writing-table, he toils for the next ten years. Ten years, like 'by and by,' in Hamlet's dictum, 'is easily said.'

III

The finest flowers of our gray North belong to the late-blooming variety. The twenties to drudge at mastering technical skill; the thirties to mature experience; then the forties and fifties for the golden afternoons of summer and autumn that ripen and garner harvest and vintage. Had Romain Rolland been killed by the motor car which struck him down in 1910, the world would have heard little more of it at the time than that an obscure author, formerly a professor at the Sorbonne, had met with a fatal accident. Yet Jean-Christophe was nearly completed, and in two years more Rolland was a European figure. Had he been willing to prostitute his talent he could have cashed in on it long before to the tune of fame and money. Fame is a bad wife but a good housemaid. Time after time he showed the loud-mouthed wench the door, until at last she came back meek, prepared to behave and make herself useful.

Goethe conceived his Faust as a youth of twenty and finished it at eighty. The seedling idea of music for Schiller's Ode to Joy came to Beethoven in 1793 as a youth of twenty-three. It became the culmination of his Choral Symphony in 1824, three years before his death. Wagner began his epic cycle of the Nibelungen midway in his thirties, and finished it a quarter of a century later. There seems to be some law whereby such heroic endeavors, in art and in life, begin as a purpose, more or less vague, in youth, to gather strength and precision with advancing maturity. With little more than a secret resolution to stead it, the soul battles its way through years

The conception of Jean-Christophe as a European work came to Rolland as a youth of twenty-three one evening during a walk on the Janiculum in the period of his friendship with Malwida von Meysenbug. Its outlines were sketched in 1895; the opening chapters were written during the summer of 1897 in a Swiss village. Then, like a composer following themes as dictated from within, he wrote several of the chapters of the fifth and ninth books. In such a work the creative daimon slumbers and reawakens. It was after Rolland's retirement from the theatre of externals that the work gathered flood tide. Then befell the miracle. Every loss suddenly turned to gain. Griefs and misfortunes were seen to have been indispensable experience. The habit - almost the mania of collecting newspaper cuttings, articles from reviews, notes, studies, music, pursued for years more by instinct than from any definite aim, unexpectedly befriended him. All magically this material arranged itself for the growing work. He discovered that for years he had been preparing himself unwittingly for this specific task. Nothing had been lost, nothing wasted; and, mindful of how surely this law of creative purpose works from top to bottom of the human scale, one is prompted to add that for stalwart souls nothing ever is.

Before the French original was completed, translations of the earlier volumes into English, German, and Spanish had made Rolland an international figure. The posture of contemptuous silence was one which the French press found it no longer possible to maintain. By June 5, 1913, when the French Academy awarded Jean-Christophe the Grand Prix, Romain Rolland was already in a position to be able to dispense with that and any other official decoration. The herd instinct of society is a good watchdog. It barks ferociously at each newcomer. Let the newcomer decline to be intimidated and the dog ends by wagging its tail and licking his handif not his boot. This is nothing against the dog. It is merely the difference between a dog and a man.

IV

Thus, at forty-seven, the seer came down from his Mount of Vision carrying his tables of prophecy -the spiritual unity of the Western world. He had written a European book, perhaps the one European book since Faust. For fifteen years he had toiled in solitude and obscurity to image the heroic protagonist of a new age and generation. Has ever life more terribly or more thrillingly taken a man at his word? Hardly were the thinking and writing done when he was himself summoned to be the figure he had thought and written.

In 1913, from the two attic rooms in the Boulevard Montparnasse, he had become comrade and comforter to a vast, heterogeneous band of lonely and aspiring souls scattered over every country of Europe and North America. They wrote to him, and he, remembering Leo the wellbeloved, shouldered the crushing task of answering their letters with his own

hand. How can one utter the depths of love and gratitude that welled up to him from these far corners and spiritual waste places? So long as he had lived, since such a life as his had been possible, anything beautiful and heroic was possible. One could joyfully risk everything and make a try for his ideal, knowing that, however it might seem to fail, it was bound to succeed. Were the children of the Exodus, who had set out on a high errand toward the Promised Land, dancing round the Golden Calf? Did a capitalist society insult every decent impulse of the human soul? Here was a voice, not of the past but of to-day, proclaiming that men were never meant to live in such squalors, and need not. Hosannah!

