ROMAIN ROLLANDAUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE”BY ALVAN F. SANBORN“Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”—Rolland.
AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE”
BY ALVAN F. SANBORN
“Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”—Rolland.
ROMAINROLLANDis to-day a world celebrity. On June 5 he was awarded the “Grand Prix” of the French Academy.Jean-Christophe, the dominant figure of the enormous work which Rolland was a score of years in writing, and nearly half a score in publishing, is gradually becoming a household name upon two continents.“Jean-Christophe” is the detailed life of a man from the cradle to the grave, a prose epic of suffering, a narrative of the evolution of musical genius, a pæan to music, and a critique of composers, the history of an epoch, a comparative study of the civilizations of France and Germany, an arraignment of society, a discussion of vexed problems, a treatise on ethics, a “barrel” of sermons, a storehouse of dissertations, and a blaze of aspirations. It is also, the protestations of the author to the contrary notwithstanding, a novel, but a novel at once so earnest and so austere that it has performed the miracle of imparting to Anglo-Saxons a belief in French seriousness. Edmund Gosse pronounces it “the noblest work of fiction of the twentieth century,” and George Moore, “one of the most remarkable novels France ever produced.” It has also been characterized by American critics as “an epoch-making departure in fiction,” “the greatest literary work that has come out of France since Zola.”
ROMAINROLLANDis to-day a world celebrity. On June 5 he was awarded the “Grand Prix” of the French Academy.
Jean-Christophe, the dominant figure of the enormous work which Rolland was a score of years in writing, and nearly half a score in publishing, is gradually becoming a household name upon two continents.
“Jean-Christophe” is the detailed life of a man from the cradle to the grave, a prose epic of suffering, a narrative of the evolution of musical genius, a pæan to music, and a critique of composers, the history of an epoch, a comparative study of the civilizations of France and Germany, an arraignment of society, a discussion of vexed problems, a treatise on ethics, a “barrel” of sermons, a storehouse of dissertations, and a blaze of aspirations. It is also, the protestations of the author to the contrary notwithstanding, a novel, but a novel at once so earnest and so austere that it has performed the miracle of imparting to Anglo-Saxons a belief in French seriousness. Edmund Gosse pronounces it “the noblest work of fiction of the twentieth century,” and George Moore, “one of the most remarkable novels France ever produced.” It has also been characterized by American critics as “an epoch-making departure in fiction,” “the greatest literary work that has come out of France since Zola.”
“FROM behind the house mounts the murmuring of the river,” is the opening phrase of the first volume of “Jean-Christophe.” The last chapter of the last volume represents St. Christopher crossing the river, with “the Child, the day that is to be,” upon his shoulder; and beneath all the intervening pages the river flows, emerging ever and anon with whisperings, babblings, and gurglings, with purlings, trillings, and trumpetings, with roarings, swishings, and swashings, with plashings, splashings, and crashings. “There are human lives,” says Romain Rolland, “that are placid lakes; others are great, open skies wherein the clouds sail; others, fertile plains; others, jagged peaks.Jean-Christophehas always seemed to me to be a river.”
This preoccupation with the river, amounting almost to an obsession, is probably due to the prominence of water in the landscape in which Romain Rolland’s early years were passed. Clamecy, the little town of the Morvan in which he was born (January 29, 1866), is situated on the Nivernais Canal, in the angle formed by the junction of the rivers Beuvron and Yonne. The volume entitled “Antoinette” is replete with memories of the scenes of his childhood. In it he has described lovingly and charmingly not Clamecy itself, but a representative community of the same province, which is one of the most heavily wooded, as well as one of the most picturesque, of France, and little infested by tourists; and he has portrayed a family which, despite deliberate and ingenious disguises, bears a close resemblance to his own.
Furthermore, the refined and altogether lovableOlivier Jeanninis more like Romain Rolland than is his hero, the often insupportableJean-Christophe Krafft, whom his creator, unwittingly perhaps, made something of a cad and a good deal of a boor, a “fresh,” bumptious fellow, always going about with a chip on his shoulder, looking for trouble.
Plate in tint, engraved for THECENTURYby H. DavidsonROMAIN ROLLAND, AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE.”FROM A PORTRAIT DRAWING BY GRANIÉ❏LARGER IMAGE
Plate in tint, engraved for THECENTURYby H. Davidson
ROMAIN ROLLAND, AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE.”
