It is really astonishing 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 Æsthetic 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 shore, 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 assumed 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 shore, imagined that he must succumb. 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 shore 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 shore to the still untrodden shore 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 bloody 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 shore 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 friendship 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 fashioned 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, AËrt 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 associate 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 god 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 pass 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 shores 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 circumscribed 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 analysis 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 fellowship. 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 domptÉe"; 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 apprenticeship 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 transmute 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 "comÉdie 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 grÜne 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 analysis 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 God, for one's own personal God. 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 passionate 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.
CHAPTER V
KEY TO THE CHARACTERS
AS a romance, Jean Christophe has no prototype in literature; but the characters in the book have prototypes in real life. Rolland the historian does not hesitate to borrow some of the lineaments of his heroes from the biographies of great men. In many cases, too, the figures he portrays recall personalities in contemporary life. In a manner peculiar to himself, by a process of which he was the originator, he combines the imaginative with the historical, fusing individual qualities in a new synthesis. His delineations tend to be mosaics, rather than entirely new imaginative creations. In ultimate analysis, his method of literary composition invariably recalls the work of a musical composer; he paraphrases thematic reminiscences, without imitating too closely. The reader of Jean Christophe often fancies that, as in a key-novel, he has recognized some public personality; but ere long he finds that the characteristics of another figure intrude. Thus each portrait is freshly constructed out of a hundred diverse elements.
Jean Christophe seems at first to be Beethoven. Seippel has aptly described La vie de Beethoven as a preface to Jean Christophe. In truth the opening volumes of the novel show us a Jean Christophe whose image is modeled after that of the great master. But it becomes plain in due course that we are being shown something more than one single musician, that Jean Christophe is the quintessence of all great musicians. The figures in the pantheon of musical history are presented in a composite portrait; or, to use a musical analogy, Beethoven, the master musician, is the root of the chord. Jean Christophe grew up in the Rhineland, Beethoven's home; Jean Christophe, like Beethoven, had Flemish blood in his veins; his mother, too, was of peasant origin, his father a drunkard. Nevertheless, Jean Christophe exhibits numerous traits proper to Friedemann Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Again, the letter which young Beethoven redivivus is made to write to the grand duke is modeled on the historical document; the episode of his acquaintanceship with Frau von Kerich recalls Beethoven and Frau von Breuning. But many incidents, like the scene in the castle, remind the reader of Mozart's youth; and Mozart's little love episode with Rose Cannabich is transferred to the life of Jean Christophe. The older Jean Christophe grows, the less does his personality recall that of Beethoven. In external characteristics he grows rather to resemble Gluck and Handel. Of the latter, Rolland writes elsewhere that "his formidable bluntness alarmed every one." Word for word we can apply to Jean Christophe, Rolland's description of Handel: "He was independent and irritable, and could never adapt himself to the conventions of social life. He insisted on calling a spade a spade, and twenty times a day he aroused annoyance in all who had to associate with him." The life history of Wagner had much influence upon the delineation of Jean Christophe. The rebellious flight to Paris, a flight originating, as Nietzsche phrases it, "from the depths of instinct"; the hack-work done for minor publishers; the sordid details of daily life—all these things have been transposed almost verbatim into Jean Christophe from Wagner's autobiographical sketches Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris.
Ernst Decsey's life of Hugo Wolf was, however, decisive in its influence upon the configuration of the leading character in Rolland's book, upon the almost violent departure from the picture of Beethoven. Not merely do we find individual incidents taken from Decsey's book, such as the hatred for Brahms, the visit paid to Hassler (Wagner), the musical criticism published in "Dionysos" ("Wiener Salonblatt"), the tragi-comedy of the unsuccessful overture to Penthesilea, and the memorable visit to Professor Schulz (Emil Kaufmann). Furthermore, Wolf's whole character, his method of musical creation, is transplanted into the soul of Jean Christophe. His primitive force of production, the volcanic eruptions flooding the world with melody, shooting forth into eternity four songs in the space of a day, with subsequent months of inactivity, the brusque transition from the joyful activity of creation to the gloomy brooding of inertia—this form of genius which was native to Hugo Wolf becomes part of the tragical equipment of Jean Christophe. Whereas his physical characteristics remind us of Handel, Beethoven, and Gluck, his mental type is assimilated rather in its convulsive energy to that of the great song-writer. With this difference, that to Jean Christophe, in his more brilliant hours, there is superadded the cheerful serenity, the childlike joy, of Schubert. He has a dual nature. Jean Christophe is the classical type and the modern type of musician combined into a single personality, so that he contains even many of the characteristics of Gustav Mahler and CÉsar Frank. He is not an individual musician, the figure of one living in a particular generation; he is the sublimation of music as a whole.
Nevertheless, in Jean Christophe's life we find incidents deriving from the adventures of those who were not musicians. From Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung comes the encounter with the French players; I have already said that the story of Tolstoi's last days was represented in Jean Christophe's flight into the forest (though in this latter case, from the figure of a benighted traveler, Nietzsche's countenance glances at us for a moment). Grazia typifies the well-beloved who never dies; Antoinette is a picture of Renan's sister Henriette; FranÇoise Oudon, the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds us of Suzanne DeprÈs. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles Louis Philippe and Charles PÉguy; among the minor figures, lightly sketched, we seem to see Debussy, Verhaeren, and Moreas. When La foire sur la place was published, the figures of Roussin the deputy, LÉvy-Coeur, the critic, Gamache the newspaper proprietor, and Hecht the music seller, hurt the feelings of not a few persons against whom no shafts had been aimed by Rolland. The portraits had been painted from studies of the commonplace, and typified the incessantly recurring mediocrities which are eternally real no less than are figures of exquisite rarity.
One portrait, however, that of Olivier, would seem to have been purely fictive. For this very reason, Olivier is felt to be the most living of all the characters, precisely because we cannot but feel that in many respects we have before us the artist's own picture, displaying not so much the circumstantial destiny as the human essence of Romain Rolland. Like the classical painters, he has, almost unmarked, introduced himself slightly disguised amid the historical scenario. The description is that of his own figure, slender, refined, slightly stooping; here we see his own energy, inwardly directed, and consuming itself in idealism; Rolland's enthusiasm is displayed in Olivier's lucid sense of justice, in his resignation as far as his personal lot is concerned, though he never resigns himself to the abandonment of his cause. It is true that in the novel this gentle spirit, the pupil of Tolstoi and Renan, leaves the field of action to his friend, and vanishes, the symbol of a past world. But Jean Christophe was merely a dream, the longing for energy sometimes felt by the man of gentle disposition. Olivier-Rolland limns this dream of his youth, designing upon his literary canvas the picture of his own life.
CHAPTER VI
A HEROIC SYMPHONY
AN abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In Jean Christophe, music is the form as well as the content. For the sake of simplicity we have to call the work a romance or a novel. But nowhere can it be said to attach to the epic tradition of any previous writers of romance: whether to that of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, who aimed at analyzing society into its chemical elements; or to that of Goethe, Gottfried Keller, and Stendhal, who sought to secure a crystallization of the soul. Rolland is neither a narrator, nor what may be termed a poetical romancer; he is a musician who weaves everything into harmony. In ultimate analysis, Jean Christophe is a symphony born out of the spirit of music, just as in Nietzsche's view classical tragedy was born out of that spirit; its laws are not those of the narrative, of the lecture, but those of controlled emotion. Rolland is a musician, not an epic poet.
Even qua narrator, Rolland does not possess what we term style. He does not write a classical French; he has no stable architechtonic in his sentences, no definite rhythm, no typical hue in his wording, no diction peculiar to himself. His personality does not obtrude itself, since he does not form the matter but is formed thereby. He possesses an inspired power of adaptation to the rhythm of the events he is describing, to the mood of the situation. The writer's mind acts as a resonator. In the opening lines the tempo is set. Then the rhythm surges on through the scene, carrying with it the episodes, which often seem like individual brief poems each sustained by its own melody—songs and airs which appear and pass, rapidly giving place to new movements. Some of the preludes in Jean Christophe are examples of pure song-craft, delicate arabesques and capriccios, islands of tone amid the roaring sea; then come other moods, gloomy ballads, nocturnes breathing elemental energy and sadness. When Rolland's writing is the outcome of musical inspiration, he shows himself one of the masters of language. At times, however, he speaks to us as historian, as critical student of the age. Then the splendor fades. Such historical and critical passages are like the periods of cold recitative in musical drama, periods which are requisite in order to give continuity to the story, and which thus fulfill an intellectual need, however much our aroused feelings may make us regret their interpolation. The ancient conflict between the musician and the historian persists unreconciled in Rolland's work.
