LONELY STRUGGLES WIN DESERVED PLACE

Stefan Zweig has accomplished in his biography of his friend, Romain Rolland, what Romain Holland himself had in mind when he wrote his "heroic biographies" of "Beethoven", "Michelangelo", and "Tolstoi". Rolland, in these books, wanted to write the lives of the heroes of history as he knew them. "True greatness was for him to be found only in solitude, in the struggle waged by the individual against the unseen." He aimed at bringing solace to others by showing, in the lives of these men, that their titanic and lonely struggles brought them at last to the places they so well deserved. This is what Stefan Zweig has done in his "Romain Rolland".

He has shown the indomitable faith of Rolland in life, fighting alone and unaided by influential friends, the struggle for a fair hearing. He has shown in his Rolland "the true hero who does not fight for the petty achievements of life, for success, for an idea in which all can participate; he fights for the whole of life, for life itself." His is "the true heroism which faces realities", and which in the face of disappointment and disaster can yet leave one mellowed and unembittered.

Zweig traces the sad and triumphant story of Rolland from his early visit to Rome when he fell under the inspiring influence of Malwida von Meysenbug; when Tolstoi so kindly answered the young man's letter of doubt raised by his booklet What's to be Done?, through the lonely years of his unsuccessful "tragedies of fate", including "Danton" and "St. Louis", through the year of the "heroic biographies", which gained for Rolland an interested but small following, to his final and definite victory with his ten volume novel "Jean Christophe" (1902-1912), and the disappointments of the War.

This record of the life of the author of "Jean-Christophe", reminds one of nothing so much as Hugh Walpole's "Fortitude". But the slow recognition given Rolland was perhaps the best thing for him. It allowed his genius to mature and broaden without the limitations imposed by immediate fame. It gave to him the quiet of his study where unmolested he could write his great novel, "Jean-Christophe". In the "orbus pictus of our generation", Rolland wrote an unclassifiable book. He himself said "Any work which can be circumscribed by a definition is a dead work". "Jean-Christophe", which has justly gained for Rolland his largest number of admirers, which stands out as one of the great contributions to contemporary literature, "combines insight into the soul with an outlook into the age".

The war came as a distinct blow to Rolland. His plea for peace and universal understanding seemed a thing of the past. His life work, seemed undone. Without hesitation, and with a contempt for popular opinion, he continued to urge the people to listen to him. Though it meant that he must live in what was practically a voluntary exile in Switzerland he gladly chose to do this in order that he might remain true to his ideals. There he wrote his "Above the Battle" (1915) and corresponded win Hauptmann, caring nothing for ridiculous accusations of being Pro-German so long as he continued to be true to himself. His latest novel, "Clerambault" (1920), is a record of the war's effects on the conscience of a man whirled into the war gulf.

Stephan Zweig has written a fascinating and inspiring biography, lacking the impersonal and critical faculty that would make it great. He is too near his subject to see him in perspective, too carried away by his personality to judge him as anything but a hero of an "heroic biography". The translation of Eden and Cedar Paul is often annoying with its endless inverted sentences, its florid and over elaborate style, its frequent tendency to melodramatize prose, which must have been stately and flowing in the original. But Roman Rolland is a book to be read, and reread as an engrossing lesson in the art of living