La vie de Michel-Ange. I. La lutte
The Life of Michelangelo. I. The Struggle
Romain Rolland
LIVES OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN
There is, in the Museo Nazionale in Florence, a marble statue that Michelangelo called the Victor. It is a nude young man, with a beautiful body, curly hair on a low brow. Standing upright, he presses his knee upon the back of a bearded prisoner who bends and stretches his head forward, like an ox. But the victor does not look at him. About to strike, he stops, he turns away his sad mouth and his uncertain eyes. His arm folds back toward his shoulder. He throws himself backward; he no longer wants the victory — it disgusts him. He has conquered. He is conquered.
This image of heroic Doubt, this Victory with broken wings, which alone of all the works of Michelangelo remained until his death in his Florentine studio, and with which Daniel de Volterre, confidant of his thoughts, wished to adorn his catafalque — it is Michelangelo himself, and the symbol of his whole life.
Suffering is infinite; it takes all forms. Sometimes it is caused by the blind tyranny of things: poverty, illness, injustice of fate, the wickedness of men. Sometimes it has its hearth in the very being itself. It is not then less pitiable, nor less fatal; for one did not choose one’s being, one did not ask to live, or to be what one is.
This last suffering was that of Michelangelo. He had the strength, he had the rare happiness of being made for struggle and for victory. He conquered. But what? He did not want the victory. That was not what he wanted. The tragedy of Hamlet! The poignant contradiction between a heroic genius and a will that was not heroic, between imperious passions and a will that would not!
Let no one expect us, after so many others, to see in this an additional greatness! Never will we say that it is because a man is too great that the world does not suffice him. Restlessness of spirit is not a sign of greatness. Every lack of harmony between the being and things, between life and its laws, even in great men, does not derive from their greatness: it derives from their weakness. Why seek to hide this weakness? Is the weaker man less worthy of love? He is far more worthy of it, for he has greater need of it. I do not raise statues of inaccessible heroes. I hate the cowardly idealism that turns its eyes from the miseries of life and the weaknesses of the soul. It must be said to a people too sensitive to the deceptive illusions of sonorous words: the heroic lie is a cowardice. There is but one heroism in the world: it is to see the world as it is — and to love it.
The tragedy of the destiny I present here is that it offers the image of an innate suffering, which comes from the depths of the being, which gnaws at it without respite, and which will not leave it before having destroyed it. It is one of the most powerful types of that great human race which, for nineteen centuries, has filled our West with its cries of sorrow and of faith: the Christian.
One day, in the future, in the depths of centuries — if the memory of our earth has still been preserved — one day, those who shall be will bend over the abyss of this vanished race, as Dante at the edge of Malebolge, with a mixture of admiration, horror, and pity. But who will feel it better than we, who were, as children, mingled with these agonies — who have seen the beings dearest to us struggling — we, whose throats know the acrid and intoxicating smell of Christian pessimism — we who have had to make, on certain days, an effort not to yield, like others, in moments of doubt, to the vertigo of the Divine Nothingness!
God! Eternal life! Refuge of those who do not succeed in living here below! Faith, which are so often but a lack of faith in life, a lack of faith in the future, a lack of faith in oneself, a lack of courage and a lack of joy! We know on how many defeats your painful victory is built! And it is for this that I love you, Christians, for I pity you. I pity you and I admire your melancholy. You sadden the world, but you beautify it. The world will be poorer when your sorrow is no more in it. In this age of cowards, who tremble before suffering and loudly claim their right to happiness — which is most often but the right to the unhappiness of others — let us dare to look suffering in the face and to venerate it! Praised be joy, and praised be sorrow! Both are sisters, and both are sacred. They forge the world and swell great souls. They are strength, they are life, they are God. Who does not love them both loves neither the one nor the other. And who has tasted them knows the price of life and the sweetness of leaving it.
Romain Rolland
THE LIFE OF MICHELANGELO — I. THE STRUGGLE
[The biography continues through a detailed account of Michelangelo’s life and artistic career, from his birth in Caprese in 1475 through his apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio, his time under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the tumultuous years of Savonarola’s Florence, his flight to Rome, the creation of the Pieta and the David, and the titanic labor of painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Rolland traces the perpetual struggle between Michelangelo’s creative genius and the forces arrayed against him — the jealousy of rivals, the demands of popes, the political upheavals of Italy, and above all the inner torment of a man who could never find peace, never satisfy the impossible demands he placed upon himself. Through meticulous use of Michelangelo’s letters, poems, and the testimony of contemporaries, Rolland paints a portrait of an artist consumed by the fire of creation, broken by the weight of an unbearable genius, perpetually torn between the yearning for beauty and the anguish of a soul that found the world unworthy of its aspirations.]