Romain Rolland Converses

IN the spring of 1919, when the long horror of World War began to dissipate, it chanced that I was living in a chamber of an old brick house on Beacon Hill still occupied by a family in its third generation of residence there through more than a century, a situation not uncommon on the Hill once. My chimneypiece was brave with urns and festoons in the style of the brothers Adam, and, the house being full of heirlooms, over the mantelshelf hung an old painting of a scene in the Swiss Alps — waterfall, chalet, peasants, and snow-capped peaks.

This picture touched off my reviving imagination. Switzerland and the Alps suggested Romain Rolland, whose books and letters had been one of my few unpoisoned wells during the war period. Above the Battle came in 1915, like an eye of the cyclone, and The Forerunners gave promise that the storms were done. This voice of sanity in a lunatic world spoke from exile among the Swiss Alps, and, although I had then never seen Rolland, he was a more intimate friend than most of my daily companions. Often I held imaginary conversations with him about the war, about international questions, about music, about literature, about the conduct of life.

Fourteen years later the imagination became reality and I did hold frequent and lengthy conversations with Rolland on these themes up among the Alps in summer, first at Spiez, and later at Lucerne.

I

At luncheon in a hotel perched on a lofty hill-terrace above Lake Thun, a pleasantly old-fashioned hostelry with a domical tower, set amid spacious grounds, the talk had turned to how American culture can compensate for much that has necessarily been lost by transplantation oversea.

‘I am thinking of the French provinces,’ said Rolland, ‘and of my own youth. In my home we had music and little nourishment for the spirit excepting that. Poetry? None. Politics? Yes; but it does not satisfy. Painting? None. What we did have was a wholesome love of the soil, and for more than because it was a livelihood: the love was also a sentiment, even humoristic. There was leisure for dreams, also for ennui and deterioration. But art can only grow in leisure: it cannot flourish in a whirligig or a tourbillon. Finally, there were private libraries where one read the classics, and those meant everything to me. It was a life much like the one you have described as being lived in the village where you were reared, only, of course, French culture is Latin; the Church took it over after the fall of Rome and it was flourishing again by the sixth century.

‘You mention the influence of your colleges on the formation of American culture; French culture was not created by colleges, but by an élite of the salons — by several élites. In my youth it was sodden with pessimism. As a boy of twelve I was astonished to hear a brilliant and rather fortunate uncle say, “If it were not for the sake of one’s children, life would not be worth living.” Thought I, “Then why have children?” There was no answer. It was a dying bourgeoisie. They had lost their religious faith and had nothing to take its place; pessimism spread everywhere like an oil stain in a tablecloth. At Paris, especially between the years 1886 and 1890, in my twenties, I was in the very abyss of it. Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Wagner ennobled the despair. “The world,” they said, “is bad, but there are still beauty and nobility.”

’I wrote to Ibsen as I wrote to Tolstoy, and Ibsen, too, answered. But he could see no light. He had never heard of Marx. His failure to see the hope when hope did exist was the tragedy of the individualist. I felt the need of giving people hope, and that is how Jean-Christophe came to be written. My sojourn in Italy was of great help to me, for until I saw Italy I did not know that happiness was obtainable. Malvida von Meysenbug’s tranquillity of spirit further steadied me. But now a different generation has arisen. Since the war the young men have been infuriated by disenchantment and they will have none of Ibsen and Tolstoy and the courageous pessimists, because in them they think they see that which they wish to evade.’

‘It is the same on our side of the Atlantic. Before and even during the war, Ibsen, and especially Tolstoy, could still be major prophets for our thinking class. To-day they are scarcely minor ones.’

‘Yet at least the pre-war pessimists were heroic men who still found beauty in the world.’

‘Have you thought what a singular course Nietzsche’s influence has run? He seems to have tumbled off too; partly, I suppose, because his thinking sounds so confused and contradictory.‘

‘His confusion arises because he was lyric, and lyricism is not philosophy. Everything is in it — the most contradictory elements.’

‘ He sets me wondering again whether men cause epochs or epochs men.’

‘I doubt if great men create epochs: they announce them, are more sensitive to influences, therefore see and speak first, and hence seem to cause the new era when they are more delicate instruments vibrating to the first footfalls of its approach.’

‘Then it must be going to take an uncommonly long time for humanity to assimilate the Machine Age, for our artists do not yet seem to feel at home in it.’

