CHAPTER XIII
THE PICTURE OF FRANCE
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.
PART FIVE
INTERMEZZO SCHERZOSO
(Colas Breugnon)
"Brugnon, mauvais garçon, tu ris, n'as tu pas honte?"—"Que veux tu, mon ami? Je suis ce que je suis. Rire ne m'empêche pas de souffrir; mais souffrir n'empêchera jamais un bon Français de rire. Et qu'il rie ou larmoie, il faut d'abord qu'il voie."
Colas Breugnon.
CHAPTER I
TAKEN UNAWARES
AT length, in this arduous career, came a period of repose. The great ten-volume novel had been finished; the work of European scope had been completed. For the first time Romain Rolland could exist outside his work, free for new words, new configurations, new labors. His disciple Jean Christophe, "the livest man of our acquaintance," as Ellen Key phrased it, had gone out into the world; Christophe was collecting a circle of friends around him, a quiet but continually enlarging community. For Rolland, nevertheless, Jean Christophe's message was already a thing of the past. The author was in search of a new messenger, for a new message.
Romain Rolland returned to Switzerland, a land he loved, lying between the three countries to which his affection had been chiefly given. The Swiss environment had been favorable to so much of his work. Jean Christophe had been begun in Switzerland. A calm and beautiful summer enabled Rolland to recruit his energies. There was a certain relaxation of tension. Almost idly, he turned over various plans. He had already begun to collect materials for a new novel, a dramatic romance belonging to the same intellectual and cultural category as Jean Christophe.
Now of a sudden, as had happened twenty-five years earlier when the vision of Jean Christophe had come to him on the Janiculum, in the course of sleepless nights he was visited by a strange and yet familiar figure, that of a countryman from ancestral days whose expansive personality thrust all other plans aside. Shortly before, Rolland had revisited Clamecy. The old town had awakened memories of his childhood. Almost unawares, home influences were at work, and his native province had begun to insist that its son, who had described so many distant scenes, should depict the land of his birth. The Frenchman who had so vigorously and passionately transformed himself into a European, the man who had borne his testimony as European before the world, was seized with a desire to be, for a creative hour, wholly French, wholly Burgundian, wholly Nivernais. The musician accustomed to unite all voices in his symphonies, to combine in them the deepest expressions of feeling, was now longing to discover a new rhythm, and after prolonged tension to relax into a merry mood. For ten years he had been dominated by a sense of strenuous responsibility; the equipment of Jean Christophe had been, as it were, a burden which his soul had had to bear. Now it would be a pleasure to pen a scherzo, free and light, a work unconcerned with the stresses of politics, ethics, and contemporary history. It should be divinely irresponsible, an escape from the exactions of the time spirit.
During the day following the first night on which the idea came to him, he had exultantly dismissed other plans. The rippling current of his thoughts was effortless in its flow. Thus, to his own astonishment, during the summer months of 1913, Rolland was able to complete his light-hearted novel Colas Breugnon, the French intermezzo in the European symphony.
CHAPTER II
THE BURGUNDIAN BROTHER
IT seemed at first to Rolland as if a stranger, though one from his native province and of his own blood, had come cranking into his life. He felt as though, out of the clear French sky, the book had burst like a meteor upon his ken. True, the melody is new; different are the tempo, the key, the epoch. But those who have acquired a clear understanding of the author's inner life cannot fail to realize that this amusing book does not constitute an essential modification of his work. It is but a variation, in an archaic setting, upon Romain Rolland's leit-motif of faith in life. Prince Aërt and King Louis were forefathers and brothers of Olivier. In like manner Colas Breugnon, the jovial Burgundian, the lusty wood-carver, the practical joker always fond of his glass, the droll fellow, is, despite his old-world costume, a brother of Jean Christophe looking at us adown the centuries.
