of art, mostly gifts from friends or inexpensive objects he collected, he owned no elaborate furnishings. He avoided mindless amusements, trivial socializing, gossiping, pleasure seeking, and all forms of banal entertainments. He loathed café society and the salons. There was something stern, even disembodied, about Romain Rolland's mode of living, something excessive about his constant need to write and his strict puritanical morality. He had an early intensity about his mission in life, a monumental sense of personal responsibility. Creative endeavors, he insisted, required renunciation of pleasure. Character meant avoiding all forms of temptation. He developed a self-conscious and monitoring conscience that became central to his character and subsequently to his world vision.^[13]

Romain Rolland's early school days at the Collège de Clamecy, from 1873 to 1880, were undistinguished. He was an emaciated and sickly looking boy, and he kept to himself. As an antidote to solitude, he fantasized and took flight from reality through reading; he was particularly drawn to Jules Verne, Gustave Armand, Chateaubriand, and Corneille.^[14] He was his mother's favorite, even after the birth of his sister Madeleine in 1872. (An earlier child, also named Madeleine, was born in 1868 but died at the age of three.) Madeleine subordinated her entire life to her brother, serving him as a loyal confidant and collaborator. That service continued after his death in 1944, when Madeleine devoted herself to collecting the French writer's papers and to helping set up societies to honor his memory.^[15]

Romain Rolland's mother believed in the natural genius of her son. To ensure that his gifts were properly nurtured, she concentrated on advancing his career. It would be through the French educational system that her son would make his mark, she thought. At her instigation the entire family uprooted itself from Burgundy and moved to Paris in October 1880 to allow Romain to pursue his higher education under optimal conditions and her supervision. He was fourteen years old. The move to Paris resulted in a loss of social status and income for the Rolland family. It was, moreover, disorienting psychologically to be suddenly wrenched from the security and much slower rhythm of life in the provinces.^[16]

After the family settled into its Parisian apartment on the rue Monge on the Left Bank, Romain Rolland prepared for the entrance examinations to the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). An omnivorous but unsystematic reader, he was more absorbed by the theater of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and the operas of Wagner than by gaining admission to the prestigious ENS—the classical training ground for the Third Republic's intellectual and political elite. Romain Rolland failed his entrance examinations twice, in 1884 and again in 1885.^[17]

From 1886 to 1889, Romain Rolland was secluded in the "cloister" of the rue d'Ulm—as he dubbed the ENS. Throughout his student days and for the duration of his life, he loathed the French university system. Professors, he once remarked, know everything but understand nothing.^[18] After passing "victoriously" the agrégation in history, a comprehensive national examination entitling him

to teach in the French secondary schools and universities, Romain Rolland's contempt brimmed over: "Oh, how I despise all these examinations!"^[19]

The historical discipline required the mastery of scientific techniques of archival documentation and rigorous methods of textual criticism. Rolland learned how to place sources in their historical frameworks. From his masters at the ENS, he imbibed a conceptually precise use of language. Intellectual discipline curbed his leanings toward abstract speculation and his flights into cosmic realms. He proved to be a first-rate researcher, making important archival discoveries in the Vatican about the seventeenth-century composer Monteverdi. His principle thesis, "The Origins of Modern Lyrical Theater: History of the Opera Before Lully and Scarlatti" (1895),^[20] was the first French state doctoral thesis in the area of musical history. Romain Rolland's Latin thesis was entitled "On the Decadence of Italian Painting in the Sixteenth Century."^[21]

Romain Rolland regarded the six-hour defense of his doctoral thesis as a "formality." He was amused and angered by the antics of the professors on his jury: "So that's what the doctorate is! Six hours of empty chatter, of discussion which misses the point, to say nothing."^[22] He developed a style of judging the judges. He regarded himself as an exception, never feeling bound to obey conformist rules and laws.

Romain Rolland was dissatisfied with his teaching career from 1895 to 1910, which he spent in Paris as a faculty member of, respectively, the ENS, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales, and the Sorbonne. Although respected by his students, he was disenchanted with professorial posturing and considered himself unsuited to the role playing, exhibitionism, theatrics, and oversimplification required of university lecturers. Pedagogy bored him. He interacted with his students in a kindly, remote, rather formal way. More important, preparing lectures and doing scholarly work were time consuming, a deflection from his grandiose literary projects. Once he was able to maintain himself as a free-lance writer, he resigned his university position and never taught again.^[23] He never developed a taste for public speaking or oratory. Even at the height of his career as an engaged writer, he rarely made public appearances and he declined invitations to address rallies or large demonstrations.

Romain Rolland's fifteen-year teaching career coincided with

a problematic Radical republican synthesis. He defined himself sharply in opposition to the hegemony of the Durkheimians, positivists, anticlerics, and false, sentimental idealists who pervaded the French university system in the decades before World War I. Bergson was the significant exception to these trends, and Romain Rolland, as a vitalist and a man of intuition, was always indebted to the Bergsonian tradition.^[24] He distrusted the professionalization of the French academic, holding that it was self-serving and hypocritical. He always drew sharp distinctions between academics and intellectuals. If the French university served the French state as a center of ideological consensus and educational conformism, it was also marked by a conspicuous absence of critical and creative thinking. To have an authentic intellectual commitment, and certainly to be an artist, was fundamentally inconsistent with being a French academic.^[25]

Despite his mordant criticism of the institution, the years at the ENS were ones of intellectual growth and self-discovery. If the grandes écoles were outdated and stifling, one nevertheless left them educated, able to write, to solve problems, to use logic, and to raise pertinent questions. While immersing himself in nineteenth-century Russian novels, particularly those of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, and above all Tolstoy, Romain Rolland conducted a probing self-analysis.^[26] In 1882 he began his sixty-year habit of recording his thoughts in a personal notebook.