FROM A PORTRAIT DRAWING BY GRANIÉ
❏LARGER IMAGE
In the Morvan, the physical type of the Gauls remains exceptionally pure, and of this type Romain Rolland is an almost perfect specimen. He is tall, he is spare; he is very blond, and his eyes are very blue. Despite a tendency to pallor and a slight stoop, he appears to be of the wiry breed that is capable of doing a great deal of hard work without excessive fatigue;but those who should know affirm that his “fine faculties were imprisoned by nature in a feeble and ailing body,” and that he has always been a close approach to an invalid in consequence. His demeanor is austere, and he is prone to long silences; but when he breaks his silences, he breaks them with a vengeance, like a pent-up torrent sweeping away a dam, and one sees that his austerity is only a cloak for sensitiveness, for passion, and for a mighty kindliness. He is an ideal comrade, a loyal friend, and a sort of patron saint or father confessor of young or struggling writers who have “the root of the matter” in them. For instance, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, having fallen under the spell of Dostoyevsky, was so oppressed by the pessimism of the great Russian that he was made nearly ill and was tempted to renounce all endeavor. Rolland, by tactful and tender encouragement, rescued him from this slough of despond, restoring to him his lost interest in life and art. The result was the beautiful sylvan novel, “Monsieur des Lourdines,” one of the sweetest and purest works of the last few years, which, without this intervention, probably never would have been written.
Rolland’s father was a notary, descended from notaries, and his mother was the daughter of a magistrate, descended from magistrates, who were related to Guillaume and Guillaume-Henri de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris (seventeenth century) and Chancellor of France (eighteenth century), respectively. At a very early age the boy studied music with his mother, who was an accomplished musician, and as soon as he dreamed of the future at all, he dreamed of a musical future. When he had exhausted the educational possibilities of Clamecy, whose communal college corresponds roughly with the average American high school, his parents, fearing to allow him to shift for himself, probably because of his delicate constitution, broke up their Nivernais establishment, and went with him to Paris, the father, with a self-sacrifice verging on heroism, exchanging the prestige of being one of the first citizens of a town to which he was devotedly attached for the effacement of a modest clerkship in the capital. In Paris, Romain entered, first, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and, later, at twenty, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating at the latter not in the department of letters, to which his tastes inclined him, but in that of history and geography, a concession, no doubt, to the father, who would have liked to see his son in the Ecole Polytechnique.
The choice was fortunate, since it put him under the tutelage of the historian Gabriel Monod, who possessed a fine personality and was a stimulating teacher, exerting a salutary moral as well as intellectual influence upon his pupils, in whom he inspired a sort of filial affection.
While at the Ecole Normale, Rolland was profoundly impressed by Wagner and by Tolstoy. In October, 1887, he was the happy and proud recipient of a letter from Tolstoy, saluting him as “Dear Brother,” which he published later, preceded by a fervid introduction, in “Les cahiers de la quinzaine.” “I loved Tolstoy profoundly,” he says in this introduction, “and I have never ceased to love him. For two or three years I lived enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought. I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karénina,’ and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ than with the works of any of the great French writers. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truthfulness, of this great man, were for me the surest of guides in the midst of the moral anarchy of the time.”
Shortly after being graduated from the Ecole Normale, Rolland was admitted to the French School of Archæology and History at Rome. Although prejudiced against Italy from his boyhood, he surrendered promptly and unconditionally not only to the splendor of the art enshrined in its monuments and museums, but to the ineffable charm of its landscape and its sky. “He took his revenge for the asceticism of the gray visions to which he had hitherto been condemned.... He was as a new man beginning life over.”
During his stay in Rome, he became a great favorite of the aged Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug, an extraordinary woman, who had known intimately and shared the hopes of all the European revolutionary movements from 1848 to 1870. Fräulein von Meysenbug’s “Memoirs,” wherein she gives her impressions of herillustrious friends, Kossuth, Mazzini, Hertzen, Ogareff, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Wagner, Lenbach, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, contains this reference to the protégé of her declining years: “I find in this young Frenchman Rolland the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound understanding of all the great intellectual issues that I have found in the superior men of other nationalities.”
To this period of Rolland’s life belong a number of historical plays,—“Les Baglioni,” “Le siège de Mantoue,” “Niobé,” “Caligula,” “Jeanne de Piennes,” “Orsino,”—which Fräulein von Meysenbug, not an entirely impartial judge, pronounced admirable, but which thus far their author has not seen fit to give to the world. They were inspired in a certain degree by Shakspere. “Despite Tolstoy, Wagner, etc.,” Rolland wrote to a friend, “Shakspere is the one artist I have most constantly preferred from my childhood. And if the Shakspere of the historical dramas is not the only Shakspere I love, he is at least the Shakspere who has influenced me most directly by opening up to me the horizons of this new artistic world and providing me with incomparable models.”
When Rolland returned to France, he had become not only an archæological and historical pundit, but under the influence of the ardent humanitarian Von Meysenbug and of the advanced artists, agitators, and reformers who gravitated about her, an insurgent and just a bit of a fanatic. He was consumed with generous ardor to edify and elevate his compatriots, who seemed to him crushed and degraded by subserviency to convention and tradition.
