Yes, I can re-read the chapter on Barrès with a certain satisfaction.
But, when we come to Romain Rolland, what a falling-off was there! How is it that Romain Rolland, who seemed, if such there was, the very prophet and the teacher of the younger generation, should have proved so much less sure as a guide and a standby than the fantastic and singular Barrès? Always an aloof and solitary spirit, Rolland completely detached himself from his country during the war. In his voluntary exile at Geneva he occupied his hands, and no doubt his heart, with works of mercy, but his mind gave no support to his compatriots. Doubtless the attraction of Germany was too strong: ‘Jean Christophe’ continued to subjugate the delicate ‘Oliver.’ These great international friendships have their perils (and, doubtless, I speak of them in the mood of Bishop Berkeley: ‘There, but for the Grace of God, go I!’) Yet Renan was no less attached to intellectual Germany than Rolland: Renan, who, when his mind crossed the Rhine, ‘crut entrer dans un temple,’ and in 1870-71 France had no firmer patriot than Ernest Renan.
The fact is that Romain Rolland’s genius is not French. The son of the lawyer at Clamecy is French enough by descent and as good a Burgundian as Lamartine, but he ought to have been Swiss by nature as by choice. There is nothing Latin or classic in him. His intense individualism, his moral earnestness, his lyric love of nature, and something querimonious, a scolding tenderness in his voice, remind us sometimes of Rousseau. And never was his high-minded crankiness more apparent than in that untimely pamphlet—‘Au dessus de la Mêlée,’ in which he rubbed it into us so tactlessly that our preoccupations are not his who dwells, unfriended, melancholy remote, above the fray.
This little volume made him probably the most unpopular writer in France. There is a radical misunderstanding which separates Romain Rolland from the young Frenchmen of the war. How has it come about? Hamlet and Harry Hotspur were good friends when we took leave of them in the final chapters of Jean-Christophe. Few men of letters had more vividly appreciated the active, ingenuous, hardy generation that was taking its first flights in the aeroplanes of 1912 and 1913. Arrogant, gay and strong, cheerful in their bright materialism (which allied itself so naturally with the most orthodox acquiescence in the creed of their forefathers), the tall and sturdy race of the Twentieth Century pleased Jean-Christophe, because they seemed so prosperous and so happy—and that is, after all, what we chiefly ask of those who are to take our place in life.
M. Rolland liked these young men; still, he expected them to look up to him; he felt himself their moral and intellectual superior, as doubtless he was. But then the war broke out, and what a reversal of values! Most of us, in France, who sheltered behind the brave broad shoulders of our ‘poilus,’ felt our hearts melt with admiration, pity, hope, and love. Not so, M. Rolland.
His attitude has been one of irritable self-defence. First of all that pamphlet, ‘Au dessus de la Mêlée’—and now this new book, published to-day (April, 1919), but finished (M. Rolland tells us) in May, 1914. Colas Breugnon is a study in Rabelais’ vein. But, if M. Rolland’s style is far from perfect when he writes as from the Twentieth Century, what an exasperating gallimaufry it becomes, what a pretentious farrago of lyrism, puns, blank-verse, conceits, and quips, when he assumes the character of one of his ancestors; a certain joiner and cabinet-maker at Clamecy, under the reign of Louis XIII. The rough jokes of the tavern chronicled in the style of Euphues! Romain Rolland maundering of Women, Wine, and Song! The worst of it is that his boozing and his babble do not seem genuine: the professor’s gown peeps from under the starched blue folds of the carpenter’s blouse. It is as though, irritated by the reproach of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, M. Rolland had said to himself, ‘After all, I am neither a Jew nor a foreigner! If Péguy came from Orleans, I come from Clamecy; I have just as good French blood in my veins as he.’ And behold him capering unconvincingly as a Burgundian artisan, drowning his troubles in the bowl.
I wonder if any of my readers remember a French country novel called Le Moulin du Frau, which appeared about 1894, by Eugène le Roy, the author of Jacquou le Croquant. Here is the novel which M. Rolland has tried to write. It is just the life, day by day, of a miller in Périgord—a man of strong political feeling, a democrat and a philosopher on his way, like Colas Breugnon. But the miller of the Frau, though rustic and plain-spoken, is not coarse, for his author lived all his life amid the peasants of Périgord and Quercy. The French peasant has his faults; he loves to excess his money and his land; but as a rule he is not coarse. I have known a great many, in the country, and, since the war, in hospital; but for coarseness commend me to the country folk of Zola, the man of letters; or those of the author of Nono, who is a schoolmaster; or these rowdy village folk of Romain Rolland’s. They lay the rustic varnish on too thick. Beneath this vulgar varnish we discern an image sufficiently touching and quite in Romain Rolland’s stoical vein: That of an obstinate, obdurate, wine-bibbing, and free-loving old cabinet-maker, besotted with his love of art and liberty, who in the end, having lost his savings, his home, his wife, his sculptured treasures, finds himself happier than he ever was before (though bedridden, poor, and a pensioner in his children’s bounty) because he has conquered the only liberty that really matters—the freedom of the soul.
It is impossible to suppose that Colas Breugnon will mark the close of M. Rolland’s career. It is evidently a caprice, a boutade, an interlude. In what sense will his talent now develop? His years have just completed their half-century, but he still has some good autumns before him: Cervantes was turned fifty-seven when he published the First Part of Don Quixote!
To return to our Twentieth Century writers, Rostand stands the next upon our list. The war has neither augmented nor diminished Rostand. The few occasional poems that he published during its course are of slight importance; one imagines him following the tragic struggle with an attention so deeply engrossed that he half-forgot to breathe, and could not sing. When Victory promised us Peace, the strain relaxed. The fragile enthusiast could draw a deep breath. It was his last. He died, after a brief illness, a few weeks after the conclusion of the Armistice.
Let us turn the page again. Paul Claudel has written a few more dithyrambs in prose, but these five years have increased the volume without changing the character of his work. He is still predominantly the author of the Cinq Grandes Odes, of L’Otage, of La Jeune Fille Violaine, all published some years before the war. He serves his country as Consul in Brazil instead of at Hamburg; still in the full strength of his years, with doubtless other laurels to conquer, he stands out, among the ranks of our writers, a creature of passion and combat, active, emotional, mystic, and material at once—adequate to his age.