‘That may be merely because machines are new, not because they are not poetic. Siegfried’s sword is a machine, yet Wagner gets poetry out of it. Imagination and affection require time before they can embrace new objects. I find certain machines among the most beautiful works of art in our times (what more beautiful than a fine airplane?); machines intoxicate me with their power, and I find them much more rich in poetic possibilities than the glaive of Siegfried and all the tinware of Bayreuth. Certain Russian poets can write with genuine feeling about machines, other Russians cannot; just as a certain set of delicate mechanisms are fitted to one set of sensitive fingers, and to another, not. Machines grow ill and die, “fatigue of metals.” Sir J. C. Bose, the Indian scientist, has plotted the curves for the maladies of metals and has shown them to botanists and physiologists. One exclaims, “This curve is the same as that of a plant ague!” and another, “This is a human fever chart!” There is no division.’

‘If anything,’ I was prompted to remark, ‘can make me feel like forgiving the Machine Age its crimes, it is the phonograph record. This gives access to the literature of music which was mostly locked to us before. And yet does it not also involve a danger of allowing us to exhaust our sensitivity to some of even the finest music? It exposes music to a strain of repetition which it was not designed to endure.‘

‘Too frequent hearing,’ said Rolland, ‘is somewhat like great poetry learned by heart in early youth. It never afterward gains its complete virtue to move. Also, the recorded performance may be mediocre; and again, enjoyment comes through a sense of conquest and one enjoys more by playing the music himself. As soon as the mind has grasped in its entirety as an intellectual entity a given work of art, its value, for me at least, is ended. I must then conquer something else. Of course there are works of art so great that they are never thus grasped, and the enjoyment of them can go on forever. These have in them the element of the inexpressible. It is the unconscious in all art work which perpetually renews our enjoyment of it. This quality exists in Greek literature and survives in spite of all the bad translations and faulty texts. The daimonic element is there and has saved it. Our French classic imitations of the Greeks are much more external and rationalized and have therefore much less life in them. The French grasped the form, but the performance is too intellectual — although I must say that the psychological art of Racine is as refined as that of Stendhal. Yet the great sources of the subconscious were insufficiently explored, if explored at all, in French until the nineteenth century. Then the puissant Hugo overflowed with it (his Contemplations), and one must not ignore Baudelaire, and finally we come to the symbolists at the end of the century. In every artist is a conflict between expressing exactly what he means in pure classic line and the desire to utter the vastness of subconscious thought. Artists of the second rank express only the second. They are able to let in the savage element of the daimonic and are content to; but artists of the first rank do both. Yet, after all, art is a feeble instrument to express life and especially to express the unconscious.’

‘“The eyes of chaos shining through a veil of order” can be seen in your own work.’

‘I? Alas, I am a deflected composer,’ sighed Rolland, ‘a painter with his arms cut off, obliged to work with his feet. The composition comes into being, it is true; but it has been forced to find a substitute voice for its expression. Another life, and I shall write music. Words seem to me an inadequate art form. Yet all the arts are limited; they do not sufficiently express the unconscious. Beethoven and Wagner thought in words as well as in music — sometimes in words first. I reverse the process — thinking in music first, then in words — only because I cannot write the music.’

‘Certain eras,’ I remarked, ‘seem favorable to certain arts: sculpture to Periclean Athens, painting to the Italian Renaissance, Gothic architecture to the Middle Ages; ours is one in which science seems to flourish best.’

‘Modern science,’ said Rolland, ‘is peculiar in that almost for the first time we have men who welcome hypotheses which upset their own. Imagine theologians doing that, or even statesmen! And there has come a new epoch in science in the last fifteen years made possible by improved apparatus. The next great struggle may be between science and religion. It does not come at once because science, which, in my youth and the time of Marcelin Berthelot the great chemist, conceived itself to have arrived at the absolute, was aggressively contemptuous of religion; but since the turn of the century, with the mathematician-philosopher Henri Poincaré, with William James, with Bergson, the door has been reopened to “the relative,”and a ground more conciliatory is thus offered as between science and religion. Besides, some of the greatest French savants of to-day are at the same time religious believers. They keep their thought in two compartments! But, after all, Descartes did the same. It was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that science showed the most intolerance, in reaction against what it had had to suffer from the intolerance of religion. To-day the Church is clever. It bides its time, saying, “Science is always changing and admitting its mistakes. Only wait: you will see that the Church was right after all.” But is this procedure safe? Science goes on seeking and will find. I see no reason to suppose that there will be any end to discoveries as startling as those of the past fifteen years when it has penetrated into other universes besides our own.’

