Chapter VI: A Heroic Symphony

An abundance of figures and events, an impressive multiplicity of contrasts, are united by a single element, music. In _Jean Christophe_, music is the form as well as the content. For the sake of simplicity we have to call the work a romance or a novel. But nowhere can it be said to attach to the epic tradition of any previous writers of romance: whether to that of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, who aimed at analyzing society into its chemical elements; or to that of Goethe, Gottfried Keller, and Stendhal, who sought to secure a crystallization of the soul. Rolland is neither a narrator, nor what may be termed a poetical romancer; he is a musician who weaves everything into harmony. In ultimate analysis, _Jean Christophe_ is a symphony born out of the spirit of music, just as in Nietzsche's view classical tragedy was born out of that spirit; its laws are not those of the narrative, of the lecture, but those of controlled emotion. Rolland is a musician, not an epic poet.

Even qua narrator, Rolland does not possess what we term style. He does not write a classical French; he has no stable architechtonic in his sentences, no definite rhythm, no typical hue in his wording, no diction peculiar to himself. His personality does not obtrude itself, since he does not form the matter but is formed thereby. He possesses an inspired power of adaptation to the rhythm of the events he is describing, to the mood of the situation. The writer's mind acts as a resonator. In the opening lines the tempo is set. Then the rhythm surges on through the scene, carrying with it the episodes, which often seem like individual brief poems each sustained by its own melody--songs and airs which appear and pass, rapidly giving place to new movements. Some of the preludes in _Jean Christophe_ are examples of pure song-craft, delicate arabesques and capriccios, islands of tone amid the roaring sea; then come other moods, gloomy ballads, nocturnes breathing elemental energy and sadness. When Rolland's writing is the outcome of musical inspiration, he shows himself one of the masters of language. At times, however, he speaks to us as historian, as critical student of the age. Then the splendor fades. Such historical and critical passages are like the periods of cold recitative in musical drama, periods which are requisite in order to give continuity to the story, and which thus fulfill an intellectual need, however much our aroused feelings may make us regret their interpolation. The ancient conflict between the musician and the historian persists unreconciled in Rolland's work.

Only through the spirit of music can the architectonic of _Jean Christophe_ be understood. However plastic the elaboration of the characters, their effective force is displayed solely in so far as they are thematically interwoven into the resounding tide of life's modulations. The essential matter is always the rhythm which these characters emit, and which issues most powerfully of all from Jean Christophe, the master of music. The structure, the inner architectural conception of the work, cannot be understood by those who merely contemplate its obvious subdivision into ten volumes. This is dictated by the exigencies of book production. The essential caesuras are those between the lesser sections, each of which is written in a different key. Only a trained musician, one familiar with the great symphonies, can follow in detail the way in which the epic poem _Jean Christophe_ is constructed as a symphony, an Eroica; only a musician can realize how in this work the most comprehensive type of musical composition is transposed into the world of speech.

Let the reader recall the chorale-like undertone, the booming note of the Rhine. We seem to be listening to some primal energy, to the stream of life in its roaring progress through eternity. A little melody rises above the general roar. Jean Christophe, the child, has been born out of the great music of the universe, to fuse in turn with the endless stream of sound. The first figures make a dramatic entry; the mystical chorale gradually subsides; the mortal drama of childhood begins. By degrees the stage is filled with personalities, with melodies; voices answer the lisping syllables of Jean Christophe; until, finally, the virile tones of Jean Christophe and the gentler voice of Olivier come to dominate the theme. Meanwhile, all the forms of life and music are unfolded in concords and discords. Thus we have the tragical outbreaks of a melancholy like that of Beethoven; fugues upon the themes of art; vigorous dance scenes, as in _Le buisson ardent_; odes to the infinite and songs to nature, pure like those of Schubert. Wonderful is the interconnection of the whole, and marvelous is the way in which the tide of sound ebbs once more. The dramatic tumult subsides; the last discords are resolved into the great harmony. In the final scene, the opening melody recurs, to the accompaniment of invisible choirs; the roaring river flows out into the limitless sea.

Thus _Jean Christophe_, the Eroica, ends in a chorale to the infinite powers of life, ends in the undying ocean of music. Rolland wished to convey the notion of these eternal forces of life symbolically through the imagery of the element which for us mortals brings us into closest contact with the infinite; he wished to typify these forces in the art which is timeless, which is free, which knows nothing of national limitations, which is eternal. Thus music is at once the form and the content of the work, "simultaneously its kernel and its shell," as Goethe said of nature. Nature is ever the law of laws for art.