Chapter II: Part 2

‘Il y a des petits villages, isolés au milieu des espaces ruraux,
qui, le soir, à l’heure où l’on voit rentrer les bêtes et les gens,
m’apparaissent comme des gaufriers; et je crois que tout être, fut
il barbare prussien, soumis à leur action patiente et persistante,
y deviendrait lentement Lorrain. Bien des générations reposent
là, au cimetière, mais leur activité persiste; elle est devenue
ce groupe de maisons, ce clocher, cet abreuvoir, cette école
qu’entourent les champs bigarrés de couleurs et de formes; et si
l’on entre dans cette communauté, on y vient nécessairement à se
conduire et penser comme ont fait les prédécesseurs.’

On Herr Doktor Friedrich Asmus the land of Lorraine exercises this sort of transformation the more readily that he adores Colette; and she is touched by his loyalty and strength. Nature pushes her into his arms; and old Madame Baudoche can only sigh and say, ‘C’est bien dommage qu’il soit Allemand!’ The excellent young man sets out on his summer holidays almost sure of Colette’s accord.

But she is a young maid of the lineage of Corneille, accustomed to poise her feelings, and to decide less by a passion of the heart than by a free consent of the mind. For the whole world, she would not forfeit her sense of honour! And Asmus returns on Commemoration Day, when all that is French in Metz is met together to attend a service in memory of the soldiers of France fallen during the siege. During that service something larger than herself takes possession of the heart and soul of the little dressmaker. ‘Elle se sent chargée d’une grande dignité, soulevée vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut et de plus constant que sa modeste personne.’ Coming out of church she turns to the kind and fervent young Prussian who accompanies her: ‘Monsieur le docteur, dit la jeune fille, je ne peux vous épouser.’

Maurice Barrès also is like his heroic Colette. ‘Il se sent chargé d’une grande dignité, soulevé vers quelque chose de plus vaste, de plus haut, et de plus constant que sa personne.’ He has gone far since first we met him, half-mystical, half-quizzical, rapt in the cult of the Ego. Now, as we have said, freed from the service of Self, ‘La Terre et les Morts’ is his watchword.

III

Or rather ‘La Terre et les Morts’ _was_ his watchword, for of late years the Dead have revealed to him something wider and deeper than the Land. Let us compare with the perverse charm and insidious nihilism of his earlier book on Toledo, _Du Sang, de la Volupté et de la Mort_ (1895), his treatment of the same theme in his recent essay on Il Greco, and we shall catch the difference. In either volume the landscape is the same. The scene is arid; the red, steep banks of the ravine through which the Tagus rolls its tawny floods lead to a city set in ruin upon its lofty rocks; no site suggests a more ardent melancholy.

In his young days, Maurice Barrès declared that the traveller entering Toledo tasted the same harsh and acrid pleasure that he derived from reading Pascal’s _Pensées_ or from contemplating Michael-Angelo’s _Penseroso_: in three gulps, it is the same rough and heroic draught. The melancholy splendour of the scene exaggerates the stranger’s sense of loneliness. There is an implacable indifference to his needs in these magnificent ruins, and the yellow rocks repeat the strange device inscribed upon a brass let into the floor of the Cathedral. Twenty years ago, this device appeared, in the eyes of Barrès, to declare the secret of the city. They are singular words to adorn a Christian tomb: _Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil_.

But see how differently in 1910 our traveller will read the secret of Toledo! Now, as of old, the city on its sun-baked height, with the tawny semicircle of the Tagus at its feet, seems less a dwelling for men than a dreary highplace of the soul, a sanctuary set apart for spiritual exaltation. The dry orange tone of the soil and buildings; the town compact of convents, fortresses, and prisons; the barren sublimity of the prospect; the violent African heat of the sky; the vast scent of sun-dried lavender and sage and benjoin, seem proper to some Holy City of the desert rather than to a European town. And yet in all this sadness there is a secret pleasure.

‘J’y respire une volupté dont j’ignore le nom, et quelque chose
comme un péché se mêle à tout un passé d’amour, d’honneur et de
religion. C’est le mystère de Tolède, et nous voudrions le saisir.
Mais que donc pourrait nous guider? Toute société a fui de cette
ruine impériale.’

A painter, long dead, a foreigner--Il Greco--is the traveller’s guide. It sometimes happens that a foreigner surprises the fine evasive spirit of a place which escapes the native, staled by custom, until he catch it again through the fresh acuity of a stranger’s glance. It was the Fleming, Philippe de Champagne, newly disembarked from Brussels, who discerned the austere heroism of Port-Royal; and a Greek from Candy came from Venice to Toledo in his twentieth year to surprise the secret of Spain. He painted the souls of the men and women who breathed the same air as Saint Teresa and Cervantes.

Through him we learn the secret of Toledo, and Barrès will no longer tell us that it is the dreary motto: _Pulvis, cinis, et Nihil_; nay, he assures us now that it is the mystical world beyond reality--the spiritual life. The Cretan painted the serious, narrow faces, the bizarre, aristocratic, and elongated persons of his sitters, but also the constant object of their secret thought: that wonderful, mysterious, illimitable Other-World, urging and surging just on the further side of appearances; a world to which they aspire, and ascend, which seems to suck them up into the eddying whirlpool of the glorious Unseen.

He loves to paint a double vision: on the lower half of his canvas Il Greco sets the world he knows: the men of sad and sober visage, of neat features and pointed beards and ruffs, elegant, honourable gentlemen; scarcely, perhaps, men of a great capacity; and then above them, only just barely overhead, a mad world (if you choose to call it mad) a mystical world at any rate, of rushing spirits, of flooding light, of joy and fire (_Joie! Joie! Joie! Pleurs de joie!_), a world of adoration, bliss, eternal peace.

