January 29, 1866

Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 to December 30, 1944) was a French writer, that rare type of person who sets a standard for purity of action.  He won the Nobel for literature in 1915, for a 10 volume novel, Jean-Christophe. He was a pacifist. He was, one reads, beginning to doubt Stalin, at a time when that great weakness of the 20th century intellectual was most virulent.  It was not his ideas that captivated men, so much as the effortlessness with which he acted on the truth.  Rolland could do, what most men only assumed they themselves could do.  Romain Rolland was a very rare type of human personality: the natural mystic. Because such people do exist, the futile dreams of most men have a greater heft, which may make it harder for the ordinary to perceive their own delusions.  According to the author info in Google Books
Rolland became a mouthpiece of the opposition to Fascism and the Nazis. During the last years of his life, Rolland lived in Vézelay and worked on the biography of Charles Péguy. On December 30, 1944 he succumbed to tuberculosis, an illness that had afflicted him since his childhood.

It was in these last years that Rolland wrote in Journey Within, (1947):

The natural impulse of my being, from my earliest recollections, was - not to observe others -but to flow into them. The passing glance of a dog, a cat, of cattle...in a field, was enough for me to descend into the depths of their cavern. Goethe knew that fascination; but he put it from him, shaking with disgust and horror. Not so I, in them I feel at home. And everything is my habitation. I do not claim the attraction is not illusory.... It is possible. But so is the contrary. What do I know about it? And what more do you know? ...What is certain is that I enjoy the illusion directly as though a hand were on my hand. That glance (man or beast) drinks me in. And the gesture of my old walnut-tree...the trembling outline of its branches lifted up toward the sky...resounds in my own limbs...

It is no wonder his books are not read today. It was not his ideas that were important, it was that one such as Romain Rolland existed, that was significant.