This preoccupation with the river, amounting almost to an obsession, is probably due to the prominence of water in the landscape in which Romain Rolland’s early years were passed. Clamecy, the little town of the Morvan in which he was born (January 29, 1866), is situated on the Nivernais Canal, in the angle formed by the junction of the rivers Beuvron and Yonne. The volume entitled “Antoinette” is replete with memories of the scenes of his childhood. In it he has described lovingly and charmingly not Clamecy itself, but a representative community of the same province, which is one of the most heavily wooded, as well as one of the most picturesque, of France, and little infested by tourists; and he has portrayed a family which, despite deliberate and ingenious disguises, bears a close resemblance to his own.

Furthermore, the refined and altogether lovable Olivier Jeannin is more like Romain Rolland than is his hero, the often insupportable Jean-Christophe Krafft, whom his creator, unwittingly perhaps, made something of a cad and a good deal of a boor, a “fresh,” bumptious fellow, always going about with a chip on his shoulder, looking for trouble.

Plate in tint, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

ROMAIN ROLLAND, AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE.”

FROM A PORTRAIT DRAWING BY GRANIÉ

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

In the Morvan, the physical type of the Gauls remains exceptionally pure, and of this type Romain Rolland is an almost perfect specimen. He is tall, he is spare; he is very blond, and his eyes are very blue. Despite a tendency to pallor and a slight stoop, he appears to be of the wiry breed that is capable of doing a great deal of hard work without excessive fatigue; but those who should know affirm that his “fine faculties were imprisoned by nature in a feeble and ailing body,” and that he has always been a close approach to an invalid in consequence. His demeanor is austere, and he is prone to long silences; but when he breaks his silences, he breaks them with a vengeance, like a pent-up torrent sweeping away a dam, and one sees that his austerity is only a cloak for sensitiveness, for passion, and for a mighty kindliness. He is an ideal comrade, a loyal friend, and a sort of patron saint or father confessor of young or struggling writers who have “the root of the matter” in them. For instance, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, having fallen under the spell of Dostoyevsky, was so oppressed by the pessimism of the great Russian that he was made nearly ill and was tempted to renounce all endeavor. Rolland, by tactful and tender encouragement, rescued him from this slough of despond, restoring to him his lost interest in life and art. The result was the beautiful sylvan novel, “Monsieur des Lourdines,” one of the sweetest and purest works of the last few years, which, without this intervention, probably never would have been written.

Rolland’s father was a notary, descended from notaries, and his mother was the daughter of a magistrate, descended from magistrates, who were related to Guillaume and Guillaume-Henri de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris (seventeenth century) and Chancellor of France (eighteenth century), respectively. At a very early age the boy studied music with his mother, who was an accomplished musician, and as soon as he dreamed of the future at all, he dreamed of a musical future. When he had exhausted the educational possibilities of Clamecy, whose communal college corresponds roughly with the average American high school, his parents, fearing to allow him to shift for himself, probably because of his delicate constitution, broke up their Nivernais establishment, and went with him to Paris, the father, with a self-sacrifice verging on heroism, exchanging the prestige of being one of the first citizens of a town to which he was devotedly attached for the effacement of a modest clerkship in the capital. In Paris, Romain entered, first, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and, later, at twenty, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating at the latter not in the department of letters, to which his tastes inclined him, but in that of history and geography, a concession, no doubt, to the father, who would have liked to see his son in the Ecole Polytechnique.

The choice was fortunate, since it put him under the tutelage of the historian Gabriel Monod, who possessed a fine personality and was a stimulating teacher, exerting a salutary moral as well as intellectual influence upon his pupils, in whom he inspired a sort of filial affection.