‘Et l’on a dit qu’il était fou!... Attention! Tout simplement,
c’est un catholique espagnol.... Ses toiles complètent les traités
de Sainte Thérèse et les poèmes de Saint Jean de la Croix. Elles
initient à la vie intérieure des dignes Castillans. Aucun livre
n’en donne une idée aussi complète, aussi neuve.’

The faults of Il Greco, his voluntary distortion of the figures that he represents, their flame-like fragility and aspiration, the lividness of the painter’s palette are not repugnant to our critic, who is always willing to permit a sacrifice of exterior truth in order to obtain a greater intensity of expression. The admirer of Ligier Richier may well be tender to the errors of Il Greco; fortunate errors, since they are perhaps a condition of the utterance of a certain spiritual state:--

‘De tels états ne semblent pas compatibles avec la grande civilisation et par exemple avec l’emploi de chef de gare. Mais ils laissent dans Tolède une atmosphere où plus d’un, qui ne s’en doute pas, gagnerait à fréquenter.’

More and more the consideration of these spiritual conditions will henceforth absorb the attention of Maurice Barrès. The indulgent historian of Bérénice, the heir of Montaigne, has gradually become the attentive devotee of Pascal, the commentator of _L’Angoisse de Pascal_; for Pascal, all sincerity and force and fire, attracts the myriad-minded, the dilettante Barrès. As he has surprised the secret of Toledo, so would he master the mystery of this great savant who made so light of science.

There are points of resemblance between Barrès and Pascal: both are sons of Auvergne, with something positive and exact in their imagination, a keen grasp of facts, a hatred of conventions. In Pascal also, though so fiery on occasion, there is something cold and harsh. And he, too, knew that _amor dominandi_ which so often inspired the political combats of Barrès; Pascal, too, in his youth, was imperious, vivacious, full of bizarre melancholy; he, likewise, had been a dreamer and a dilettante. And though the ultimate character of Pascal was a tragic spiritual grandeur, yet almost to the end there was a freakishness mixed up with it, a love of paradox, a delight in subterfuges and disguises. Saint as he was, Pascal was prompt to disdain, proud, full of self-confidence, ardent; he had his vanities and curiosities. His passionate and avid soul was often unsatisfied, ‘parce que ce gouffre infini ne peut-être rempli que par un objet infini et immuable, c’est à dire, par Dieu même.’ (_Pensées_, p. 425.)

_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 24_

Was it the memory of Pascal that inclined Barrès to collect the fragmentary legends and souvenirs, even the documents, of a humbler mystic, half saint and half schismatic, once famous in the region round Charmes, the little town where Barrès was born and where he still spends his summers?

Perhaps; but Barrès (whose singular temperament appears to combine the sense of order with a contempt for law) has always sought an axiom, a religion, a discipline, which would satisfy an ardent sensibility, and unite the individual with the brothers of his race and faith, while yet leaving free that inner Ego which, after all, has nothing to do with our organisations and arrangements, which transcends reason and order, being (if indeed anything is) in direct communication with the Infinite. From the time he wrote _Un Homme Libre_, from the time he organised Nationalism, Barrès has always sought a rule and a regulation; but he has never bowed his head to a yoke. Self-discipline, not obedience, is what he sought--and at one season he sought it in the ascetic life. But we must not forget that ἀ ςκητής means an athlete, one who has exercised himself and grown strong; and that which Barrès has always desired, in religion as in politics, is a perfecting and augmenting of his own personality.

That way lies heresy! And a heretic is the hero of Barrès’ last novel, _La Colline Inspirée_.

It is a narration of religious experience (or rather of religious aberration), and at the same time it is an idyll of a strange Druid-like poetry, all the native sap and strength of Celtic forests and high places. Chateaubriand, with his Velléda, Renan, these alone in France have touched that deepest fibre of the Celtic heart, that dread, sacred, and yet sweet, that sense of communion with the Invisible, of which the mystery is deeper than the baptismal font and larger than the consecrated altar stone. Rome will never entirely wean Barrès from his devotion to the Celtic divinities of wood and weald. In _La Colline Inspirée_ he opposes Poetry and Dogma. On the one hand, the Church, with its venerated hierarchy, its discipline, its universality and order; on the other, the mystic, the prophet--impatient of all mediation between the instinct of his soul and the eternal life--the seer of visions, too often sensual or insane.

Léopold Baillard is a real personage--almost contemporary, since he died in 1883. He and his two brothers, born of pious peasants in the dawn of the Nineteenth Century were three priests who dreamed of restoring, not only in their invisible supremacy but also in their positive and material prosperity, the prestige and the power of the native shrines of Lorraine. They were, in fact, as we should say (only a hundred years too soon), Celtic revivalists. Restorers of altars fallen into decay, founders of religious congregations, they were, during the first years of their ministry, the pride and the miracle of Alsace as of Lorraine. The acropolis of Sainte Odile in the Vosges and the sanctuary of Sion-Vaudémont in Lorraine became the property of Léopold Baillard and his brothers, where they founded convents and hostelries, and instituted an Order of Begging Sisters, who travelled all over Europe collecting alms. (A happy touch is that which shows Léopold Baillard in the Imperial Palace at Vienna, asking a contribution from the Emperor of Austria as Count de Vaudémont in Lorraine.)

Their enterprise, their intrepid imagination, their financial audacities awakened the mistrust of a prudent bishop, who refused to confirm the miraculous cure of one of the Sisters, and subsequently withdrew his sanction from their quest of alms. It was the axe-stroke at the root of the Baillards’ prosperity; it was the deliberate quashing of a new (but a less spiritual) Port Royal. The Baillards were obliged to sell all their possessions, and, bankrupt in purse and credit, they were sent into retreat in a Cistercian monastery. In that place of peace a Cistercian father inconsiderately bade Léopold Baillard visit in Normandy a wonder-working visionary, Vintras, a prophet in his degree.

