The firmament will echo—“Abélard!”
ROMAIN ROLLAND
AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE”
BY ALVAN F. SANBORN
“Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”—Rolland.
ROMAIN ROLLAND is to-day a world celebrity. On June 5 he was awarded the “Grand Prix” of the French Academy.
Jean-Christophe, the dominant figure of the enormous work which Rolland was a score of years in writing, and nearly half a score in publishing, is gradually becoming a household name upon two continents.
“Jean-Christophe” is the detailed life of a man from the cradle to the grave, a prose epic of suffering, a narrative of the evolution of musical genius, a pæan to music, and a critique of composers, the history of an epoch, a comparative study of the civilizations of France and Germany, an arraignment of society, a discussion of vexed problems, a treatise on ethics, a “barrel” of sermons, a storehouse of dissertations, and a blaze of aspirations. It is also, the protestations of the author to the contrary notwithstanding, a novel, but a novel at once so earnest and so austere that it has performed the miracle of imparting to Anglo-Saxons a belief in French seriousness. Edmund Gosse pronounces it “the noblest work of fiction of the twentieth century,” and George Moore, “one of the most remarkable novels France ever produced.” It has also been characterized by American critics as “an epoch-making departure in fiction,” “the greatest literary work that has come out of France since Zola.”
“FROM behind the house mounts the murmuring of the river,” is the opening phrase of the first volume of “Jean-Christophe.” The last chapter of the last volume represents St. Christopher crossing the river, with “the Child, the day that is to be,” upon his shoulder; and beneath all the intervening pages the river flows, emerging ever and anon with whisperings, babblings, and gurglings, with purlings, trillings, and trumpetings, with roarings, swishings, and swashings, with plashings, splashings, and crashings. “There are human lives,” says Romain Rolland, “that are placid lakes; others are great, open skies wherein the clouds sail; others, fertile plains; others, jagged peaks. Jean-Christophe has always seemed to me to be a river.”