But struggle implies the use of force. Despite his natural kindliness of disposition, Jean Christophe is an apostle of force. We discern in him something barbaric and elemental, the power of a storm or of a torrent which, obeying not its own will but the unknown laws of nature, rushes down from the heights into the lower levels of life. His outward aspect is that of a fighter. He is tall and massive, almost uncouth, with large hands and brawny arms. He has the sanguine temperament, and is liable to outbursts of turbulent passion. His footfall is heavy; his gait is awkward, though he knows nothing of fatigue. These characteristics derive from the crude energy of his peasant forefathers on the maternal side; their pristine strength gives him steadfastness in the most arduous crises of existence. "Well is it with him who amid the mishaps of life is sustained by the power of a sturdy stock, so that the feet of father and grandfathers may carry forward the son when he grows weary, so that the vigorous growth of more robust forebears may relift the crushed soul." The power of resilence against the oppression of existence is given by such physical energy. Still more helpful is Jean Christophe's trust in the future, his healthy and unyielding optimism, his invincible confidence in victory. "I have centuries to look forward to," he cries exultantly in an hour of disillusionment. "Hail to life! Hail to joy!" From the German race he inherits Siegfried's confidence in success, and for this reason he is ever a fighter. He knows, "le génie veut l'obstacle, l'obstacle fait le génie"—genius desires obstacles, for obstacles create genius.
Force, however, is always wilful Young Jean Christophe, while his energies have not yet been spiritually enlightened, have not yet been ethically tamed, can see no one but himself. He is unjust towards others, deaf and blind to remonstrance, indifferent as to whether his actions may please or displease. Like a woodcutter, ax in hand, he hastes stormfully through the forest, striking right and left, simply to secure light and space for himself. He despises German art without understanding it, and scorns French art without knowing anything about it. He is endowed with "the marvelous impudence of opinionated youth"; that of the undergraduate who says, "the world did not exist till I created it." His strength has its fling in contentiousness; for only when struggling does he feel that he is himself, then only can he enjoy his passion for life.
These struggles of Jean Christophe continue throughout the years, for his maladroitness is no less conspicuous than his strength. He does not understand his opponents. He is slow to learn the lessons of life; and it is precisely because the lessons are learned so slowly, piece by piece, each stage besprinkled with blood and watered with tears, that the novel is so impressive and so full of help. Nothing comes easily to him; no ripe fruit ever falls into his hands. He is simple like Parsifal, naive, somewhat boisterous and provincial. Instead of rubbing off his angularities upon the grindstones of social life, he bruises himself by his clumsy movements. He is an intuitive genius, not a psychologist; he foresees nothing, but must endure all things before he can know. "He had not the hawklike glance of Frenchmen and Jews, who discern the most trifling characteristics of all that they see. He silently absorbed everything he came in contact with, as a sponge absorbs. Not until days or hours had elapsed would he become fully aware of what had now become a part of himself." Nothing was real to him so long as it remained objective. To be of use, every experience must be, as it were, digested and worked up into his blood. He could not exchange ideas and concepts one for another as people exchange bank notes. After prolonged nausea, he was able to free himself from all the conventional lies and trivial notions which had been instilled into him in youth, and was then at length enabled to absorb fresh nutriment. Before he could know France, he had to strip away all her masks one after another; before he could reach Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies," he had to make his way through less lofty adventures. Before he could discover himself and before he could discover his god, he had to live the whole of his life through. Not until he reaches the other shore does Christophorus recognize that his burden has been a message.
He knows that "it is good to suffer when one is strong," and he therefore loves to encounter hindrances. "Everything great is good, and the extremity of pain borders on enfranchisement. The only thing that crushes irremediably, the only thing that destroys the soul, is mediocrity of pain and joy." He gradually learns to recognize his enemy, his own impetuosity; he learns to be just; he begins to understand himself and the world. The nature of passion becomes clear to him. He realizes that the hostility he encounters is aimed, not at him personally, but at the eternal powers goading him on; he learns to love his enemies because they have helped him to find himself, and because they march towards the same goal by other roads. The years of apprenticeship have come to an end. As Schiller admirably puts it in the above-quoted letter to Goethe: "Years of apprenticeship are a relative concept. They imply their correlative, which is mastery. The idea of mastery is presupposed to elucidate and ground the idea of apprenticeship." Jean Christophe, in riper years, begins to see that through all his transformations he has by degrees become more truly himself. Preconceptions have been cast aside; he has been freed from beliefs and illusions, freed from the prejudices of race and nationality. He is free and yet pious, now that he grasps the meaning of the path he has to tread. In the frank and noisy optimism of youth, he had exclaimed, "What is life? A tragedy. Hurrah!" Now, "transfiguré par la foi," this optimism has been transformed into a gentle, all-embracing wisdom. His freethinker's confessions runs: "To serve God and to love God, signifies to serve life and to love life." He hears the footsteps of coming generations. Even in those who are hostile to him he salutes the undying spirit of life. He sees his fame growing like a great cathedral, and feels it be to something remote from himself. He who was an aimless stormer, is now a leader; but his own goal does not become clear to him until the sonorous waves of death encompass him, and he floats away into the vast ocean of music, into eternal peace.
