Chapter XVII: The Generations

Thus the entire human herd is penned within ring after ring of hurdles, which the life-force must break down if it would win to freedom. We have the hurdle of the fatherland, which shuts us away from other nations; the hurdle of language, which imposes its constraint upon our thought; the hurdle of religion, which makes us unable to understand alien creeds; the hurdle of our own natures, barring the way to reality by prejudice and false learning. Terrible are the resulting isolations. The peoples fail to understand one another; the races, the creeds, individual human beings, fail to understand one another; they are segregated; each group or each individual has experience of no more than a part of life, a part of truth, a part of reality, each mistaking his part for the whole.

Even the free man, "freed from the illusion of fatherland, creed, and race," even he, who seems to have escaped from all the pens, is still enclosed within an ultimate ring of hurdles. He is confined within the limits of his own generation, for generations are the steps of the stairway by which humanity ascends. Every generation builds on the achievements of those that have gone before; here there is no possibility of retracing our footsteps; each generation has its own laws, its own form, its own ethic, its own inner meaning. And the tragedy of such compulsory fellowship arises out of this, that a generation does not in friendly fashion accept the achievements of its predecessors, does not gladly undertake the development of their acquisitions. Like individual human beings, like nations, the generations are animated with hostile prejudices against their neighbors. Here, likewise, struggle and mistrust are the abiding law. The second generation rejects what the first has done; the deeds of the first generation do not secure approval until the third or the fourth generation. All evolution takes place according to what Goethe termed "a spiral recurrence." As we rise, we revolve on narrowing circles round the same axis. Thus the struggle between generation and generation is unceasing.

Each generation is perforce unjust towards its predecessors. "As the generations succeed one another, they become more strongly aware of the things which divide them than they are of the things which unite. They feel impelled to affirm the indispensability, the importance, of their own existence, even at the cost of injustice or falsehood to themselves." Like individual human beings, they have "an age when one must be unjust if one is to be able to live." They have to live out their own lives vigorously, asserting their own peculiarities in respect of ideas, forms, and civilization. It is just as little possible to them to be considerate towards later generations, as it has been for earlier generations to be considerate towards them. There prevails in this self-assertion the eternal law of the forest, where the young trees tend to push the earth away from the roots of the older trees, and to sap their strength, so that the living march over the corpses of the dead. The generations are at war, and each individual is unwittingly a champion on behalf of his own era, even though he may feel himself out of sympathy with that era.

Jean Christophe, the young solitary in revolt against his time, was without knowing it the representative of a fellowship. In and through him, his generation declared war against the dying generation, was unjust in his injustice, young in his youth, passionate in his passion. He grew old with his generation, seeing new waves rising to overwhelm him and his work. Now, having gained wisdom, he refused to be wroth with those who were wroth with him. He saw that his enemies were displaying the injustice and the impetuosity which he had himself displayed of yore. Where he had fancied a mechanical destiny to prevail, life had now taught him to see a living flux. Those who in his youth had been fellow revolutionists, now grown conservative, were fighting against the new youth as they themselves in youth had fought against the old. Only the fighters were new; the struggle was unchanged. For his part, Jean Christophe had a friendly smile for the new, since he loved life more than he loved himself. Vainly does his friend Emmanuel urge him to defend himself, to pronounce a moral judgment upon a generation which declared valueless all the things which they of an earlier day had acclaimed as true with the sacrifice of their whole existence. Christophe answers: "What is true? We must not measure the ethic of a generation with the yardstick of an earlier time." Emmanuel retorts: "Why, then, did we seek a measure for life, if we were not to make it a law for others?" Christophe refers him to the perpetual flux, saying: "They have learned from us, and they are ungrateful; such is the inevitable succession of events. Enriched by our efforts, they advance further than we were able to advance, realizing the conquests which we struggled to achieve. If any of the freshness of youth yet lingers in us, let us learn from them, and seek to rejuvenate ourselves. If this is beyond our powers, if we are too old to do so, let us at least rejoice that they are young."

Generations must grow and die as men grow and die. Everything on earth is subject to nature's laws, and the man strong in faith, the pious freethinker, bows himself to the law. But he does not fail to recognize (and herein we see one of the profoundest cultural acquirements of the book) that this very flux, this transvaluation of values, has its own secular rhythm. In former times, an epoch, a style, a faith, a philosophy, endured for a century; now such phases do not outlast a generation, endure barely for a decade. The struggle has become fiercer and more impatient. Mankind marches to a quicker measure, digests ideas more rapidly than of old. "The development of European thought is proceeding at a livelier pace, much as if its acceleration were concomitant with the advance in our powers of mechanical locomotion.... The stores of prejudices and hopes which in former times would have nourished mankind for twenty years, are exhausted now in a lustrum. In intellectual matters the generations gallop one after another, and sometimes outpace one another." The rhythm of these spiritual transformations is the epopee of _Jean Christophe_. When the hero returns to Germany from Paris, he can hardly recognize his native land. When from Italy he revisits Paris, the city seems strange to him. Here and there he still finds the old "foire sur la place," but its affairs are transacted in a new currency; it is animated with a new faith; new ideas are exchanged in the market place; only the clamor rises as of old. Between Olivier and his son Georges lies an abyss like that which separates two worlds, and Olivier is delighted that his son should regard him with contempt. The abyss is an abyss of twenty years.

Life must eternally express itself in new forms; it refuses to allow itself to be dammed up by outworn thoughts, to be hemmed in by the philosophies and religions of the past; in its headstrong progress it sweeps accepted notions out of its way. Each generation can understand itself alone; it transmits a legacy to unknown heirs who will interpret and fulfill as seems best to them. As the heritage from his tragical and solitary generation, Rolland offers his great picture of a free soul. He offers it "to the free souls of all nations; to those who suffer, struggle, and will conquer." He offers it with the words:

"I have written the tragedy of a vanishing generation. I have made no attempt to conceal either its vices or its virtues, to hide its load of sadness, its chaotic pride, its heroic efforts, its struggles beneath the overwhelming burden of a superhuman task--the task of remaking an entire world, an ethic, an æsthetic, a faith, a new humanity. Such were we in our generation.

"Men of to-day, young men, your turn has come. March forward over our bodies. Be greater and happier than we have been.

"For my part, I say farewell to my former soul. I cast it behind me like an empty shell. Life is a series of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, that we may be reborn."