excess of sectarian zeal--against the village science of the Radical
druggist, of Monsieur Homais? Nothing is more interesting, more
symptomatic, to those who remember the France of yesterday, when, as a
rule, the Intellectuals and the artists were on one side of the hedge,
and the priests and the pious on the other. Persecution has certainly
done wonders for the Church in France! Those whom Maurice Barrès
convokes to defend the belfry and the altar are the younger generation
in letters!
‘Je ne doute pas de leurs réponses.... Ces mêmes jeunes troupes
désintéressées qui auraient à d’autres moments, combattu, rejeté
un catholicisme oppressif ... se rassemblent d’instinct pour
faire face à la Barbarie. Je voudrais tracer ici le tableau de la
littérature nouvelle que je salue et d’où s’élève, plus ou moins
haut, la grande flamme spirituelle que le Café du Commerce ne voit
pas....’
ROMAIN ROLLAND
Among the still young masters of the young in France, the men rising
fifty--Rostand, Claudel, Boylesve, Gide, Suarès, Francis Jammes, Romain
Rolland--only the first and the last are really well known beyond
our frontiers. Claudel is appreciated in Germany as an interesting
exotic; but there, as well as in England and Italy, Romain Rolland
has an audience of his own. In some ways he is the most approachable
of French writers to an English, or, indeed, to an Italian mind. His
intense moral earnestness, his love of nature, his lack of irony,
and his sense of sarcasm, no less than an idealism devoid of all
religiosity, distinguish him among the men of his generation. And he is
an Individualist. When Claudel gibes at the idols which Freethinkers
raise on their altars--the geniuses and the heroes, all the great
men--be sure he is thinking of Romain Rolland, and perhaps of Suarès.
Hero-worship, love of the poor and humble, faith in the human mind and
its divine destinies, are indeed, to Romain Rolland, as much a religion
as the doctrines of the Catholic Church to Claudel, or to his convert,
Francis Jammes.
Romain Rolland owes his fame to _Jean-Christophe_, his great novel in
ten volumes, the _Clarissa_ of our age. But he has written many other
books. Romain Rolland’s unknown works are voluminous and abundant. Some
twenty years ago I used to take them to the _Revue de Paris_ and expend
all my small store of diplomacy in persuading the editor to print those
immense and formless dramas, _Saint Louis_, _Aert_, _Danton_, in which
rare streaks of real genius illumined desolate wastes of verbiage. I
cannot say that any of them attained success.
Having striven to express his mind in these inchoate symphonies, Romain
Rolland tried a new form of art, in which from the first stroke he
was singularly successful: his _Lives of Great Men (Vies des Hommes
Illustres)_, have the terseness, the morality, the grandeur, and the
natural piety of Plutarch’s _Lives_. He has written nothing better
than his _Beethoven_ or his _Michael Angelo_, and he has given us a
_Mazzini_, a _Tolstoi_ only less excellent. These are quite little
books, so far as size is concerned. And the mind of Romain Rolland
continued to teem with images and ideas, with a sense of the tragedy
of human destiny, and yet with an invincible hope in human reason. He
had a thousand things to say to the men of his generation; his heart
burned within him. So he invented a great man of his own making,
Jean-Christophe.
Here he has written the tragedy of a free soul, the tragedy rather,
let us say, of a whole generation perpetually in quest of Truth and
Liberty. There are many stars in the sky; there are many virtues in the
soul of man; perhaps no two succeeding generations make their idols
of the same. Truth, Justice, Freedom, inflamed our youth with a noble
passion. The young men of to-day adore Courage, Activity, Self-control,
and Faith. They are optimists. We were pessimists. And Romain Rolland
writes, as a foreword to the tenth volume of his novel:--
‘I have written the tragedy of a generation which soon must
disappear. I have sought to dissimulate nothing of its vices or its
virtues--neither its heavy sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic
efforts, nor its spent weariness under the crushing burden of a
superhuman task: for we had to renew our whole epitome of life,
our conception of the world, our æsthetics and our ethics, our
religion, our humanity.’
