Chapter V: Tolstoi

The biographies of Beethoven and Michelangelo were fashioned out of the superabundance of life. They were calls to heroism, odes to energy. The biography of Tolstoi, written some years later, is a requiem, a dirge. Rolland had been near to death from the accident in the Champs Elysées. On his recovery, the news of his beloved master's end came to him with profound significance and as a sublime exhortation.

Tolstoi typifies for Rolland a third form of heroic suffering. Beethoven's infirmity came as a stroke of fate in mid career. Michelangelo's sad destiny was inborn. Tolstoi deliberately chose his own lot. All the externals of happiness promised enjoyment. He was in good health, rich, independent, famous; he had home, wife, and children. But the heroism of the man without cares lies in this, that he makes cares for himself, through doubt as to the best way to live. What plagued Tolstoi was his conscience, his inexorable demand for truth. He thrust aside the freedom from care, the low aims, the petty joys, of insincere beings. Like a fakir, he pierced his own breast with the thorns of doubt. Amid the torment, he blessed doubt, saying: "We must thank God if we be discontented with ourselves. A cleavage between life and the form in which it has to be lived, is the genuine sign of a true life, the precondition of all that is good. The only bad thing is to be contented with oneself."

For Rolland, this apparent cleavage is the true Tolstoi, just as for Rolland the man who struggles is the only man truly alive. Whilst Michelangelo believes himself to see a divine life above this human life, Tolstoi sees a genuine life behind the casual life of everyday, and to attain to the former he destroys the latter. The most celebrated artist in Europe throws away his art, like a knight throwing away his sword, to walk bare-headed along the penitent's path; he breaks family ties; he undermines his days and his nights with fanatical questions. Down to the last hour of his life he is at war with himself, as he seeks to make peace with his conscience; he is a fighter for the invisible, that invisible which means so much more than happiness, joy, and God; a fighter for the ultimate truth which he can share with no one.

This heroic struggle is waged, like that of Beethoven and Michelangelo, in terrible isolation, is waged like theirs in airless spaces. His wife, his children, his friends, his enemies, all fail to understand him. They consider him a Don Quixote, for they cannot see the opponent with whom he wrestles, the opponent who is himself. None can bring him solace; none can help him. Merely that he may die at peace, he has to flee from his comfortable home on a bitter night in winter, to perish like a beggar by the wayside. Always at this supreme altitude to which mankind looks yearningly up, the atmosphere is ice-bound and lonely. Those who create for all must do so in solitude, each one of them a savior nailed to the cross, each suffering for a different faith; and yet suffering every one of them for all mankind.