Something more than a year of this. Then, one August morning of 1914, a world in flames. The spiritual unity of Europe'? It was hate. With the dying Beethoven, one was ready to exclaim: 'Plaudite, amici, comædia finita est!' The Mount of Vision? It was cannon smoke. The tables of prophecy? Götterdämmerung. The Golden Calf? It was the blood-drenched Moloch of capitalist imperialism armed by modern science with an enginery of slaughter well-nigh capable of exterminating the human race. 'Applaud, friends, applaud! The comedy is finished!' And so an end of Jean-Christophes! An end? Well, no not quite, perhaps. An end for this generation, certainly. The Jean-Christophes of 1914 had been conscripted to rip out one another's vitals with the bayonet and to blast off one another's faces with T. N. T. But up in a Swiss town is a solitary, shattered man, no longer young. Just yesterday he completed one life-work, and, even in the moment when a scoffing world had ceased jeering to acclaim it great and good, he has seen it smashed by the first volley of cannon, and finds himself, at forty

eight, called to pick up his tools again and start another. "The spiritual unity of the Western world'? It was at that moment the grain of wheat shut in the mummied hand of dead Pharaoh. Romain Rolland's life-work was the dead body. His faith was the solitary seed.

With what cunning the creative daimon husbands its forces. That the war should have found Romain Rolland in Switzerland and above the military age would, to eyes that are holden, seem like the merest luck of coincidence. But in the rhythm of the spirit 'luck' is foreordering and 'coincidence' law,

Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent.

A sharp inner conflict, a tragic selfsearching, and Romain Rolland saw what was wanted of him. It was to

remain in Switzerland where thought and speech would be, in comparison with belligerent countries, free. Then began what, I suppose, the future will account one of the most prodigious feats of mind and spirit that our time has beheld: one man, alone of all the commanding figures of his age, taking thought, not for his own country solely, but for Europe - and this in an hour when Europe was taking thought of nothing except fratricide. Above the Battle appeared in September 1914. Worthies who had never given the future of Europe a thought were outraged that a thinker who had spent his life endeavoring to reconcile its conflicts should decline, at the first stroke of the drum, to cheer for murder. And now Siegfried encounters the Dragon Fafner of Hate Cavern. He has been warned:

Poisonous slaver
Slides from his jaws.
Who by his spittle's
Spume is bespattered,

Shrivels and shrinks up alive.

The chagrin of having been forced, two years previously, to recognize as one of the foremost figures of European letters a man whom it had ignored added venom to the cloaca maxima of abuse vomited upon him by the French press. It spread to Allied countries, even to the United States. An American newspaper correspondent in Paris, who had written in 1913 about what a great man Romain Rolland was, wrote in 1914 about what a bad man he was. I saved the article. In years to come it would be a curiosity. It is. Here is its concluding sentence: 'Romain Rolland is to-day the moral inferior of the humblest poilu in the trenches.'

The moral inferior, meanwhile, was working as a volunteer, twelve hours a day, in the Civil Prisoners' Service of the Red Cross of Geneva, reuniting families, relieving material distress, and, when all else failed, writing letters of consolation. He was spied on by agents provocateurs, his every caller noted, his every telephone conversation recorded. So ferocious had been the campaign of falsehood against him that he lived in constant peril of some fanatic's bullet. In the autumn of 1916 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature $40,000. The occasion was seized on with gloating. 'Swedish Academy? Ha! More German propaganda!' The French press talked of 'Judas and his thirty pieces of silver.' Judas gave his thirty pieces of silver to war sufferers. 'Ah, yes. The heroic pose! Even worse taste, if possible.'

Then a curious thing happened. Let us call it the 'Book of Catacombs.' More than one American radical has told me that, in the midst of savage persecutions by government and press, they have found themselves secretly befriended, often by the very reporters assigned to write the attacks, or by the underofficials delegated to the

prosecution. They would receive clandestine messages and anonymous telephone calls giving them timely warning or valuable advice. Something of this sort befell Romain Rolland. As the weeks went on he found himself once more in two attic rooms, this time in a Swiss hotel, father confessor to what remained of an international mind. From every country-belligerent and neutral tortured souls, no matter what sorry façade they were obliged to maintain even with their nearest of kin, poured out their hearts to him. Often the writers were so highly placed as not to dare sign their names: men whose souls abhorred what their family responsibilities and social positions seemed to require their hands to do. They told him their sufferings, their self-loathing, their despairs, their hopes, their love for him, their faith in him. Romain Rolland, by the allpowerful law of the spirit, had become custodian of the European conscience. These letters and documents he recorded. They are put away in a safe place. And one day they will be published as a testament to the future. Little as he may seem to have had to do with the writing of such pages, it is quite possible that they may rank as his greatest work.

