In his solitude he read the literature of the day. And since in all voices man hears the echo of his own, Rolland found everywhere pain and loneliness. He studied the lives of the artists, and having done so he wrote: "The further we penetrate into the existence of great creators, the more strongly are we impressed by the magnitude of the unhappiness by which their lives were enveloped. I do not merely mean that, being subject to the ordinary trials and disappointments of mankind, their higher emotional susceptibility rendered these smarts exceptionally keen. I mean that their genius, placing them in advance of their contemporaries by twenty, thirty, fifty, nay often a hundred years, and thus making of them wanderers in the desert, condemned them to the most desperate exertions if they were but to live, to say nothing of winning to victory." Thus these great ones among mankind, those towards whom posterity looks back with veneration, those who will for all time bring consolation to the lonely in spirit, were themselves "pauvres vaincus, les vainqueurs du monde"--the conquerors of the world, but themselves beaten in the fray. An endless chain of perpetually repeated and unmeaning torments binds their successive destinies into a tragical unity. "Never," as Tolstoi pointed out in the oft-mentioned letter, "do true artists share the common man's power of contented enjoyment." The greater their natures, the greater their suffering. And conversely, the greater their suffering the fuller the development of their own greatness.