Still, let me own, while I admire Jean-Christophe, I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who composed his novels at a like tremendous length, and then, pen in hand, went through his manuscript again, and reduced it by two-thirds.
When we open by chance one of those old novels, still famous, long unread, which nourished the minds of our ancestors—Clarissa Harlowe, La Nouvelle Héloise, or L’Astrée, or Amadis—or any other of those immense, untidy romances, vast bazaars or stores of their age, which provided several generations with every necessary of life, we are nearly always astonished to find them so interesting and so good. Our forefathers were no fools: what they loved in these books, which were for them a school of feeling, was not Art, but Life. Nothing is more instructive in this connection than to read a letter of Mme de Sévigné’s on the interminable masterpiece of La Calprenède; the great lady, so delicate, so difficile, ‘blessée des méchants styles,’ can scarcely understand her own enthusiasm:—
‘Le style de La Calprenède est maudit en mille endroits; de grandes périodes de roman, de méchants mots—je sens tout cela ... et cependant je ne laisse pas de m’y prendre comme à de la glu; la beauté des sentiments, la violence des passions, la grandeur des événements tout cela m’entraîne comme une petite fille.’
And even as Mme de Sévigné was absorbed in Cléopatre we lose ourselves in Jean-Christophe. Romain Rolland is the great spectator of our times. Will this quality of moralising criticism, this tendency to preach as well as to paint, and to hold the mirror up to Nature in a mood of violent irony—will this gift of satire keep its savour when the generation whom M. Rolland alternately objurgates and encourages shall have passed away? It is difficult to say. He is perhaps one of a race who exist rather because of a certain flame of life, a force of personality, than because of the perfection of their work. Tolstoi, Dr Johnson, Rousseau, are the great names of this fraternity. We are their characters, they mould us, they move us, no less than their puppets. And we treasure their lessons. But do we often open The Rambler or La Nouvelle Héloise? Will our children know, as we know, all the ins and outs of War and Peace? And have we, finally, the right to include M. Romain Rolland in this great category of artists who were something more than artists? It is too soon to say. We are still lost in the multiplicity of detail, the immense succession of portraits (not only of persons but of generations and nations and societies) which fill the vast canvas of Jean-Christophe.
EDMOND ROSTAND
When, in 1886, at eighteen years of age, Edmond Rostand, carried off the Prize for Eloquence at the Academy of Marseilles, the bent of his genius was already plain. For in praising Honoré d’Urfé and his great romance, Astrée, the young poet pleaded the cause of a form of art as far removed as possible from the Naturalist formulas which were still the fashion of the hour. And his praise appeared a programme; and the young apologist of Urfé discovered himself to be the apostle of an idealist and sentimental revival.
Despite his amusing originality, and notwithstanding the real nobility of his ideas, Edmond Rostand is not a poet for poets. He was too clever by half—never was a clearer case of the wisdom of the ancients whose proverb ran that ‘the half is more than the whole!’ His poems are like a brilliant display of fireworks, whose flowers and fusees, whose flashing greens, and blues, and carmines, confuse our sight and prevent our seeing the quiet radiance of the stars behind, above.
And this is not saying that there are no stars in Rostand’s poems, no ideas, that is to say, eternally calm and bright. Although not primarily a thinker, yet our poet thinks: there are as many ideas in Rostand as, for instance, in Swinburne. But too often he uses his unrivalled virtuosity to obscure his plain meaning, as, in some modern music, the importance of the accompaniment drowns the voice. Contrasting the simple nobility of his intention with the quips and the quirks, the puns and the periods, of his rhapsodies, his rhetoric and his rodomontade (the style is catching), shall I say that he reminds us of that mediæval acrobat who, not knowing how to express all his adoration of the Virgin Mary, turned a somersault before her altar? It is amusing to discover that the ideas of Rostand, when we get at them, are not so very different from the ideas of Paul Claudel, who stands at the other extreme of the political and literary horizon.
‘Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch,
Nur mit ein Bisschen andern Worten.’
Rostand, too, believes that order is rooted in self-sacrifice. His heroes, like Claudel’s, strike free of the sterile introspection which marred the art of the Fin-de-Siècle. They make for action, and aim at an end outside themselves (in which they always fail), but Rostand amalgamates his modern Anti-Individualism with the old Liberal romantic, idealist enthusiasm, perfectly sincere so far as it goes. If not devout, he is at least devoted. His plays have generally for their subject some sort of a burnt-offering. For instance in La Princesse Lointaine, Bertrand and the Princess sacrifice their passion to the peace of mind of the dying Rudel:—