II

One day at Lucerne the Mayor called at our hotel to conduct an excursion to Villa Triebschen, which he had persuaded the city to buy and turn into a museum of Wagneriana. When it was opened, a month previously, Rolland — whom the Swiss are evidently proud of having as a resident, for one sees it manifested in numerous ways — was invited to the dedication, but felt obliged to decline. The Villa was Wagner’s residence from 1866 to 1872 and it was here that he finished the orchestration of Die Meistersinger and of Siegfried (resumed after thirteen years), and sketched in score the last act of Götterdämmerung. The place is quite pretentious and easy to identify from across the lake by its light gray stucco walls and the tall poplars which wave above the promontory on which it stands. Refurbishing has made it spick-and-span, and its excellent collection includes the original manuscript of the Siegfried Idyl which was composed here and first performed on the terrace in front of the Villa, and ‘The Swan,’ the grand pianoforte, a gift from the Érards, at which Tristan was composed. In a cabinet near at hand is a facsimile manuscript of the score of Tristan, the original of which I had seen at Bayreuth only a few days before. As we were peering at it Rolland remarked: —

‘ Richard Strauss has said to me that he believes Wagner’s brain when he was composing this erotic music was cold as ice.’

The Mayor objected urbanely: ‘Dr. Strauss was denied the privilege of being in love with Madame Wesendonck.’

There is a brown-paneled snuggery, the restaurant Dubeli, tucked away amongst the narrow streets in the ancient quarter of Lucerne, to which we adjourned for tea because it was a favorite resort of Wagner’s during his residence at Triebschen, and one wall of it is hung with rare photographs of him autographed to the establishment. The restaurant’s history is distinguished, but, the day being humid and vexed with thunderstorms, the cream happened to be sour, and besides the house specializes in beer, not tea; so we compromised on coffee. As thunder went on roaring among the peaks overhead, Rolland recounted a story of Mount Pilatus. In the fourteenth century people believed that the body of Pontius Pilate lay in the lake at its summit. The place was diabolic, and if one threw a stone in the lake it would raise a storm. Some men of Lucerne climbed the mountain and out of curiosity threw a stone. A storm did arise and wreaked damage in the valley. They were severely punished by the authorities. ‘But think of the hardihood of those men! It was the first gleam of scientific skepticism in the Middle Ages. They ivanted to know.’

Returning to Wagner, ‘The mortality rate of operas,’ said Rolland, ‘is excessively high. There are great moments in Wagner, then long fillingsin. To me the repetition of motifs at length becomes annoying. In Götterdämmerung I find much the same faults that you do, and I expected that the representations of it would cease long before this, like most of Gluck’s. On the other hand, Fidelio has been made presentable again within the last fifteen years. It was admirably performed in the time of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient; and one reads in the books of Berlioz what a thunderbolt effect it had on him. But later the tradition was lost, and has been refound and renovated only in recent years when the mounting blaze of genius in the second act, and especially the apotheosis finale, have been given their true value for the first time. Wagner in his great moments is, I think, as great as Beethoven; but those can be had in concert. How beautiful it is when the singers stop!’

‘Last month in Bayreuth after the performance of Parsifal (which I was hearing for perhaps the dozenth time and not as well done as at least two recent performances which I heard in New York) I was left thinking, “There has been and still is much sharp condemnation of Wagner’s transactions in property and sex. This man fifty years after his death can fill theatres on two continents with people who come to worship beauty in tones. What earthly difference does it make whether he broke the rules? The man was one being, the artist another. The man is dead, the artist lives.’

‘Wagner,’ said Rolland, ‘was personally mediocre. Even in his old age after the composition of Parsifal, one finds him writing to Judith Gautier about silks and perfumery which she is to get for him in Paris. The man had his tragic side, and Villa Wahnfried has been marvelously successful in suppressing all but the triumph.’

‘Do you suppose his debts ever troubled him?’