His earliest autobiographical renderings were of a young man "mystical and retired within himself." He suffered from recurrent bouts of "nervous and cerebral fatigue," precipitated by a constant fear of death. He was tormented by the notion that he would die prematurely, perhaps at the age of thirty-five. What Romain Rolland described as a "nihilistic crisis" was in fact a depression coinciding with his rupture with organized Catholicism. Disoriented by doubt, obsessed by feelings of his own fragility, desiring separation from and yet relationship to his parents, the adolescent Romain Rolland also experienced great pangs of conscience about breaking away from his mother's cherished beliefs. His need for distance from her may have seemed like a betrayal, generating great guilt and remorse.^[27] In addition, he was haunted by a fear that a bloody war was inevitable between France and Germany, a prospect that reinforced his anxiety about death. He projected his

fear onto the whole French generation born after France's defeat by Prussia in 1870. The survival of France, of Europe, of culture, all seemed bound up with Franco-German reconciliation.^[28]

Romain Rolland's earliest literary creations were dramatic. From 1895 to 1904, he completed ten full-length dramas, including a trilogy called The Tragedies of Faith , and the first three volumes of a projected twelve-part dramatic cycle entitled The Theater of the Revolution . The plays inaugurated his involvement in the people's theater movement. They were also his first sustained campaign in creating an engaged form of literature, and his first experience and defeat as a committed intellectual.^[29]

In May 1892, at the age of twenty-six, Romain Rolland jotted down some goals for his theater projects. He rejected the principle of art for art's sake and hoped to develop a life-affirming art that did not capitulate to the whims of the marketplace.^[30] Twentieth-century art had to identify itself with, serve, and direct the people. Dramas with a popular form and content would mediate between the "imperishable" realms of art and a culture with democratic roots. The populist playwright was urged to speak in an idiom comprehensible to all classes.^[31]

Romain Rolland's writings about popular theater oscillated between denunciations of anachronism in French theatrical genres and the desire to preserve what was valid in them. To an inquiry on the value of French dramatic criticism, he replied that its suppression would be useful to the public and to artists. He provocatively suggested that artistic innovation would be the result of a "social movement."^[32] He sharpened his analysis of the cultural crisis of 1900 by polemicizing against the uncritical assimilation of German influences in France, particularly Wagnerian "neomysticism." A committed idealist was always more opposed to hypocritical idealism than to the reductionism of modern materialism. He condemned insincere idealistic thought, not on nationalist grounds, but rather for its rhetorical excesses and its sterile abstractions. False idealism was a poison that encouraged romantic illusions and enervated humanity. It prevented clear-sighted observation from "real facts, real feelings." Modern politics and art were linked, he proclaimed; the "sentimentalism" and "illusions" of such works as Rostand's immensely popular Cyrano de Bergerac benefited the same clientele—the "political and literary reaction."^[33] When asked to comment on the con-

temporary role of the state-supported Comédie-Française Rolland stopped just short of calling for its closure.^[34]

He always considered the divisions between art and society to be arbitrary. He became involved with the people's theater movement in order to combine creativity with action. As early as November 1897, he told Maurice Pottecher, the founder of the People's Theater of Bussang in the Vosges,^[35] that he regretted having no influence in the literary world. If he were better known, his support of the people's theater would carry more weight. His writing would ultimately be inextricable from commitment: "I am waiting to have a more solid base to engage myself in struggle."^[36] This may be the first explicit connection between intellectual activity and political commitment in modern French history. The assertive, even abrasive, style of the engaged writer was in its first utterance hesitating and ambiguous. Before struggling, he needed to construct a "solid base."

Long before he became attuned to ideological nuances, Romain Rolland was temperamentally a man of the left. However, to be a socialist with an oceanic sensitivity did not necessitate active participation in social or political struggles. When the Dreyfus Affair exploded in France with the news of another inquiry into the case in June 1897, Romain Rolland was thirty-one years old. He lived in Paris during the various stages of the crisis and he recorded these events as a continuous outburst of "frenzy" and "delirium."^[37] He had inherited a genuine respect for historical continuity, the preservation of valid French republican institutions, and the democratic traditions of civil liberties. He had also inherited a petit-bourgeois fear of rapid social change and political disruption. Yet he was married to a French Jew, Clotilde Bréal, and was exposed to an articulate Dreyfusard viewpoint in his wife's family: the Bréals were prominent Parisian intellectuals and academics. Most of his literary and political friends were Dreyfusard or sympathetic to the Dreyfusards. Emotionally and ideologically, he appeared a natural recruit to the Dreyfusard cause.^[38]

Nonetheless, he adopted a stance of silence and solitary distance from both camps. His detachment reinforced feelings of repulsion for both "parties." He alleged that Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards were self-serving, manipulative, contemptuous of the truth, and extraordinarily violent. Withdrawal from a clear choice

allowed him to maintain his "lucid reason," as he put it, an exceptional posture in a context that threatened civil war or, even worse, a "war of religion." Like many other literary figures of his generation, Romain Rolland had mixed feelings about the Jews. He recoiled against the Bréal family's insistence that he take a definite public stand on the Dreyfus case. His failure to do so exacerbated dissatisfactions in his marriage and prepared the ground for a divorce in early 1901. He indiscreetly told Lucien Herr that he refused to take a position for "Zola-Dreyfus" because of his "anti-Semitic feelings." This remark expressed a specific dissatisfaction with his wife and a temporary perception that the French Jewish community was exploiting the affair opportunistically, without a demonstrated commitment to fairness, justice, and democratic principles.^[39]

He was disgusted by the virulent anti-Semitism of Drumont, the demagoguery of the right-wing press, and the militaristic excesses and authoritarianism of the anti-Dreyfusards. France, he felt, was being ripped apart by the confrontation of two forms of fanaticism. He felt threatened by the transformation of the "bestial and murderous instincts" of the multitudes into collective pathology and mass hysteria. Romain Rolland was clearly appalled by the anti-Semitic riots and violent demonstrations in the streets.^[40]

He thought that the mobilization of French intellectuals on either side of the political spectrum vastly increased the climate of hatred. Writers on the left and right seemed oblivious to logic, evidence, and the complexity of the issues. They took refuge in invention or inflated verbiage; their slogans pandered to the worst prejudices of their partisans and thus intensified the confusion and spread the fear. Unable to provide direction or clarity to the masses, French intellectuals responded to the anarchic situation injudiciously, by obscuring profound principles and juggling language to the detriment of ideals. The mystique of social justice and of democratic rights for all French citizens had been twisted into vulgar politics. Romain Rolland would not let his name be exploited by either side. In an apocalyptic mood, he yearned for the intervention of a "great conscience," an impeccable man of honor, someone of the stature of Victor Hugo.^[41] Yet he himself was unable to become that prophet at this historical conjunction.