As ever, we find the same theme underlying the novel. The author shows us how a creative human being (those who are not creative, hardly count for Rolland) comes to terms with life, and above all with the tragedy of his own life. Colas Breugnon, like Jean Christophe, is the romance of an artist's life. But the Burgundian is an artist of a vanished type, such as could not without anachronism have been introduced into Jean Christophe. Colas Breugnon is an artist only through fidelity, diligence, and fervor. In so far as he is an artist, it is in the faithful performance of his daily task. What raises him to the higher levels of art is not inspiration, but his broad humanity, his earnestness, and his vigorous simplicity. For Rolland, he was typical of the nameless artists who carved the stone figures that adorn French cathedrals, the artist-craftsmen to whom we owe the beautiful gateways, the splendid castles, the glorious wrought ironwork of the middle ages. These artificers did not fashion their own vanity into stone, did not carve their own names upon their work; but they put something into that work which has grown rare to-day, the joy of creation. In Jean Christophe, on one occasion, Romain Rolland had indited an ode to the civic life of the old masters who were wholly immersed in the quiet artistry of their daily occupations. He had drawn attention to the life of Sebastian Bach and his congeners. In like manner, he now wished to display anew what he had depicted in so many portraits of the artists, in the studies of Michelangelo, Beethoven, Tolstoi, and Handel. Like these sublime figures, Colas Breugnon took delight in his creative work. The magnificent inspiration that animated them was lacking to the Burgundian, but Breugnon had a genius for straightforwardness and for sensual harmony. Without aspiring to bring salvation to the world, not attempting to wrestle with the problems of passion and the spiritual life, he was content to strive for that supreme simplicity of craftsmanship which has a perfection of its own and thus brings the craftsman into touch with the eternal. The primitive artist-artisan is contrasted with the comparatively artificialized artist of modern days; Hephaistos, the divine smith, is contrasted with the Pythian Apollo and with Dionysos. The simpler artist's sphere is perforce narrower, but it is enough that an artist should be competent to fill the sphere for which he is pre-ordained.
Nevertheless, Colas Breugnon would not have been the typical artist of Rolland's creation, had not struggle been a conspicuous feature of his life, and had we not been shown through him that the real man is always stronger than his destiny. Even the cheerful Colas experiences a full measure of tragedy. His house is burned down, and the work of thirty years perishes in the flames; his wife dies; war devastates the country; envy and malice prevent the success of his last artistic creations; in the end, illness elbows him out of active life. The only defenses left him against his troubles, against age, poverty, and gout, are "the souls he has made," his children, his apprentice, and one friend. Yet this man, sprung from the Burgundian peasantry, has an armor to protect him from the bludgeonings of fate, armor no less effectual than was the invincible German optimism of Jean Christophe or the inviolable faith of Olivier. Breugnon has his imperturbable cheerfulness. "Sorrows never prevent my laughing; and when I laugh, I can always weep at the same time." Epicure, gormandizer, deep drinker, ever ready to leave work for play, he is none the less a stoic when misfortune comes, an uncomplaining hero in adversity. When his house burns, he exclaims: "The less I have, the more I am." The Burgundian craftsman is a man of lesser stature than his brother of the Rhineland, but the Burgundian's feet are no less firmly planted on the beloved earth. Whereas Christophe's daimon breaks forth in storms of rage and frenzy, Colas reacts against the visitations of destiny with the serene mockery of a healthy Gallic temperament. His whimsical humor helps him to face disaster and death. Assuredly this mental quality is one of the most valuable forms of spiritual freedom.
Freedom, however, is the least important among the characteristics of Rolland's heroes. His primary aim is always to show us a typical example of a man armed against his doom and against his god, a man who will not allow himself to be defeated by the forces of life. In the work we are now considering, it amuses him to present the struggle as a comedy, instead of portraying it in a more serious dramatic vein. But the comedy is always transfigured by a deeper meaning. Despite the lighter touches, as when the forlorn old Colas is unwilling to take refuge in his daughter's house, or as when he boastfully feigns indifference after the destruction of his home (lest his soul should be vexed by having to accept the sympathy of his fellow men), still amid this tragi-comedy he is animated by the unalloyed desire to stand by his own strength.
Before everything, Colas Breugnon is a free man. That he is a Frenchman, that he is a burgher, are secondary considerations. He loves his king, but only so long as the king leaves him his liberty; he loves his wife, but follows his own bent; he is on excellent terms with the priest of a neighboring parish, but never goes to church; he idolizes his children, but his vigorous individuality makes him unwilling to live with them. He is friendly with all, but subject to none; he is freer than the king; he has that sense of humor characteristic of the free spirit to whom the whole world belongs. Among all nations and in all ages, that being alone is truly alive who is stronger than fate, who breaks through the seine of men and things as he swims freely down the great stream of life. We have seen how Christophe, the Rhinelander, exclaimed: "What is life? A tragedy! Hurrah!" From his Burgundian brother comes the response: "Struggle is hard, but struggle is a delight." Across the barriers of epoch and language, the two look on one another with sympathetic understanding. We realize that free men form a spiritual kinship independent of the limitations imposed by race and time.