Baillard was a sort of romantic genius--the genius of revolt and sentiment--a man for whom the invisible world exists so naturally that nothing in him protested when Vintras, on the occasion of their meeting, declared himself in constant and direct communication with a spiritual sphere. Baillard returned from Normandy to Sion-Vaudémont a fervent disciple of the New Elias (as Vintras styled himself), and, on the scene of his old labours, began to edify--with how much less success!--a schismatic Church. But he is no longer the prosperous, the genial, Abbé Léopold Baillard. His cure is taken from him, his doctrines are condemned, his person excommunicated. He is the fallen Angel, he whom pride misled.

There is tenderness as well as irony, poetry as well as tragedy, deep compassion mixed with a half-reluctant disapproval in the eloquence of M. Barrès, as he relates the downfall of the schismatic--his follies, his errors, his sufferings, his long martyrdom, his final reconciliation with the Church. _Melius est ut pereat unus quam unitas._ Yet if that one be Pascal, or Fénelon, or Father Tyrrell, or even an Abbé Léopold Baillard (so mere a peasant in his harsh materialism, so nearly a saint in his inspired spirituality), how shall one not admire the ardour, the grandeur, the genius, the generosity of a soul superior to the docile flock? The lost sheep (depend upon it) was the fairest of the fold--and was, as we know, the dearest to the immortal Shepherd. The sympathies, if not the convictions, of the author are evidently with the vanquished prophet. For a religion, says our author, is made of two elements, with difficulty conciliable, yet equally vital: on the one hand, enthusiasm, inspiration; on the other, discipline, authority.

‘Eternel dialogue de ces deux puissances! À laquelle obéir? Et
faut-il donc choisir entre elles? Ah! plutôt qu’elles puissent,
ces deux forces antagonistes, s’éprouver éternellement, ne jamais
se vaincre et s’amplifier par leur lutte même. Elles ne sauraient
se passer l’une de l’autre. Qu’est-ce qu’un enthousiasme qui
demeure une fantaisie individuelle? Qu’est-ce qu’un ordre qu’aucun
enthousiasme ne vient plus animer?’

_Est aliquid hominis quod nec ipse scit spiritus hominis qui in ipso est_: there is more in man than the soul of man conceives. This line of Saint Augustine (which serves as an epigraph to _La Colline Inspirée_) might be inscribed above all Maurice Barrès’ later writings: they are all laid on the altar of an Unknown God. Nothing in the eyes of this barely orthodox critic is more sacred, more moving than a village church, whose narrow chancel has echoed the prayers, the praise, of countless spirits straining to approach the secret Reality which sustains the world of Appearances. The stones have witnessed the tears of generations many times renewed as they consigned their dead to the keeping of God; before the same altar fathers and children have plighted their troth; and the font served to christen the grandsires of to-day. A village church is, to an imaginative mind, a thing which revives the sacred memory of our country and our dead. And so--not in a spirit of narrow orthodoxy--but in the largest and most human movement of generosity--Barrès takes up his pen to plead for the churches of France, falling into ruin since the separation of Church and State.

It must be remembered that, when these parted company, there was a question of constituting certain parish councils, or _associations cultuelles_, specially charged with the maintenance of the churches of France; but the Vatican, ever suspicious of all that tends towards a decentralisation of authority, would not allow of their existence. In consequence, no responsibility towards the Government obliges the communes to restore their parish church; if it fall into disrepair, they may abandon it or amend it at their own sweet will, should it threaten to tumble about their shoulders, they may disaffect it, or even at a last extremity, pull it down altogether.

Now, such is the antagonism of free-thinker and Catholic in France, especially in the less cultivated part of the community, that in certain villages, where the Church-people would be willing to restore their parish church at their own expense, a sectarian town council has forbidden them to do so, and, by an abuse of authority, has declared the church disaffected. In other hamlets, too poor for so great an outlay, the church is in ruins for lack of means and initiative. In others, their treasure, however slight, of old glass, enamel, tapestry, or gold and silver embroideries, old lace, or mediæval carving, has awakened the cupidity of those who know too well how to dispose of such relics of the past.

It is true that certain churches and certain treasures are considered worthy of the rank of historical monuments, and, as such, are entrusted to the protection of the State. But the thesis of M. Barrès is that _all_ churches, built before 1800 (I don’t know why he insists upon the date), should be included in this immunity; that any vote of a sum to be expended in repairs, decreed by a commune or department, should be immediately doubled by the Government; and that any ratepayer should have the right to restore his parish church at his own expense. It is not as a Catholic that he pleads the cause of the altar, but in the name of civilisation; and he requires the nation to repair its village churches just as he would demand the preservation of the National Library or the College of France.

‘C’est à la civilisation qu’il faut s’intéresser, si l’on n’a
pas le sens de Dieu et si l’on est rassasié du moi. Eh bien! la
civilisation, où est-elle défendue aujourd’hui?’

‘Dans les conseils d’administration? Je ne suis pas de ceux qui
le croient. Elle est défendue dans les laboratoires et dans les
églises.’

It is perhaps a little difficult to formulate the intellectual position of Barrès. What he craves, appears to be, not an orthodoxy, but a preserve of Mystery; a sort of private hunting ground for the imagination; the right to lean out of the visible world and draw a deep breath, _hors de la prison des choses claires_. Or, shall we say? in the blank wall of our science and our ignorance, he wants to be free to throw open a window looking on the Infinite? He defends, perhaps, less a faith than a conception of life which is bound up with all our ideas of honour, our notions of sacrifice. I think he is inspired by a sense of ancestral piety rather than by what we usually term religion. Indeed, I imagine that no reader would have more intimately vibrated to _La Grande Pitié des Églises de France_, than a certain old friend of mine, whom Barrès did not always understand, by name Ernest Renan--Renan who wrote (already in 1849):--

‘N’y aurait il quelque moyen d’être catholique sans croire au
catholicisme?’