Only through the spirit of music can the architectonic of Jean Christophe be understood. However plastic the elaboration of the characters, their effective force is displayed solely in so far as they are thematically interwoven into the resounding tide of life's modulations. The essential matter is always the rhythm which these characters emit, and which issues most powerfully of all from Jean Christophe, the master of music. The structure, the inner architectural conception of the work, cannot be understood by those who merely contemplate its obvious subdivision into ten volumes. This is dictated by the exigencies of book production. The essential caesuras are those between the lesser sections, each of which is written in a different key. Only a trained musician, one familiar with the great symphonies, can follow in detail the way in which the epic poem Jean Christophe is constructed as a symphony, an Eroica; only a musician can realize how in this work the most comprehensive type of musical composition is transposed into the world of speech.
Let the reader recall the chorale-like undertone, the booming note of the Rhine. We seem to be listening to some primal energy, to the stream of life in its roaring progress through eternity. A little melody rises above the general roar. Jean Christophe, the child, has been born out of the great music of the universe, to fuse in turn with the endless stream of sound. The first figures make a dramatic entry; the mystical chorale gradually subsides; the mortal drama of childhood begins. By degrees the stage is filled with personalities, with melodies; voices answer the lisping syllables of Jean Christophe; until, finally, the virile tones of Jean Christophe and the gentler voice of Olivier come to dominate the theme. Meanwhile, all the forms of life and music are unfolded in concords and discords. Thus we have the tragical outbreaks of a melancholy like that of Beethoven; fugues upon the themes of art; vigorous dance scenes, as in Le buisson ardent; odes to the infinite and songs to nature, pure like those of Schubert. Wonderful is the interconnection of the whole, and marvelous is the way in which the tide of sound ebbs once more. The dramatic tumult subsides; the last discords are resolved into the great harmony. In the final scene, the opening melody recurs, to the accompaniment of invisible choirs; the roaring river flows out into the limitless sea.
Thus Jean Christophe, the Eroica, ends in a chorale to the infinite powers of life, ends in the undying ocean of music. Rolland wished to convey the notion of these eternal forces of life symbolically through the imagery of the element which for us mortals brings us into closest contact with the infinite; he wished to typify these forces in the art which is timeless, which is free, which knows nothing of national limitations, which is eternal. Thus music is at once the form and the content of the work, "simultaneously its kernel and its shell," as Goethe said of nature. Nature is ever the law of laws for art.
CHAPTER VII
THE ENIGMA OF CREATIVE WORK
Jean Christophe took the form of a book of life rather than that of a romance of art, for Rolland does not make a specific distinction between poietic types of men and those devoid of creative genius, but inclines rather to see in the artist the most human among men. Just as for Goethe, true life was identical with activity; so for Rolland, true life is identical with production. One who shuts himself away, who has no surplus being, who fails to radiate energy that shall flow beyond the narrow limits of his individuality to become part of the vital energy of the future, is doubtless still a human being, but is not genuinely alive. There may occur a death of the soul before the death of the body, just as there is a life that outlasts one's own life. The real boundary across which we pass from life to extinction is not constituted by physical death but the cessation of effective influence. Creation alone is life. "There is only one delight, that of creation. Other joys are but shadows, alien to the world though they hover over the world. Desire is creative desire; for love, for genius, for action. One and all are born out of ardor. It matters not whether we are creating in the sphere of the body or in the sphere of the spirit. Ever, in creation, we are seeking to escape from the prison of the body, to throw ourselves into the storm of life, to be as gods. To create is to slay death."
Creation, therefore, is the meaning of life, its secret, its innermost kernel. While Rolland almost always chooses an artist for his hero, he does not make this choice in the arrogance of the romance writer who likes to contrast the melancholy genius with the dull crowd. His aim is to draw nearer to the primal problems of existence. In the work of art, transcending time and space, the eternal miracle of generation out of nothing (or out of the all) is made manifest to the senses, while simultaneously its mystery is made plain to the intelligence. For Rolland, artistic creation is the problem of problems precisely because the artist is the most human of men. Everywhere Rolland threads his way through the obscure labyrinth of creative work, that he may draw near to the burning moment of spiritual receptivity, to the painful act of giving birth. He watches Michelangelo shaping pain in stone; Beethoven bursting forth in melody; Tolstoi listening to the heart-beat of doubt in his own laden breast. To each, Jacob's angel is revealed in a different form, but for all alike the ecstatic force of the divine struggle continues to burn. Throughout the years, Rolland's sole endeavor has been to discover this ultimate type of artist, this primitive element of creation, much as Goethe was in search of the archetypal plant. Rolland wishes to discover the essential creator, the essential act of creation, for he knows that in this mystery are comprised the root and the blossoms of the whole of life's enigma.
As historian he had depicted the birth of art in humanity. Now, as poet, he was approaching the same problem in a different form, and was endeavoring to depict the birth of art in one individual. In his Histoire de l'opÉra avant Lully et Scarlatti, and in his Musiciens d'autrefois, he had shown how music, "blossoming throughout the ages," begins to form its buds; and how, grafted upon different racial stems and upon different periods, it grows in new forms. But here begins the mystery of creation. Every beginning is wrapped in obscurity; and since the path of all mankind is symbolically indicated in each individual, the mystery recurs in each individual's experience. Rolland is aware that the intellect can never unravel this ultimate mystery. He does not share the views of the monists, for whom creation has become trivialized to a mechanical effect which they would explain by talking of primitive gases and by similar verbiage. He knows that nature is modest, and that in her secret hours of generation she would fain elude observation; he knows that we are unable to watch her at work in those moments when crystal is joining to crystal, and when flowers are springing out of the buds. Nothing does she hide more jealously than her inmost magic, everlasting procreation, the very secret of infinity.
Creation, therefore, the life of life, is for Rolland a mystic power, far transcending human will and human intelligence. In every soul there lives, side by side with the conscious individuality, a stranger as guest. "Man's chief endeavor since he became man has been to build up dams that shall control this inner sea by the powers of reason and religion. But when a storm comes (and those most plenteously endowed are peculiarly subject to such storms), the elemental powers are set free." Hot waves flood the soul, streaming forth out of the unconscious; not out of the will, but against the will; out of a super-will. This "dualism of the soul and its daimon" cannot be overcome by the clear light of reason. The energy of the creative spirit surges from the depths of the blood, often from parents and remoter progenitors, not entering through the doors and windows of the normal waking consciousness, but permeating the whole being as atmospheric spirits may be conceived to do. Of a sudden the artist is seized as by intoxication, inspired by a will independent of the will, subjected to the power "of the ineffable riddle of the world and of life," as Goethe terms the daimonic. The divine breaks upon him like a hurricane; or opens before him like an abyss, "dieu abime," into which he hurls himself unreflectingly. In Rolland's sense, we must not say that the true artist has his art, but that the art has the artist. Art is the hunter, the artist is the quarry; art is the victor, whereas the artist is happy in that he is again and again and forever the vanquished. Thus before creation we must have the creator. Genius is predestined. At work in the channels of the blood, while the senses still slumber, this power from without prepares the great magic for the child. Wonderful is Rolland's description of the way in which Jean Christophe's soul was already filled with music before he had heard the first notes. The daimon is there within the youthful breast, awaiting but a sign before stirring, before making himself known to the kindred spirit within the dual soul. When the boy, holding his grandfather's hand, enters the church and is greeted by an outburst of music from the organ, the genius within acclaims the work of the distant brother and the child is filled with joy. Again, driving in a carriage, and listening to the melodious rhythm of the horse's hoofs, his heart goes out in unconscious brotherhood to the kindred element. Then comes one of the most beautiful passages in the book, probably the most beautiful of those treating of music. The little Jean Christophe clambers on to the music stool in front of the black chest filled with magic, and for the first time thrusts his fingers into the unending thicket of concords and discords, where each note that he strikes seems to answer yes or no to the unconscious questions of the stranger's voice within him. Soon he learns to produce the tones he desires to hear. At first the airs had sought him out, but now he can seek them out. His soul which, thirsting for music, has long been eagerly drinking in its strains, now flows forth creatively over the barriers into the world.
This inborn daimon in the artist grows with the child, ripens with the man, and ages as the man grows old. Like a vampire it is nourished by all the experiences of its host, drinking his joys and his sorrows, gradually sucking up all the life into itself, so that for the creative human being nothing more remains but the eternal thirst and the torment of creation. In Rolland's sense the artist does not will to create, but must create. For him, production is not (as Nordau and Nordau's congeners fancy in their simplicity) a morbid outgrowth, an abnormality of life, but the only true health; unproductivity is disease. Never has the torment of the lack of inspiration been more splendidly described than in Jean Christophe. The soul in such cases is like a parched land under a torrid sun, and its need is worse than death. No breath of wind brings coolness; everything withers; joy and energy fade; the will is utterly relaxed. Suddenly comes a storm out of the swiftly overcast heavens, the thunder of the burgeoning power, the lightning of inspiration; the stream wells up from inexhaustible springs, carrying the soul along with it in eternal desire; the artist has become the whole world, has become God, the creator of all the elements. Whatever he encounters, he sweeps along with him in his rush; "tout lui est prÉtexte À sa fÉconditÉ intarissable"; everything is material for his inexhaustible fertility. He transforms the whole of life into art; like Jean Christophe he transforms his death into a symphony.
