Of them all, it is Grazia that he desires to marry. But Grazia, indifferent and gentle, loves Christophe less than her quiet days, her children’s interests, her pleasant, nonchalant, and sociable life of a handsome widow ‘well left,’ who cares above all things for her quieto vivere. She is not very interesting, this Grazia, so much in love with peace and measure; she and Christophe would have been as well mated as a sleek and sober Angora with a mastiff ever on the growl (though his bark is worse than his bite), and we are not very sorry when she dies. We have wept so many tears for poor old Louisa (Christophe’s mother), for Sabine, for Antoinette, for Olivier, that we have none to spare for the passive and elegant great lady. Neither in the painting of Grazia nor in his image of Rome is our author to be seen at his best. And yet what citizen of Cosmopolis knows Rome as well as Romain Rolland?
By the end of this tenth volume, Jean-Christophe is no longer young, and all has happened to him that reasonably could be expected to happen. He has mixed in the politics of several nations, he has known fight and flight and exile; he has been poor, he has been famous; he is now the greatest musician of his times. The most exacting reader could not wish to stretch him out much longer on the rack of this tough world. There are ten sizable volumes of him at Mr Ollendorff’s—or, if you prefer, seventeen of those wonderful little ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ (beloved of garrulous and expansive genius) in which M. Charles Péguy has produced not only M. Romain Rolland, but himself. Now we know all there is to know, and find that (as in real life) the climax is middling compared to the hopes of youth.
Jean-Christophe dies a genius; but we, after all, have never heard his operas. He dies, like any other mortal whom a living faith sustains in the last hour of all. The death of Jean-Christophe has probably preoccupied more readers than the end of any other hero in fiction since the great days of Dickens and Thackeray. We ourselves know one eminent hand in letters who wrote to the author suggesting that his hero should disappear in the wreck of the Titanic, conducting the band, in place of the unforgettable bandmaster. Another wished him to wander away alone and die in the desert, after the fashion of Tolstoi.
And I should have liked for him the death of Péguy—defending his country—leading his men into battle on the Marne—Ah! there’s the rub! Jean-Christophe was an enemy-alien; he would have been fighting in the Prussian ranks. For many years to come M. Rolland’s hero cannot be our hero.
A reader appreciative of the intentions of M. Rolland might have been sure than Jean-Christophe would die in no such picturesque or dramatic fashion, but quietly yield his life on the brink of a new world, as a wave effaces itself gently and vanishes in the sand, obliterated by the pressure of the oncoming wave.
The whole meaning of M. Rolland’s book is the continuity of Life, spreading insensibly from soul to soul, from sphere to sphere, in an endless symphony. And the last chapters are full of new characters, pushing forward, rising to maturity; children of the Past in whom the dead revive, fathers of the Future who already are changing the face of our world. The scheme of Jean-Christophe (rising thus, and falling, and rising at the end towards the yet unvisioned spectacle of times about to be) recalls the structure of Tolstoi’s War and Peace.
Jean-Christophe succumbs, sordidly enough, in a Paris lodging, to pneumonia. But he gives up the ghost in a mood of heroic joy, thankful to exchange the worn-out faculties, the dreary, dingy end of life, which are all he can dispose of here, for some undreamed-of harmony and power which await him (as he believes) beyond. Tolstoi himself has not a serener conviction that Life extends illimitably around our tiny sphere, bathing the shores of all the stars in a tide of continual renewal. The unity of the forces which compose a living being must sooner or later dissolve, but the processes of Infinity will reassemble them again. ‘Un jour je renaîtrai pour de nouveaux combats!’ Meanwhile, caught in a rapture beyond the delusion of self, the dying musician feels his personality expand and vanish for a while in something vaster. He is lost in the One-and-All. ‘Tu renaîtras.... Repose. Tout n’est plus qu’un seul cœur.’
And so Jean-Christophe greets a new dawn and leaves behind him, also, on earth a new day. The finest passages of this last volume contain M. Rolland’s masterly portrayal of the young France of our times. Surely never was there a generation more unlike its introspective, intellectual forbears: Hamlet has given birth to Harry Hotspur! We must perhaps go back to the times of Ausonius (when the fathers were readers of Seneca and Cicero and the sons hardy Christian barbarians) to find two generations similarly contrasted.
Jean-Christophe was a man of yesterday. His creed was to think no lie, to consent to no injustice, and to love his neighbour as himself. Here M. Rolland shows him in his puissant and solitary decline, dominating a new generation that rises round his knees, strangely different, with other ideals. Truth? Humanity? The old-fashioned words are rarely heard. We hear of Authority, of Order, of the claims of one’s race, of the rights and responsibilities of the strong. This new generation, which has witnessed no war, has the mind and disposition of conquerors. Christophe surveys with tender ironical affection the lovable breed of airmen, and sportsmen, and soldiers who fill France to-day—fresh, and frank, and admirably valiant, full of prompt physical courage and intellectual docility.
Jean-Christophe is perhaps the most remarkable work of contemporary fiction: a singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an unequalled sensibility, a torrent of sarcasm, rancour, revolt, tenderness, stream from its disconcerting pages. But these delicate notations of minute variations in sensibility, though infinitely precious to the psychologist, transgress the limits that strict art prescribes. Romain Rolland sacrifices every grace of measure and composition to his abundance, to his enthusiasm for Life. He has no sense of style. His endless files of short, breathless sentences succeed each other interminably, with no variation, till we experience at last the sensation of a drop falling at regular intervals on the crown of our head! He has been called ‘un volcan qui ne vomit que des cendres.’ And then the rare flame strikes out—passages of infinite tenderness or of solemn grandeur.