And who are the followers whom Barrès calls to the rescue against an excess of sectarian zeal--against the village science of the Radical druggist, of Monsieur Homais? Nothing is more interesting, more symptomatic, to those who remember the France of yesterday, when, as a rule, the Intellectuals and the artists were on one side of the hedge, and the priests and the pious on the other. Persecution has certainly done wonders for the Church in France! Those whom Maurice Barrès convokes to defend the belfry and the altar are the younger generation in letters!

‘Je ne doute pas de leurs réponses.... Ces mêmes jeunes troupes
désintéressées qui auraient à d’autres moments, combattu, rejeté
un catholicisme oppressif ... se rassemblent d’instinct pour
faire face à la Barbarie. Je voudrais tracer ici le tableau de la
littérature nouvelle que je salue et d’où s’élève, plus ou moins
haut, la grande flamme spirituelle que le Café du Commerce ne voit
pas....’

ROMAIN ROLLAND

Among the still young masters of the young in France, the men rising fifty--Rostand, Claudel, Boylesve, Gide, Suarès, Francis Jammes, Romain Rolland--only the first and the last are really well known beyond our frontiers. Claudel is appreciated in Germany as an interesting exotic; but there, as well as in England and Italy, Romain Rolland has an audience of his own. In some ways he is the most approachable of French writers to an English, or, indeed, to an Italian mind. His intense moral earnestness, his love of nature, his lack of irony, and his sense of sarcasm, no less than an idealism devoid of all religiosity, distinguish him among the men of his generation. And he is an Individualist. When Claudel gibes at the idols which Freethinkers raise on their altars--the geniuses and the heroes, all the great men--be sure he is thinking of Romain Rolland, and perhaps of Suarès. Hero-worship, love of the poor and humble, faith in the human mind and its divine destinies, are indeed, to Romain Rolland, as much a religion as the doctrines of the Catholic Church to Claudel, or to his convert, Francis Jammes.

Romain Rolland owes his fame to _Jean-Christophe_, his great novel in ten volumes, the _Clarissa_ of our age. But he has written many other books. Romain Rolland’s unknown works are voluminous and abundant. Some twenty years ago I used to take them to the _Revue de Paris_ and expend all my small store of diplomacy in persuading the editor to print those immense and formless dramas, _Saint Louis_, _Aert_, _Danton_, in which rare streaks of real genius illumined desolate wastes of verbiage. I cannot say that any of them attained success.

Having striven to express his mind in these inchoate symphonies, Romain Rolland tried a new form of art, in which from the first stroke he was singularly successful: his _Lives of Great Men (Vies des Hommes Illustres)_, have the terseness, the morality, the grandeur, and the natural piety of Plutarch’s _Lives_. He has written nothing better than his _Beethoven_ or his _Michael Angelo_, and he has given us a _Mazzini_, a _Tolstoi_ only less excellent. These are quite little books, so far as size is concerned. And the mind of Romain Rolland continued to teem with images and ideas, with a sense of the tragedy of human destiny, and yet with an invincible hope in human reason. He had a thousand things to say to the men of his generation; his heart burned within him. So he invented a great man of his own making, Jean-Christophe.

Here he has written the tragedy of a free soul, the tragedy rather, let us say, of a whole generation perpetually in quest of Truth and Liberty. There are many stars in the sky; there are many virtues in the soul of man; perhaps no two succeeding generations make their idols of the same. Truth, Justice, Freedom, inflamed our youth with a noble passion. The young men of to-day adore Courage, Activity, Self-control, and Faith. They are optimists. We were pessimists. And Romain Rolland writes, as a foreword to the tenth volume of his novel:--

‘I have written the tragedy of a generation which soon must
disappear. I have sought to dissimulate nothing of its vices or its
virtues--neither its heavy sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic
efforts, nor its spent weariness under the crushing burden of a
superhuman task: for we had to renew our whole epitome of life,
our conception of the world, our æsthetics and our ethics, our
religion, our humanity.’

A Hamlet-like generation, intensely intellectual, sensitive, and chivalrous, issuing painfully from the shed sheath of a worn-out creed and struggling painfully towards a loftier faith and a fuller life--such is the subject of _Jean-Christophe_. And the author, merely middle-aged, has lived to see a new race inherit the earth: a race ingenuous, ingenious, active, alert, little given to self-questioning, or to any form of subtlety, and as a rule content with the religion of its forefathers, just because it was the religion of one’s forefather’s, and is probably as good as any other. Already _Jean-Christophe_ is a portrait of the past, and certain volumes--as a rule those we admired the most on their appearance: for instance _La Foire sur la Place_--present the half-pathetic interest of a photograph album ten years old.

What is still fresh, what is still moving and touching and delightful is the story of a heart, the painting of passion and especially the drawing of the feminine figures--the very numerous feminine figures--who diversify the existence of Jean-Christophe.

The novel has been translated into English. My readers know (or at least can easily learn) that the story is that of a great German musician. It follows him from his childhood in a little Rhenish town, to Paris, whither Jean-Christophe resorts, when, after a skirmish with a Prussian officer, he has to flee for his life across the frontier. There is no plot. The story is as ill-defined, as vague, as fluctuating, as constantly developing, as life itself; and these ten volumes are a sequence of episodes rather than a tale. Above all, they are a criticism of contemporary Europe, or rather of the Europe of yesterday, a Europe less infected with Nationalism, Imperialism, Panslavism, than the instable and agitated compound that we know.

The hero is born in Germany. No German book, I think, not even _Werther_, gives with a sweeter serenity, the peculiar charm of Rhenish ‘Gemüthlichkeit’ than these early volumes of _Jean-Christophe_. But, as the hero grows older, he finds himself constantly hostile to the dreamy optimism of his environment. He hates the humbler forms of German idealism--that public and private Phariseeism which will not admit the world to be that which it is; the majestic sentimentality which invades all German art; that general artifice of emotion, moral nobleness, sensibility, and poetry which exasperates when it does not endear.