In order to grasp life in its entirety, Rolland has endeavored to describe the profoundest mystery of life; to describe creation, the origin of the all, the development of art in an artist. He has furnished a vivid description of the tie between creation and life, which weaklings are so eager to avoid. Jean Christophe is simultaneously the working genius and the suffering man; he suffers through creation, and creates through suffering. For the very reason that Rolland is himself a creator, the imaginary figure of Jean Christophe, the artist, is transcendently alive.
CHAPTER VIII
JEAN CHRISTOPHE
ART has many forms, but its highest form is always that which is most intimately akin to nature in its laws and its manifestations. True genius works elementally, works naturally, is wide as the world and manifold as mankind. It creates out of its own abundance, not out of weakness. Its perennial effect, therefore, is to create more strength, to glorify nature, and to raise life above its temporal confines into infinity.
Jean Christophe is inspired with such genius. His name is symbolical. Jean Christophe Krafft is himself energy (Kraft), the indefatigable energy that springs from peasant ancestry. It is the energy which is hurled into life like a projectile, the energy that forcibly overcomes every obstacle. Now, as long as we identify the concept of life with quiescent being, with inactive existence, with things as they are, this force of nature must be ever at war with life. For Rolland, however, life is not the quiescent, but the struggle against quiescence; it is creation, poiesis, the eternal, upward and onward impulse against the inertia of "the perpetual as-you-were." Among artists, one who is a fighter, an innovator, must necessarily be such a genius. Around him stand other artists engaged in comparatively peaceful activities, the contemplators, the sage observers of that which is, the completers of the extant, the imperturbable organizers of accomplished facts. They, the heirs of the past, have repose; he, the precursor, has storm. It is his lot to transform life into a work of art; he cannot enjoy life as a work of art; first he must create life as he would have it, create its form, its tradition, its ideal, its truth, its god. Nothing for him is ready-made; he has eternally to begin. Life does not welcome him into a warm house, where he can forthwith make himself at home. For him, life is but plastic material for a new edifice, wherein those who come after will live. Such a man, therefore, knows nothing of repose. "Work unrestingly," says his god to him; "you must fight ceaselessly." Obedient to the injunction, from boyhood to the day of his death he follows this path, fighting without truce, the flaming sword of the will in his hand. Often he grows weary, wondering whether struggle must indeed be unending, asking himself with Job whether his days be not "like the days of an hireling." But soon, shaking off lethargy, he recognizes that "we cannot be truly alive while we continue to ask why we live; we must live life for its own sake." He knows that labor is its own reward. In an hour of illumination he sums up his destiny in the splendid phrase: "I do not seek peace; I seek life."
But struggle implies the use of force. Despite his natural kindliness of disposition, Jean Christophe is an apostle of force. We discern in him something barbaric and elemental, the power of a storm or of a torrent which, obeying not its own will but the unknown laws of nature, rushes down from the heights into the lower levels of life. His outward aspect is that of a fighter. He is tall and massive, almost uncouth, with large hands and brawny arms. He has the sanguine temperament, and is liable to outbursts of turbulent passion. His footfall is heavy; his gait is awkward, though he knows nothing of fatigue. These characteristics derive from the crude energy of his peasant forefathers on the maternal side; their pristine strength gives him steadfastness in the most arduous crises of existence. "Well is it with him who amid the mishaps of life is sustained by the power of a sturdy stock, so that the feet of father and grandfathers may carry forward the son when he grows weary, so that the vigorous growth of more robust forebears may relift the crushed soul." The power of resilence against the oppression of existence is given by such physical energy. Still more helpful is Jean Christophe's trust in the future, his healthy and unyielding optimism, his invincible confidence in victory. "I have centuries to look forward to," he cries exultantly in an hour of disillusionment. "Hail to life! Hail to joy!" From the German race he inherits Siegfried's confidence in success, and for this reason he is ever a fighter. He knows, "le gÉnie veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le gÉnie"—genius desires obstacles, for obstacles create genius.
Force, however, is always wilful Young Jean Christophe, while his energies have not yet been spiritually enlightened, have not yet been ethically tamed, can see no one but himself. He is unjust towards others, deaf and blind to remonstrance, indifferent as to whether his actions may please or displease. Like a woodcutter, ax in hand, he hastes stormfully through the forest, striking right and left, simply to secure light and space for himself. He despises German art without understanding it, and scorns French art without knowing anything about it. He is endowed with "the marvelous impudence of opinionated youth"; that of the undergraduate who says, "the world did not exist till I created it." His strength has its fling in contentiousness; for only when struggling does he feel that he is himself, then only can he enjoy his passion for life.
These struggles of Jean Christophe continue throughout the years, for his maladroitness is no less conspicuous than his strength. He does not understand his opponents. He is slow to learn the lessons of life; and it is precisely because the lessons are learned so slowly, piece by piece, each stage besprinkled with blood and watered with tears, that the novel is so impressive and so full of help. Nothing comes easily to him; no ripe fruit ever falls into his hands. He is simple like Parsifal, naive, somewhat boisterous and provincial. Instead of rubbing off his angularities upon the grindstones of social life, he bruises himself by his clumsy movements. He is an intuitive genius, not a psychologist; he foresees nothing, but must endure all things before he can know. "He had not the hawklike glance of Frenchmen and Jews, who discern the most trifling characteristics of all that they see. He silently absorbed everything he came in contact with, as a sponge absorbs. Not until days or hours had elapsed would he become fully aware of what had now become a part of himself." Nothing was real to him so long as it remained objective. To be of use, every experience must be, as it were, digested and worked up into his blood. He could not exchange ideas and concepts one for another as people exchange bank notes. After prolonged nausea, he was able to free himself from all the conventional lies and trivial notions which had been instilled into him in youth, and was then at length enabled to absorb fresh nutriment. Before he could know France, he had to strip away all her masks one after another; before he could reach Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies," he had to make his way through less lofty adventures. Before he could discover himself and before he could discover his god, he had to live the whole of his life through. Not until he reaches the other shore does Christophorus recognize that his burden has been a message.
He knows that "it is good to suffer when one is strong," and he therefore loves to encounter hindrances. "Everything great is good, and the extremity of pain borders on enfranchisement. The only thing that crushes irremediably, the only thing that destroys the soul, is mediocrity of pain and joy." He gradually learns to recognize his enemy, his own impetuosity; he learns to be just; he begins to understand himself and the world. The nature of passion becomes clear to him. He realizes that the hostility he encounters is aimed, not at him personally, but at the eternal powers goading him on; he learns to love his enemies because they have helped him to find himself, and because they march towards the same goal by other roads. The years of apprenticeship have come to an end. As Schiller admirably puts it in the above-quoted letter to Goethe: "Years of apprenticeship are a relative concept. They imply their correlative, which is mastery. The idea of mastery is presupposed to elucidate and ground the idea of apprenticeship." Jean Christophe, in riper years, begins to see that through all his transformations he has by degrees become more truly himself. Preconceptions have been cast aside; he has been freed from beliefs and illusions, freed from the prejudices of race and nationality. He is free and yet pious, now that he grasps the meaning of the path he has to tread. In the frank and noisy optimism of youth, he had exclaimed, "What is life? A tragedy. Hurrah!" Now, "transfigurÉ par la foi," this optimism has been transformed into a gentle, all-embracing wisdom. His freethinker's confessions runs: "To serve God and to love God, signifies to serve life and to love life." He hears the footsteps of coming generations. Even in those who are hostile to him he salutes the undying spirit of life. He sees his fame growing like a great cathedral, and feels it be to something remote from himself. He who was an aimless stormer, is now a leader; but his own goal does not become clear to him until the sonorous waves of death encompass him, and he floats away into the vast ocean of music, into eternal peace.
