CHAPTER IV
THE WORK WITHOUT A FORMULA
WHAT, then, is Jean Christophe? Can it be properly spoken of as a romance? This book, which is as comprehensive as the world, an orbis pictus of our generation, cannot be described by a single all-embracing term. Rolland once said: "Any work which can be circumscribed by a definition is a dead work." Most applicable to Jean Christophe is the refusal to permit so living a creation to be hidebound by the restrictions of a name. Jean Christophe is an attempt to create a totality, to write a book that is universal and encyclopedic, not merely narrative; a book which continually returns to the central problem of the world-all. It combines insight into the soul with an outlook into the age. It is the portrait of an entire generation, and simultaneously it is the biography of an imaginary individual. Grautoff has termed it "a cross-section of our society"; but it is likewise the religious confession of its author. It is critical, but at the same time productive; at once a criticism of reality, and a creative analysis of the unconscious; it is a symphony in words, and a fresco of contemporary ideas. It is an ode to solitude, and likewise an Eroica of the great European fellowship. But whatever definition we attempt, can deal with a part only, for the whole eludes definition. In the field of literary endeavor, the nature of a moral or ethical act cannot be precisely specified. Rolland's sculptural energies enable him to shape the inner humanity of what he is describing; his idealism is a force that strengthens faith, a tonic of vitality. His Jean Christophe is an attempt towards justice, an attempt to understand life. It is also an attempt towards faith, an attempt to love life. These coalesce in his moral demand (the only one he has ever formulated for the free human being), "to know life, and yet to love it."
The essential aim of the book is explained by its hero when he refers to the disparateness of contemporary life, to the manner in which its art has been severed into a thousand fragments. "The Europe of to-day no longer possesses a common book; it has no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which is the common heritage of all. This lack is fatal to the art of our time. There is no one who has written for all; no one who has fought for all." Rolland hoped to remedy the evil. He wished to write for all nations, and not for his fatherland alone. Not artists and men of letters merely, but all who are eager to learn about life and about their own age, were to be supplied with a picture of the environment in which they were living. Jean Christophe gives expression to his creator's will, saying: "Display everyday life to everyday people—the life that is deeper and wider than the ocean. The least among us bears infinity within him.... Describe the simple life of one of these simple men; ... describe it simply, as it actually happens. Do not trouble about phrasing; do not dissipate your energies, as do so many contemporary writers, in straining for artistic effects. You wish to speak to the many, and you must therefore speak their language.... Throw yourself into what you create; think your own thoughts; feel your own feelings. Let your heart set the rhythm to the words. Style is soul."
Jean Christophe was designed to be, and actually is, a work of life, and not a work of art; it was to be, and is, a book as comprehensive as humanity; for "l'art est la vie domptée"; art is life broken in. The book differs from the majority of the imaginative writings of our day in that it does not make the erotic problem its central feature. But it has no central feature. It attempts to comprehend all problems, all those which are a part of reality, to contemplate them from within, "from the spectrum of an individual" as Grautoff expresses it. The center is the inner life of the individual human being. The primary motif of the romance is to expound how this individual sees life, or rather, how he learns to see it. The book may therefore be described as an educational romance in the sense in which that term applies to Wilhelm Meister. The educational romance aims at showing how, in years of apprenticeship and years of travel, a human being makes acquaintance with the lives of others, and thus acquires mastery over his own life; how experience teaches him to transform into individual views the concepts he has had transmitted to him by others, many of which are erroneous; how he becomes enabled to transmute the world so that it ceases to be an outward phenomenon and becomes an inward reality. The educational romance traces the change from curiosity to knowledge, from emotional prejudice to justice.
But this educational romance is simultaneously a historical romance, a "comédie humaine" in Balzac's sense; an "histoire contemporaine" in Anatole France's sense; and in many respects also it is a political romance. But Rolland, with his more catholic method of treatment, does not merely depict the history of his generation, but discusses the cultural history of the age, exhibiting the radiations of the time spirit, concerning himself with poesy and with socialism, with music and with the fine arts, with the woman's question and with racial problems. Jean Christophe the man is a whole man, and Jean Christophe the book embraces all that is human in the spiritual cosmos. This romance ignores no questions; it seeks to overcome all obstacles; it has a universal life, beyond the frontiers of nations, occupations, and creeds.
It is a romance of art, a romance of music, as well as a historical romance. Its hero is not a saunterer through life, like the heroes of Goethe, Novalis, and Stendhal, but a creator. As with Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich, in this book the path through the externals of life leads simultaneously to the inner world, to art, to completion. The birth of music, the growth of genius, is individually and yet typically presented. In his portrayal of experience, the author does not merely aim at giving an analysis of the world; he desires also to expound the mystery of creation, the primal secret of life.
Furthermore, the book furnishes an outlook on the universe, thus becoming a philosophic, a religious romance. The struggle for the totality of life, signifies for Rolland the struggle to understand its significance and origin, the struggle for God, for one's own personal God. The rhythm of the individual existence is in search of an ultimate harmony between itself and the rhythm of the universal existence. From this earthly sphere, the Idea flows back into the infinite in an exultant canticle.
Such a wealth of design and execution was unprecedented. In one work alone, Tolstoi's War and Peace, had Rolland encountered a similar conjuncture of a historical picture of the world with a process of inner purification and a state of religious ecstasy. Here only had he discerned the like passionate sense of responsibility towards truth. But Rolland diverged from this splendid example by placing his tragedy in the temporal environment of the life of to-day, instead of amid the wars of Napoleonic times; and by endowing his hero with the heroism, not of arms, but of the invisible struggles which the artist is constrained to fight. Here, as always, the most human of artists was his model, the man to whom art was not an end in itself, but was ever subordinate to an ethical purpose. In accordance with the spirit of Tolstoi's teaching, Jean Christophe was not to be a literary work, but a deed. For this reason, Rolland's great symphony cannot be subjected to the restrictions of a convenient formula. The book ignores all the ordinary canons, and is none the less a characteristic product of its time. Standing outside literature, it is an overwhelmingly powerful literary manifestation. Often enough it ignores the rules of art, and is yet a most perfect expression of art. It is not a book, but a message; it is not a history, but is nevertheless a record of our time. More than a book, it is the daily miracle of revelation of a man who lives the truth, whose whole life is truth.
CHAPTER V
KEY TO THE CHARACTERS
AS a romance, Jean Christophe has no prototype in literature; but the characters in the book have prototypes in real life. Rolland the historian does not hesitate to borrow some of the lineaments of his heroes from the biographies of great men. In many cases, too, the figures he portrays recall personalities in contemporary life. In a manner peculiar to himself, by a process of which he was the originator, he combines the imaginative with the historical, fusing individual qualities in a new synthesis. His delineations tend to be mosaics, rather than entirely new imaginative creations. In ultimate analysis, his method of literary composition invariably recalls the work of a musical composer; he paraphrases thematic reminiscences, without imitating too closely. The reader of Jean Christophe often fancies that, as in a key-novel, he has recognized some public personality; but ere long he finds that the characteristics of another figure intrude. Thus each portrait is freshly constructed out of a hundred diverse elements.