Instead, he chose a position of detached neutrality and did not

try to mediate between the two camps. He asserted that a disinterested critic (presumably himself) could not deny "the chaotic grandeur and benefit of the struggle." Moving from political to moral terrain, from the contemporaneous to the abstract, Romain Rolland retreated to an elevated defense of "Reason" and of "Love." He was not lured into a pragmatic political quarrel, preferring to remain remote, uninvolved, stubborn, and pure.^[42]

These are sanctimonious rationalizations. Romain Rolland's perception of and reaction to the Dreyfus Affair represented a great evasion of its central issues, a failure of historical imagination. This was a regressive moment in his own emerging style of intellectual engagement. His refusal to take a position during the period 1897–1900 was a singular instance of nonengagement and retreat in a career of social and political responsibility. Neutrality contrasted vividly to his strong anti-Boulangist position during the 1880s, as a student, when he opposed the demagoguery and mass hysteria generated by that dubious military hero. In a judicious self-criticism written June 1940, Romain Rolland commented on his own political and intellectual immaturity during the Dreyfus crisis and reproved himself for having neglected a just cause.^[43]

Romain Rolland's play Les Loups was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris in May 1898, a climactic point in the Dreyfus Affair. The play failed to communicate his advocacy of an intermediate, conciliatory position. It reflected the ambiguous—and ultimately bankrupt—nature of his aloof stance. In a letter, he complained that "it is difficult to be independent in a milieu of fanatics."^[44] That sentence condenses the dilemmas of an independent left-wing intellectual in the context of fin de siècle Paris. Standing self-consciously alone, his intention was to avoid sullying himself in the muck of mass politics and collective emotion.^[45] The concept of critical support for the Dreyfusards did not pose itself as an alternative to the young idealist.

Romain Rolland's preoccupation with the French Revolution grew out of his historical training, the populism generated by the Dreyfus Affair and the international socialist movement, and his crusade to rejuvenate the French dramatic tradition. He once referred to the French Revolution as the "Iliad of the French people."^[46] He aspired to become the Michelet, not the Homer, of the French theater.

To capture the panoramic sweep of the revolutionary decade, Romain Rolland conceived an epic cycle. This work, The Theater of the Revolution , reflected the potency of the revolutionary heritage among French intellectuals; the revolution could still raise, in a cultural framework, unresolved social and political questions unleashed a century before.^[47]

Whereas important historians such as Aulard and Jaurès investigated the political and social aspects of the French Revolution in the same era, Romain Rolland focused on its cultural orientation and theory. In a daring stance for his period, he insisted that one could not dismiss the Terror as an aberrant period of revolutionary violence or unfettered tyranny. Rather, its cultural assumptions were positive and worthy of emulation.^[48]

His interest in socialism arose from his fascination with history (particularly the French Revolution), collective psychology, populist aesthetics and ideology, and individual morality. As early as 1895, Romain Rolland recorded the imprint, often against his will, of socialist ideas on his consciousness. He described himself as a "Socialist of the heart" or, more paradoxically, as an "individual Socialist." Nonetheless, he was unwilling to compromise his artistic integrity and unable to accept the discipline, dogma, and political priorities of the organized socialist mass movement. This stance was complicated by his unequivocal sympathies with socialist goals and by the perception of himself as a man of the left.

Despite his knowledge of German culture, Romain Rolland, like most Frenchmen of his generation, had read neither Marx nor Engels nor the early French translations of Marxist works.^[49] He had also fallen out with influential intellectual socialists, most notably with Lucien Herr, the librarian at the Ecole Normale. In a rhetorical formula that crystallized his pessimistic idealism, he prophesied that "Europe will be socialist in a hundred years, or it will not be." Typically, he considered French syndicalism a more profound expression of the popular will than parliamentary socialism. The semi-clandestine worker unions and cooperatives, with their hostility to bourgeois politics, were a "formidable subterranean movement."^[50]

In the period 1900–1901, Romain Rolland aligned himself with the "extreme left" of the French Socialist Party. He attended sessions at the Chamber of Deputies both to observe and collect im-

pressions of people's theater: "The Palais-Bourbon was then, in my sense, the first theater of Paris." His feelings toward the Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, were highly ambivalent. The Socialist Party leadership furnished a direction and lent a "grandeur" to the cause that the rank and file lacked because of their inexperience and immaturity. Not least of all, he loathed the political enemies of the socialists in France, associating them with the obsolete tyrannies and mindless superstitions of the past.^[51]

Never one to take his role lightly, he agonized over his relationship to socialism. During one of the most difficult personal crises of his life, the breakup of his marriage in 1901, Romain Rolland seriously considered affiliating with the French Socialist Party.^[52] He resolved the political question by posing it in psychological and aesthetic terms and by placing the decision within a moral framework. Socialism might be a necessary ingredient in constructing a nonalienated and modern society, but the oceanic feeling was absolutely essential in maintaining a fundamental respect for individuals, artistic independence, and a personal sense of justice. His oceanic feeling made him a socialist, allowing him to feel bonded to the French working class. Most contemporary socialists resisted such a mystical construct. Detachment from mass parties allowed him to work for two parallel goals: the democratization of French culture and the ethical mission of keeping the "divine" alive in the social revolution. He would accomplish the first through the people's theater movement and the second through a voluntary collaboration with Charles Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine .^[53]

What distinguished intellectual sympathizers from socialists was merely the realm of the struggle, not the end: "We pursue an analogous task: they in politics and I in art." For Romain Rolland, Péguy's iconoclastic socialist position became both a model and an ideological alternative to membership in the Socialist Party. He assumed that he could serve as an unrelenting critic of capitalist society and bourgeois culture while simultaneously opposing Socialist abuses, sectarianism, and intolerance.