Thenceforth his every act was to be combative, was to possess an unequivocal social significance, was to count, if not for revolution, at least for radical reform. His thesis for the doctorate, “The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,” sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne, June 19, 1895, was the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body. It was intended as a protest against the disdain with which music, in contradistinction to painting, sculpture, and architecture, had always been treated by the university, and was a move to secure for music the consideration it deserves.
Rolland’s next moves were the organization (1898) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales of a department of music, in opening which he delivered a pithy and brilliant address on the place of music in general history; the unobtrusive but bold transformation (1903) of the course on the history of art, with which he had been intrusted by the Ecole Normale (in 1897), into a course on the history of music; and the stubborn maintenance of this iconoclastic orientation after the absorption of the Ecole Normale by the Sorbonne.
Rolland was also the leading spirit of a movement, so impassioned that it amounted to a veritable crusade, for the democratization of the drama, “for the creation,” to employ his rather ambitious phraseology, “of a new art for a new world.” He aspired to replace the contemporaneous stage by a stage more human and fraternal, that should edify and improve the masses on one hand, and emancipate and develop art on the other, and to found “a theater of, by, and for the people,” that should “share the bread of the people, their restlessness and anxieties, their battles and their hopes,” and that should be for them “a fountain-head of joy and of life.” In March, 1899, he signed, with Lucien Besnard, Maurice Pottecher, Louis Lumet, and Gabriel Trarieux, a somewhat turgid manifesto which ended thus: “Make no mistake. It is no mere literary experiment we are proposing. It is a question of life or death for art and for the people. For, if art is not opened to the people, it is doomed to disappear; and if the people do not discover the pathway of art, humanity abdicates its destinies.” To this propaganda, Rolland contributed a volume entitled “Le théâtre du peuple,” which contained both eloquent and grandiloquent passages, and a virile and highly colored, if slightly declamatory, tetralogy of the Revolution,—“Le quatorze juillet,” “Danton,” “Les loups,” “Le triomphe de la raison,”—designed to “resuscitate the forces of the past, reanimate its capacities for action, and rekindle the national faith and heroism with the flames of the republican epoch, in order that the work interrupted in 1794 may be resumed and completed by a people more mature and more fully aware of its destiny.”“Danton,” “Les loups,” and “Le triomphe de la raison” were given two or three performances each by dramatic societies of one sort or another; and “Le quatorze juillet” was finally produced by a regular theater (La Renaissance), but its run was short.
Rolland was a vehement Dreyfusard, with a special enthusiasm for Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. “He who can see injustice without trying to combat it is neither entirely an artist,” he observed, in this connection, “nor entirely a man”; and he protested vigorously against the British invasion of the Transvaal with a play, dedicated to “Civilization” and entitled “Le temps viendra,” in which he makes one of the characters say: “Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”
Sadly disillusioned by the triumph of might over right in South Africa, by the altogether shameless manner in which the righteous indignation of the sincere Dreyfusards was exploited by the professional politicians, and by the failure of his efforts to regenerate the stage, Rolland found fresh force and new courage in a study of the lives of heroes, the men who were great of heart in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, the noble souls who suffered for the sake of right; and always a propagandist, he straightway endeavored to found a cult of heroism, to persuade his fellows “to read in the eyes” of those sanctified by suffering, and in the histories of their careers, that “life is never greater, more fruitful, and more blessed than in affliction.” To this end he wrote a series of biographies of heroes (“Beethoven,” “Michelangelo,” “Tolstoy,” “Millet,” “Handel,” “Hugo Wolf,” etc.), which he presented to the French public and to the rest of the world with these ringing words: “The air is heavy about us. Old Europe is waxing torpid in an oppressive and vitiated atmosphere. A materialism devoid of grandeur cumbers thought and fetters the action of governments and of individuals. The world is dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism. The world is stifling. Fling the windows wide open! Let the free air rush in! Let us inhale the vivifying breath of the heroes!”
“Jean-Christophe,” which is a ten-volume biography of an imaginary hero, synthesizes and supplements the “Théâtre du peuple” and the heroic biographies. It is, like them, an act of propaganda, conceived in a similar spirit of revolt, and animated by a similar desire to help people “to live, to correct their errors, to conquer their prejudices, and to enlarge from day to day their thoughts and their hearts.” “I was isolated,” writes Rolland, regarding the origin of this now famous work; “I was stifling, like so many others in France, in a hostile moral atmosphere; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against a sickly civilization, against a thought corrupted by a false élite.
“I wanted to say to this élite: ‘You are liars! You do not represent France!’ And for that I needed a hero of pure eyes and of pure heart, with a soul sufficiently unblemished to have the right to speak, and with a voice strong enough to make itself heard.”