What makes Jean Christophe's struggle supremely heroic is that he aspires solely towards the greatest, towards life as a whole. This striving man has to upbuild everything for himself; his art, his freedom, his faith, his God, his truth. He has to fight himself free from everything which others have taught him; from all the fellowships of art, nationality, race, and creed. His ardor never wrestles for any personal end, for success or for pleasure. "Il n'y a aucun rapport entre la passion et le plaisir." Jean Christophe's loneliness makes this struggle tragical. It is not on his own behalf that he troubles to attain to truth, for he knows that every man has his own truth. When, nevertheless, he becomes a helper of mankind, this is not by words, but by his own essential nature, which exercises a marvelously harmonizing influence in virtue of his vigorous goodness. Whoever comes into contact with him—the imaginary personalities in the book, and no less the real human beings who read the book—is the better for having known him. The power through which he conquers is that of the life which we all share. And inasmuch as we love him, we grow enabled to cherish an ardent love for the world of mankind.
CHAPTER IX
OLIVIER
JEAN CHRISTOPHE is the portrait of an artist. But every form and every formula of art and the artist must necessarily be one-sided. Rolland, therefore, introduces to Christophe in mid career, "nel mezzo del cammin," a counterpart, a Frenchman as foil to the German, a hero of thought as contrast to the hero of action. Jean Christophe and Olivier are complementary figures, attracting one another in virtue of the law of polarity. "They were very different each from the other, and they loved one another on account of this difference, being of the same species"—the noblest. Olivier is the essence of spiritual France, just as Jean Christophe is the offspring of the best energies of Germany; they are ideals, alike fashioned in the form of the highest ideal; alternating like major and minor, they transpose the theme of art and life into the most wonderful variations.
In externals the contrast between them is marked, both in respect of physical characteristics and social origins. Olivier is slightly built, pale and delicate. Whereas Jean Christophe springs from working folk, Olivier derives from an old and somewhat effete bourgeois stock, and despite all his ardor he has an aristocratic aloofness from vulgar things. His vitality does not come like that of his robust comrade from excess of bodily energy, from muscles and blood, but from nerves and brain, from will and passion. He is receptive rather than productive. "He was ivy, a gentle soul which must always love and be loved." Art is for him a refuge from reality, whereas Jean Christophe flings himself upon art to find in it life many times multiplied. In Schiller's sense of the terms, Olivier is the sentimental artist, whilst his German brother is the naive genius. Olivier represents the beauty of a civilization; he is symbolic of "la vaste culture et le gÉnie psychologique de la France"; Jean Christophe is the very luxuriance of nature. The Frenchman represents contemplation; the German, action. The former reflects by many facets; the latter has the genius which shines by its own light. Olivier "transfers to the sphere of thought all the energies that he has drawn from action," producing ideas where Christophe radiates vitality, and wishing to improve, not the world, but himself. It suffices him to fight out within himself the eternal struggle of responsibility. He contemplates unmoved the play of secular forces, looking on with the skeptical smile of his teacher Renan, as one who knows in advance that the perpetual return of evil is inevitable, that nothing can avert the eternal victory of injustice and wrong. His love, therefore, goes out to humanity, the abstract idea, and not to actual men, the unsatisfactory realizations of that idea.
At first we incline to regard him as a weakling, as timid and inactive. Such is the view taken at the outset by his forceful friend, who says almost angrily: "Are you incapable of feeling hatred?" Olivier answers with a smile: "I hate hatred. It is repulsive to me that I should struggle with people whom I despise." He does not enter into treaties with reality; his strength lies in isolation. No defeat can daunt him, and no victory can persuade him: he knows that force rules the world, but he refuses to recognize the victor. Jean Christophe, fired by Teutonic pagan wrath, rushes at obstacles and stamps them underfoot; Olivier knows that next day the weeds that have been trodden to the earth will spring up again. He does not love struggle for its own sake. When he avoids struggle, this is not because he fears defeat, but because victory is indifferent to him. A freethinker, he is in truth animated by the spirit of Christianity. "I should run the risk of disturbing my soul's peace, which is more precious to me than any victory. I refuse to hate. I desire to be just even to my enemies. Amid the storms of passion I wish to retain clarity of vision, that I may understand everything and love everything."
Jean Christophe soon comes to recognize that Olivier is his spiritual brother, learning that the heroism of thought is just as great as the heroism of action, that his friend's idealistic anarchism is no less courageous than his own primitive revolt. In this apparent weakling, he venerates a soul of steel. Nothing can shake Olivier, nothing can confuse his serene intelligence. Superior force is no argument against him. "He had an independence of judgment which nothing could overcome. When he loved anything, he loved it in defiance of the world." Justice is the only pole towards which the needle of his will points unerringly; justice is his sole form of fanaticism. Like AËrt, his weaker prototype, he has "la faim de justice." Every injustice, even the injustices of a remote past, seem to him a disturbance of the world order. He belongs, therefore, to no party; he is unfailingly the advocate on behalf of all the unhappy and all the oppressed; his place is ever "with the vanquished"; he does not wish to help the masses socially, but to help individual souls, whereas Jean Christophe desires to conquer for all mankind every paradise of art and freedom. For Olivier there is but one true freedom, that which comes from within, the freedom which a man must win for himself. The illusion of the crowd, its eternal class struggles and national struggles for power, distress him, but do not arouse his sympathy. Standing quite alone, he maintains his mental poise when war between Germany and France is imminent, when all are shaken in their convictions, and when even Jean Christophe feels that he must return home to fight for his fatherland. "I love my country," says the Frenchman to his German brother. "I love it just as you love yours. But am I for this reason to betray my conscience, to kill my soul? This would signify the betrayal of my country. I belong to the army of the spirit, not to the army of force." But brute force takes its revenge upon the man who despises force, and he is killed in a chance medley. Only his ideals, which were his true life, survive him, to renew for those of a later generation the mystic idealism of his faith.
Marvelously delineated is the answer made by the advocate of mental force to the advocate of physical force, by the genius of the spirit to the genius of action. The two heroes are profoundly united in their love for art, in their passion for freedom, in their need for spiritual purity. Each is "pious and free" in his own sense; they are brothers in that ultimate domain which Rolland finely terms "the music of the soul"—in goodness. But Jean Christophe's goodness is that of instinct; it is elemental, therefore, and liable to be interrupted by passionate relapses into hate. Olivier's goodness, on the other hand, is intellectual and wise, and is tinged merely at times by ironical skepticism. But it is this contrast between them, it is the fact that their aspirations towards goodness are complementary, which draws them together. Christophe's robust faith revives joy in life for the lonely Olivier. Christophe, in turn, learns justice from Olivier. The sage is uplifted by the strong, who is himself enlightened by the sage's clarity. This mutual exchange of benefits symbolizes the relationship between their nations. The friendship between the two individuals is designed to be the prototype of a spiritual alliance between the brother peoples. France and Germany are "the two pinions of the west." The European spirit is to soar freely above the blood-drenched fields of the past.
CHAPTER X
GRAZIA
JEAN CHRISTOPHE is creative action; Olivier is creative thought; a third form is requisite to complete the cycle of existence, that of Grazia, creative being, who secures fulfillment merely through her beauty and refulgence. In her case likewise the name is symbolic. Jean Christophe Krafft, the embodiment of virile energy, reËncounters, comparatively late in life, Grazia, who now embodies the calm beauty of womanhood. Thus his impetuous spirit is helped to realize the final harmony.
Hitherto, in his long march towards peace, Jean Christophe has encountered only fellow-soldiers and enemies. In Grazia he comes for the first time into contact with a human being who is free from nervous tension, with one characterized by that serene concord which in his music he has unconsciously been seeking for many years. Grazia is not a flaming personality from whom he himself catches fire. The warmth of her senses has long ere this been cooled, through a certain weariness of life, a gentle inertia. But in her, too, sounds that "music of the soul"; she too is inspired with that goodness which is needed to attract Jean Christophe's liking. She does not incite him to further action. Already, owing to the many stresses of his life, the hair on his temples has been whitened. She leads him to repose, shows him "the smile of the Italian skies," where his unrest, tending as ever to recur, vanishes at length like a cloud in the evening air. The untamed amativeness which in the past has convulsed his whole being, the need for love which has flamed up with elemental force in Le buisson ardent, threatening to destroy his very existence, is clarified here to become the "suprasensual marriage" with Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies." Through Olivier, Jean Christophe is made lucid; through Grazia, he is made gentle. Olivier reconciled him with the world; Grazia, with himself. Olivier had been Virgil, guiding him through purgatorial fires; Grazia is Beatrice, pointing towards the heaven of the great harmony. Never was there a nobler symbolization of the European triad; the restrained fierceness of Germany; the clarity of France; the gentle beauty of the Italian spirit. Jean Christophe's life melody is resolved in this triad; he has now been granted the citizenship of the world, is at home in all feelings, lands, and tongues, and can face death in the ultimate unity of life.
Grazia, "la linda" (the limpid), is one of the most tranquil figures in the book. We seem barely aware of her passage through the agitated worlds, but her soft Mona Lisa smile streams like a beam of light athwart the animated space. Had she been absent, there would have been lacking to the work and to the man the magic of "the eternal feminine," the solution of the ultimate riddle. When she vanishes, her radiance still lingers, filling this book of exuberance and struggle with a soft lyrical melancholy, and transfusing it with a new beauty, that of peace.