Romain Rolland's play Le 14 juillet expressed most comprehensively the social populism of the period. In terms of his collective portrait of the people and his insistence that the masses themselves were fully able to make their own history and forge their own

destiny, it was far more advanced in conception than either Les Loups (1898) or Danton (1900).

The playwright situated the drama in Paris at the crucial moment leading to the assault on the Bastille, consciously subordinating the roles of the individual characters and spoken dialogue to the heroic actions of the masses. The people became the drama's key actors and the beneficiaries of the popular triumph at the conclusion.^[54] Romain Rolland endowed the people with positive attributes in Le 14 juillet . They could be defiant, impetuous, enthusiastic, and fraternal. They were motivated by collective pride, self-defense, a sense of decency, and the awareness that they were participating in the first stage of a global drama of freedom. They were united in their opposition to the Old Regime. Certain members even articulated a primitive class consciousness concerning the future—specifically, a distrust of the bourgeoisie.

Romain Rolland demonstrated that the taking of the Bastille was a spontaneous outburst of moral indignation, that the people were capable of acting alone, rapidly and intelligently. The role of leaders was conspicuously small. Those who vilified the people (with such epithets as scum, rabble, trash, vermin) represented the forces of the past, who capitulated, in the end, to the people's superior idealism and force.^[55]

Romain Rolland elevated the storming of the Bastille into a world-historical struggle against darkness, oppression, brute force, and centuries of inequality. The essence of the collective activity of Le 14 juillet was the "heroism and faith" of the masses, out of which was born modern republicanism. He significantly referred to the people as the "popular ocean"—a metaphor suggesting their fraternity, vitality, vastness, and above all their creative possibilities for making history and seizing control of their destiny. He depicted the revolutionaries of 14 July 1789 as mature activists united to fight for justice, risking disorder in their resistance to oppression. Fired by the idealism of this first act of collective emancipation, modern audiences would complete the social and political work that had been interrupted in 1794.^[56]

The play concluded with a spontaneous people's festival. Revolutionary violence gave way to bacchanalian song, dance, and procession: "The general impression of the play must be that of a national popular festival where all classes feel united, and where

they are not separated into this or that faction." For Romain Rolland the "conquest of freedom" in 1789 reflected the rationally purposeful and vitalistic mass behavior of the people.^[57]

In the spring of 1902, after the closing of Le 14 juillet , Romain Rolland inaugurated a series of public lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales on the history of music, including papers on popular music and music during the French Revolution.^[58] The practical failures of the people's theater experiments suggested that his concept might be premature. As an idealist he worked for vast cultural undertakings without guarantee of success. If they failed, he struggled against despair, preferring to get on with his other creative endeavors. He astutely saw the philosophical and political limitations of his socially engaged experiment. Intellectuals, however déclassé, were not members of the working class, nor could they easily shed their middle-class backgrounds and ideologies.^[59]

Romain Rolland emerged as the principal figure of the popular theater movement; he was its leading journalist, propagandist, drama critic, populist playwright, historian, and theoretician. His 1903 manifesto, The People's Theater , summed up the movement's theory and practice and proposed a strategy for qualitative forms of popular culture in France. It also demonstrated his considerable abilities as a writer of manifestos—one of the key genres of engaged literature. The People's Theater was the climax of populist theatrical innovation for the years 1895–1904. Subtitled an "Aesthetic Essay for a New Theater," its publication in Péguy's Cahiers coincided with the existence of seven apparently viable French ventures in popular theater and heightened expectations of state or municipal funding for a full-time Parisian popular theater.^[60]

The essay was neither a comprehensive aesthetic system nor a blueprint for the people's theater, but it synthesized some of the significant concepts underlying the perspective of social populism. Without using Marxist vocabulary or referring to "alienation," Romain Rolland showed that the working classes were brutalized both by the appalling conditions in which they worked and by their lack of access to spiritually enriching forms of leisure and entertainment. His critique of bourgeois society emphasized the cultural

fruits of economic oppression. He opposed the capitalist system for perpetuating a huge gap between the beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries of a variegated culture.

In Romain Rolland's positive view of the popular masses, they were capable of acting reasonably and maturely, without leaders. They had often been defeated and betrayed, but they had also won important battles and were destined to be victorious in the distant future. Unlike Michelet's relatively static concept of the people as exemplars of good nature and devotion, Romain Rolland's emphasized their collective energies, virtues, and potential for intellectual and political development. He contended that the masses were corrupted by civilization, in particular by the mania for earning, consuming, and pleasure seeking in modern urban centers.^[61]

The people's theater movement hoped to encourage mass participation by bringing the theater to working-class neighborhoods, drastically reducing admission prices, offering collective subscriptions, producing shows of high quality and wide variety—musical concerts as well as theater—and by converting the hall into a community center or house of culture. The people's theater, in contradistinction to the church, school, or town hall, would become the focal point of neighborhood activities. Romain Rolland urged his partisans to use modern propaganda techniques such as newspapers, posters, and public meetings to publicize the theater. He expected—but was unable to mobilize—wide-scale collective support for the people's theater from existing populist and working-class associations: unions, consumer cooperatives, socialist organizations, and the popular universities.^[62]

In the distant future, Romain Rolland envisaged the people's theater as an international, secular, and humanistic art form that would contribute to the foundation of a "new Europe." However flexible its form or contemporary its content, he hoped that the people's theater would remain relatively steadfast in its educational objective—namely, to raise the consciousness of the people.^[63] A disciplined effort was required to end the cultural annihilation of the people's class identity. A primitive level of class consciousness resulted from the absorption of the upwardly mobile by middle-class institutions and values and the pulverization of the lower sectors of the working class by overwork and extreme misery. Both developments were reinforced by the state's mo-

nopoly of cultural and educational life. Class pride and memory represented the people's only antidotes to collective assimilation or manipulation.

