“Jean-Christophe,” which is a ten-volume biography of an imaginary hero, synthesizes and supplements the “Théâtre du peuple” and the heroic biographies. It is, like them, an act of propaganda, conceived in a similar spirit of revolt, and animated by a similar desire to help people “to live, to correct their errors, to conquer their prejudices, and to enlarge from day to day their thoughts and their hearts.” “I was isolated,” writes Rolland, regarding the origin of this now famous work; “I was stifling, like so many others in France, in a hostile moral atmosphere; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against a sickly civilization, against a thought corrupted by a false élite.
“I wanted to say to this élite: ‘You are liars! You do not represent France!’ And for that I needed a hero of pure eyes and of pure heart, with a soul sufficiently unblemished to have the right to speak, and with a voice strong enough to make itself heard.”
The veritable drubbing the fourth volume of “Jean-Christophe” gives Germany was inspired by sympathy, not by antipathy; it was the rod, so to speak, indispensable to the salvation of the child. “I am not in the least an enemy of Germany,” Rolland wrote in a personal letter bearing the date of September 12, 1907, “and the best proof is that I have chosen a German for my hero. The absolute sincerity, the creative energy, and the moral rigidity of Christophe offset his rather severe criticisms of his countrymen. No German can love more than I the Germany of Goethe and of Beethoven. But I believe that the Germany of to-day is sick; and, in her interest, some one must have the courage to say so. You may be sure that Christophe, at present in Paris, will be as hard upon my compatriots as he has been upon his own.”
This prediction was amply verified, as we know, by Volume V, “La foire sur la place,” which, in its turn, proceeded not from malevolence, but from a deep-rooted determination to “battle for the life and the honor of the race”; not from anti-patriotism, but from the high and pure form of patriotism that wishes its country to be blameless. “Whosoever has divined the soul that animates the body of this people, which does not want to perish, can and must boldly lay bare its vices and its follies, in order to combat them—in order to combat especially those who exploit them and who live off them. To struggle is even to inflict pain that good may come.”
The entire ten volumes preach that all things work together for good to the persons or the peoples who hitch their wagons to the stars.
Incidentally, Rolland seems also to teach in “Jean-Christophe” that the Gallic ideal and the Germanic ideal, “the vast culture and the combative reason of France” and “the inner music and the feeling for nature of Germany,” have everything to gain by joining forces.
Romain Rolland has not solved the riddle of existence. His works are less a revelation than an inspiration; he is a well-nigh peerless kindler of ambition of the higher order. He has not done much toward making life comprehensible, but he has done a good deal, and possibly this is better, toward making it livable, at least for those who have renounced trying to comprehend it. He aids and encourages the downcast or despairing not with tenets of philosophy or religion,—dogmas are his bête noire,—but with stories of heroic souls whose example arouses them to a consciousness of their own capacity for virtue, inspires them with faith in themselves and in the future, and shows them how blessedness may be wrought out of wretchedness. It is the old, old, but always new, message of joy through sanctified suffering.
“Seek not happiness, seek blessedness. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him!” thundered the British worshiper and biographer of heroes, Carlyle.
The French biographer and worshiper of heroes expresses essentially the same thought in slightly different terms:
And the little fifteen-year-old Puritan heard the voice of his God.