The veritable drubbing the fourth volume of “Jean-Christophe” gives Germany was inspired by sympathy, not by antipathy; it was the rod, so to speak, indispensable to the salvation of the child. “I am not in the least an enemy of Germany,” Rolland wrote in a personal letter bearing the date of September 12, 1907, “and the best proof is that I have chosen a German for my hero. The absolute sincerity, the creative energy, and the moral rigidity ofChristopheoffset his rather severe criticisms of his countrymen. No German can love more than I the Germany of Goethe and of Beethoven. But I believe that the Germany of to-day is sick; and, in her interest, some one must have the courage to say so. You may be sure thatChristophe, at present in Paris, will be as hard upon my compatriots as he has been upon his own.”
This prediction was amply verified, as we know, by Volume V, “La foire sur la place,” which, in its turn, proceeded not from malevolence, but from a deep-rooted determination to “battle for the life and the honor of the race”; not from anti-patriotism, but from the high and pure form of patriotism that wishes its country to be blameless.“Whosoever has divined the soul that animates the body of this people, which does not want to perish, can and must boldly lay bare its vices and its follies, in order to combat them—in order to combat especially those who exploit them and who live off them. To struggle is even to inflict pain that good may come.”
The entire ten volumes preach that all things work together for good to the persons or the peoples who hitch their wagons to the stars.
Incidentally, Rolland seems also to teach in “Jean-Christophe” that the Gallic ideal and the Germanic ideal, “the vast culture and the combative reason of France” and “the inner music and the feeling for nature of Germany,” have everything to gain by joining forces.
Romain Rolland has not solved the riddle of existence. His works are less a revelation than an inspiration; he is a well-nigh peerless kindler of ambition of the higher order. He has not done much toward making life comprehensible, but he has done a good deal, and possibly this is better, toward making it livable, at least for those who have renounced trying to comprehend it. He aids and encourages the downcast or despairing not with tenets of philosophy or religion,—dogmas are hisbête noire,—but with stories of heroic souls whose example arouses them to a consciousness of their own capacity for virtue, inspires them with faith in themselves and in the future, and shows them how blessedness may be wrought out of wretchedness. It is the old, old, but always new, message of joy through sanctified suffering.
“Seek not happiness, seek blessedness. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him!” thundered the British worshiper and biographer of heroes, Carlyle.
The French biographer and worshiper of heroes expresses essentially the same thought in slightly different terms:
And the little fifteen-year-old Puritan heard the voice of his God.“Go on, on and on, never stopping to rest.”“But where shall I go, Lord? Whatever I do, wherever I go, is not the result always the same, is not the end always there?”“Go die, you who are doomed to die! Go suffer, you who are doomed to suffer! You do not live to be happy. You live to accomplish my Law. Suffer! Die! But be what you should be—a Man!”
And the little fifteen-year-old Puritan heard the voice of his God.
“Go on, on and on, never stopping to rest.”
“But where shall I go, Lord? Whatever I do, wherever I go, is not the result always the same, is not the end always there?”
“Go die, you who are doomed to die! Go suffer, you who are doomed to suffer! You do not live to be happy. You live to accomplish my Law. Suffer! Die! But be what you should be—a Man!”
Romain Rolland, at forty-seven, has proved himself a man of great heart and of pure conscience, one of the heroic beings “forged upon the anvil of physical and moral suffering,” who dares “to look anguish in the face and venerate it”; one of the choice spirits who, seeing the world as it is, still loves it. Intoxicated with proselyting zeal, he has not thus far deigned—more’s the pity!—to become the supreme literary artist such a well-nigh flawless gem as his “Beethoven,” the best pages of “Jean-Christophe,” and his less known works, show that he can be if he will. But signs are not wanting of a growing sympathy with the sanity, the symmetry, and the harmony of classic art. His latest volume, “La nouvelle journée,” is instinct with a yearning for serenity that may lift him ultimately to a place beside the undisputed masters. It does not yet appear what he will be. He himself affirms that his work has only just begun. The time may not be far distant when, likeChristophetoward the end of his career, he will blush at his former lack of orderliness and measure; when, imposing upon himself a rigid discipline, he will resolve “to be the king” of his tumultuous temperament; when his literary creations will take on, as did the mature musical creations of his hero, calmer, cooler, purer, serener forms. The torrent gradually loses its boisterousness as it approaches the sea.
In any event, Rolland’s splendid sincerity guarantees that he will not be the slave of his record. “As for me,” he declares in the farewell toChristophewith which he prefaces “La nouvelle journée,” “I bid adieu to my past soul; I cast it away like an empty husk. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die,Christophe, to be born again!”