Jean Christophe seems at first to be Beethoven. Seippel has aptly described La vie de Beethoven as a preface to Jean Christophe. In truth the opening volumes of the novel show us a Jean Christophe whose image is modeled after that of the great master. But it becomes plain in due course that we are being shown something more than one single musician, that Jean Christophe is the quintessence of all great musicians. The figures in the pantheon of musical history are presented in a composite portrait; or, to use a musical analogy, Beethoven, the master musician, is the root of the chord. Jean Christophe grew up in the Rhineland, Beethoven's home; Jean Christophe, like Beethoven, had Flemish blood in his veins; his mother, too, was of peasant origin, his father a drunkard. Nevertheless, Jean Christophe exhibits numerous traits proper to Friedemann Bach, son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Again, the letter which young Beethoven redivivus is made to write to the grand duke is modeled on the historical document; the episode of his acquaintanceship with Frau von Kerich recalls Beethoven and Frau von Breuning. But many incidents, like the scene in the castle, remind the reader of Mozart's youth; and Mozart's little love episode with Rose Cannabich is transferred to the life of Jean Christophe. The older Jean Christophe grows, the less does his personality recall that of Beethoven. In external characteristics he grows rather to resemble Gluck and Handel. Of the latter, Rolland writes elsewhere that "his formidable bluntness alarmed every one." Word for word we can apply to Jean Christophe, Rolland's description of Handel: "He was independent and irritable, and could never adapt himself to the conventions of social life. He insisted on calling a spade a spade, and twenty times a day he aroused annoyance in all who had to associate with him." The life history of Wagner had much influence upon the delineation of Jean Christophe. The rebellious flight to Paris, a flight originating, as Nietzsche phrases it, "from the depths of instinct"; the hack-work done for minor publishers; the sordid details of daily life—all these things have been transposed almost verbatim into Jean Christophe from Wagner's autobiographical sketches Ein deutscher Musiker in Paris.
Ernst Decsey's life of Hugo Wolf was, however, decisive in its influence upon the configuration of the leading character in Rolland's book, upon the almost violent departure from the picture of Beethoven. Not merely do we find individual incidents taken from Decsey's book, such as the hatred for Brahms, the visit paid to Hassler (Wagner), the musical criticism published in "Dionysos" ("Wiener Salonblatt"), the tragi-comedy of the unsuccessful overture to Penthesilea, and the memorable visit to Professor Schulz (Emil Kaufmann). Furthermore, Wolf's whole character, his method of musical creation, is transplanted into the soul of Jean Christophe. His primitive force of production, the volcanic eruptions flooding the world with melody, shooting forth into eternity four songs in the space of a day, with subsequent months of inactivity, the brusque transition from the joyful activity of creation to the gloomy brooding of inertia—this form of genius which was native to Hugo Wolf becomes part of the tragical equipment of Jean Christophe. Whereas his physical characteristics remind us of Handel, Beethoven, and Gluck, his mental type is assimilated rather in its convulsive energy to that of the great song-writer. With this difference, that to Jean Christophe, in his more brilliant hours, there is superadded the cheerful serenity, the childlike joy, of Schubert. He has a dual nature. Jean Christophe is the classical type and the modern type of musician combined into a single personality, so that he contains even many of the characteristics of Gustav Mahler and César Frank. He is not an individual musician, the figure of one living in a particular generation; he is the sublimation of music as a whole.
Nevertheless, in Jean Christophe's life we find incidents deriving from the adventures of those who were not musicians. From Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung comes the encounter with the French players; I have already said that the story of Tolstoi's last days was represented in Jean Christophe's flight into the forest (though in this latter case, from the figure of a benighted traveler, Nietzsche's countenance glances at us for a moment). Grazia typifies the well-beloved who never dies; Antoinette is a picture of Renan's sister Henriette; Françoise Oudon, the actress, recalls Eleanora Duse, but in certain respects she reminds us of Suzanne Deprès. Emmanuel contains, in addition to traits that are purely imaginary, lineaments that are drawn respectively from Charles Louis Philippe and Charles Péguy; among the minor figures, lightly sketched, we seem to see Debussy, Verhaeren, and Moreas. When La foire sur la place was published, the figures of Roussin the deputy, Lévy-Coeur, the critic, Gamache the newspaper proprietor, and Hecht the music seller, hurt the feelings of not a few persons against whom no shafts had been aimed by Rolland. The portraits had been painted from studies of the commonplace, and typified the incessantly recurring mediocrities which are eternally real no less than are figures of exquisite rarity.