This notion of class consciousness operated outside socialist or political categories. Romain Rolland did not intend to aggravate existing social hostilities or to precipitate class revolt. On the contrary, he advocated a social-populist version of class identity that would unite the often sectarian and divided heterogeneous popular masses and simultaneously generate a healthy mental perspective among the people. Class consciousness was self-preservative, a double-edged defense against ignorance from within the laboring masses and external contamination by a corrupted bourgeois society.^[64]

Romain Rolland once remarked that what interested him most profoundly about the theater was the "dramatic sense of the crowds."^[65] The people's theater was merely a miniature form of collective activity. His ultimate goal was to surpass the narrow parameters of art, encompass the realm of social psychology, and create a modern collective consciousness—a new populist mentalité . Regular popular festivals would be the highest expression of joy, force, and intelligence. The festival would embrace all realms of civic life except commerce, narrow nationalism, and violence. The modern mass festival would approximate a new kind of communitarianism. There could be no higher tribute to the people's "sovereignty" than festivals that heightened the masses' "consciousness of their own personality."^[66]

Yet there could be neither a network of people's theaters in France nor popular festivals unless there existed a highly self-conscious and revolutionary people. Sensing that the popular masses themselves had to win and experience equality, Romain Rolland placed the responsibility for the struggle for emancipation on the people. To democratize France's cultural realm, it would be necessary for the people to liberate themselves from ignorant biases and parochial dogmas as well as to radically renovate France's institutions and social values. Populism would never conquer cultural forms unless it were linked to a critical spirit.^[67]

Although the people's theater movement proposed to create new forms of popular culture by and for the people, its deeper orientation was the formation of a modern cultural vanguard, con-

sisting of artists and intellectuals who had partially transcended their middle-class origins and ideologies. In reaching out to the people and in rejecting much of what passed for bourgeois culture, these writers were acting as socially committed intellectuals. Consequently, their concept of popular culture was engagé , presupposing a posture of protest toward past and present forms of culture.

Romain Rolland as engagé social populist was caught in an ultimately tragic bind: he became a fellow traveler of socialist mass movements while refusing to make major concessions in his art, in his life-style, or in the theatrical fare offered to the people. He chose not to integrate the available entertainments and spiritual culture of the people into the artistic fabric of his plays or into his aesthetic theories. Instead, he invited the people to journey with him into the imaginary worlds of their heroic past and their dignified and festive future.

He plainly believed that populist artists and the working-class public could make this voyage together and that it would be mutually beneficial, but the travelers would not yet be equal partners. He implied that the cultural emancipation of the workers would ultimately be the work of the laboring classes themselves. But in the present, socially conscious intellectuals had to prepare the way, formulate the goals, and ignite the cultural transformation.

Throughout his life Romain Rolland searched for exemplary guides. He was an inveterate hero worshiper. He was drawn to male, non-French, artistic heroes of earlier ages. His faith in genius merged with his artistic romanticism and his oceanic religiosity. Great men were vast, uncharted continents. To explore their lives and works was to come into intimate contact with mysterious forces of energy, strength, and autonomy. To know an authentic hero, even vicariously, was to come into contact with a boundless source of vitality. Romain Rolland retained a sense of wonder while contemplating these great men and their masterpieces. If we remember that his own father had been relatively ineffectual in life, we can speculate that his idealization of heroes was a search for a surrogate father; it may have also been a protection against his own passivity, femininity, fragile and sickly nature, and powerful ties to his mother. Identi-

fication with a hero was a constructive way out of his frequent state of dejection. Reflecting on the pasts of great artists provided solace for his inferiority feelings and compensation for melancholia and social isolation. Meditation on the hero became a positive outlet to channel his social and psychological resentments. He mythologized great personalities into sources of spiritual nourishment, godlike presences, or archetypal forces of nature. As he wrote to Henrik Ibsen in 1894:

Great men are trees with profound roots; around them the wind blows the rest of men like dead leaves. In the disarray of the human consciousness at present, in the dizziness of thought that oscillates from frivolous skepticism to insipid mysticism, it is a salutary spectacle that the view of a Man, of a powerful being who, equal to a force of nature, carries in himself his law and his necessity of being. That is a comfort.^[68]

Geniuses radiated strength, will power, and single-mindedness. Their intransigence contrasted with the mediocrity of spirit and commercialism so noticeable in everyday life, including the compromises of cultural life. The feeling of contact with the artist-genius revitalized him. His identification with these figures fostered the fantasy that he was not alone in his "sorrow and grief."^[69]

Romain Rolland composed five pre-World War I heroic biographies—Millet (1902), Vie de Beethoven (1903), Vie de Michel-Ange (1906), Handel (1910), and Vie de Tolstoï (1911). He attempted to make "these great souls" known to the general public. His aim: to allow the "common man" a glimpse of the "Eternal."^[70] Through his biographical monographs, the young French writer hoped to transfer the psychic energies of the genius to the public. This transfer would have regenerative power, rescuing the educated masses from torpor, mediocrity, and spiritual impoverishment. In a world without security or the foundations of established religion, the artist symbolized humanity's divine possibilities and capacity to achieve human splendor. This "great man" theory of history posited that the creative genius had sacred value.