Even the ‘cher vieux Schultz,’ ‘le bon Allemand,’ Christophe’s one admirer; even Modesta, the blind girl who will not allow that she has any cause to be unhappy, irritate the choleric young man, despite their candid goodness and their tranquil courage, because of a certain unconscious hypocrisy in their attitude, a habit of ignoring the truth when it happens to be disagreeable. Christophe cannot as yet admit that human nature is incapable of assimilating unadulterated reality: he has still to learn that every nation mixes with the truth some special spice of lies; and that there are more dangerous condiments than a romantic optimism. He himself, in his cult of force, is no less local, no less German: he is merely a German of a later generation.

When Christophe flies to France, he finds to his discomfiture that sincerity is not a common attribute, even across the frontier; but French insincerity is of a different sort, cynical, excitable. France has ever been a _fanfaron de vices_, and loves to brag of her depravity rather than to practise it. The angry, heady, passionate, fuming youth spares no class or type in his first revolt against his new environment: the squalor of the poor, the struggling ambition and snobbish meannesses of the world of art, the hollow ceremony of fashionable circles combine to make him hate Paris. Little by little he penetrates below the surface: his friend Olivier Jalin interprets to him the real France. The intellectuals and the æsthetes of twenty years ago, who so irritate Christophe on his first arrival, were but the foam on the face of a deep reality. ‘C’est curieux que vous soyez Française!’ says the musician to his friend’s sister, with her honest, girlish face, her round, full forehead, her little straight nose, her neat small chin, and the brown locks that frame so demurely her thin cheeks.

This quiet little girl, at once artless and disenchanted, pious and disillusioned, does not answer in the least to the conception that a young German artist forms of France. But we know better! The little governess personifies that France, known to few outside her boundaries, which is compact of sacrifice, of duty, of delicate conscientiousness, of rigid economy for self and generous outlay for some treasured ideal, child, or cause:--the France of Port-Royal, the France of ‘48. Indeed, if we mistake not, Mademoiselle Antoinette Jeannin has misspelt her name; and we envy the novelist who (annihilating time and space) can link the mind of Beethoven to the soul of Henriette Renan, and make two lovers happy.

It is true that Romain Rolland will not let them be happy: Antoinette dies; and Christophe embarks afresh on innumerable adventures. One first of May, in a Socialist riot, his friend, Olivier Jeannin is killed on a barricade; and Christophe, red-handed, is spirited away by his friends, and takes refuge in Switzerland. What an arraignment of the civilisation of Bâle! Give us rather the incoherence of German militarism mixed with German _schwärmerei_! Steep us in the intellectual and social extravagances of France! But keep us free from that death-in-life, the Phariseeism of Bâle! A rigid discipline never relaxed; a collective conscience ever on the watch to punish and deride the faults of individuals; a perpetual constraint in which diversity and spontaneity perish; all the virtues--without the grace of God! And underneath the strict uniformity of its phylacteries, human passions more brutal than elsewhere, because never visited by the open air and sun. As we read the description of Christophe’s life in Switzerland, we fall in love with Bohemia. Order is only lovely when it is tempered with grandeur or with grace. But the order of these sordid millionaires is merely a morose economy, a gloomy, dull privation, a lifeless rigour, a sombre constraint. Against this dark background, Romain Rolland projects a figure of almost animal passion.

The story of Jean-Christophe in Switzerland is the history of Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonk. In either case a German musician, fleeing from political difficulties, takes refuge (and takes refuge in Bâle) with a friend who generously comes to his rescue; and in return the musician seduces the wife of his protector.

We know little of the Wesendonks, save that Frau Mathilde was a poetess; I imagine her very different from the wife of Doctor Braun. That kind, fussy little man was oddly mated with the stiff and silent spouse whose large, Michael-Angelesque type of beauty seemed almost ugly or ridiculous in her awkward provincial clothes. Anna is an uninteresting but perfectly virtuous woman until Jean-Christophe comes to stay in her house. And then music invades her with an incomprehensible passion, turning this sombre young Hausfrau into an imperious Venus.

As she and Christophe sing together the fiery phrases of his Opera, a frenzy overcomes them, and they experience that sort of love in which there is something savage, cosmic, as far as possible removed from our ideas of tenderness or duty. And Christophe, the faithful Christophe, steals from his generous host that little treasure of honour and domestic happiness which was all that Dr Braun had known of life’s ideal. Christophe had been received under that roof in his dire necessity, and he betrayed a trust. With a woman whom he barely knew, whom he did not pretend to understand, whom he did not love. Not love? Love was too weak a work to express the torrent of flame that tortured the musician when he thought of Anna or listened to her voice; and yet he was dimly aware that this fierce instinct, this irresistible intuition, was something less, or more, than human: _Ce n’était pas l’amour, et c’était mille fois plus que l’amour_.

Thus in the Swiss town, in the Calvinist society, which glorified rationalism and made of Intellect the sole motive power of life, Christophe encountered, and was conquered by, that great irreducible Force which makes light of reason and morality, and in front of which all our laws and our scruples and our duties are as idle straws caught in the swirl of a river in flood.

But the strength of that fragility, which is Man, lies in his power of recovery. Like the prodigal son, having fed with the swine, he can always return and go to his Father. Christophe, like Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s novel, sets duty and faithfulness above passion, and ascends out of the abyss.

‘Il comprenait la vanité de son orgueil, la vanité de l’orgueil
humain, sous le poing redoutable de la Force qui meut les mondes.
Nul n’est maître de soi avec certitude. Il faut veiller. Car si
l’on s’endort, la Force se rue en nous et nous emporte ... dans
quels abîmes? Ou le torrent qui nous charrie se retire et nous
laisse dans son lit à sec. Il ne suffit même pas de vouloir, pour
lutter. Il faut s’humilier devant le Dieu inconnu qui _fiat ubi
vult_, qui souffle quand il veut, où il veut: l’amour, la mort ou
la vie. La volonté humaine ne peut rien sans la sienne. Une seconde
lui suffit pour anéantir des années d’efforts. Et, s’il lui plait,
il peut faire surgir l’éternel de la poussière et de la boue.’