‘No. He thought his genius would pay, and he was right. It did. Still, he was never wealthy; even at Bayreuth the performances, though they may have been artistically successful, always ended in a deficit. Yet he needed luxury and spared no pains to surround himself with it when he could in order to create a holiday mood favorable to composition. He invariably stayed at good hotels when he had the money — and sometimes when he did n’t (he once stayed at the Hotel Byron across the way from Villa Olga) — and the Schweizerhof here in Lucerne is no pauper’s hostel.’

‘I wonder, when the letters kept coming to ask for more money, if Liszt ever sighed.’

‘Liszt was a man of the world. More probably he smiled.’

‘With us in America, frontier Philistinism, buttered by the Pharisaical judgments inherited from the Puritans, refuses to see any distinction between the man and the artist.’

‘In France that allowance has always been made. Mozart, for example, was a great artist, but his personality was feeble, weak, almost decadent. I admire Wagner’s vitality and he had great force of will. There was immense strength in him. And then, paired with his mysticism was a profound sensuality. His passions were so strong as to be an anguish. It is in Tristan that he expresses himself most truly.’

‘That abrupt change in his fortunes when the emissary of King Ludwig of Bavaria found him, almost by accident, at a period when his hopes were at their lowest ebb, sets one to questioning whether it could be thought to have been a mysterious intervention on his behalf by “a friend behind phenomena.”‘

‘What was mysterious,’ thought Rolland, ‘was Wagner’s force of will and capacity to endure. My old friend Malvida von Meysenbug has told me that according to Wagner’s confession to her he had been, just before Ludwig’s emissary arrived, on the brink of suicide. But he might have been the same a dozen times before, and we know that he was once. The point is that he did not commit suicide. The luck, the “befriending of fortune,” is to live, to go on living. A weak man would have perished long before. Wagner’s vitality was prodigious. In the very last years of his life he ran and romped with his children, leapt up to catch the bough of a flowering tree in the park. It broke in his hand; he stood looking at it like an astonished child, then tried to tie it back on the tree with a piece of string. One day when Malvida was with him a disagreeable caller took his departure, a man whose society anything but rejoiced Wagner. Malvida performed the office of seeing the caller to the door, and when she returned to the drawingroom, here was the aged Wagner on the floor on his back, gleefully waving his heels in the air like an urchin of ten!

‘Thus Wagner had his extremes of despair, but alternating with exuberant joy. The peculiarity of his disposition was that he could rally from these depressions and resume his work. Other men are not so fortunate: such a depression may last for days or months and incapacitate them. Berlioz was much more delivered over to his romantic sensibility and to the chagrins of his life than Wagner. He offered less resistance to the sadnesses and afflictions which never spared him. (The death of his son was the hardest blow and he never recovered from it.) More sincere perhaps in his life than Wagner, he did not find in art an Ersatz which sufficed for the reality whose nothingness was a stab to him. His later years were pitiable. Friends of his in Paris have told me that he would come to see them, silent, gloomy, and sit in a corner saying nothing. Or, if he spoke, it would be to ask others not to speak to him. “Not a word!” And he would depart as gloomily. It was because he felt his creative powers failing. Up to the age of thirty he had had more than Wagner and spent them prodigally; but Wagner’s lasted and urged him on. Berlioz has been unfortunate. Wagner’s reputation has eclipsed him, and yet he was a very great composer.’

‘ English critics of Wagner amuse me intensely. They are forever hopefully predicting that his reputation will deflate.’

’I think it probable that a time will come when his works will suffer. It will be perceived how little melodic invention they contain in proportion to the harmonic elaboration, and audiences will tire of the continual working over of the same themes. There is astonishingly little melody. I think that he may suffer a temporary eclipse in a few decades.’

III

At dinner that evening I secretly entertained myself studying the portrait canvas composed by Rolland’s patrician head, — blond, the features incisively chiseled, the eyes blue, brilliant, and piercing under bushy strawcolored eyebrows, — this portrait set against a background of paneled wall painted a French gray and a chimneypiece of white marble carved in low relief with designs of lyre and acanthus. A dinner apparently there was: I have a memory of food having been brought, plates changed, wine decanted; but it all passed as a kind of subconscious accompaniment to a succession of amusing tales, told mainly by Madame Rolland, of the life that flows in and out of Villa Olga, their house beside Lake Geneva at Villeneuve. It seems that the ironclad visitors’ rule does not always work. There was an involved Balkan feud which adjourned itself to Geneva and a letter came asking Holland’s adherence to one faction. (His known championship of humanitarian causes naturally exposes him also to demands from cranks and fanatics.) Being ill in bed, he wrote a courteous reply and let it go at that. Back came another letter when he was still more ill: ‘Your pretensions are detestably false. It is evident that you have no real sympathy for the aspirations of the proletariat’ — and so on, in a distinctly menacing tone. Madame Rolland expected the assassin hourly. He did not come. What did come was a newspaper containing a brief notice that the Balkan correspondent at Geneva had been murdered, presumably by feudists of differing sympathy for the aspirations of the proletariat.