CHAPTER XI
JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND HIS FELLOW MEN
NOTWITHSTANDING the intimate relationships described in the previous chapters, the path of Jean Christophe the artist is a lonely one. He walks by himself, pursuing an isolated course that leads deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of his own being. The blood of his fathers drives him along, out of an infinite of confused origins, towards that other infinite of creation. Those whom he encounters in his life's journey are no more than shadows and intimations, milestones of experience, steps of ascent and descent, episodes and adventures. But what is knowledge other than a sum of experiences; what is life beyond a sum of encounters? Other human beings are not Jean Christophe's destiny, but they are material for his creative work. They are elements of the infinite, to which he feels himself akin. Since he wishes to live life as a whole, he must accept the bitterest part of life, mankind.
All he meets are a help to him. His friends help him much; but his enemies help him still more, increasing his vitality and stimulating his energy. Thus even those who wish to hinder his work, further it; and what is the true artist other than the work upon which he is engaged? In the great symphony of his passion, his fellow beings are high and low voices inextricably interwoven into the swelling rhythm. Many an individual theme he dismisses after a while with indifference, but many another he pursues to the end. Into his childhood's days comes Gottfried, the kindly old man, deriving more or less from the spirit of Tolstoi. He appears quite incidentally, never for more than a night, shouldering his pack, the undying Ahasuerus, but cheerful and kindly, never mutinous, never complaining, bowed but splendidly unflinching, as he wends his way Godward. Only in passing does he touch Christophe's life, but this transient contact suffices to set the creative spirit in movement. Consider, again, Hassler, the composer. His face flashes upon Jean Christophe, a lightning glimpse, at the beginning of the young man's work; but, in this instant, Jean Christophe recognizes the danger that he may come to resemble Hassler through indolence, and he collects his forces. Intimations, appeals, signs—such are other men to him. Every one acts as a stimulus, some through love, some through hatred. Old Schulz, with sympathetic understanding, helps him in a moment of despair. The family pride of Frau von Kerich and the stupidity of the Gothamites drive him anew to despair, which culminates this time in flight, and thus proves his salvation. Poison and antidote have a terrible resemblance. But to his creative spirit nothing is unmeaning, for he stamps his own significance upon all, sweeping into the current of his life the very things which were imposing themselves as hindrances to the stream. Suffering is needful to him for the knowledge it brings. He draws his best forces out of sadness, out of the shocks of life. Designedly does Rolland make Jean Christophe conceive the most beautiful of his imaginative works during the times of his profoundest spiritual distresses, during the days after the death of Olivier, and during those which followed the departure of Grazia. Opposition and affliction, the foes of the ordinary man, are friends to the artist, just as much as is every experience in his career. Precisely for his profoundest creative solitude, he requires the influences which emanate from his fellows.
It is true that he takes long to learn this lesson, judging men falsely at first because he sees them temperamently, not knowledgeably. To begin with, Jean Christophe colors all human beings with his own overflowing enthusiasm, fancying them to be as upright and good-natured as he is himself, to speak no less frankly and spontaneously than he himself speaks. Then, after the first disillusionments, his views are falsified in the opposite direction by bitterness and mistrust. But gradually he learns to hold just measure between overvaluation and its opposite. Helped towards justice by Olivier, guided to gentleness by Grazia, gathering experience from life, he comes to understand, not himself alone, but his foes likewise. Almost at the end of the book we find a little scene which may seem at first sight insignificant. Jean Christophe comes across his sometime enemy, LÉvy-Coeur, and spontaneously offers his hand. This reconciliation implies something more than transient sympathy. It expresses the meaning of the long pilgrimage. It leads us to his last confession, which runs as follows, with a slight alteration from his old description of true heroism: "To know men, and yet to love them."
CHAPTER XII
JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND THE NATIONS
YOUNG Headstrong, looking upon his fellow men with passion and prejudice, fails to understand their natures; at first he contemplates the families of mankind, the nations, with like passion and prejudice. It is a part of our inevitable destiny that to begin with, and for many of us throughout life, we know our own land from within only, foreign lands only from without. Not until we have learned to see our own country from without, and to understand foreign countries from within as the natives of these countries understand them, can we acquire a European outlook, can we realize that these various countries are complementary parts of a single whole. Jean Christophe fights for life in its entirety. For this reason he must pursue the path by which the nationalist becomes a citizen of the world and acquires a "European soul."
As must happen, Jean Christophe begins with prejudice. At first he overvalues France. Ideas have been impressed upon his mind concerning the artistic, cheerful, liberal-spirited French, and he regards his own Germany as a land full of restriction. His first sight of Paris brings disillusionment; he can see nothing but lies, clamor, and cheating. By degrees, however, he discovers that the soul of a nation is not an obvious and superficial thing, like a paving-stone in the street, but that the observer of a foreign people must dig his way to that soul through a thick stratum of illusion and falsehood. Ere long he weans himself of the habit which leads people to talk of the French, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, as if members of these respective nations or races were all of a piece, to be classified and docketed in so simple a fashion. Each people has its own measure, its own form, customs, failings, and lies; just as each has its own climate, history, skies, and race; and these things cannot be easily summarized in a phrase or two. As with all experience, our experiences of a country must be built up from within. With words alone we can build nothing but a house of cards. "Truth is the same to all nations, but each nation has its own lies which it speaks of as its idealism. Every member of each nation inhales the appropriate atmosphere of lying idealism from the cradle to the grave, until it becomes the very breath of his life. None but isolated geniuses can free themselves by heroic struggle, during which they stand alone in the free universe of their own thought." We must free ourselves from prejudice if we are to judge freely. There is no other formula; there are no other psychological prescriptions. As with all creative work, we must permeate the material with which we have to deal, must yield ourselves without reserve. In the case of nations as in the case of individual men, he who would know them will find that there is but one science, that of the heart and not of books.
Nothing but such mutual understanding passing from soul to soul can weld the nations together. What keeps them asunder is misunderstanding, the way those of each nation hold their own beliefs to be the only right ones, look upon their own natures as the only good ones. The mischief lies in the arrogance of persons who believe that all others are wrong. Nation is estranged from nation by the collective conceit of the members of each nation, by the "great European plague of national pride" which Nietzsche termed "the malady of the century." They stand like trees in a forest, each stem priding itself on its isolation, though the roots interlace underground and the summits touch overhead. The common people, the proletariat, living in the depths, universally human in its feelings, know naught of national contrasts. Jean Christophe, making the acquaintance of Sidonie, the Breton maidservant, recognizes with astonishment "how closely she resembles respectable folk in Germany." Look again at the summits, at the elite. Olivier and Grazia have long been living in that lofty sphere known to Goethe "in which we feel the fate of foreign nations just as we feel our own." Fellowship is a truth; mutual hatred is a falsehood; justice is the only real tie linking men and linking nations. "All of us, all nations, are debtors one to another. Let us, then, pay our debts and do our duty together." Jean Christophe has suffered at the hands of every nation, and has received gifts from every nation; disillusioned by all, he has also been benefited by all. To the citizen of the world, at the end of his pilgrimage, all nations are alike. In each his soul can make itself at home. The musician in him dreams of a sublime work, of the great European symphony, wherein the voices of the peoples, resolving discords, will rise in the last and highest harmony, the harmony of mankind.
THE picture of France in the great romance is notable because we are here shown a country from a twofold outlook, from without and from within, from the perspective of a German and with the eyes of a Frenchman. It is likewise notable because Christophe's judgment is not merely that of one who sees, but that of one who learns in seeing.
In every respect, the German's thought process is intentionally presented in a typical form. In his little native town he had never known a Frenchman. His feelings towards the French, of whom he had no concrete experience whatever, took the form of a genial, but somewhat contemptuous, sympathy. "The French are good fellows, but rather a slack lot," would seem to sum up his German prejudice. They are a nation of spineless artists, bad soldiers, corrupt politicians, women of easy virtue; but they are clever, amusing, and liberal-minded. Amid the order and sobriety of German life, he feels a certain yearning towards the democratic freedom of France. His first encounter with a French actress, Corinne, akin to Goethe's Philine, seems to confirm this facile judgment; but soon, when he meets Antoinette, he comes to realize the existence of another France. "You are so serious," he says with astonishment to the demure, tongue-tied girl, who in this foreign land is hard at work as a teacher in a pretentious, parvenu household. Her characteristics are not in keeping with his traditional prejudices. A Frenchwoman ought to be trivial, saucy, and wanton. For the first time France presents to him "the riddle of its twofold nature." This initial appeal from the distance exercises a mysterious lure. He begins to realize the infinite multiplicity of these foreign worlds. Like Gluck, Wagner, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach, he takes refuge from the narrowness of German provincial life, and flees to Paris, the fabled home of universal art.