Jean-Christophe sacrifices his delight to his ideal of conduct. He is rewarded by a great influx of inspiration. In solitude and renunciation he takes up his abode on the edge of a mountain, in the shelter of great woods full of shadow and loneliness; and he lives there in retreat and penitence, hearing nothing of Anna. And, even as Wagner in his exile at Venice, when he had renounced Madame Wesendonk, composed _Tristan und Isolde_, Jean-Christophe receives at last his inspiration as a great musician.

The final volume takes us back to Paris, and thence to Rome. Christophe is now the genius of his age, but his personal life is still meagre and sad; no wife, no child, no friend, no love, concentrates its elixir in one golden drop. And one day in the Alps he meets--as a middle-aged woman, a widow still charming in her tired grace and kind serenity,--that Countess Berény whom he had known as a girl in Paris, long ago. And Grazia Berény incarnates indulgent lazy Italy; as Anna Braun, Switzerland; as Henriette Jeannin, France; as the dear, feckless, gentle Sabina, South Germany; in the long gallery of Christophe’s lady-loves.

Of them all, it is Grazia that he desires to marry. But Grazia, indifferent and gentle, loves Christophe less than her quiet days, her children’s interests, her pleasant, nonchalant, and sociable life of a handsome widow ‘well left,’ who cares above all things for her _quieto vivere_. She is not very interesting, this Grazia, so much in love with peace and measure; she and Christophe would have been as well mated as a sleek and sober Angora with a mastiff ever on the growl (though his bark is worse than his bite), and we are not very sorry when she dies. We have wept so many tears for poor old Louisa (Christophe’s mother), for Sabine, for Antoinette, for Olivier, that we have none to spare for the passive and elegant great lady. Neither in the painting of Grazia nor in his image of Rome is our author to be seen at his best. And yet what citizen of Cosmopolis knows Rome as well as Romain Rolland?

By the end of this tenth volume, Jean-Christophe is no longer young, and all has happened to him that reasonably could be expected to happen. He has mixed in the politics of several nations, he has known fight and flight and exile; he has been poor, he has been famous; he is now the greatest musician of his times. The most exacting reader could not wish to stretch him out much longer on the rack of this tough world. There are ten sizable volumes of him at Mr Ollendorff’s--or, if you prefer, seventeen of those wonderful little ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ (beloved of garrulous and expansive genius) in which M. Charles Péguy has produced not only M. Romain Rolland, but himself. Now we know all there is to know, and find that (as in real life) the climax is middling compared to the hopes of youth.

Jean-Christophe dies a genius; but we, after all, have never heard his operas. He dies, like any other mortal whom a living faith sustains in the last hour of all. The death of Jean-Christophe has probably preoccupied more readers than the end of any other hero in fiction since the great days of Dickens and Thackeray. We ourselves know one eminent hand in letters who wrote to the author suggesting that his hero should disappear in the wreck of the _Titanic_, conducting the band, in place of the unforgettable bandmaster. Another wished him to wander away alone and die in the desert, after the fashion of Tolstoi.

And I should have liked for him the death of Péguy--defending his country--leading his men into battle on the Marne--Ah! there’s the rub! Jean-Christophe was an enemy-alien; he would have been fighting in the Prussian ranks. For many years to come M. Rolland’s hero cannot be our hero.

A reader appreciative of the intentions of M. Rolland might have been sure than Jean-Christophe would die in no such picturesque or dramatic fashion, but quietly yield his life on the brink of a new world, as a wave effaces itself gently and vanishes in the sand, obliterated by the pressure of the oncoming wave.

The whole meaning of M. Rolland’s book is the continuity of Life, spreading insensibly from soul to soul, from sphere to sphere, in an endless symphony. And the last chapters are full of new characters, pushing forward, rising to maturity; children of the Past in whom the dead revive, fathers of the Future who already are changing the face of our world. The scheme of _Jean-Christophe_ (rising thus, and falling, and rising at the end towards the yet unvisioned spectacle of times about to be) recalls the structure of Tolstoi’s _War and Peace_.

Jean-Christophe succumbs, sordidly enough, in a Paris lodging, to pneumonia. But he gives up the ghost in a mood of heroic joy, thankful to exchange the worn-out faculties, the dreary, dingy end of life, which are all he can dispose of here, for some undreamed-of harmony and power which await him (as he believes) beyond. Tolstoi himself has not a serener conviction that Life extends illimitably around our tiny sphere, bathing the shores of all the stars in a tide of continual renewal. The unity of the forces which compose a living being must sooner or later dissolve, but the processes of Infinity will reassemble them again. ‘Un jour je renaîtrai pour de nouveaux combats!’ Meanwhile, caught in a rapture beyond the delusion of self, the dying musician feels his personality expand and vanish for a while in something vaster. He is lost in the One-and-All. ‘Tu renaîtras.... Repose. Tout n’est plus qu’un seul cœur.’

And so Jean-Christophe greets a new dawn and leaves behind him, also, on earth a new day. The finest passages of this last volume contain M. Rolland’s masterly portrayal of the young France of our times. Surely never was there a generation more unlike its introspective, intellectual forbears: Hamlet has given birth to Harry Hotspur! We must perhaps go back to the times of Ausonius (when the fathers were readers of Seneca and Cicero and the sons hardy Christian barbarians) to find two generations similarly contrasted.

