Marvelously delineated is the answer made by the advocate of mental force to the advocate of physical force, by the genius of the spirit to the genius of action. The two heroes are profoundly united in their love for art, in their passion for freedom, in their need for spiritual purity. Each is "pious and free" in his own sense; they are brothers in that ultimate domain which Rolland finely terms "the music of the soul"—in goodness. But Jean Christophe's goodness is that of instinct; it is elemental, therefore, and liable to be interrupted by passionate relapses into hate. Olivier's goodness, on the other hand, is intellectual and wise, and is tinged merely at times by ironical skepticism. But it is this contrast between them, it is the fact that their aspirations towards goodness are complementary, which draws them together. Christophe's robust faith revives joy in life for the lonely Olivier. Christophe, in turn, learns justice from Olivier. The sage is uplifted by the strong, who is himself enlightened by the sage's clarity. This mutual exchange of benefits symbolizes the relationship between their nations. The friendship between the two individuals is designed to be the prototype of a spiritual alliance between the brother peoples. France and Germany are "the two pinions of the west." The European spirit is to soar freely above the blood-drenched fields of the past.
CHAPTER X
GRAZIA
JEAN CHRISTOPHE is creative action; Olivier is creative thought; a third form is requisite to complete the cycle of existence, that of Grazia, creative being, who secures fulfillment merely through her beauty and refulgence. In her case likewise the name is symbolic. Jean Christophe Krafft, the embodiment of virile energy, reëncounters, comparatively late in life, Grazia, who now embodies the calm beauty of womanhood. Thus his impetuous spirit is helped to realize the final harmony.
Hitherto, in his long march towards peace, Jean Christophe has encountered only fellow-soldiers and enemies. In Grazia he comes for the first time into contact with a human being who is free from nervous tension, with one characterized by that serene concord which in his music he has unconsciously been seeking for many years. Grazia is not a flaming personality from whom he himself catches fire. The warmth of her senses has long ere this been cooled, through a certain weariness of life, a gentle inertia. But in her, too, sounds that "music of the soul"; she too is inspired with that goodness which is needed to attract Jean Christophe's liking. She does not incite him to further action. Already, owing to the many stresses of his life, the hair on his temples has been whitened. She leads him to repose, shows him "the smile of the Italian skies," where his unrest, tending as ever to recur, vanishes at length like a cloud in the evening air. The untamed amativeness which in the past has convulsed his whole being, the need for love which has flamed up with elemental force in Le buisson ardent, threatening to destroy his very existence, is clarified here to become the "suprasensual marriage" with Grazia, "the well-beloved who never dies." Through Olivier, Jean Christophe is made lucid; through Grazia, he is made gentle. Olivier reconciled him with the world; Grazia, with himself. Olivier had been Virgil, guiding him through purgatorial fires; Grazia is Beatrice, pointing towards the heaven of the great harmony. Never was there a nobler symbolization of the European triad; the restrained fierceness of Germany; the clarity of France; the gentle beauty of the Italian spirit. Jean Christophe's life melody is resolved in this triad; he has now been granted the citizenship of the world, is at home in all feelings, lands, and tongues, and can face death in the ultimate unity of life.
Grazia, "la linda" (the limpid), is one of the most tranquil figures in the book. We seem barely aware of her passage through the agitated worlds, but her soft Mona Lisa smile streams like a beam of light athwart the animated space. Had she been absent, there would have been lacking to the work and to the man the magic of "the eternal feminine," the solution of the ultimate riddle. When she vanishes, her radiance still lingers, filling this book of exuberance and struggle with a soft lyrical melancholy, and transfusing it with a new beauty, that of peace.
CHAPTER XI
JEAN CHRISTOPHE AND HIS FELLOW MEN
NOTWITHSTANDING the intimate relationships described in the previous chapters, the path of Jean Christophe the artist is a lonely one. He walks by himself, pursuing an isolated course that leads deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of his own being. The blood of his fathers drives him along, out of an infinite of confused origins, towards that other infinite of creation. Those whom he encounters in his life's journey are no more than shadows and intimations, milestones of experience, steps of ascent and descent, episodes and adventures. But what is knowledge other than a sum of experiences; what is life beyond a sum of encounters? Other human beings are not Jean Christophe's destiny, but they are material for his creative work. They are elements of the infinite, to which he feels himself akin. Since he wishes to live life as a whole, he must accept the bitterest part of life, mankind.
All he meets are a help to him. His friends help him much; but his enemies help him still more, increasing his vitality and stimulating his energy. Thus even those who wish to hinder his work, further it; and what is the true artist other than the work upon which he is engaged? In the great symphony of his passion, his fellow beings are high and low voices inextricably interwoven into the swelling rhythm. Many an individual theme he dismisses after a while with indifference, but many another he pursues to the end. Into his childhood's days comes Gottfried, the kindly old man, deriving more or less from the spirit of Tolstoi. He appears quite incidentally, never for more than a night, shouldering his pack, the undying Ahasuerus, but cheerful and kindly, never mutinous, never complaining, bowed but splendidly unflinching, as he wends his way Godward. Only in passing does he touch Christophe's life, but this transient contact suffices to set the creative spirit in movement. Consider, again, Hassler, the composer. His face flashes upon Jean Christophe, a lightning glimpse, at the beginning of the young man's work; but, in this instant, Jean Christophe recognizes the danger that he may come to resemble Hassler through indolence, and he collects his forces. Intimations, appeals, signs—such are other men to him. Every one acts as a stimulus, some through love, some through hatred. Old Schulz, with sympathetic understanding, helps him in a moment of despair. The family pride of Frau von Kerich and the stupidity of the Gothamites drive him anew to despair, which culminates this time in flight, and thus proves his salvation. Poison and antidote have a terrible resemblance. But to his creative spirit nothing is unmeaning, for he stamps his own significance upon all, sweeping into the current of his life the very things which were imposing themselves as hindrances to the stream. Suffering is needful to him for the knowledge it brings. He draws his best forces out of sadness, out of the shocks of life. Designedly does Rolland make Jean Christophe conceive the most beautiful of his imaginative works during the times of his profoundest spiritual distresses, during the days after the death of Olivier, and during those which followed the departure of Grazia. Opposition and affliction, the foes of the ordinary man, are friends to the artist, just as much as is every experience in his career. Precisely for his profoundest creative solitude, he requires the influences which emanate from his fellows.
It is true that he takes long to learn this lesson, judging men falsely at first because he sees them temperamently, not knowledgeably. To begin with, Jean Christophe colors all human beings with his own overflowing enthusiasm, fancying them to be as upright and good-natured as he is himself, to speak no less frankly and spontaneously than he himself speaks. Then, after the first disillusionments, his views are falsified in the opposite direction by bitterness and mistrust. But gradually he learns to hold just measure between overvaluation and its opposite. Helped towards justice by Olivier, guided to gentleness by Grazia, gathering experience from life, he comes to understand, not himself alone, but his foes likewise. Almost at the end of the book we find a little scene which may seem at first sight insignificant. Jean Christophe comes across his sometime enemy, Lévy-Coeur, and spontaneously offers his hand. This reconciliation implies something more than transient sympathy. It expresses the meaning of the long pilgrimage. It leads us to his last confession, which runs as follows, with a slight alteration from his old description of true heroism: "To know men, and yet to love them."