His feeling on arrival is one of disorder, and this impression never leaves him. The first and last impression, the strongest impression, to which the German in him continually returns, is that powerful energies are being squandered through lack of discipline. His first guide in the fair is one of those spurious "real Parisians," one of the immigrants who are more Parisian in their manners than those who are Parisian by birth, a Jew of German extraction named Sylvain Kohn, who here passes by the name of Hamilton, and in whose hands all the threads of the trade in art are centered. He shows Jean Christophe the painters, the musicians, the politicians, the journalists; and Jean Christophe turns away disheartened. It seems to him that all their works exhale an unpleasant "odor femininus," an oppressive atmosphere laden with scent. He sees praises showered upon second-rate persons, hears a clamor of appreciation, without discovering a single genuine work of art. There is indeed art of a kind amid the medley, but it is over-refined and decadent; the work of taste and not of power; lacking integration through excess of irony; an Alexandrian-Greek literature and music; the breath of a moribund nation; the hothouse blossom of a perishing civilization. He sees an end, but no beginning. The German in him already hears "the rumbling of the cannon" which will destroy this enfeebled Greece.
He learns to know good men and bad; many of them are vain and stupid, dull and soulless; not one does he meet, in his experience of social life in Paris, who gives him confidence in France. The first messenger comes from a distance; this is Sidonie, the peasant girl who tends him during his illness. He learns, all at once, how calm and inviolable, how fertile and strong, is the earth, the humus, out of which the Parisian exotics suck their energies. He becomes acquainted with the people, the robust and serious-minded French people, which tills the land, caring naught for the noise of the great fair, the people which has made revolutions with the might of its wrath and has waged the Napoleonic wars with its enthusiasm. From this moment he feels there must be a real France still unknown to him. In conversation with Sylvain Kohn, he asks, "Where can I find France?" Kohn answers grandiloquently, "We are France!" Jean Christophe smiles bitterly, knowing well that he will have a long search. Those among whom he is now moving have hidden France.
At length comes the rencounter which is a turning-point in his fate; he meets Olivier, Antoinette's brother, the true Frenchman. Just as Dante, guided by Virgil, wanders through new and ever new circles of knowledge, so Jean Christophe, led by Olivier, learns with astonishment that behind this veil of noise, behind this clamorous faÇade, an elite is quietly laboring. He sees the work of persons whose names are never printed in the newspapers; sees the people, those who, remote from the hurly-burly, tranquilly pursue their daily round. He learns to know the new idealism of the France whose soul has been strengthened by defeat. At first this discovery fills him with rage. "I cannot understand you all," he cries to the gentle Olivier. "You live in the most beautiful of countries, are marvelously gifted, are endowed with the highest human sensibilities, and yet you fail to turn these advantages to account. You allow yourselves to be dominated and to be trampled upon by a handful of rascals. Rouse yourselves; get together; sweep your house clean!" The first and most natural thought of the German is for organization, for the drawing together of the good elements; the first thought of the strong man is to fight. Yet the best in France insist on holding aloof, some of them content with a mysterious clarity of vision, and others giving themselves up to a facile resignation. With that tincture of pessimism in their sagacity to which Renan has given such lucid expression, they shrink from the struggle. Action is uncongenial to them, and the hardest thing of all is to combine them for joint action. "They are over cautious, and visualize defeat before the battle begins." Lacking the optimism of the Germans, they remain isolated individuals, some from prudence, others from pride. They seem to be affected with a spirit of exclusiveness, the operation of which Jean Christophe is able to study in his own dwelling. On each story there live excellent persons who could combine well, but they will have nothing to do with one another. For twenty years they pass on the staircase without becoming acquainted, without the least concern about one another's lives. Thus the best among the artists remain strangers.
Jean Christophe suddenly comes to realize with all its merits and defects the essential characteristic of the French people, the desire for liberty. Each one wishes to be free for himself, free from ties. They waste enormous quantities of energy because each tries to wage the time struggle unaided, because they will not permit themselves to be organized, because they refuse to pull together in harness. Although their activities are thus paralyzed by their reason, their minds nevertheless remain free. Consequently they are enabled to permeate every revolutionary movement with the religious fervor of the solitary, and they can perpetually renew their own revolutionary faith. These things are their salvation, preserving them from an order which would be unduly rigid, from a mechanical system which would impose excessive uniformity. Jean Christophe at length understands that the noisy fair exists only to attract the unthinking, and to preserve a creative solitude for the really active spirits. He sees that for the French temperament this clamor is indispensable, is a means by which the French fire one another to labor; he sees that the apparent inconsequence of their thoughts is a rhythmical form of continuous renewal. His first impression, like that of so many Germans, had been that the French are effete. But after twenty years he realizes that in truth they are always ready for new beginnings, that amid the apparent contradictions of their spirit a hidden order reigns, a different order from that known to the Germans, just as their freedom is a different freedom. The citizen of the world, who no longer desires to impose upon any other nation the characteristics of his own, now contemplates with delight the eternal diversity of the races. As the light of the world is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum, so from this racial diversity arises that wonderful multiplicity in unity, the fellowship of all mankind.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PICTURE OF GERMANY
IN this romance, Germany likewise is viewed in a twofold aspect; but whereas France is seen first from without, with the eyes of a German, and then from within, with the eyes of a Frenchman, Germany is first viewed from within and then regarded from abroad. Moreover, just as happened in the case of France, two worlds are imperceptibly superimposed one upon the other; a clamant civilization and a silent one, a false culture and a true. We see respectively the old Germany, which sought its heroism in the things of the spirit, discovered its profundity in truth; and the new Germany, intoxicated with its own strength, grasping at the powers of the reason which as a philosophical discipline had transformed the world, and perverting them to the uses of business efficiency. It is not suggested that German idealism had become extinct; that there no longer existed the belief in a purer and more beautiful world freed from the compromises of our earthly lot. The trouble rather was that this idealism had been too widely diffused, had been generalized until it had grown thin and superficial. The German faith in God, turning practical, and now directed towards mundane ends, had been transformed into grandiose ideas of the national future. In art, it had been sentimentalized. In its new manifestations, it was signally displayed in the cheap optimism of Emperor William. The defeat which had spiritualized French idealism, had, from the German side, as a victory, materialized German idealism. "What has victorious Germany given to the world?" asks Jean Christophe. He answers his own question by saying: "The flashing of bayonets; vigor without magnanimity; brutal realism; force conjoined with greed for profit; Mars as commercial traveler." He is grieved to recognize that Germany has been harmed by victory. He suffers; for "one expects more of one's own country than of another, and is hurt more by the faults of one's own land." Ever the revolutionist, Christophe detests noisy self-assertion, militarist arrogance, the churlishness of caste feeling. In his conflict with militarized Germany, in his quarrel with the sergeant at the dance in the Alsatian village inn, we have an elemental eruption of the hatred for discipline felt by the artist, the lover of freedom; we have his protest against the brutalization of thought. He is compelled to shake the dust of Germany off his feet.
When he reaches France, however, he begins to realize Germany's greatness. "In a foreign environment his judgment was freed"; this statement applies to him as to all of us. Amid the disorder of France he learned to value the active orderliness of Germany; the skeptical resignation of the French made him esteem the vigorous optimism of the Germans; he was impressed by the contrast between a witty nation and a thoughtful one. Yet he was under no illusions about the optimism of the new Germany, perceiving that it is often spurious. He became aware that the idealism often took the form of idealizing a dictatorial will. Even in the great masters, he saw, to quote Goethe's wonderful phrase, "how readily in the Germans the ideal waxes sentimental." His passionate sincerity, grown pitiless in the atmosphere of French clarity, revolts against this hazy idealism, which compromises between truth and desire, which justifies abuses of power with the plea of civilization, and which considers that might is sufficient warrant for victory. In France he becomes aware of the faults of France, in Germany he realizes the faults of Germany, loving both countries because they are so different. Each suffers from the defective distribution of its merits. In France, liberty is too widely diffused and engenders chaos, while a few individuals comprising the elite keep their idealism intact. In Germany, idealism, permeating the masses, has been sugared into sentimentalism and watered into a mercantile optimism; and here a still smaller elite preserves complete freedom aloof from the crowd. Each suffers from an excessive development of national peculiarities. Nationalism, as Nietzsche says, "has in France corrupted character, and in Germany has corrupted spirit and taste." Could but the two peoples draw together and impress their best qualities upon one another, they would rejoice to find, as Christophe himself had found, that "the richer he was in German dreams, the more precious to him became the clarity of the Latin mind." Olivier and Christophe, forming a pact of friendship, hope for the day when their personal sentiments will be perpetuated in an alliance between their respective peoples. In a sad hour of international dissension, the Frenchman calls to the German in words still unfulfilled: "We hold out our hands to you. Despite lies and hatred, we cannot be kept apart. We have mutual need of one another, for the greatness of our spirit and of our race. We are the two pinions of the west. Should one be broken, the other is useless for flight. Even if war should come, this will not unclasp our hands, nor will it prevent us from soaring upwards together."