Among other odd fish was a Breton war veteran who was for a time Rolland’s manservant. He was studious and had given himself a schooling of sorts, but was a bit weak in history, and, seeing a bonnet rouge, a Phrygian mobcap which someone had sent Rolland in fun because of his sympathy for the aspirations of the proletariat, the Breton remarked, ‘Ah yes, doubtless the cap worn by Monsieur in the French Revolution.’

Eccentric chronology pursues him, for when Villa Triebschen was formally opened as a museum a Swiss newspaper announced that among the illustrious men who had there visited Wagner were Liszt, Mazzini, Nietzsche, and Romain Rolland. At that period Rolland was an infant in arms.

But an even wilder flight of years was to follow. I had noticed that on damp days he wears indoors a voluminous gray cloak of some material at once soft, light, and warm, of a shaggy texture like camel’s hair. It is a necessary protection against the chronic bronchitis which afflicts his frail health. When Madame Rolland went to have this cloak made by a modiste at Vevey she noticed, while she was waiting in the anteroom, that it abounded with books which looked familiar to her from her own excursions into theosophy in Russia when she was a girl. Yes, sure enough, here was the picture of Mrs. Besant; then came the modiste with just another such pair of owlish eyes as Madame Blavatsky herself had.

To what address should the cloak be sent? ‘Rolland: Villa Olga.’

‘Not Romain Rolland?’

‘Yes, madame.’

Gallic explosions. ‘Ah, madame, what a wonderful author! I have taken my friend to walk round and round Villa Olga until one day we saw him come out. He bowed to us! What beautiful eyes he has!’ (Rolland looked a trifle ill, as his wife wickedly intended that he should.) ‘Tell me,’ exclaimed the modiste (and in her excitement her arithmetic, too, weakened), ‘tell me: is it possible that a man who looks so young can be one hundred and seventy years old?’ She meant seventy. But, as Rolland remarked airily, ‘What are one hundred and seventy years in the life of a theosophist?’

‘The advantage of reincarnation,’ I suggested, ‘is that you can choose your own ancestors.’

‘Better still,’ said Madame Rolland, ‘you can choose to be your own ancestor.’

‘ And I notice that they are invariably distinguished. After all, when choosing your own, why not choose the best?’

‘Yes,’ said Rolland, ‘in Rome as a young man I knew the wife of a German classical scholar, and an excellent pianist she was, but distressingly corpulent. She confided to me that her affliction was an expiation for the sins she had committed in her previous incarnation when she was Catherine II of Russia.’

For a man who has appeared to lead the quiet existence of a man of letters and, especially in these years since the war, with even a touch of the hermit and recluse, Rolland has stirred about Europe a surprising lot, and an even more surprising lot are the people he has known well. Mounet-Sully and Dr. Richard Strauss, D’Annunzio and the late Eleanora Duse, will give an idea of the range.

Is Frangoise Oudon in Jean-Christophe a portrait of La Duse? It is not, and it is: a portrait from life seen though the imaginative veil of fiction. The last time Rolland saw her, in Rome, she said affectionately that she recognized herself in it. ‘But the fact is,’ says the author, ‘in Françoise Oudon there are only certain traits of La Duse, and these rather more the traits of situations than of physiognomy and character. Other memories of La Duse are strewn in the personage of Grazia. The little Grazia, as a child, holding out her piece of bread and butter to the tramp who threatened her, “Give me that, or I’ll hurt you,” and answering, “You may have it without being wicked,” is a story of La Duse’s childhood which she told me.

‘Her art? Alas, her art was a torment to her! She would talk about anything but the theatre. It disgusted her. What she wanted to play was the great classic rôles; her manager kept her in mediocre plays. So she ate her heart out.