In the Vie de Beethoven , Romain Rolland perfected the genre of the popular biographical essay. It was part of a larger series of biographies entitled Lives of Illustrious Men . Intoxicated by his first literary success (he was thirty-seven years old when the book appeared), he

imagined himself a "new Plutarch," who would produce unending cycles of modern life histories documenting courage.^[71]

The Vie de Beethoven was a labor of love to repay a personal debt to the composer. Because the text was written during the rupture of his nine-year marriage, it had a strong subjective component, a transfer of amorous energy from his wife to the glory of Beethoven. Evocative portraiture and deftly selected biographical data were imaginatively woven into a historical setting. The text was unencumbered by academic scholarship or the technical jargon of musical treatises. To make artistic personalities and their oeuvres comprehensible to the population, Romain Rolland wrote accurate, linear, immensely readable historical narratives that resonated with the public without pandering to philistine taste and without sensationalizing the subject matter. By casting Beethoven as a neoromantic hero, and by constructing a "Beethovian religion," he made the German composer's integrity and achievement palpable to a French public that had developed an antipathy to all things German. The author had mastered the French genre of haute vulgarisation in a work that was neither high nor vulgar. He popularized without trivializing.^[72]

Ultimately, Romain Rolland conceived of the hero's life as a perpetual combat against internal enemies. Since the essential terrain of struggle was psychological, the battles were waged in solitude. Beethoven's renunciation of society and physical pleasure was "for the good of universal humanity and dedicated to the unhappy."^[73] By inference, the artist elevated and consoled the public, contributing to the social community and to posterity through his works. This meant, paradoxically, that his excessive self-absorption resembled true generosity of the spirit. Artistic heroism, however, was incomplete unless coupled with "goodness of heart" and a genuine commitment to the categorical imperative. Romain Rolland rejected the Nietzschean version of self-overcoming as contemptuous of the masses, glorifying power, and lacking in authentic empathy with the dominated in society. Beethoven's heroism was triumphant because of its resigned conquest of despair and its more democratic concept of joy. He accepted the tragic vision that there could be neither character, faith, nor beauty unless the artist suffered in life. Miserable, in ill health, painfully aware of his own martyrdom, Beethoven was vulnerable yet willing to fight against his "physical and

moral grief." Overcoming deafness became a metaphor for transforming physical deficiencies into lasting cultural achievement and transcendence. The persistent antagonism between the individual artist and his social existence, his heroism and his outcast situation, gives rise to enduring art.^[74]

Romain Rolland's Vie de Tolstoï was written on the occasion of the Russian writer's death. In it he paid tribute to Tolstoy's seminal influence as an artist, critic, and above all as an intellectual and moral model.^[75] Tolstoy was the key point of reference in his early literary endeavors and his cultural-political interrogations. The Tolstoy monograph began a pattern of looking to the East for cultural stimulation. Rolland felt linked to Tolstoy by temperament and by shared common values: both implacably opposed the brutality, shallowness, and hypocrisy that passed for civilized behavior; both desired to have their art reach across class barriers and national lines; both sought an art form that would entertain, enlighten, and embrace all literate persons.^[76]

Impelled to communicate directly with living cultural heroes, young Romain Rolland had written Tolstoy inquiring about the Russian's repudiation of modern art. In his letter of April 1887, the twenty-one-year-old Frenchman wondered if Tolstoy had not exaggerated the intrinsic immorality of art, while overestimating the cleansing power of manual labor and of living close to the earth. "Don't you think," he asked Tolstoy, "that art could have an immense role to play, even in your doctrine, among those people who die from the complexity of their feelings and from the excess of their civilization?"^[77]

Much to Romain Rolland's delight, Tolstoy answered his covert plea for help with a letter in his own hand, in French, dated 4 October 1887. The substance of the letter was less important than the fraternal tone of the response, and the fact that the elder writer had taken the trouble to reply. "Dear brother! I received your first letter. It touched my heart. I read it with tears in my eyes."^[78]

Although he revered the Russian writer, Romain Rolland was not uncritical. He found Tolstoy's advice "truthful and helpful" but rejected his fuzzy conceptual framework and the moral austerity of his propositions. Tolstoy, he felt, was inclined to impose his moral gospel on his artistic works. Romain Rolland was learning that he

could not depend on others, heroes included, in the project of developing an authentic world vision and a personal voice.^[79]

In discussing Tolstoy's writing style, Romain Rolland revealed his own concept of artistic creation. He called Tolstoy the "least literary of writers," who subordinated stylistic considerations to delineations of character and ideas, without forgetting the symphonic complexity of social existence.

Tolstoy's art brought together "absolute sincerity, pitiless insight, and independence of judgment."^[80] For the remainder of his life, Romain Rolland deified critical and unfettered thinking, which he linked to individual liberty and the freedom to conduct research and to publish results without external censorship. The process of discovering and uttering the truth revealed that one system of thought, no matter how scientific or rigorous, could never fully encompass the truth. He remained an iconoclastic pluralist, bound by no single school or definitive method. He had no wish to be perceived as a master thinker with a cult of disciples.^[81]

Romain Rolland connected Tolstoy's anti-institutional religiosity and his advocacy of the Golden Rule to his protest against warfare and his notion of a Christian nonresistance to evil. Tolstoy had set the precedent of a major writer's publicly declaring his opposition to war.^[82] Romain Rolland's Tolstoyism was a crucial point of departure for his own brand of antiwar dissent, for his elaboration of a pacifist political philosophy after 1919, and for his receptivity to Gandhism in the early 1920s. He astutely assessed Tolstoy as a "revolutionary conservative," in that his concept of nonobedience to the state challenged established institutions such as the czarist state hierarchy, the army, and the church. Tolstoy's propaganda for conscientious objection and his renunciation of wealth were radical negations in the Russian context. He was conservative in his lack of sympathy for socialist revolutionaries or even for democratic radicals. Tolstoy rallied to Russian dissidents only when they were savagely repressed. Above all, Tolstoy claimed that economic materialism addressed itself to people's "lowest needs," thus neglecting their spiritual needs, conscience, and feeling for human fellowship. Tolstoy's pre-occupation with the tension between moral revolution and social revolution was to pervade Romain Rolland's itinerary as an engaged intellectual.^[83]

After Tolstoy's death, Romain Rolland imagined that the torch had been passed on to him, both as a writer and as a responsible intellectual with an international reputation. He appointed himself a European Tolstoy, attempting to destroy idols and to see reality with merciless insight while remaining a "dreamer and lover of mankind."^[84] Romain Rolland modernized the Tolstoyan temperament, while maintaining Tolstoy's fundamental values, sense of mission, openness, and largeness of view.

