Romain Rolland Part 8

When, finally, Rolland came to deal with Mazzini, he realized, as he sympathetically studied the embitterment of the forgotten patriot in old age, that it would either be necessary to falsify the record if edification were to be derived from this biography, or else, by recording the truth, to provide readers with further grounds for depression. He recognized that there are truths which love for mankind must lead us to conceal. Of a sudden he has personal experience of the conflict, of the tragical dilemma, which Tolstoi had had to face. He became aware of "the dissonance between his pitiless vision which enabled him to see all the horror of reality, and his compa.s.sionate heart which made him desire to veil these horrors and retain his readers' affection. We have all experienced this tragical struggle. How often has the artist been filled with distress when contemplating a truth which he will have to describe. For this same healthy and virile truth, which for some is as natural as the air they breathe, is absolutely insupportable to others, who are weak through the tenor of their lives or through simple kindliness. What are we to do? Are we to suppress this deadly truth, or to utter it unsparingly? Continually does the dilemma force itself upon us, Truth or Love?"

Such was the overwhelming experience which came upon Rolland in mid career. It is impossible to write the history of great men, both as historian recording truth, and as lover of mankind who desires to lead his fellows upwards towards perfection. To Rolland, the enthusiast, the historian's function now seemed the less important of the two. For what is the truth about a man? "It is so difficult to describe a personality.

Every man is a riddle, not for others alone, but for himself likewise.

It is presumptuous to claim a knowledge of one who is not known even by himself. Yet we cannot help pa.s.sing judgments on character, for to do so is a necessary part of life. Not one of those we believe ourselves to know, not one of our friends, not one of those we love, is as we see him. In many cases he is utterly different from our picture. We wander amid the phantoms we create. Yet we have to judge; we have to act."

Justice to himself, justice to those whose names he honored, veneration for the truth, compa.s.sion for his fellows--all these combined to arrest his half-completed design. Rolland laid aside the heroic biographies. He would rather be silent than surrender to that cowardly idealism which touches up lest it should have to repudiate. He halted on a road which he had recognized to be impa.s.sable, but he did not forget his aim "to defend greatness on earth." Since these historic figures would not serve the ends of his faith, his faith created a figure for itself. Since history refused to supply him with the image of the consoler, he had recourse to art, fas.h.i.+oning amid contemporary life the hero he desired, creating out of truth and fiction his own and our own Jean Christophe.

PART IV

JEAN CHRISTOPHE

It is really astonis.h.i.+ng to note how the epic and the philosophical are here compressed within the same work. In respect of form we have so beautiful a whole. Reaching outwards, the work touches the infinite, touches both art and life. In fact we may say of this romance, that it is in no respects limited except in point of aesthetic form, and that where it transcends form it comes into contact with the infinite. I might compare it to a beautiful island lying between two seas.

SCHILLER TO GOETHE CONCERNING _Wilhelm Meister_.

October 19, 1796.

CHAPTER I

SANCTUS CHRISTOPHORUS

Upon the last page of his great work, Rolland relates the well-known legend of St. Christopher. The ferryman was roused at night by a little boy who wished to be carried across the stream. With a smile the good-natured giant shouldered the light burden. But as he strode through the water the weight he was carrying grew heavy and heavier, until he felt he was about to sink in the river. Mustering all his strength, he continued on his way. When he reached the other sh.o.r.e, gasping for breath, the man recognized that he had been carrying the entire meaning of the world. Hence his name, Christophorus.

Rolland has known this long night of labor. When he a.s.sumed the fateful burden, when he took the work upon his shoulders, he meant to recount but a single life. As he proceeded, what had been light grew heavy. He found that he was carrying the whole destiny of his generation, the meaning of the entire world, the message of love, the primal secret of creation. We who saw him making his way alone through the night, without recognition, without helpers, without a word of cheer, without a friendly light winking at him from the further sh.o.r.e, imagined that he must succ.u.mb. From the hither bank the unbelievers followed him with shouts of scornful laughter. But he pressed manfully forward during these ten years, what time the stream of life swirled ever more fiercely around him; and he fought his way in the end to the unknown sh.o.r.e of completion. With bowed back, but with the radiance in his eyes undimmed, did he finish fording the river. Long and heavy night of travail, wherein he walked alone! Dear burden, which he carried for the sake of those who are to come afterwards, bearing it from our sh.o.r.e to the still untrodden sh.o.r.e of the new world. Now the crossing had been safely made.