A Hamlet-like generation, intensely intellectual, sensitive, and
chivalrous, issuing painfully from the shed sheath of a worn-out
creed and struggling painfully towards a loftier faith and a
fuller life--such is the subject of _Jean-Christophe_. And the
author, merely middle-aged, has lived to see a new race inherit the
earth: a race ingenuous, ingenious, active, alert, little given to
self-questioning, or to any form of subtlety, and as a rule content
with the religion of its forefathers, just because it was the religion
of one’s forefather’s, and is probably as good as any other. Already
_Jean-Christophe_ is a portrait of the past, and certain volumes--as a
rule those we admired the most on their appearance: for instance _La
Foire sur la Place_--present the half-pathetic interest of a photograph
album ten years old.
What is still fresh, what is still moving and touching and delightful
is the story of a heart, the painting of passion and especially
the drawing of the feminine figures--the very numerous feminine
figures--who diversify the existence of Jean-Christophe.
The novel has been translated into English. My readers know (or at
least can easily learn) that the story is that of a great German
musician. It follows him from his childhood in a little Rhenish town,
to Paris, whither Jean-Christophe resorts, when, after a skirmish
with a Prussian officer, he has to flee for his life across the
frontier. There is no plot. The story is as ill-defined, as vague,
as fluctuating, as constantly developing, as life itself; and these
ten volumes are a sequence of episodes rather than a tale. Above all,
they are a criticism of contemporary Europe, or rather of the Europe
of yesterday, a Europe less infected with Nationalism, Imperialism,
Panslavism, than the instable and agitated compound that we know.
The hero is born in Germany. No German book, I think, not even
_Werther_, gives with a sweeter serenity, the peculiar charm of Rhenish
‘Gemüthlichkeit’ than these early volumes of _Jean-Christophe_. But, as
the hero grows older, he finds himself constantly hostile to the dreamy
optimism of his environment. He hates the humbler forms of German
idealism--that public and private Phariseeism which will not admit the
world to be that which it is; the majestic sentimentality which invades
all German art; that general artifice of emotion, moral nobleness,
sensibility, and poetry which exasperates when it does not endear.
Even the ‘cher vieux Schultz,’ ‘le bon Allemand,’ Christophe’s one
admirer; even Modesta, the blind girl who will not allow that she has
any cause to be unhappy, irritate the choleric young man, despite
their candid goodness and their tranquil courage, because of a certain
unconscious hypocrisy in their attitude, a habit of ignoring the truth
when it happens to be disagreeable. Christophe cannot as yet admit that
human nature is incapable of assimilating unadulterated reality: he
has still to learn that every nation mixes with the truth some special
spice of lies; and that there are more dangerous condiments than a
romantic optimism. He himself, in his cult of force, is no less local,
no less German: he is merely a German of a later generation.
When Christophe flies to France, he finds to his discomfiture that
sincerity is not a common attribute, even across the frontier; but
French insincerity is of a different sort, cynical, excitable.
France has ever been a _fanfaron de vices_, and loves to brag of her
depravity rather than to practise it. The angry, heady, passionate,
fuming youth spares no class or type in his first revolt against his
new environment: the squalor of the poor, the struggling ambition
and snobbish meannesses of the world of art, the hollow ceremony of
fashionable circles combine to make him hate Paris. Little by little
he penetrates below the surface: his friend Olivier Jalin interprets
to him the real France. The intellectuals and the æsthetes of twenty
years ago, who so irritate Christophe on his first arrival, were but
the foam on the face of a deep reality. ‘C’est curieux que vous soyez
Française!’ says the musician to his friend’s sister, with her honest,
girlish face, her round, full forehead, her little straight nose, her
neat small chin, and the brown locks that frame so demurely her thin
cheeks.
This quiet little girl, at once artless and disenchanted, pious and
disillusioned, does not answer in the least to the conception that a
young German artist forms of France. But we know better! The little
governess personifies that France, known to few outside her boundaries,
which is compact of sacrifice, of duty, of delicate conscientiousness,
of rigid economy for self and generous outlay for some treasured ideal,
child, or cause:--the France of Port-Royal, the France of ‘48. Indeed,
if we mistake not, Mademoiselle Antoinette Jeannin has misspelt her
name; and we envy the novelist who (annihilating time and space) can
link the mind of Beethoven to the soul of Henriette Renan, and make two
lovers happy.
