Yet the sacred flame still burned within him. With heroic determination he threw the figures once more into the fiery crucible of his heart, melting the metal that it might be recast in new forms. Since his feeling for truth made it impossible for him to find the supreme consoler in any actual historical figure, he resolved to create a genius of the spirit, who should combine and typify what the great ones of all times had suffered, a hero who should not belong to one nation but to all peoples. No longer confining himself to historical truth, he looked for a higher harmony in the new configuration of truth and fiction. He fashioned the epic of an imaginary personality.
As if by miracle, all that he had lost was now regained. The vanished fancies of his school days, the boy artist's dream of a great artist who should stand erect against the world, the young man's vision on the Janiculum, surged up anew. The figures of his dramas, Aërt and the Girondists, arose in a fresh embodiment; the images of Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Tolstoi, emerging from the rigidity of history, took their places among our contemporaries. Rolland's disillusionments had been but precious experiences; his trials, but a ladder to higher things. What had seemed like an end became the true beginning, that of his masterwork, Jean Christophe.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK
JEAN CHRISTOPHE had long been beckoning the poet from a distance. The first message had come to the lad in the Normal School. During those years, young Rolland had planned the writing of a romance, the history of a single-hearted artist shattered on the rocks of the world. The outlines were vague; the only definite idea was that the hero was to be a musician whose contemporaries failed to understand him. The dream came to nothing, like so many of the dreams of youth.
But the vision returned in Rome, when Rolland's poetic fervor, long pent by the restrictions of school life, broke forth with elemental energy. Malwida von Meysenbug had told him much concerning the tragical struggles of her intimate friends Wagner and Nietzsche. Rolland came to realize that heroic figures, though they may be obscured by the tumult and dust of the hour, belong in truth to every age. Involuntarily he learned to associate the unhappy experiences of these recent heroes with those of the figures in his vision. In Parsifal, the guileless Fool, by pity enlightened, he recognized an emblem of the artist whose intuition guides him through the world, and who comes to know the world through experience. One evening, as Rolland walked on the Janiculum, the vision of Jean Christophe grew suddenly clear. His hero was to be a pure-hearted musician, a German, visiting other lands, finding his god in Life; a free mortal spirit, inspired with a faith in greatness, and with faith even in mankind, though mankind rejected him.
The happy days of freedom in Rome were followed by many years of arduous labor, during which the duties of daily life thrust the image into the background. Rolland had for a season become a man of action, and had no time for dreams. Then came new experiences to reawaken the slumbering vision. I have told of his visit to Beethoven's house in Bonn, and of the effect produced on his mind by the realization of the tragedy of the great composer's life. This gave a new direction to his thoughts. His hero was to be a Beethoven redivivus, a German, a lonely fighter, but a conqueror. Whereas the immature youth had idealized defeat, imagining that to fail was to be vanquished, the man of riper years perceived that true heroism lay in this, "to know life, and yet to love it." Thus splendidly did the new horizon open as setting for the long cherished figure, the dawn of eternal victory in our earthly struggle. The conception of Jean Christophe was complete.
Rolland now knew his hero. But it was necessary that he should learn to describe that hero's counterpart, that hero's eternal enemy, life, reality. Whoever wishes to delineate a combat fairly, must know both champions. Rolland became intimately acquainted with Jean Christophe's opponent through the experiences of these years of disillusionment, through his study of literature, through his realization of the falseness of society and of the indifference of the crowd. It was necessary for him to pass through the purgatorial fires of the years in Paris before he could begin the work of description. At twenty, Rolland had made acquaintance only with himself, and was therefore competent to describe no more than his own heroic will to purity. At thirty he had become able to depict likewise the forces of resistance. All the hopes he had cherished and all the disappointments he had suffered jostled one another in the channel of this new existence. The innumerable newspaper cuttings, collected for years, almost without a definite aim, magically arranged themselves as material for the growing work. Personal griefs were seen to have been valuable experience; the boy's dream swelled to the proportions of a life history.
During the year 1895 the broad lines were finished. As prelude, Rolland gave a few scenes from Jean Christophe's youth. During 1897, in a remote Swiss hamlet, the first chapters were penned, those in which the music begins as it were spontaneously. Then (so definitely was the whole design now shaping itself in his mind) he wrote some of the chapters for the fifth and ninth volumes. Like a musical composer, Rolland followed up particular themes as his mood directed, themes which his artistry was to weave harmoniously into the great symphony. Order came from within, and was not imposed from without. The work was not done in any strictly serial succession. The chapters seemed to come into being as chance might direct. Often they were inspired by the landscape, and were colored by outward events. Seippel, for instance, shows that Jean Christophe's flight into the forest was suggested by the last journey of Rolland's beloved teacher Tolstoi. With appropriate symbolism, this work of European scope was composed in various parts of Europe; the opening scenes, as we have said, in a Swiss hamlet; L'adolescent in Zurich and by the shores of Lake Zug; much in Paris; much in Italy; Antoinette in Oxford; while, after nearly fifteen years' labor, the work was completed in Baveno.
In February, 1902, the first volume, L'aube, was published in "Les cahiers de la quinzaine," and the last serial number was issued on October 20, 1912. When the fifth serial issue, La foire sur la place, appeared, a publisher, Ollendorff, was found willing to produce the whole romance in book form. Before the French original was completed, English, Spanish, and German translations were in course of publication, and Seippel's valuable biography had also appeared. Thus when the work was crowned by the Academy in 1913, its reputation was already established. In the fifth decade of his life, Rolland had at length become famous. His messenger Jean Christophe was a living contemporary figure, on pilgrimage through the world.