The Forerunners (Romain Rolland)/XI
XI
TO THE WRITERS OF AMERICA
Letter to "The Seven Arts," New York, October, 1916.
I AM delighted to learn of the creation of a magazine in which the American soul will become fully aware of its own individuality. I believe in the lofty destinies of America, and the events of the hour render the realisation of that destiny urgently necessary. In the Old World, civilisation is imperilled. America must cherish the flickering flame.
You possess one great advantage over us in Europe. You are free from traditions; free from the burdens of thought, of sentiments, from agelong follies, from the obsessions in the spheres of the intellect, of art, and of politics; you are free from all these things which crush the Old World. Contemporary Europe is sacrificing her future to quarrels, ambitions, rancours, revived again and again. Every endeavour to bring these troubles to an end serves but to add a few meshes to the net wherein a murderous destiny has snared us. Our fate resembles that of the Atrides, vainly awaiting, as in the Eumenides, a god's word of power which may break the bloody spell. In art, if our writers owe their perfection of form and their clarity of thought to the strength of our classical traditions, these advantages have been gained at the cost of great sacrifices. Too few among our artists are awakened to the manifold life of the world. Their minds are mewed within a closed garden. They display little interest concerning the spacious regions through which, after leaving that garden, the river, a swelling flood, pursues its torrential course, watering all the world.
You have been born in a land which is neither encumbered nor enclosed by the artificial constructions of the mind. Profit by the fact. Be free. Do not enslave yourselves to foreign examples. Your model is in yourselves. Begin by knowing yourselves.
This is the first duty. The differing individualities which combine to make up your country must not be afraid to express themselves in art; to express themselves freely, honestly, integrally; without straining for originality, but regardless of what expression may have been found by those who have gone before, and fearless of the tyranny of opinion. Above all, let them dare to look into their own souls, to look well and long, to plumb the depths in silent meditation. Those who do so, must then dare to reveal what they have seen. This self-communing is not a self-incarceration within an egoistic personality. Those who engage in it will strike deep roots in the essential being of the nation to which they belong. I urge on you the endeavour to participate to the full in its sufferings and its aspirations. Be the light lightening the darkness of the great social masses whose mission it is to renew the world. The men and women of the common people, those whose want of interest in artistic matters is often a trial to you, are mutes. Lacking power of expression, they are ignorant of themselves. Become a voice for them. As they hear you speak, they will grow aware of themselves. In giving expression to your own souls, you will create the soul of your nation.
Your second task, vaster and more distant, will be to form a fraternal link between these free individualities, to build a rose window that shall concentre their multiple trends, to compose a symphony from out their various voices. The United States is made up of elements drawn from all the nations of the world. Let the richness of the structure help you to understand the essence of all these nations, to realise the harmony of their intellectual energies!—To-day, in the Old World, we witness the deplorable and foolish antagonism displayed by national individualities, near neighbours and close kin, distinguished only by trifling shades like France and Germany, repudiating one another, longing for one another's destruction. Parochial disputes about which the human mind is eager to achieve self-mutilation! For my part I cry aloud, not merely that the intellectual ideal of a single nation is too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a reconciled western world would be too narrow for me; I declare that the ideal of a united Europe would still be too narrow for me. The hour has come in which man, truly healthy and truly alive, must deliberately turn his footsteps towards the ideal of a universal humanity, wherein the European races of the Old World and of the New will join hands with the representatives of the ancient and now rejuvenescent civilisations of Asia—of India and of China. A universal humanity with a common spiritual treasury. All these splendid types of mankind are mutually complementary. The thought of the future must be a synthesis of the great thoughts of the entire universe. America lies between the two oceans which lave the two continents; America is at the centre of the life of the world. Let it be the mission of all that is best in America to cement this fecund union!
To sum up, we ask of you two things, writers and thinkers of America. We ask, first of all, that you should defend freedom, that you should safeguard its conquests and extend them: political freedom and mental freedom, an unceasing renewal of life through freedom, through this great and ever-flowing river of the mind.
In the second place, we await from you that you should bring to pass, on behalf of the world, a harmony of diverse liberties; a symphonic expression of associated individualities, of associated races, of associated civilisations, of mankind at once integral and free.
You have splendid opportunities: you have an exuberant young life; you have wide areas of virgin land. Your day has just begun. You are not wearied by the toil of a previous day. You are unencumbered by the heritage of the past. All that comes down to you from the past is a voice like the sound of many waters, the voice of a great herald whose work seems a homeric foreshadowing of the task that awaits you. I speak of the American master, Walt Whitman.—Surge et age.
"Revue mensuelle," Geneva, February, 1917.