Jean-Christophe was a man of yesterday. His creed was to think no lie, to consent to no injustice, and to love his neighbour as himself. Here M. Rolland shows him in his puissant and solitary decline, dominating a new generation that rises round his knees, strangely different, with other ideals. Truth? Humanity? The old-fashioned words are rarely heard. We hear of Authority, of Order, of the claims of one’s race, of the rights and responsibilities of the strong. This new generation, which has witnessed no war, has the mind and disposition of conquerors. Christophe surveys with tender ironical affection the lovable breed of airmen, and sportsmen, and soldiers who fill France to-day--fresh, and frank, and admirably valiant, full of prompt physical courage and intellectual docility.

_Jean-Christophe_ is perhaps the most remarkable work of contemporary fiction: a singular moral fervour, a rare imagination, an unequalled sensibility, a torrent of sarcasm, rancour, revolt, tenderness, stream from its disconcerting pages. But these delicate notations of minute variations in sensibility, though infinitely precious to the psychologist, transgress the limits that strict art prescribes. Romain Rolland sacrifices every grace of measure and composition to his abundance, to his enthusiasm for Life. He has no sense of style. His endless files of short, breathless sentences succeed each other interminably, with no variation, till we experience at last the sensation of a drop falling at regular intervals on the crown of our head! He has been called ‘un volcan qui ne vomit que des cendres.’ And then the rare flame strikes out--passages of infinite tenderness or of solemn grandeur.

Still, let me own, while I admire _Jean-Christophe_, I think sometimes with regret of a Turgeneff, no less subtle, who composed his novels at a like tremendous length, and then, pen in hand, went through his manuscript again, and reduced it by two-thirds.

When we open by chance one of those old novels, still famous, long unread, which nourished the minds of our ancestors--_Clarissa Harlowe_, _La Nouvelle Héloise_, or _L’Astrée_, or _Amadis_--or any other of those immense, untidy romances, vast bazaars or stores of their age, which provided several generations with every necessary of life, we are nearly always astonished to find them so interesting and so good. Our forefathers were no fools: what they loved in these books, which were for them a school of feeling, was not Art, but Life. Nothing is more instructive in this connection than to read a letter of Mme de Sévigné’s on the interminable masterpiece of La Calprenède; the great lady, so delicate, so difficile, ‘blessée des méchants styles,’ can scarcely understand her own enthusiasm:--

‘Le style de La Calprenède est maudit en mille endroits; de grandes
périodes de roman, de méchants mots--je sens tout cela ... et
cependant je ne laisse pas de m’y prendre comme à de la glu; la
beauté des sentiments, la violence des passions, la grandeur des
événements tout cela m’entraîne comme une petite fille.’

And even as Mme de Sévigné was absorbed in _Cléopatre_ we lose ourselves in _Jean-Christophe_. Romain Rolland is the great spectator of our times. Will this quality of moralising criticism, this tendency to preach as well as to paint, and to hold the mirror up to Nature in a mood of violent irony--will this gift of satire keep its savour when the generation whom M. Rolland alternately objurgates and encourages shall have passed away? It is difficult to say. He is perhaps one of a race who exist rather because of a certain flame of life, a force of personality, than because of the perfection of their work. Tolstoi, Dr Johnson, Rousseau, are the great names of this fraternity. _We_ are their characters, they mould _us_, they move _us_, no less than their puppets. And we treasure their lessons. But do we often open _The Rambler_ or _La Nouvelle Héloise_? Will our children know, as we know, all the ins and outs of _War and Peace_? And have we, finally, the right to include M. Romain Rolland in this great category of artists who were something more than artists? It is too soon to say. We are still lost in the multiplicity of detail, the immense succession of portraits (not only of persons but of generations and nations and societies) which fill the vast canvas of _Jean-Christophe_.

EDMOND ROSTAND

When, in 1886, at eighteen years of age, Edmond Rostand, carried off the Prize for Eloquence at the Academy of Marseilles, the bent of his genius was already plain. For in praising Honoré d’Urfé and his great romance, _Astrée_, the young poet pleaded the cause of a form of art as far removed as possible from the Naturalist formulas which were still the fashion of the hour. And his praise appeared a programme; and the young apologist of Urfé discovered himself to be the apostle of an idealist and sentimental revival.

Despite his amusing originality, and notwithstanding the real nobility of his ideas, Edmond Rostand is not a poet for poets. He was too clever by half--never was a clearer case of the wisdom of the ancients whose proverb ran that ‘the half is more than the whole!’ His poems are like a brilliant display of fireworks, whose flowers and fusees, whose flashing greens, and blues, and carmines, confuse our sight and prevent our seeing the quiet radiance of the stars behind, above.

And this is not saying that there are no stars in Rostand’s poems, no ideas, that is to say, eternally calm and bright. Although not primarily a thinker, yet our poet thinks: there are as many ideas in Rostand as, for instance, in Swinburne. But too often he uses his unrivalled virtuosity to obscure his plain meaning, as, in some modern music, the importance of the accompaniment drowns the voice. Contrasting the simple nobility of his intention with the quips and the quirks, the puns and the periods, of his rhapsodies, his rhetoric and his rodomontade (the style is catching), shall I say that he reminds us of that mediæval acrobat who, not knowing how to express all his adoration of the Virgin Mary, turned a somersault before her altar? It is amusing to discover that the ideas of Rostand, when we get at them, are not so very different from the ideas of Paul Claudel, who stands at the other extreme of the political and literary horizon.

‘Ungefähr sagt das der Pfarrer auch,
Nur mit ein Bisschen andern Worten.’

Rostand, too, believes that order is rooted in self-sacrifice. His heroes, like Claudel’s, strike free of the sterile introspection which marred the art of the Fin-de-Siècle. They make for action, and aim at an end outside themselves (in which they always fail), but Rostand amalgamates his modern Anti-Individualism with the old Liberal romantic, idealist enthusiasm, perfectly sincere so far as it goes. If not devout, he is at least devoted. His plays have generally for their subject some sort of a burnt-offering. For instance in _La Princesse Lointaine_, Bertrand and the Princess sacrifice their passion to the peace of mind of the dying Rudel:--

‘Oui, les grandes amours travaillent pour le Ciel!’

even as in _Cyrano_ the poet renounces his love in favour of his friend. And that friend again ... _Cyrano_ is a veritable vertigo of self-sacrifice!