It is true that Romain Rolland will not let them be happy: Antoinette
dies; and Christophe embarks afresh on innumerable adventures. One
first of May, in a Socialist riot, his friend, Olivier Jeannin is
killed on a barricade; and Christophe, red-handed, is spirited away
by his friends, and takes refuge in Switzerland. What an arraignment
of the civilisation of Bâle! Give us rather the incoherence of
German militarism mixed with German _schwärmerei_! Steep us in the
intellectual and social extravagances of France! But keep us free from
that death-in-life, the Phariseeism of Bâle! A rigid discipline never
relaxed; a collective conscience ever on the watch to punish and deride
the faults of individuals; a perpetual constraint in which diversity
and spontaneity perish; all the virtues--without the grace of God! And
underneath the strict uniformity of its phylacteries, human passions
more brutal than elsewhere, because never visited by the open air and
sun. As we read the description of Christophe’s life in Switzerland,
we fall in love with Bohemia. Order is only lovely when it is tempered
with grandeur or with grace. But the order of these sordid millionaires
is merely a morose economy, a gloomy, dull privation, a lifeless
rigour, a sombre constraint. Against this dark background, Romain
Rolland projects a figure of almost animal passion.
The story of Jean-Christophe in Switzerland is the history of Wagner
and Mathilde Wesendonk. In either case a German musician, fleeing from
political difficulties, takes refuge (and takes refuge in Bâle) with a
friend who generously comes to his rescue; and in return the musician
seduces the wife of his protector.
We know little of the Wesendonks, save that Frau Mathilde was a
poetess; I imagine her very different from the wife of Doctor Braun.
That kind, fussy little man was oddly mated with the stiff and silent
spouse whose large, Michael-Angelesque type of beauty seemed almost
ugly or ridiculous in her awkward provincial clothes. Anna is an
uninteresting but perfectly virtuous woman until Jean-Christophe
comes to stay in her house. And then music invades her with an
incomprehensible passion, turning this sombre young Hausfrau into an
imperious Venus.
As she and Christophe sing together the fiery phrases of his Opera,
a frenzy overcomes them, and they experience that sort of love in
which there is something savage, cosmic, as far as possible removed
from our ideas of tenderness or duty. And Christophe, the faithful
Christophe, steals from his generous host that little treasure of
honour and domestic happiness which was all that Dr Braun had known of
life’s ideal. Christophe had been received under that roof in his dire
necessity, and he betrayed a trust. With a woman whom he barely knew,
whom he did not pretend to understand, whom he did not love. Not love?
Love was too weak a work to express the torrent of flame that tortured
the musician when he thought of Anna or listened to her voice; and
yet he was dimly aware that this fierce instinct, this irresistible
intuition, was something less, or more, than human: _Ce n’était pas
l’amour, et c’était mille fois plus que l’amour_.
Thus in the Swiss town, in the Calvinist society, which glorified
rationalism and made of Intellect the sole motive power of life,
Christophe encountered, and was conquered by, that great irreducible
Force which makes light of reason and morality, and in front of which
all our laws and our scruples and our duties are as idle straws caught
in the swirl of a river in flood.
But the strength of that fragility, which is Man, lies in his power
of recovery. Like the prodigal son, having fed with the swine, he can
always return and go to his Father. Christophe, like Maggie Tulliver
in George Eliot’s novel, sets duty and faithfulness above passion, and
ascends out of the abyss.
‘Il comprenait la vanité de son orgueil, la vanité de l’orgueil
humain, sous le poing redoutable de la Force qui meut les mondes.
Nul n’est maître de soi avec certitude. Il faut veiller. Car si
l’on s’endort, la Force se rue en nous et nous emporte ... dans
quels abîmes? Ou le torrent qui nous charrie se retire et nous
laisse dans son lit à sec. Il ne suffit même pas de vouloir, pour
lutter. Il faut s’humilier devant le Dieu inconnu qui _fiat ubi
vult_, qui souffle quand il veut, où il veut: l’amour, la mort ou
la vie. La volonté humaine ne peut rien sans la sienne. Une seconde
lui suffit pour anéantir des années d’efforts. Et, s’il lui plait,
il peut faire surgir l’éternel de la poussière et de la boue.’