What makes Jean Christophe's struggle supremely heroic is that he aspires solely towards the greatest, towards life as a whole. This striving man has to upbuild everything for himself; his art, his freedom, his faith, his God, his truth. He has to fight himself free from everything which others have taught him; from all the fellowships of art, nationality, race, and creed. His ardor never wrestles for any personal end, for success or for pleasure. "Il n'y a aucun rapport entre la passion et le plaisir." Jean Christophe's loneliness makes this struggle tragical. It is not on his own behalf that he troubles to attain to truth, for he knows that every man has his own truth. When, nevertheless, he becomes a helper of mankind, this is not by words, but by his own essential nature, which exercises a marvelously harmonizing influence in virtue of his vigorous goodness. Whoever comes into contact with him—the imaginary personalities in the book, and no less the real human beings who read the book—is the better for having known him. The power through which he conquers is that of the life which we all share. And inasmuch as we love him, we grow enabled to cherish an ardent love for the world of mankind.
CHAPTER IX
OLIVIER
JEAN CHRISTOPHE is the portrait of an artist. But every form and every formula of art and the artist must necessarily be one-sided. Rolland, therefore, introduces to Christophe in mid career, "nel mezzo del cammin," a counterpart, a Frenchman as foil to the German, a hero of thought as contrast to the hero of action. Jean Christophe and Olivier are complementary figures, attracting one another in virtue of the law of polarity. "They were very different each from the other, and they loved one another on account of this difference, being of the same species"—the noblest. Olivier is the essence of spiritual France, just as Jean Christophe is the offspring of the best energies of Germany; they are ideals, alike fashioned in the form of the highest ideal; alternating like major and minor, they transpose the theme of art and life into the most wonderful variations.
In externals the contrast between them is marked, both in respect of physical characteristics and social origins. Olivier is slightly built, pale and delicate. Whereas Jean Christophe springs from working folk, Olivier derives from an old and somewhat effete bourgeois stock, and despite all his ardor he has an aristocratic aloofness from vulgar things. His vitality does not come like that of his robust comrade from excess of bodily energy, from muscles and blood, but from nerves and brain, from will and passion. He is receptive rather than productive. "He was ivy, a gentle soul which must always love and be loved." Art is for him a refuge from reality, whereas Jean Christophe flings himself upon art to find in it life many times multiplied. In Schiller's sense of the terms, Olivier is the sentimental artist, whilst his German brother is the naive genius. Olivier represents the beauty of a civilization; he is symbolic of "la vaste culture et le génie psychologique de la France"; Jean Christophe is the very luxuriance of nature. The Frenchman represents contemplation; the German, action. The former reflects by many facets; the latter has the genius which shines by its own light. Olivier "transfers to the sphere of thought all the energies that he has drawn from action," producing ideas where Christophe radiates vitality, and wishing to improve, not the world, but himself. It suffices him to fight out within himself the eternal struggle of responsibility. He contemplates unmoved the play of secular forces, looking on with the skeptical smile of his teacher Renan, as one who knows in advance that the perpetual return of evil is inevitable, that nothing can avert the eternal victory of injustice and wrong. His love, therefore, goes out to humanity, the abstract idea, and not to actual men, the unsatisfactory realizations of that idea.
At first we incline to regard him as a weakling, as timid and inactive. Such is the view taken at the outset by his forceful friend, who says almost angrily: "Are you incapable of feeling hatred?" Olivier answers with a smile: "I hate hatred. It is repulsive to me that I should struggle with people whom I despise." He does not enter into treaties with reality; his strength lies in isolation. No defeat can daunt him, and no victory can persuade him: he knows that force rules the world, but he refuses to recognize the victor. Jean Christophe, fired by Teutonic pagan wrath, rushes at obstacles and stamps them underfoot; Olivier knows that next day the weeds that have been trodden to the earth will spring up again. He does not love struggle for its own sake. When he avoids struggle, this is not because he fears defeat, but because victory is indifferent to him. A freethinker, he is in truth animated by the spirit of Christianity. "I should run the risk of disturbing my soul's peace, which is more precious to me than any victory. I refuse to hate. I desire to be just even to my enemies. Amid the storms of passion I wish to retain clarity of vision, that I may understand everything and love everything."
Jean Christophe soon comes to recognize that Olivier is his spiritual brother, learning that the heroism of thought is just as great as the heroism of action, that his friend's idealistic anarchism is no less courageous than his own primitive revolt. In this apparent weakling, he venerates a soul of steel. Nothing can shake Olivier, nothing can confuse his serene intelligence. Superior force is no argument against him. "He had an independence of judgment which nothing could overcome. When he loved anything, he loved it in defiance of the world." Justice is the only pole towards which the needle of his will points unerringly; justice is his sole form of fanaticism. Like Aërt, his weaker prototype, he has "la faim de justice." Every injustice, even the injustices of a remote past, seem to him a disturbance of the world order. He belongs, therefore, to no party; he is unfailingly the advocate on behalf of all the unhappy and all the oppressed; his place is ever "with the vanquished"; he does not wish to help the masses socially, but to help individual souls, whereas Jean Christophe desires to conquer for all mankind every paradise of art and freedom. For Olivier there is but one true freedom, that which comes from within, the freedom which a man must win for himself. The illusion of the crowd, its eternal class struggles and national struggles for power, distress him, but do not arouse his sympathy. Standing quite alone, he maintains his mental poise when war between Germany and France is imminent, when all are shaken in their convictions, and when even Jean Christophe feels that he must return home to fight for his fatherland. "I love my country," says the Frenchman to his German brother. "I love it just as you love yours. But am I for this reason to betray my conscience, to kill my soul? This would signify the betrayal of my country. I belong to the army of the spirit, not to the army of force." But brute force takes its revenge upon the man who despises force, and he is killed in a chance medley. Only his ideals, which were his true life, survive him, to renew for those of a later generation the mystic idealism of his faith.