When the good ferryman raised his eyes, the night seemed to be over, the darkness vanished. Eastward the heaven was all aglow. Joyfully he welcomed the dawn of the coming day towards which he had carried this emblem of the day that was done.

Yet what was reddening there was naught but the b.l.o.o.d.y cloud-bank of war, the flame of burning Europe, the flame that was to consume the spirit of the elder world. Nothing remained of our sacred heritage beyond this, that faith had bravely struggled from the sh.o.r.e of yesterday to reach our again distracted world. The conflagration has burned itself out; once more night has lowered. But our thanks speed towards you, ferryman, pious wanderer, for the path you have trodden through the darkness. We thank you for your labors, which have brought the world a message of hope. For the sake of us all have you marched on through the murky night. The flame of hatred will yet be extinguished; the spirit of friends.h.i.+p will again unite people with people. It will dawn, that new day.

CHAPTER II

RESURRECTION

Romain Rolland was now in his fortieth year. His life seemed to be a field of ruins. The banners of his faith, the manifestoes to the French people and to humanity, had been torn to rags by the storms of reality.

His dramas had been buried on a single evening. The figures of the heroes, which were designed to form a stately series of historic bronzes, stood neglected, three as isolated statues, while the others were but rough-casts prematurely destroyed.

Yet the sacred flame still burned within him. With heroic determination he threw the figures once more into the fiery crucible of his heart, melting the metal that it might be recast in new forms. Since his feeling for truth made it impossible for him to find the supreme consoler in any actual historical figure, he resolved to create a genius of the spirit, who should combine and typify what the great ones of all times had suffered, a hero who should not belong to one nation but to all peoples. No longer confining himself to historical truth, he looked for a higher harmony in the new configuration of truth and fiction. He fas.h.i.+oned the epic of an imaginary personality.

As if by miracle, all that he had lost was now regained. The vanished fancies of his school days, the boy artist's dream of a great artist who should stand erect against the world, the young man's vision on the Janiculum, surged up anew. The figures of his dramas, Aert and the Girondists, arose in a fresh embodiment; the images of Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Tolstoi, emerging from the rigidity of history, took their places among our contemporaries. Rolland's disillusionments had been but precious experiences; his trials, but a ladder to higher things. What had seemed like an end became the true beginning, that of his masterwork, _Jean Christophe_.

CHAPTER III

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK

Jean Christophe had long been beckoning the poet from a distance. The first message had come to the lad in the Normal School. During those years, young Rolland had planned the writing of a romance, the history of a single-hearted artist shattered on the rocks of the world. The outlines were vague; the only definite idea was that the hero was to be a musician whose contemporaries failed to understand him. The dream came to nothing, like so many of the dreams of youth.

But the vision returned in Rome, when Rolland's poetic fervor, long pent by the restrictions of school life, broke forth with elemental energy.

Malwida von Meysenbug had told him much concerning the tragical struggles of her intimate friends Wagner and Nietzsche. Rolland came to realize that heroic figures, though they may be obscured by the tumult and dust of the hour, belong in truth to every age. Involuntarily he learned to a.s.sociate the unhappy experiences of these recent heroes with those of the figures in his vision. In Parsifal, the guileless Fool, by pity enlightened, he recognized an emblem of the artist whose intuition guides him through the world, and who comes to know the world through experience. One evening, as Rolland walked on the Janiculum, the vision of Jean Christophe grew suddenly clear. His hero was to be a pure-hearted musician, a German, visiting other lands, finding his G.o.d in Life; a free mortal spirit, inspired with a faith in greatness, and with faith even in mankind, though mankind rejected him.

The happy days of freedom in Rome were followed by many years of arduous labor, during which the duties of daily life thrust the image into the background. Rolland had for a season become a man of action, and had no time for dreams. Then came new experiences to reawaken the slumbering vision. I have told of his visit to Beethoven's house in Bonn, and of the effect produced on his mind by the realization of the tragedy of the great composer's life. This gave a new direction to his thoughts. His hero was to be a Beethoven redivivus, a German, a lonely fighter, but a conqueror. Whereas the immature youth had idealized defeat, imagining that to fail was to be vanquished, the man of riper years perceived that true heroism lay in this, "to know life, and yet to love it." Thus splendidly did the new horizon open as setting for the long cherished figure, the dawn of eternal victory in our earthly struggle. The conception of Jean Christophe was complete.