Charles Péguy, in the Parisian context, was another prototype for the responsible intellectual, particularly during the years 1900–1905. In the young Péguy, Romain Rolland found a man of passionate and implacable idealism, an arresting blend of conscience and integrity. Péguy had character, a commitment to personal honor, in addition to a philosopher's concern for the truth. As early as 1900, Romain Rolland was drawn to Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine . He associated Péguy's "cause" with a secular crusade against the intellectual terrorism of many Parisian cultural chapels. Writing for the Cahiers meant working for cultural renewal, and he dedicated himself to it fervently and without compromising his pessimistic idealism: "[Péguy] has undertaken to purify the public sense, to found a social Revolution on a reform of customs and of intelligence—like Mazzini and the great Revolutionaries."^[85]

Romain Rolland contributed to the Cahiers because of the wide latitude and eclectic spirit with which Péguy infused his review. Affiliation meant neither joining a hermetically sealed coterie nor identifying with a narrow literary sect or evanescent but flashy movement so typical of Parisian avant-gardes. The Cahiers published original literary endeavors, opened its pages to young writers, and combined thought-provoking essays with muckraking journalism. The review cut across several disciplines and blurred the boundary between politics and culture. Its politics were left-wing but independent, and it eschewed all forms of dogma, including that of the left. It served as an outlet for many of Rolland's creations, including the cycle of French revolutionary plays, his early biographies, the first edition of the novel cycle Jean-Christophe , and his essay-manifesto The People's Theater . The Cahiers also protected the puritanical Romain Rolland from the whims of fashion, commercialism, irreverence, and the sectarian spirit so rampant in Parisian intellectual circles during the "Banquet Years." Most of the subscribers to the

Cahiers , estimated at about twelve hundred, were tolerant and independent in their thinking. Many were school teachers and members of the liberal professions. Writing for Péguy's Cahiers would never lead to co-optation or celebrity status. Editor Péguy did not interfere with his need for solitude. Although the two never developed an intimate friendship, Péguy had high esteem for Romain Rolland, who repaid his debt to Péguy late in life with a two-volume biography of his former collaborator, editor, and mentor. From Péguy, Romain Rolland gained an intuitive grasp of the frontier where politics and culture converged. He was destined to live on that frontier.^[86]

Péguy was committed to preserving an integrated view of twentieth-century man. Romain Rolland admired the younger Péguy's courageous campaign in favor of Dreyfus and his audacious break with the opportunistic French Socialist Party, in which he retained his socialist faith. Romain Rolland depicted Péguy as a tough and stubborn man, an original , totally escaping classification. Péguy did not mute his idealism by abdicating personal responsibility or refusing to tackle controversial or elusive issues. For both Péguy and Romain Rolland, politics and mysticism were compatible: they could be fused. Romain Rolland fundamentally agreed with Péguy's motto for the Cahiers , a felicitous mélange of socialist politics and mysticism: "The social Revolution will be moral, or it will not be." He was proud to be affiliated with Péguy's review. "It is therefore an elite, less intellectual than moral, and an avant-garde of Society on the march toward new forms of civilization."^[87]

Romain Rolland's prewar fictional masterpiece, Jean-Christophe , was written between 1903 and 1912. It was serialized in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine and concurrently released in ten volumes by the Parisian publishing house of Ollendorff. He wrote most of the novel while living alone, deeply isolated, in his Left Bank apartment at 162, boulevard du Montparnasse. The process of writing was his only deliverance in a joyless and friendless period. In the novel, he expressed his extreme ambivalence toward fin de siècle European culture. One of the longest bildungsromans in the corpus of European literature (the definitive French edition is 1,600 pages; the English translation 1,580), Jean-Christophe traced the

birth, development, conflicts, creative resolution, maturation, and death of its composer hero.^[88]

For the intellectual historian, Jean-Christophe can be considered the great European novel of the prewar epoch. Its thesis was that French-German reconciliation was crucial both for the survival and renewal of European culture and for the foundation of a stable European peace. Romain Rolland conceptualized France and Germany as two powerful forces living on opposite sides of a river. The problematic of the novel was how to wed the two sides. Music was to bridge the river, enabling each culture to complete the other. If Europeans realized they could choose to integrate, rather than to select one side and annihilate the other, the resulting cultural production might be abundant. France and Germany were two civilizations that mingled in the same stream. Union would permit each nation to maintain its balance and political equilibrium while absorbing foreign energies and perspectives. Cultural interpenetration was vastly preferable to military preparations and imperialistic rivalries. It was music, much more than literature, that broke down national barriers and restored health, joy, solace, strength, and hope to humanity.^[89]

The hero Christophe composed music embracing the national characters of both France and Germany. Romain Rolland made Christophe a German, in order to explore French attitudes and values from an ostensibly non-French orientation. Christophe's music mediated between both civilizations by discounting the barriers to interpenetration as artificial and by emphasizing the basic similarities between the two cultures: common ideas, common tasks, and a common moral frontier. This blatantly idealistic novel of European harmony posed two frightening, realistic warnings: If the French and the Germans did not collaborate on the great projects of the present and the future, culture might be severely ruptured or even destroyed. If they failed to establish a rapprochement, world war might be unleashed.^[90]