CHAPTER III
GAULOISERIES
ROMAIN ROLLAND had looked upon Colas Breugnon as an intermezzo, as an easy occupation, which should, for a change, enable him to enjoy the delights of irresponsible creation. But there is no irresponsibility in art. A thing arduously conceived is often heavy in execution, whereas that which is lightly undertaken may prove exceptionally beautiful.
From the artistic point of view, Colas Breugnon may perhaps be regarded as Rolland's most successful work. This is because it is woven in one piece, because it flows with a continuous rhythm, because its progress is never arrested by the discussion of thorny problems. Jean Christophe was a book of responsibility and balance. It was to discuss all the phenomena of the day; to show how they looked from every side, in action and reaction. Each country in turn made its demand for full consideration. The encyclopedic picture of the world, the deliberate comprehensiveness of the design, necessitated the forcible introduction of many elements which transcended the powers of harmonious composition. But Colas Breugnon is written throughout in the same key. The first sentence gives the note like a tuning fork, and thence the entire book takes its pitch. Throughout, the same lively melody is sustained. The writer employs a peculiarly happy form. His style is poetic without being actually versified; it has a melodious measure without being strictly metrical. The book, printed as prose, is written in a sort of free verse, with an occasional rhymed series of lines. It is possible that Rolland adopted the fundamental tone from Paul Fort; but that which in the Ballades françaises with their recurrent burdens leads to the formation of canzones, is here punctuated throughout an entire book, while the phrasing is most ingeniously infused with archaic French locutions after the manner of Rabelas.
Here, Rolland wishes to be a Frenchman. He goes to the very heart of the French spirit, has recourse to "gauloiseries," and makes the most successful use of the new medium, which is unique, and which cannot be compared with any familiar literary form. For the first time we encounter an entire novel which, while written in old-fashioned French like that of Balzac's Contes drolatiques, succeeds in making its intricate diction musical throughout. "The Old Woman's Death" and "The Burned House" are as vividly picturesque as ballads. Their characteristic and spiritualized rhythmical quality contrasts with the serenity of the other pictures, although they are not essentially different from these. The moods pass lightly, like clouds drifting across the sky; and even beneath the darkest of these clouds, the horizon of the age smiles with a fruitful clearness. Never was Rolland able to give such exquisite expression to his poetic bent as in this book wherein he is wholly the Frenchman. What he presents to us as whimsical sport and caprice, displays more plainly than anything else the living wellspring of his power: his French soul immersed in its favorite element of music.
CHAPTER IV
A FRUSTRATE MESSAGE
JEAN CHRISTOPHE was the deliberate divergence from a generation. Colas Breugnon is another divergence, unconsciously effected; a divergence from the traditional France, heedlessly cheerful. This "bourguinon salé" wished to show his fellow countrymen of a later day how life can be salted with mockery and yet be full of enjoyment. Rolland here displayed all the riches of his beloved homeland, displaying above all the most beautiful of these goods, the joy of life.
A heedless world, our world of to-day, was to be awakened by the poet singing of an earlier world which had been likewise impoverished, had likewise wasted its energies in futile hostility. A call to joy from a Frenchman, echoing down the ages, was to answer the voice of the German, Jean Christophe. Their two voices were to mingle harmoniously as the voices mingle in the Ode to Joy of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. During the tranquil summer the pages were stacked like golden sheaves. The book was in the press, to appear during the next summer, that of 1914.
But the summer of 1914 reaped a bloody harvest. The roar of the cannon, drowning Jean Christophe's warning cry, deafened the ears of those who might otherwise have hearkened also to the call to joy. For five years, the five most terrible years in the world's history, the luminous figure stood unheeded in the darkness. There was no conjuncture between Colas Breugnon and "la douce France"; for this book, with its description of the cheerful France of old, was not to appear until that Old France had vanished for ever.