Rolland now knew his hero. But it was necessary that he should learn to describe that hero's counterpart, that hero's eternal enemy, life, reality. Whoever wishes to delineate a combat fairly, must know both champions. Rolland became intimately acquainted with Jean Christophe's opponent through the experiences of these years of disillusionment, through his study of literature, through his realization of the falseness of society and of the indifference of the crowd. It was necessary for him to pa.s.s through the purgatorial fires of the years in Paris before he could begin the work of description. At twenty, Rolland had made acquaintance only with himself, and was therefore competent to describe no more than his own heroic will to purity. At thirty he had become able to depict likewise the forces of resistance. All the hopes he had cherished and all the disappointments he had suffered jostled one another in the channel of this new existence. The innumerable newspaper cuttings, collected for years, almost without a definite aim, magically arranged themselves as material for the growing work. Personal griefs were seen to have been valuable experience; the boy's dream swelled to the proportions of a life history.

During the year 1895 the broad lines were finished. As prelude, Rolland gave a few scenes from Jean Christophe's youth. During 1897, in a remote Swiss hamlet, the first chapters were penned, those in which the music begins as it were spontaneously. Then (so definitely was the whole design now shaping itself in his mind) he wrote some of the chapters for the fifth and ninth volumes. Like a musical composer, Rolland followed up particular themes as his mood directed, themes which his artistry was to weave harmoniously into the great symphony. Order came from within, and was not imposed from without. The work was not done in any strictly serial succession. The chapters seemed to come into being as chance might direct. Often they were inspired by the landscape, and were colored by outward events. Seippel, for instance, shows that Jean Christophe's flight into the forest was suggested by the last journey of Rolland's beloved teacher Tolstoi. With appropriate symbolism, this work of European scope was composed in various parts of Europe; the opening scenes, as we have said, in a Swiss hamlet; _L'adolescent_ in Zurich and by the sh.o.r.es of Lake Zug; much in Paris; much in Italy; _Antoinette_ in Oxford; while, after nearly fifteen years' labor, the work was completed in Baveno.

In February, 1902, the first volume, _L'aube_, was published in "_Les cahiers de la quinzaine_," and the last serial number was issued on October 20, 1912. When the fifth serial issue, _La foire sur la place_, appeared, a publisher, Ollendorff, was found willing to produce the whole romance in book form. Before the French original was completed, English, Spanish, and German translations were in course of publication, and Seippel's valuable biography had also appeared. Thus when the work was crowned by the Academy in 1913, its reputation was already established. In the fifth decade of his life, Rolland had at length become famous. His messenger Jean Christophe was a living contemporary figure, on pilgrimage through the world.

CHAPTER IV

THE WORK WITHOUT A FORMULA

What, then, is _Jean Christophe_? Can it be properly spoken of as a romance? This book, which is as comprehensive as the world, an orbis pictus of our generation, cannot be described by a single all-embracing term. Rolland once said: "Any work which can be circ.u.mscribed by a definition is a dead work." Most applicable to _Jean Christophe_ is the refusal to permit so living a creation to be hidebound by the restrictions of a name. _Jean Christophe_ is an attempt to create a totality, to write a book that is universal and encyclopedic, not merely narrative; a book which continually returns to the central problem of the world-all. It combines insight into the soul with an outlook into the age. It is the portrait of an entire generation, and simultaneously it is the biography of an imaginary individual. Grautoff has termed it "a cross-section of our society"; but it is likewise the religious confession of its author. It is critical, but at the same time productive; at once a criticism of reality, and a creative a.n.a.lysis of the unconscious; it is a symphony in words, and a fresco of contemporary ideas. It is an ode to solitude, and likewise an Eroica of the great European fellows.h.i.+p. But whatever definition we attempt, can deal with a part only, for the whole eludes definition. In the field of literary endeavor, the nature of a moral or ethical act cannot be precisely specified. Rolland's sculptural energies enable him to shape the inner humanity of what he is describing; his idealism is a force that strengthens faith, a tonic of vitality. His _Jean Christophe_ is an attempt towards justice, an attempt to understand life. It is also an attempt towards faith, an attempt to love life. These coalesce in his moral demand (the only one he has ever formulated for the free human being), "to know life, and yet to love it."