CHAPTER XV
THE PICTURE OF ITALY
JEAN CHRISTOPHE is growing old and weary when he comes to know the third country that will form part of the future European synthesis. He had never felt drawn towards Italy. As had happened many years earlier in the case of France, so likewise in the case of Italy, his sympathies had been chilled by his acceptance of the disastrous and prejudiced formulas by which the nations impose barriers between themselves while each extols its own peculiarities as peculiarly right and phenomenally strong. Yet hardly has he been an hour in Italy when these prejudices are shaken off and are replaced by enthusiastic admiration. He is fired by the unfamiliar light of the Italian landscape. He becomes aware of a new rhythm of life. He does not see fierce energy, as in Germany, or nervous mobility as in France; but the sweetness of these "centuries of ancient culture and civilization" makes a strong appeal to the northern barbarian. Hitherto his gaze has always been turned towards the future, but now he becomes aware of the charms of the past. Whereas the Germans are still in search of the best form of self-expression; and whereas the French refresh and renew themselves through incessant change; here he finds a nation with a clear sequence of tradition, a nation which need merely be true to its own past and to its own landscape, in order to fulfill the most perfect blossoming of its nature, in order to realize beauty.
It is true that Christophe misses the element which to him is the breath of life; he misses struggle. A gentle drowsiness seems universally prevalent, a pleasant fatigue which is debilitating and dangerous. "Rome is too full of tombs, and the city exhales death." The fire kindled by Mazzini and Garibaldi, the flame in which United Italy was forged, still glows in isolated Italian souls. Here, too, there is idealism. But it differs from the German and from the French idealism; it is not yet directed towards the citizenship of the world, but remains purely national; "Italian idealism is concerned solely with itself, with Italian desires, with the Italian race, with Italian renown." In the calm southern atmosphere, this flame does not burn so fiercely as to radiate a light through Europe; but it burns brightly and beautifully in these young souls, which are apt for all passions, though the moment has not yet come for the intensest ardors.
But as soon as Jean Christophe begins to love Italy, he grows afraid of this love. He realizes that Italy is also essential to him, in order that in his music and in his life the impetuosity of the senses shall be clarified to a perfect harmony. He understands how necessary the southern world is to the northern, and is now aware that only in the trio of Germany, France, and Italy does the full meaning of each voice become clear. In Italy, there is less illusion and more reality; but the land is too beautiful, tempting to enjoyment and killing the impulse towards action. Just as Germany finds a danger in her own idealism, because that idealism is too widely disseminated and becomes spurious in the average man; just as to France her liberty proves disastrous because it encourages in the individual an idea of absolute independence which estranges him from the community; so for Italy is her beauty a danger, since it makes her indolent, pliable, and self-satisfied. To every nation, as to every individual, the most personal of characteristics, the very things that commend the nation or the individual to others, are dangerous. It would seem, therefore, that nations and individuals must seek salvation by combining as far as possible with their own opposites. Thus will they draw nearer to the highest ideal, that of European unity, that of universal humanity. In Italy, as aforetime in France and in Germany, Jean Christophe redreams the dream which Rolland at two-and-twenty had first dreamed on the Janiculum. He foresees the European symphony, which hitherto poets alone have created in works transcending nationality, but which the nations as yet have failed to realize for themselves.
CHAPTER XVI
THE JEWS
IN the three diversified nations, by each of which Christophe is now attracted, now repelled, he finds a unifying element, adapted to each nation, but not completely merged therein—the Jews. "Do you notice," he says on one occasion to Olivier, "that we are always running up against Jews? It might be thought that we draw them as by a spell, for we continually find them in our path, sometimes as enemies and sometimes as allies." It is true that he encounters Jews wherever he goes. In his native town, the first people to give him a helping hand (for their own ends, of course) were the wealthy Jews who ran "Dionysos"; in Paris, Sylvain Kohn had been his mentor, LÉvy-Coeur his bitterest foe, Weil and Mooch his most helpful friends. In like manner, Olivier and Antoinette frequently hold converse with Jews, either on terms of friendship or on terms of enmity. At every cross-roads to which the artist comes, they stand like signposts pointing the way, now towards good and now towards evil.
Christophe's first feeling is one of hostility. Although he is too open-minded to entertain a sentiment of hatred for Jews, he has imbibed from his pious mother a certain aversion; and sharp-sighted though they are, he questions their capacity for the real understanding of his work. But again and again it becomes apparent to him that they are the only persons really concerned about his work at all, the only ones who value innovation for its own sake.
Olivier, the clearer-minded of the two, is able to explain matters to Christophe, showing that the Jews, cut off from tradition, are unconsciously the pioneers of every innovation which attacks tradition; these people without a country are the best assistants in the campaign against nationalism. "In France, the Jews are almost the only persons with whom a free man can discuss something novel, something that is really alive. The others take their stand upon the past, are firmly rooted in dead things. Of enormous importance is it that this traditional past does not exist for the Jews; or that in so far as it exists, it is a different past from ours. The result is that we can talk to Jews about to-day, whereas with those of our own race we can speak only of yesterday ... I do not wish to imply that I invariably find their doings agreeable. Often enough, I consider these doings actually repulsive. But at least they live, and know how to value what is alive.... In modern Europe, the Jews are the principal agents alike of good and of evil. Unwittingly they favor the germination of the seed of thought. Is it not among Jews that you have found your worst enemies and your best friends?"
Christophe agrees, saying: "It is perfectly true that they have encouraged me and helped me; that they have uttered words which invigorated me for the struggle, showing me that I was understood. Nevertheless, these friends are my friends no longer; their friendship was but a fire of straw. No matter! A passing sheen is welcome in the night. You are right, we must not be ungrateful."
He finds a place for them, these folk without a country, in his picture of the fatherlands. He does not fail to see the faults of the Jews. He realizes that for European civilization they do not form a productive element in the highest sense of the term; he perceives that in essence their work tends to promote analysis and decomposition. But this work of decomposition seems to him important, for the Jews undermine tradition, the hereditary foe of all that is new. Their freedom from the ties of country is the gadfly which plagues the "mangy beast of nationalism" until it loses its intellectual bearings. The decomposition they effect helps us to rid ourselves of the dead past, of the "eternal yesterday"; detachment from national ties favors the growth of a new spirit which it is itself incompetent to produce. These Jews without a country are the best assistants of the "good Europeans" of the future. In many respects Christophe is repelled by them. As a man cherishing faith in life, he dislikes their skepticism; to his cheerful disposition, their irony is uncongenial; himself striving towards invisible goals, he detests their materialism, their canon that success must be tangible. Even the clever Judith Mannheim, with her "passion for intelligence," understands only his work, and not the faith upon which that work is based. Nevertheless, the strong will of the Jews appeals to his own strength, their vitality to his vigorous life. He sees in them "the ferment of action, the yeast of life." A homeless man, he finds himself most intimately and most quickly understood by these "sanspatries." Furthermore, as a free citizen of the world, he is competent to understand on his side the tragedy of their lives, cut adrift from everything, even from themselves. He recognizes that they are useful as means to an end, although not themselves an end. He sees that, like all nations and races, the Jews must be harnessed to their contrast. "These neurotic beings ... must be subjected to a law that will give them stability.... Jews are like women, splendid when ridden on the curb, though it would be intolerable to be ruled either by Jews or by women." Just as little as the French spirit or the German spirit, is the Jewish spirit adapted for universal application. But Christophe does not wish the Jews to be different from what they are. Every race is necessary, for its peculiar characteristics are requisite for the enrichment of multiplicity, and for the consequent enlargement of life. Jean Christophe, now in his later years making peace with the world, finds that everything has its appointed place in the whole scheme. Each strong tone contributes to the great harmony. What may arouse hostility in isolation, serves to bind the whole together. Nay more, it is necessary to pull down the old buildings and to clear the ground before we can begin to build anew; the analytic spirit is the precondition of the synthetic. In all countries Christophe acclaims the folk without a country as helpers towards the foundation of the universal fatherland. He accepts them all into his dream of the New Europe, whose still distant rhythm stirs his responsive yearnings.