Jean-Christophe sacrifices his delight to his ideal of conduct. He is
rewarded by a great influx of inspiration. In solitude and renunciation
he takes up his abode on the edge of a mountain, in the shelter of
great woods full of shadow and loneliness; and he lives there in
retreat and penitence, hearing nothing of Anna. And, even as Wagner in
his exile at Venice, when he had renounced Madame Wesendonk, composed
_Tristan und Isolde_, Jean-Christophe receives at last his inspiration
as a great musician.
The final volume takes us back to Paris, and thence to Rome. Christophe
is now the genius of his age, but his personal life is still meagre
and sad; no wife, no child, no friend, no love, concentrates its
elixir in one golden drop. And one day in the Alps he meets--as a
middle-aged woman, a widow still charming in her tired grace and
kind serenity,--that Countess Berény whom he had known as a girl in
Paris, long ago. And Grazia Berény incarnates indulgent lazy Italy;
as Anna Braun, Switzerland; as Henriette Jeannin, France; as the
dear, feckless, gentle Sabina, South Germany; in the long gallery of
Christophe’s lady-loves.
Of them all, it is Grazia that he desires to marry. But Grazia,
indifferent and gentle, loves Christophe less than her quiet days, her
children’s interests, her pleasant, nonchalant, and sociable life of a
handsome widow ‘well left,’ who cares above all things for her _quieto
vivere_. She is not very interesting, this Grazia, so much in love with
peace and measure; she and Christophe would have been as well mated as
a sleek and sober Angora with a mastiff ever on the growl (though his
bark is worse than his bite), and we are not very sorry when she dies.
We have wept so many tears for poor old Louisa (Christophe’s mother),
for Sabine, for Antoinette, for Olivier, that we have none to spare for
the passive and elegant great lady. Neither in the painting of Grazia
nor in his image of Rome is our author to be seen at his best. And yet
what citizen of Cosmopolis knows Rome as well as Romain Rolland?
By the end of this tenth volume, Jean-Christophe is no longer young,
and all has happened to him that reasonably could be expected to
happen. He has mixed in the politics of several nations, he has known
fight and flight and exile; he has been poor, he has been famous; he
is now the greatest musician of his times. The most exacting reader
could not wish to stretch him out much longer on the rack of this tough
world. There are ten sizable volumes of him at Mr Ollendorff’s--or,
if you prefer, seventeen of those wonderful little ‘Cahiers de la
Quinzaine’ (beloved of garrulous and expansive genius) in which M.
Charles Péguy has produced not only M. Romain Rolland, but himself.
Now we know all there is to know, and find that (as in real life) the
climax is middling compared to the hopes of youth.
Jean-Christophe dies a genius; but we, after all, have never heard his
operas. He dies, like any other mortal whom a living faith sustains
in the last hour of all. The death of Jean-Christophe has probably
preoccupied more readers than the end of any other hero in fiction
since the great days of Dickens and Thackeray. We ourselves know one
eminent hand in letters who wrote to the author suggesting that his
hero should disappear in the wreck of the _Titanic_, conducting the
band, in place of the unforgettable bandmaster. Another wished him to
wander away alone and die in the desert, after the fashion of Tolstoi.
And I should have liked for him the death of Péguy--defending his
country--leading his men into battle on the Marne--Ah! there’s the rub!
Jean-Christophe was an enemy-alien; he would have been fighting in the
Prussian ranks. For many years to come M. Rolland’s hero cannot be our
hero.
A reader appreciative of the intentions of M. Rolland might have been
sure than Jean-Christophe would die in no such picturesque or dramatic
fashion, but quietly yield his life on the brink of a new world, as a
wave effaces itself gently and vanishes in the sand, obliterated by the
pressure of the oncoming wave.
The whole meaning of M. Rolland’s book is the continuity of Life,
spreading insensibly from soul to soul, from sphere to sphere, in an
endless symphony. And the last chapters are full of new characters,
pushing forward, rising to maturity; children of the Past in whom the
dead revive, fathers of the Future who already are changing the face of
our world. The scheme of _Jean-Christophe_ (rising thus, and falling,
and rising at the end towards the yet unvisioned spectacle of times
about to be) recalls the structure of Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_.