One portrait, however, that of Olivier, would seem to have been purely fictive. For this very reason, Olivier is felt to be the most living of all the characters, precisely because we cannot but feel that in many respects we have before us the artist's own picture, displaying not so much the circumstantial destiny as the human essence of Romain Rolland. Like the classical painters, he has, almost unmarked, introduced himself slightly disguised amid the historical scenario. The description is that of his own figure, slender, refined, slightly stooping; here we see his own energy, inwardly directed, and consuming itself in idealism; Rolland's enthusiasm is displayed in Olivier's lucid sense of justice, in his resignation as far as his personal lot is concerned, though he never resigns himself to the abandonment of his cause. It is true that in the novel this gentle spirit, the pupil of Tolstoi and Renan, leaves the field of action to his friend, and vanishes, the symbol of a past world. But Jean Christophe was merely a dream, the longing for energy sometimes felt by the man of gentle disposition. Olivier-Rolland limns this dream of his youth, designing upon his literary canvas the picture of his own life.
CHAPTER VI
A HEROIC SYMPHONY
AN abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In Jean Christophe, music is the form as well as the content. For the sake of simplicity we have to call the work a romance or a novel. But nowhere can it be said to attach to the epic tradition of any previous writers of romance: whether to that of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, who aimed at analyzing society into its chemical elements; or to that of Goethe, Gottfried Keller, and Stendhal, who sought to secure a crystallization of the soul. Rolland is neither a narrator, nor what may be termed a poetical romancer; he is a musician who weaves everything into harmony. In ultimate analysis, Jean Christophe is a symphony born out of the spirit of music, just as in Nietzsche's view classical tragedy was born out of that spirit; its laws are not those of the narrative, of the lecture, but those of controlled emotion. Rolland is a musician, not an epic poet.
Even qua narrator, Rolland does not possess what we term style. He does not write a classical French; he has no stable architechtonic in his sentences, no definite rhythm, no typical hue in his wording, no diction peculiar to himself. His personality does not obtrude itself, since he does not form the matter but is formed thereby. He possesses an inspired power of adaptation to the rhythm of the events he is describing, to the mood of the situation. The writer's mind acts as a resonator. In the opening lines the tempo is set. Then the rhythm surges on through the scene, carrying with it the episodes, which often seem like individual brief poems each sustained by its own melody—songs and airs which appear and pass, rapidly giving place to new movements. Some of the preludes in Jean Christophe are examples of pure song-craft, delicate arabesques and capriccios, islands of tone amid the roaring sea; then come other moods, gloomy ballads, nocturnes breathing elemental energy and sadness. When Rolland's writing is the outcome of musical inspiration, he shows himself one of the masters of language. At times, however, he speaks to us as historian, as critical student of the age. Then the splendor fades. Such historical and critical passages are like the periods of cold recitative in musical drama, periods which are requisite in order to give continuity to the story, and which thus fulfill an intellectual need, however much our aroused feelings may make us regret their interpolation. The ancient conflict between the musician and the historian persists unreconciled in Rolland's work.
Only through the spirit of music can the architectonic of Jean Christophe be understood. However plastic the elaboration of the characters, their effective force is displayed solely in so far as they are thematically interwoven into the resounding tide of life's modulations. The essential matter is always the rhythm which these characters emit, and which issues most powerfully of all from Jean Christophe, the master of music. The structure, the inner architectural conception of the work, cannot be understood by those who merely contemplate its obvious subdivision into ten volumes. This is dictated by the exigencies of book production. The essential caesuras are those between the lesser sections, each of which is written in a different key. Only a trained musician, one familiar with the great symphonies, can follow in detail the way in which the epic poem Jean Christophe is constructed as a symphony, an Eroica; only a musician can realize how in this work the most comprehensive type of musical composition is transposed into the world of speech.
Let the reader recall the chorale-like undertone, the booming note of the Rhine. We seem to be listening to some primal energy, to the stream of life in its roaring progress through eternity. A little melody rises above the general roar. Jean Christophe, the child, has been born out of the great music of the universe, to fuse in turn with the endless stream of sound. The first figures make a dramatic entry; the mystical chorale gradually subsides; the mortal drama of childhood begins. By degrees the stage is filled with personalities, with melodies; voices answer the lisping syllables of Jean Christophe; until, finally, the virile tones of Jean Christophe and the gentler voice of Olivier come to dominate the theme. Meanwhile, all the forms of life and music are unfolded in concords and discords. Thus we have the tragical outbreaks of a melancholy like that of Beethoven; fugues upon the themes of art; vigorous dance scenes, as in Le buisson ardent; odes to the infinite and songs to nature, pure like those of Schubert. Wonderful is the interconnection of the whole, and marvelous is the way in which the tide of sound ebbs once more. The dramatic tumult subsides; the last discords are resolved into the great harmony. In the final scene, the opening melody recurs, to the accompaniment of invisible choirs; the roaring river flows out into the limitless sea.
Thus Jean Christophe, the Eroica, ends in a chorale to the infinite powers of life, ends in the undying ocean of music. Rolland wished to convey the notion of these eternal forces of life symbolically through the imagery of the element which for us mortals brings us into closest contact with the infinite; he wished to typify these forces in the art which is timeless, which is free, which knows nothing of national limitations, which is eternal. Thus music is at once the form and the content of the work, "simultaneously its kernel and its shell," as Goethe said of nature. Nature is ever the law of laws for art.