The essential aim of the book is explained by its hero when he refers to the disparateness of contemporary life, to the manner in which its art has been severed into a thousand fragments. "The Europe of to-day no longer possesses a common book; it has no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which is the common heritage of all. This lack is fatal to the art of our time. There is no one who has written for all; no one who has fought for all." Rolland hoped to remedy the evil. He wished to write for all nations, and not for his fatherland alone. Not artists and men of letters merely, but all who are eager to learn about life and about their own age, were to be supplied with a picture of the environment in which they were living. Jean Christophe gives expression to his creator's will, saying: "Display everyday life to everyday people--the life that is deeper and wider than the ocean. The least among us bears infinity within him.... Describe the simple life of one of these simple men; ... describe it simply, as it actually happens. Do not trouble about phrasing; do not dissipate your energies, as do so many contemporary writers, in straining for artistic effects. You wish to speak to the many, and you must therefore speak their language.... Throw yourself into what you create; think your own thoughts; feel your own feelings. Let your heart set the rhythm to the words. Style is soul."

_Jean Christophe_ was designed to be, and actually is, a work of life, and not a work of art; it was to be, and is, a book as comprehensive as humanity; for "l'art est la vie domptee"; art is life broken in. The book differs from the majority of the imaginative writings of our day in that it does not make the erotic problem its central feature. But it has no central feature. It attempts to comprehend all problems, all those which are a part of reality, to contemplate them from within, "from the spectrum of an individual" as Grautoff expresses it. The center is the inner life of the individual human being. The primary motif of the romance is to expound how this individual sees life, or rather, how he learns to see it. The book may therefore be described as an educational romance in the sense in which that term applies to _Wilhelm Meister_.

The educational romance aims at showing how, in years of apprentices.h.i.+p and years of travel, a human being makes acquaintance with the lives of others, and thus acquires mastery over his own life; how experience teaches him to transform into individual views the concepts he has had transmitted to him by others, many of which are erroneous; how he becomes enabled to trans.m.u.te the world so that it ceases to be an outward phenomenon and becomes an inward reality. The educational romance traces the change from curiosity to knowledge, from emotional prejudice to justice.

But this educational romance is simultaneously a historical romance, a "comedie humaine" in Balzac's sense; an "histoire contemporaine" in Anatole France's sense; and in many respects also it is a political romance. But Rolland, with his more catholic method of treatment, does not merely depict the history of his generation, but discusses the cultural history of the age, exhibiting the radiations of the time spirit, concerning himself with poesy and with socialism, with music and with the fine arts, with the woman's question and with racial problems.

Jean Christophe the man is a whole man, and _Jean Christophe_ the book embraces all that is human in the spiritual cosmos. This romance ignores no questions; it seeks to overcome all obstacles; it has a universal life, beyond the frontiers of nations, occupations, and creeds.

It is a romance of art, a romance of music, as well as a historical romance. Its hero is not a saunterer through life, like the heroes of Goethe, Novalis, and Stendhal, but a creator. As with Gottfried Keller's _Der grune Heinrich_, in this book the path through the externals of life leads simultaneously to the inner world, to art, to completion. The birth of music, the growth of genius, is individually and yet typically presented. In his portrayal of experience, the author does not merely aim at giving an a.n.a.lysis of the world; he desires also to expound the mystery of creation, the primal secret of life.

Furthermore, the book furnishes an outlook on the universe, thus becoming a philosophic, a religious romance. The struggle for the totality of life, signifies for Rolland the struggle to understand its significance and origin, the struggle for G.o.d, for one's own personal G.o.d. The rhythm of the individual existence is in search of an ultimate harmony between itself and the rhythm of the universal existence. From this earthly sphere, the Idea flows back into the infinite in an exultant canticle.

Such a wealth of design and execution was unprecedented. In one work alone, Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, had Rolland encountered a similar conjuncture of a historical picture of the world with a process of inner purification and a state of religious ecstasy. Here only had he discerned the like pa.s.sionate sense of responsibility towards truth. But Rolland diverged from this splendid example by placing his tragedy in the temporal environment of the life of to-day, instead of amid the wars of Napoleonic times; and by endowing his hero with the heroism, not of arms, but of the invisible struggles which the artist is constrained to fight. Here, as always, the most human of artists was his model, the man to whom art was not an end in itself, but was ever subordinate to an ethical purpose. In accordance with the spirit of Tolstoi's teaching, _Jean Christophe_ was not to be a literary work, but a deed. For this reason, Rolland's great symphony cannot be subjected to the restrictions of a convenient formula. The book ignores all the ordinary canons, and is none the less a characteristic product of its time.

Standing outside literature, it is an overwhelmingly powerful literary manifestation. Often enough it ignores the rules of art, and is yet a most perfect expression of art. It is not a book, but a message; it is not a history, but is nevertheless a record of our time. More than a book, it is the daily miracle of revelation of a man who lives the truth, whose whole life is truth.