Romain Rolland
Ellen Key
(Authorized translation from the Swedish by Mamah Bouton Borthwick. Copyright, 1914.)
I.
In Clamecy, a quiet town in Nivernais in Central France, Romain Rolland was born in 1866. His family had dwelt for centuries in the little place, both as country folk and townspeople. Quite contrary to the inference one would draw from Jean Christophe, neither German nor other foreign ancestry is discoverable in the family lineage; Rolland is descended from pure French Catholic burgher stock. His parents devoted themselves with loving zeal to his education; his mother endowing him with a musical sense and love of music that made music, from earliest childhood, his passion and joy; his father, a notary in Clamecy, gave up his profession that he might accompany his young son to Paris.
It is not the external events of his life, but the spiritual atmosphere and environment of his native town, that Rolland depicted in the sixth part of Jean Christophe, under the sub-title, “Antoinette.” The landscape of Nivernais is a mingling of rivers and canals, great forests and Mont de Moran’s peaks. The region unites memorials of the Keltic and Gallic-Roman times and cathedrals of the Gothic period, stimulating the historical sense which, next to the sense of music, is most characteristic of Romain Rolland.
He entered the Ecole Normale superieure in Paris, when about fifteen or sixteen years of age, and later went to the Academia di Francia in Rome. He considers the friendship formed there with Malvida von Meysenburg[1] profoundly significant in his development. As she was a faithful friend of Mazzini and Herzen, of Wagner and Nietzsche, in middle age, so in her old age she was the friend of Romain Rolland. “Her memory is sacred to me,” he recently wrote, and he had continued in regular correspondence with her from 1890 until her death in 1903.
Rome exercised a profound influence upon his entire spiritual life. He spent there the years 1889 and 1890, and has since made frequent visits for longer or shorter periods. Italy is the country which, next to France, he knows best and loves most. Germany, on the other hand, which he has described in Jean Christophe so vividly that one is convinced he must have passed a great part of his life there, he knows only through some minor journeys.
In 1895, he received his doctor’s degree at the University of Paris, and presented two theses.[2] He was, first, instructor in the History of Art at the school he had attended; later he became professor of History of Music at the Sorbonne, a position he will probably resign; partly, because an automobile accident injured his arm so that he can no longer illustrate his lectures on the History of Music with the piano; partly, because he has found the combination of authorship and lectures too great a strain upon his delicate health.
Concerning the literary impressions that were decisive in his development, he says that his education, like that of most young Frenchmen, was founded upon the classics of the seventeenth century. He found his way, himself, to the writers who gave him spiritual sustenance: Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Encyclopedists, especially Diderot.