Chapter XVII: The Diary

There was, however, one companion with whom Rolland could hold converse daily--his inner consciousness. Day by day, from the outbreak of the war, Rolland recorded his sentiments, his secret thoughts, and the messages he received from afar. His very silence was an impassioned conversation with the time spirit. During these years, volume was added to volume, until by the end of the war, they totaled no less than twenty-seven. When he was able to return to France, he naturally hesitated to take this confidential document to a land where the censors would have a legal right to study every detail of his private thoughts. He has shown a page here and there to intimate friends, but the whole remains as a legacy to posterity, for those who will be able to contemplate the tragedy of our days with purer and more dispassionate views.

It is impossible for us to do more than surmise the real nature of this document, but our feelings suggest to us that it must be a spiritual history of the epoch, and one of incomparable value. Rolland's best and freest thoughts come to him when he is writing. His most inspired moments are those when he is most personal. Consequently, just as the letters taken in their entirety may be regarded as artistically superior to the published essays, so beyond question his diary must be a human document supplying a most admirable and pure-minded commentary upon the war. Only to the children of a later day will it become plain that what Rolland so ably showed in the case of Beethoven and the other heroes, applies with equal force to himself. They will learn at what a cost of personal disillusionment his message of hope and confidence was delivered to the world; they will learn that an idealism which brought help to thousands, and which wiseacres have often derided as trivial and commonplace, sprang from the darkest abysses of suffering and loneliness, and was rendered possible solely by the heroism of a soul in travail. All that has been disclosed to us is the fact of his faith. These manuscript volumes contain a record of the ransom with which that faith was purchased, of the payments demanded from day to day by the inexorable creditor we name Life.