V

Above the Battle and The Forerunners now read like axioms. In 1915 and 1916 they read like treason. Once a telephone is invented, anyone can use it. Not everyone can invent a telephone. Yet these two volumes of essays were merely Rolland's journalistic day-labor of the period. Almost alone of European writers, the electrical current of his creative faculty kept on flowing without interruption throughout the flashes and crashes of that ghastly thunderstorm. Clérambault, 'the history of a free conscience

in war time,' was begun in 1916 and finished in 1920. This composite portrait of war psychology, the whole of modern society for its canvas, is one of those books which assuredly ought to be written provided anyone can be found able and willing to write it. Clérambault is a cool and desperate feat of surgery for cancer of the soul. (Whether surgery can save the patient is still uncertain.) I picture men of the future reading this book with the pity and horror of Dante, his features lit by the nether flame-glare, peering over into the abyss of Malebolge.

In a letter of the war period Rolland wrote: 'It seems to me that our age needs the whip of a Molière or a Ben Jonson.' That whip he produced. It is Liluli. This Aristophanic satire could have been conceived only by a man so steeped in his intellectual material and so tortured by the spectacle of human blindness and misery that he could not help but write it. The seal of effortless creation is all over the play. It quite evidently wrote itself. Its argument is as perfect an anarchist fable as the libretto of Siegfried. Like Wagner, from long meditation on the central facts of human society and from harsh experience of them, he hit upon a seedling allegory so universally true that, follow it whichsoever way he would, he found himself always in the realm of universal truth-to-life. And then, to balm the hurt mind after that peal of ironic laughter, like cool hands on an aching forehead, came the infinite pity and tenderness of the idyll, Pierre et Luce.

Shortly after the war appeared Colas Breugnon. It had been written in an abrupt seizure of creative energy, all in the holiday mood of release from the prolonged strain of Jean-Christophe'scherzo intermezzo,' as Stephan Zweig neatly calls it. The book was in type when the storm burst over Europe.

Those years were no time for such an explosion of Gallic glee. But in 1919 it came most gratefully. This Chaucerian April of laughter and tears seems to me Rolland's most perfect work, and I should not be surprised if it ended by being his most popular one. (The present English translation of it is butchery. 'Rabelais for fiveo'clock tea!' exclaimed the author when he saw it.)

The French original is such a spring of gayety and tenderness, lyric poetry and smiling irony, as wells up only out of the ancestral deeps of a seasoned race and an old culture. This seventeenth-century wood-carver is an artist in common life, a robust soul taking the ups and downs of average existence. Here are disappointment in love, a nagging wife, a burned house, illness, mutilation of his finest craftsmanship, social upheaval, financial ruin, war, physical disablement, and at last dependency in the house of his children. Yet here also is immense relish for every savor of life, sweet or sour delight in the simplest sights and sounds of nature; huge gusto of eating, drinking, and sociability; a hungry mind that can find refuge from outer broils in the pages of a book; the great gift of laughter, even at one's own discomfiture; and, above all, a life that knows the beauty and dignity of humble creative work. All this melody sings above a solid ground-bass of shrewd political satire and sound social philosophy. The hint is a broad one. It is a book which tells common people the half-dozen home truths whereby common life may be lived well, and all so genially and wittily that no one can feel himself in the least preached at. "There it is, neighbor. Take it or leave it.'

Before the war Europe debouched works of art, music, and literature in annual cycles. One dated the years by

them. "The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?' Light after light has gone out. 'Night Falls On The Gods.' The masterpieces that once came out of Europe in a flood are now hardly a runlet. That Romain Rolland should be one of the few whose stream of creative energy has not faltered is no accident. Hatred and the spirit that creates do not keep house together. Go down the list of names that were illustrious in art and letters in 1914. Of those who yelped with the pack during the war years how many have regained their spiritual estate? By a grisly law of recompense it would seem that just in so far as one abandons himself to the herd-passions of destruction is he abandoned by the power to create. From his very sufferings Romain Rolland has drawn strength. His love and compassion have kept the springs of his art replenished. His Christophe watched by the deathbed of the age that is gone; his Annette Rivère, heraldress of free women, watches by the birthbed of the new. And when, out of India, cradle of religions, came the political evangel of nonviolence, who more worthy could have been found to deliver to the blood-bolter'd West the new testament of Mahatma Gandhi than this great European whose forehead is so strangely spotless of the Cain-brand that will disfigure our age to all eternity?

The mills of the gods seem to have shifted gears. Exceeding small they still may grind; but grind slowly they certainly no longer do. Is it that the Machine Age devours grist faster than any preceding? Or is this the acceleration common to all ages of transition and revolution? In any case, the prophet no longer seems invariably obliged to wait a century for his vindication. Ramsay MacDonald, the hissed and hooted of 1914, is Premier