Jean-Christophe Journey's End

by Romain Rolland

"Companions, enemies, walk over me, crush me, let me feel the cannons which shall win victory pass over my body! I do not think of the iron which cuts deep into my flesh, I do not think of the foot that tramples down my head, I think of my Avenger, the Master, the Leader of the countless army. My blood shall cement the victory of the future…."

God was not to him the impassive Creator, a Nero from his tower of brass watching the burning of the City to which he himself has set fire. God was fighting. God was suffering. Fighting and suffering with all who fight and for all who suffer. For God was Life, the drop of light fallen into the darkness, spreading out, reaching out, drinking up the night. But the night is limitless, and the Divine struggle will never cease: and none can know how it will end. It was a heroic symphony wherein the very discords clashed together and mingled and grew into a serene whole! Just as the beech-forest in silence furiously wages war, so Life carries war into the eternal peace.

The wars and the peace rang echoing through Christophe. He was like a shell wherein the ocean roars. Epic shouts passed, and trumpet calls, and tempestuous sounds borne upon sovereign rhythms. For in that sonorous soul everything took shape in sound. It sang of light. It sang of darkness, sang of life and death. It sang for those who were victorious in battle. It sang for himself who was conquered and laid low. It sang. All was song. It was nothing but song.

It was so drunk with it that it could not hear its own song. Like the spring rains, the torrents of music disappeared into the earth that was cracked by the winter. Shame, grief, bitterness now revealed their mysterious mission: they had decomposed the earth and they had fertilized it. The share of sorrow, breaking the heart, had opened up new sources of life. The waste land had once more burst into flower. But they were not the old spring flowers. A new soul had been born.

Every moment it was springing into birth. For it was not yet shaped and hardened, like the souls that have come to the end of their belief, the souls which are at the point of death. It was not the finished statue. It was molten metal. Every second made a new universe of it. Christophe had no thought of setting bounds upon himself. He gave himself up to the joy of a man leaving behind him the burden of his past and setting out on a long voyage, with youth in his blood, freedom in his heart, to breathe the sea air, and think that the voyage will never come to an end. Now that he was caught up again by the creative force which flows through the world, he was amazed to the point of ecstasy at the world's wealth. He loved, he was, his neighbor as himself. And all things were "neighbors" to him, from the grass beneath his feet to the man whose hand he clasped. A fine tree, the shadow of a cloud on the mountain, the breath of the fields borne upward on the wind, and, at night, the hive of heaven buzzing with the swarming suns … his blood raced through him … he had no desire to speak or to think, he desired only to laugh and to cry, and to melt away into the living marvel of it all. Write? Why should he write? Can a man write the inexpressible?… But whether it were possible or no, he had to write. It was his law. Ideas would come to him in flashes, wherever he might be, most often when he was out walking. He could not wait. Then he would write with anything, on anything that came to hand: and very often he could not have told the meaning of the phrases which came rushing forth from him with irresistible impetuosity: and, as he wrote, more ideas would come, more and more: and he would write and write, on his shirt cuffs, in the lining of his hat. Quickly though he wrote, yet his thoughts would leap ahead, and he had to use a sort of shorthand.

They were only rough notes. The difficulty began when he tried to turn his ideas into the ordinary musical forms: he discovered that none of the conventional molds were in the least suitable: if he wanted to fix his visions with any sort of fidelity, he had to begin by forgetting all the music he had ever heard, everything he had ever written, make a clean sweep of all the formulae he had ever learned, and the traditional technique; fling away all such crutches of the impotent mind, the comfortable bed made for the indolence of those who lie back on the thoughts of other men to save themselves the trouble of thinking for themselves. A short while ago, when he thought that he had reached maturity in life and art—(as a matter of fact he had only been at the end of one of his lives and one of his incarnations in art),—he had expressed himself in a preexisting language: his feelings had submitted without revolt to the logic of a pre-established development, which dictated a portion of his phrases in advance, and had led him, docilely enough, along the beaten track to the appointed spot where the public was awaiting him. Now there was no road marked out, and his feelings had to carve out their own path: his mind had only to follow. It was no longer appointed to describe or to analyze passion: it had to become part and parcel of it, and seek to wed its inward law.

At the same time he shed all the contradictions in which he had long been involved, though he had never willingly submitted to them. For, although he was a pure artist, he had often incorporated in his art considerations which are foreign to art: he had endowed it with a social mission. And he had not perceived that there were two men in him: the creative artist who never worried himself about any moral aim, and the man of action, the thinker, who wanted his art to be moral and social. The two would sometimes bring each other to an awkward pass. But now that he was subject to every creative idea, with its organic law, like a reality superior to all reality, he had broken free of practical reason. In truth, he shed none of his contempt for the flabby and depraved immorality of the age: in truth, he still thought that its impure and unwholesome art was the lowest rung of art, because it is a disease, a fungus growing on a rotting trunk: but if art for pleasure's sake is the prostration of art, Christophe by no means opposed to it the short-sighted utilitarianism of art for morality's sake, that winged Pegasus harnessed to the plow. The highest art, the only art which is worthy of the name, is above all temporary laws: it is a comet sweeping through the infinite. It may be that its force is useful, it may be that it is apparently useless and dangerous in the existing order of the workaday world: but it is force, it is movement and fire: it is the lightning darted from heaven: and, for that very reason, it is sacred, for that very reason it is beneficent. The good it does may be of the practical order: but its real, its Divine benefits are, like faith, of the supernatural order. It is like the sun whence it is sprung. The sun is neither moral nor immoral. It is that which Is. It lightens the darkness of space. And so does art.

And Christophe, being delivered up to art, was amazed to find unknown and unsuspected powers teeming in himself: powers quite apart from his passions, his sorrows, his conscious soul, a stranger soul, indifferent to all his loves and sufferings, to all his life, a joyous, fantastic, wild, incomprehensible soul. It rode him and dug its spurs into his sides. And, in the rare moments when he could stop to take breath, he wondered as he read over what he had written:

"How could such things have come out of me?"

He was a prey to that delirium of the mind which is known to every man of genius, that will which is independent of the will, "the ineffable enigma of the world and life" which Goethe calls "the demoniac," against which he was always armed, though it always overcame him.