‘One evening I saw her here in Lucerne. It was pitiable. Not twenty persons in the theatre, and she played superbly. It seemed the least I could do to go and pay my respects before she left, but that was not easy, for her habit was to shut herself in her dressing room and see no one, to stay in obscure hotels and associate but little with the members of her company. Toward midnight over yonder at the Bahnhof, I spied at last, far down the platform of the train concourse, seated on a heap of luggage, a solitary, lonely, bent figure wrapped in fur to her eyes, looking like a little old poor woman. It was La Duse.

‘I saw her again before she started on her first American tour. She was in terror, having a premonition that she would die in America; and years later she did.’

Of D’Annunzio, whom he had known equally well, he spoke with no small degree of sympathy. ‘Although D’Annunzio does not disesteem his works he believes that his principal achievement is in having reforged Italian style. Artists are often very humble when by themselves or with friends. One night I was sitting with Richard Strauss in the artists’ room of a concert hall, listening to a performance of Beethoven’s violin concerto which wre could hear through the open door. Strauss kept grimacing. At a pause between movements I inquired, “ Do you find the concerto so bad?”

‘“No,” said he, “I shall never write anything as good.”

‘Beethoven especially seems to have that effect on people, for at Zürich once, when I was staying with D’Annunzio and La Duse, I played them one evening Beethoven’s “Thirty-three Variations on a Theme of Diabelli.” There was one in especial, No. XX, of peculiar depth and nobility, which evidently made a profound impression on D’Annunzio. Next day he seemed depressed. Finally I asked him what weighed on him so. “That music of Beethoven,” said he; “it makes me feel how vile I am.”’

IV

Rolland was sitting in bed propped on pillows, the gray cloak drawn round his shoulders, his lap full of papers.

‘Work?’

‘Yes.’

He was correcting page proof of the last two volumes of L’Âme Enchantée. Madame Rolland said they had both gone rather stale on it in the spring, for, being ill when a part of it was composed, he had not felt sure of his touch, so he had written, been dissatisfied, and then rewritten: she had typed and retyped, until neither of them ever wanted to see it again. But when the proof began coming they experienced a change of heart. Rolland would glance up from a page and exclaim in a tone of pleased surprise, ‘Why, this is quite good!’

Pen in hand, — and none of your fountain pens, but a light, supple penstock permitting his hand to fly along in those delicate, feathery strokes of his cursive cheirography, — he was comparing the proof sheets with his typed manuscript as minutely as though French printers had belied their fabulous repute for accuracy, and as faithfully as though he had not already performed this chore of authorship on forty-four volumes. The morning was blithe, and he, like his chamber, was full of light and cheer. Adding to the gayety, a waiter staggered in under a breakfast tray heavily laden for two. They were much astonished at this zeal, for they had already disposed of one breakfast, whose mémentos still lay on the table. The talk somehow veered to Anatole France, perhaps because I had mentioned an episode when one of my fellow townsmen, a professor of French in Boston University, was dining with him shortly after the war. France was praising Rolland so whole-heartedly for having stood to his pacifist conviction when everybody else deserted that my friend, after reflection, decided to come out with it: —

‘You praise Rolland, yes; but why did n’t you do it yourself?’

‘I will tell you, my friend,’ said Anatole, like a game sportsman. ‘I was afraid.‘

No doubt I added what has often been in my thought about Rolland’s wartime pacifism (peacetime pacifism costs nothing): that one offense which a man is never forgiven, at least not in his own lifetime, is having been right when everybody else was wrong, and that to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1915 could scarcely have endeared him to his compatriots.

‘The French Academy,’ said Rolland, ‘was furious. The legality of my award was questioned, for the awards are decreed by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy from lists furnished by other official bodies, notably among them the French Academy, and it was unthinkable that any member of the Academy had proposed me. But they were wrong. A member had proposed me. It was Anatole France. . . .

‘The very elements of one’s thinking,’ he continued, ‘need to be international — as, to a large extent, France’s were. We must base ourselves on universal laws. I used to believe that the individual could think and act independently, but now I believe he may do so only when rooted in the soil of common life. As a youth I reached Paris in the period of “art for art’s sake.” I despised it, for I could see that it produced a shallow egoism. That is why I wrote to Tolstoy: I was tormented by his criticism of art. He replied that art owes a duty to life and to common people. One should first be a great man: if one were a great artist he would be that anyhow. By “great man” I mean grandeur of character, for without greatness of soul there is not great art.‘