The tragedy of _L’Aiglon_ is the oblation of a young man’s life to a great idea. Chantecler also is a man--or rather a cock--with a mission to which he is willing to immolate all personal delight. The plays of Edmond Rostand are a sort of serum against selfishness! Despite their rodomontade and their buffoonery, they are nobly moral.

But how they irritate a fastidious taste, with their perpetual posturing, their gesticulations, their pirouettes, and their impertinence! Was ever a real poet and a sincere knight-errant so quaintly disguised as an acrobat, and sometimes, alas! even as a commercial ‘gent’! Is it possible to be at once quite sincere and yet so appallingly clever? He moves us when he expresses the sense of patriotism or the praise of courage. He had a peculiar gift for expressing admiration blent with pity. He had, in fact, a chivalrous soul, an instinct for all that is gracious or grand, a sensibility that was sincere but shallow. Had he but lived a few months longer, how admirably he would have celebrated the Fêtes of Victory!

Was he a great poet? It is perhaps too soon to say. Bad taste never yet prevented any one from being a great poet. This is a point on which I cannot insist too strongly. When Juliet says:--

‘Give me my Romeo and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world shall be in love with night.’

Shakespeare is writing Rostand with a vengeance.

When in Victor Hugo’s _La Forêt Mouillée_ the sparrow makes believe his woodland glade is the court of Louis XIV., and says in a series of puns, first of all, to a tuft of heather (bruyère):--

‘Bonjour,
La Bruyère! (à une branche d’arbre)
Bonjour, Rameau!
(à une corneille sur le rocher)
Bonjour, Corneille!
(au nénufar) Bonjour, Boileau!’

let us admit at once that Victor Hugo wallows (and not in this instance only) in the very slough of that bad taste so dear to Rostand. How pleased Rostand would have been to call the water-lily, say, John Drinkwater!

But then Shakespeare and Victor Hugo have amazing qualities wherewith to counter-balance these conceits. In art, that is everything. The smallest chip of pure gold compensates for a bag full of pebbles: a work of art must be estimated by the degree of its merits and not by the quantity of its defects. If there is dross along with the gold--even though there be much more dross than gold--let us be thankful if the gold itself is pure and unaffected by the presence of the baser residue. There is the question.

I borrow from a book, recently published in French by a Hungarian Professor, M. Haraszti, some details of the youth and origin of Rostand. In 1868, he was born at Marseilles of a wealthy family of merchants and bankers, long established there. For a hundred years, at least, they had all been lovers of the arts. Early in the Nineteenth Century, the quatuors of Beethoven were performed, for the first time in France, in the Rostands’ salon. In 1844, a Mademoiselle Victorine Rostand--a great-aunt of the poet’s--published a volume of lyrics in the manner of Lamartine. Edmond’s uncle, the banker, Alexis Rostand, has composed an opera and more than one oratorio; and his father, the economist Eugène Rostand, is himself a poet. A volume of verse, _Les Sentiers Unis_, published in 1876, celebrates the precocity and charm of the child, Edmond, at that time eight years old; and it is interesting to learn that, even at that early date, he was remarkable for his original grace of words and flow of language:--

‘Cette petite langue exquise,
Un vrai jargon de Paradis,
De mots qu’il façonne à sa guise.
De diminutifs inédits;
D’inimitables tours de phrases....’

At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, was certainly the father of the man. As a schoolboy, at the lycée of Marseilles, his Quixotic, pathetic temperament--his characteristic preference for the unsuccessful--was already established. An old, drunken usher scorned by the masters, tormented by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his pupils (on account of his shining nose) surnamed _Pif-Luisant_, was young Rostand’s chosen companion. And in his first volume of verse, the poet dedicates a charming poem to the tippler of genius who gave him, perhaps, his first idea of Cyrano:--

‘Toi que j’ai tant aimé ... doux pochard ... Pif-Luisant.’

At one-and-twenty years of age, Edmond Rostand published his first volume of verse, _Les Musardises_, and shortly afterwards married the beautiful young poetess of _Les Pipeaux_, three years younger than himself. I can remember Rosemonde Gérard in her nineteenth year, a vision of loveliness, as, one evening, in the salon of the old poet, Leconte de Lisle, she stood up, so slender, so smiling, so ravishingly blonde and fresh, and recited a lyric as charming as herself. Madame Rostand has a talent of her own, sincere, simple, femininely sentimental. All the lovers in France know her _Chanson éternelle_:--

‘Car vois-tu chaque jour je t’aime davantage,
Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, et bien moins que demain.’

_Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 56_

This marriage with Mademoiselle Gérard, granddaughter of Napoleon’s marshal, the victor of Wagram, the victim of Moscow and Waterloo, confirmed Edmond Rostand in his meditations on the dramatic fiasco of the First Empire--that extraordinary antithesis of triumph and disaster, of all tragedies the most touching to martial and patriotic France.

The poet, however, was too wise to undertake this tremendous subject with a ‘prentice hand. He made his debut as a playwright in 1894, at the age of twenty-six, with a pretty little fanciful comedy, _Les Romanesques_. A year later, Sarah Bernhardt produced his _Princesse Lointaine_, playing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, brought out _La Samaritaine_. And at Christmas, 1897, came the conquering hero, _Cyrano de Bergerac_.

I cannot analyse Rostand’s plays, which everybody knows, which are (with Kipling’s novels) the immense, the international, the universal success of our times; I cannot calmly plod through the plots of these familiar pieces with the patience I employ on an obscure play of Paul Claudel’s, known perhaps to a hundred readers in the British Isles.