As an artist in the Beethovian lineage, Christophe expressed his world vision through the universal art form of music. Living in exile in Paris freed him from the oppressive nature of German family life and from Germany's hierarchical, authoritarian cultural and social life. In Paris, he remained distinctly German in appearance, accent, taste, and sensibility, always an outsider to the main-

stream of French artistic life. He totally rejected the basic tenets and practices of modernism as cowardly, decadent, immoral, and overly aesthetic. He resisted the infighting, snobbishness, ideological polarities, and intellectual terrorism of the Parisian avant-garde. Romain Rolland depicted Christophe as a man of force and vitality. Yet he was no overman in the sense of the Nietzschean warrior. He was a gentle Nietzschean who struggled to overcome internal interferences in creative expression.^[91]

Christophe's art transcended spatial, temporal, and institutional boundaries. He intuitively searched for the totality, motivated by an ethical imperative "to see, to know, to feel, to love, and to grasp everything." The highest freedom was the freedom to create, and to create he was obliged to spend most of his time in solitude. Foreshadowing the extended exile of the novelist, Christophe moved to Switzerland in order "to stand above Europe." In Switzerland, he breathed better, remained in contact with elemental forces, and experimented with a model for a potentially united Europe. The mature Christophe became an incarnation of a "moral force," his music "irradiated life" and set a lofty example for others to emulate. Christophe's art was truly universal: it aimed for communion with other men; its energies were all-embracing.^[92]

Romain Rolland split his voice in the novel between two central characters: Christophe and Olivier Jeannin. Olivier not only became Christophe's loyal and devoted comrade but also represented the fin de siècle French idealist intellectual. Whereas Christophe was candid and unsophisticated, Olivier was cosmopolitan to the core and excessively complicated. The novel clearly helped to popularize the word "intellectual." It also evoked the internal ambiguities of French intellectual life. Olivier came to stand for authentic, as opposed to dilettantish, forms of intellectuality. Through Olivier, the novelist launched a comprehensive critique of the Parisian cultural market-place (La Foire sur la place ). What set the retiring and sensitive Olivier apart from his peers was his psychological understanding and his absorption of a vast European culture informed by non-French sources. His form of intellectual inquiry was sincerely internationalist. He was frequently "overwhelmed" by examples of injustice and suffered inordinately for the outcast and humiliated in society. Having known personal injury and having been victimized himself, he expressed "generous sympathy" for others less fortunate or less

verbal than himself. Yet there was something desiccated, remote, and aristocratic about him. After years of study, Olivier's analytical detachment, his "lofty outlook," and his ability to judge people without illusions made him inaccessible. Like Christophe, he lived a solitary existence, removed from any viable form of collective association. Having acquired his individualism after great internal struggle, Olivier hated, perhaps feared, the "herd" mentality in intellectual groups or political movements.^[93]

Because of his precarious mental stability, obsessive ruminations, skepticism, and self-doubt, Olivier never linked thought to practice. He became the paradigm for Romain Rolland's free spirit, the intellectual who liberated himself from religious, political, national, or artistic dogma. He emancipated himself from the parochial side of Parisian intellectual life but was still catalyzed by the passionate debates and the enthralling life of the mind in that great city. Olivier's strength and health were cerebral. He was a Parisian intellectual who "abhorred" Parisian intellectual coteries while speaking their idiom. He "dreaded" militant political action, yet ironically he died fighting for the French working class on the barricades in the streets of Paris. As an intellectual freed from the parochialism of political parties, academies, organized churches, and competing intellectual cliques, Olivier refused to sanction any expression of nationalist hatred, just as he opposed social, ethnic, or class injustice. He remained "just to his enemies," hoping to preserve "the clarity of his vision" in the midst of violence and chaos. Realizing that Europe hovered on the brink of social revolution or world war, Olivier was intransigent on basic moral questions. If world war were to be declared, he would have refused to participate in it or to legitimize it in any way. Anticipating the stance of the novelist himself, Olivier would call for "love and understanding" if hostilities were unleashed, while attempting to keep his "reason uncontaminated."^[94]

Jean-Christophe celebrated the grandiose ethical and social possibilities of art. It argued that the idea of moral frontiers between nations was shallow and absurd. It attempted to fill the void left by the death of God and the decline of organized religion in the late nineteenth century. The Beethovian cult of heroism was offered as an alternative to the neurasthenia and doubt saturating European art and thought. The authentic culture hero could serve as an ideal. Truly epic literature had to be addressed to all people in their own

languages. Romain Rolland contributed Jean-Christophe to the healing of European fragmentation and the gap opened by the decline in spirituality and loss of faith in human transcendence. Jean-Christophe was designed to be "a common book for all of Europe." The responsible artist did not address a tiny, privileged minority of refined sensibilities, but endeavored "to think and to write for all."^[95]

The enormous popularity of Jean-Christophe decisively changed Romain Rolland's life. The novel developed an enthusiastic cult of readers, inspired by the characters, the story, and the thoughtful and effusive idealism. Perhaps up until 1945, a multitude of readers regarded Jean-Christophe as a trusted companion and source of spiritual nourishment. Parents passed the book on to their children. As the author of a classic recognized in his own day, Rolland was no longer an obscure teacher of the history of music at the Sorbonne or a reclusive Left Bank artist. The success of Jean-Christophe , both in France and in the many countries in which it was translated, made Romain Rolland financially independent for the remainder of his life. He could now write what he wanted and publish his writings almost where he pleased. He had been on leave from the Sorbonne since 1910; he officially resigned in July 1912. He won the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature from the Académie Française on 9 June 1913. The French have a long tradition of honoring their novelists. Characteristically, Romain Rolland denigrated the literary award: "The hell with all these prizes!" He and his work became sources of discussion and controversy in the French literary community. His name and face became familiar to the French public. The entire novel was widely translated. For the most part, it was extensively and favorably reviewed, although literary modernists found it hopelessly anachronistic and nineteenth-century in form.^[96] Romain Rolland's reputation was that of a Frenchman who had humanitarian sympathies, internationalist perspectives, and an empathic but critical understanding of Germany.

Having earned the solid base of authority and credibility lacking in his campaign for the French people's theater, he was now prepared to engage himself in intellectual and political battles.