Jean-Christophe succumbs, sordidly enough, in a Paris lodging, to
pneumonia. But he gives up the ghost in a mood of heroic joy, thankful
to exchange the worn-out faculties, the dreary, dingy end of life,
which are all he can dispose of here, for some undreamed-of harmony
and power which await him (as he believes) beyond. Tolstoi himself has
not a serener conviction that Life extends illimitably around our tiny
sphere, bathing the shores of all the stars in a tide of continual
renewal. The unity of the forces which compose a living being must
sooner or later dissolve, but the processes of Infinity will reassemble
them again. ‘Un jour je renaîtrai pour de nouveaux combats!’ Meanwhile,
caught in a rapture beyond the delusion of self, the dying musician
feels his personality expand and vanish for a while in something
vaster. He is lost in the One-and-All. ‘Tu renaîtras.... Repose. Tout
n’est plus qu’un seul cœur.’
And so Jean-Christophe greets a new dawn and leaves behind him, also,
on earth a new day. The finest passages of this last volume contain
M. Rolland’s masterly portrayal of the young France of our times.
Surely never was there a generation more unlike its introspective,
intellectual forbears: Hamlet has given birth to Harry Hotspur! We must
perhaps go back to the times of Ausonius (when the fathers were readers
of Seneca and Cicero and the sons hardy Christian barbarians) to find
two generations similarly contrasted.
Jean-Christophe was a man of yesterday. His creed was to think no lie,
to consent to no injustice, and to love his neighbour as himself. Here
M. Rolland shows him in his puissant and solitary decline, dominating
a new generation that rises round his knees, strangely different, with
other ideals. Truth? Humanity? The old-fashioned words are rarely
heard. We hear of Authority, of Order, of the claims of one’s race, of
the rights and responsibilities of the strong. This new generation,
which has witnessed no war, has the mind and disposition of conquerors.
Christophe surveys with tender ironical affection the lovable breed
of airmen, and sportsmen, and soldiers who fill France to-day--fresh,
and frank, and admirably valiant, full of prompt physical courage and
intellectual docility.
_Jean-Christophe_ is perhaps the most remarkable work of contemporary
fiction: a singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an unequalled
sensibility, a torrent of sarcasm, rancour, revolt, tenderness,
stream from its disconcerting pages. But these delicate notations
of minute variations in sensibility, though infinitely precious to
the psychologist, transgress the limits that strict art prescribes.
Romain Rolland sacrifices every grace of measure and composition to
his abundance, to his enthusiasm for Life. He has no sense of style.
His endless files of short, breathless sentences succeed each other
interminably, with no variation, till we experience at last the
sensation of a drop falling at regular intervals on the crown of our
head! He has been called ‘un volcan qui ne vomit que des cendres.’ And
then the rare flame strikes out--passages of infinite tenderness or of
solemn grandeur.
Still, let me own, while I admire _Jean-Christophe_, I think sometimes
with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who composed his novels
at a like tremendous length, and then, pen in hand, went through his
manuscript again, and reduced it by two-thirds.
When we open by chance one of those old novels, still famous, long
unread, which nourished the minds of our ancestors--_Clarissa Harlowe_,
_La Nouvelle Héloise_, or _L’Astrée_, or _Amadis_--or any other of
those immense, untidy romances, vast bazaars or stores of their age,
which provided several generations with every necessary of life, we
are nearly always astonished to find them so interesting and so good.
Our forefathers were no fools: what they loved in these books, which
were for them a school of feeling, was not Art, but Life. Nothing is
more instructive in this connection than to read a letter of Mme de
Sévigné’s on the interminable masterpiece of La Calprenède; the great
lady, so delicate, so difficile, ‘blessée des méchants styles,’ can
scarcely understand her own enthusiasm:--
‘Le style de La Calprenède est maudit en mille endroits; de grandes
périodes de roman, de méchants mots--je sens tout cela ... et
cependant je ne laisse pas de m’y prendre comme à de la glu; la
beauté des sentiments, la violence des passions, la grandeur des
événements tout cela m’entraîne comme une petite fille.’