CHAPTER XVII
THE GENERATIONS
THUS the entire human herd is penned within ring after ring of hurdles, which the life-force must break down if it would win to freedom. We have the hurdle of the fatherland, which shuts us away from other nations; the hurdle of language, which imposes its constraint upon our thought; the hurdle of religion, which makes us unable to understand alien creeds; the hurdle of our own natures, barring the way to reality by prejudice and false learning. Terrible are the resulting isolations. The peoples fail to understand one another; the races, the creeds, individual human beings, fail to understand one another; they are segregated; each group or each individual has experience of no more than a part of life, a part of truth, a part of reality, each mistaking his part for the whole.
Even the free man, "freed from the illusion of fatherland, creed, and race," even he, who seems to have escaped from all the pens, is still enclosed within an ultimate ring of hurdles. He is confined within the limits of his own generation, for generations are the steps of the stairway by which humanity ascends. Every generation builds on the achievements of those that have gone before; here there is no possibility of retracing our footsteps; each generation has its own laws, its own form, its own ethic, its own inner meaning. And the tragedy of such compulsory fellowship arises out of this, that a generation does not in friendly fashion accept the achievements of its predecessors, does not gladly undertake the development of their acquisitions. Like individual human beings, like nations, the generations are animated with hostile prejudices against their neighbors. Here, likewise, struggle and mistrust are the abiding law. The second generation rejects what the first has done; the deeds of the first generation do not secure approval until the third or the fourth generation. All evolution takes place according to what Goethe termed "a spiral recurrence." As we rise, we revolve on narrowing circles round the same axis. Thus the struggle between generation and generation is unceasing.
Each generation is perforce unjust towards its predecessors. "As the generations succeed one another, they become more strongly aware of the things which divide them than they are of the things which unite. They feel impelled to affirm the indispensability, the importance, of their own existence, even at the cost of injustice or falsehood to themselves." Like individual human beings, they have "an age when one must be unjust if one is to be able to live." They have to live out their own lives vigorously, asserting their own peculiarities in respect of ideas, forms, and civilization. It is just as little possible to them to be considerate towards later generations, as it has been for earlier generations to be considerate towards them. There prevails in this self-assertion the eternal law of the forest, where the young trees tend to push the earth away from the roots of the older trees, and to sap their strength, so that the living march over the corpses of the dead. The generations are at war, and each individual is unwittingly a champion on behalf of his own era, even though he may feel himself out of sympathy with that era.
Jean Christophe, the young solitary in revolt against his time, was without knowing it the representative of a fellowship. In and through him, his generation declared war against the dying generation, was unjust in his injustice, young in his youth, passionate in his passion. He grew old with his generation, seeing new waves rising to overwhelm him and his work. Now, having gained wisdom, he refused to be wroth with those who were wroth with him. He saw that his enemies were displaying the injustice and the impetuosity which he had himself displayed of yore. Where he had fancied a mechanical destiny to prevail, life had now taught him to see a living flux. Those who in his youth had been fellow revolutionists, now grown conservative, were fighting against the new youth as they themselves in youth had fought against the old. Only the fighters were new; the struggle was unchanged. For his part, Jean Christophe had a friendly smile for the new, since he loved life more than he loved himself. Vainly does his friend Emmanuel urge him to defend himself, to pronounce a moral judgment upon a generation which declared valueless all the things which they of an earlier day had acclaimed as true with the sacrifice of their whole existence. Christophe answers: "What is true? We must not measure the ethic of a generation with the yardstick of an earlier time." Emmanuel retorts: "Why, then, did we seek a measure for life, if we were not to make it a law for others?" Christophe refers him to the perpetual flux, saying: "They have learned from us, and they are ungrateful; such is the inevitable succession of events. Enriched by our efforts, they advance further than we were able to advance, realizing the conquests which we struggled to achieve. If any of the freshness of youth yet lingers in us, let us learn from them, and seek to rejuvenate ourselves. If this is beyond our powers, if we are too old to do so, let us at least rejoice that they are young."
Generations must grow and die as men grow and die. Everything on earth is subject to nature's laws, and the man strong in faith, the pious freethinker, bows himself to the law. But he does not fail to recognize (and herein we see one of the profoundest cultural acquirements of the book) that this very flux, this transvaluation of values, has its own secular rhythm. In former times, an epoch, a style, a faith, a philosophy, endured for a century; now such phases do not outlast a generation, endure barely for a decade. The struggle has become fiercer and more impatient. Mankind marches to a quicker measure, digests ideas more rapidly than of old. "The development of European thought is proceeding at a livelier pace, much as if its acceleration were concomitant with the advance in our powers of mechanical locomotion.... The stores of prejudices and hopes which in former times would have nourished mankind for twenty years, are exhausted now in a lustrum. In intellectual matters the generations gallop one after another, and sometimes outpace one another." The rhythm of these spiritual transformations is the epopee of Jean Christophe. When the hero returns to Germany from Paris, he can hardly recognize his native land. When from Italy he revisits Paris, the city seems strange to him. Here and there he still finds the old "foire sur la place," but its affairs are transacted in a new currency; it is animated with a new faith; new ideas are exchanged in the market place; only the clamor rises as of old. Between Olivier and his son Georges lies an abyss like that which separates two worlds, and Olivier is delighted that his son should regard him with contempt. The abyss is an abyss of twenty years.
Life must eternally express itself in new forms; it refuses to allow itself to be dammed up by outworn thoughts, to be hemmed in by the philosophies and religions of the past; in its headstrong progress it sweeps accepted notions out of its way. Each generation can understand itself alone; it transmits a legacy to unknown heirs who will interpret and fulfill as seems best to them. As the heritage from his tragical and solitary generation, Rolland offers his great picture of a free soul. He offers it "to the free souls of all nations; to those who suffer, struggle, and will conquer." He offers it with the words:
"I have written the tragedy of a vanishing generation. I have made no attempt to conceal either its vices or its virtues, to hide its load of sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, its struggles beneath the overwhelming burden of a superhuman task—the task of remaking an entire world, an ethic, an Æsthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were we in our generation.
"Men of to-day, young men, your turn has come. March forward over our bodies. Be greater and happier than we have been.
"For my part, I say farewell to my former soul. I cast it behind me like an empty shell. Life is a series of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, that we may be reborn."
CHAPTER XVIII
DEPARTURE
JEAN CHRISTOPHE has reached the further shore. He has stridden across the river of life, encircled by roaring waves of music. Safely carried across seems the heritage which he has borne on his shoulders through storm and flood—the meaning of the world, faith in life.
Once more he looks back towards his fellows in the land he has left. All has grown strange to him. He can no longer understand those who are laboring and suffering amid the ardors of illusion. He sees a new generation, young in a different way from his own, more energetic, more brutal, more impatient, inspired with a different heroism. The children of the new days have fortified their bodies with physical training, have steeled their courage in aerial flights. "They are proud of their muscles and their broad chests." They are proud of their country, their religion, their civilization, of all that they believe to be their own peculiar appanage; and from each of these prides they forge themselves a weapon. "They would rather act than understand." They wish to show their strength and test their powers. The dying man realizes with alarm that this new generation, which has never known war, wants war.
He looks shudderingly around: "The fire which had been smouldering in the European forest was now breaking forth into flame. Extinguished in one place, it promptly began to rage in another. Amid whirlwinds of smoke and a rain of sparks, it leaped from point to point, while the parched undergrowth kindled. Outpost skirmishes in the east had already begun, as preludes to the great war of the nations. The whole of Europe, that Europe which was still skeptical and apathetic like a dead forest, was fuel for the conflagration. The fighting spirit was universal. From moment to moment, war seemed imminent. Stifled, it was continually reborn. The most trifling pretext served to feed its strength. The world felt itself to be at the mercy of chance, which would initiate the terrible struggle. It was waiting. A feeling of inexorable necessity weighed upon all, even upon the most pacific. The ideologues, sheltering in the shade of Proudhon the titan, hailed war as man's most splendid claim to nobility.
"It was for this, then, that there had been effected a physical and moral resurrection of the races of the west! It was towards these butcheries that the streams of action and passionate faith had been hastening! None but a Napoleonic genius could have directed these blind impulses to a foreseen and deliberately chosen end. But nowhere in Europe was there any one endowed with the genius for action. It seemed as if the world had singled out the most commonplace among its sons to be governors. The forces of the human spirit were coursing in other channels."
Christophe recalls those earlier days when he and Olivier had been concerned about the prospect of war. At that time there were but distant rumblings of the storm. Now the storm clouds covered all the skies of Europe. Fruitless had been the call to unity; vain had been the pointing out of the path through the darkness. Mournfully the seer contemplates in the distance the horsemen of the Apocalypse, the heralds of fratricidal strife.
But beside the dying man is the Child, smiling and full of knowledge; the Child who is Eternal Life.
