E-text prepared by the Distributed Proofreading Team
by Romain Rolland
Translated by Gilbert Cannan
"Jean-Christophe" is the history of the development of a musician ofgenius. The present volume comprises the first four volumes of the originalFrench, viz.: "L'Aube," "Le Matin," "L'Adolescent," and "La Révólte," whichare designated in the translation as Part I—The Dawn; Part II—Morning;Part III—Youth; Part IV—Revolt. Parts I and II carry Jean-Christophe fromthe moment of his birth to the day when, after his first encounter withWoman, at the age of fifteen, he falls back upon a Puritan creed. PartsIII and IV describe the succeeding five years of his life, when, at theage of twenty, his sincerity, integrity, and unswerving honesty have madeexistence impossible for him in the little Rhine town of his birth. An actof open revolt against German militarism compels him to cross the frontierand take refuge in Paris, and the remainder of this vast book is devoted tothe adventures of Jean-Christophe in France.
His creator has said that he has always conceived and thought of the lifeof his hero and of the book as a river. So far as the book has a plan, thatis its plan. It has no literary artifice, no "plot." The words of it hangtogether in defiance of syntax, just as the thoughts of it follow one onthe other in defiance of every system of philosophy. Every phase of thebook is pregnant with the next phase. It is as direct and simple as lifeitself, for life is simple when the truth of it is known, as it was knowninstinctively by Jean-Christophe. The river is explored as though it wereabsolutely uncharted. Nothing that has ever been said or thought of life isaccepted without being brought to the test of Jean-Christophe's own life.What is not true for him does not exist; and, as there are very few ofthe processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed, there isdisclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of modern life whichhas appeared in literature in this century.
To leave M. Rolland's simile of the river, and to take another, the bookhas seemed to me like a, mighty bridge leading from the world of ideas ofthe nineteenth century to the world of ideas of the twentieth. The wholethought of the nineteenth century seems to be gathered together to make thestarting-point for Jean-Christophe's leap into the future. All that wasmost religious in that thought seems to be concentrated in Jean-Christophe,and when the history of the book is traced, it appears that M. Rolland hasit by direct inheritance.
M. Rolland was born in 1866 at Clamecy, in the center of France, of aFrench family of pure descent, and educated in Paris and Rome. At Rome, in1890, he met Malwida von Meysenburg, a German lady who had taken refugein England after the Revolution of 1848, and there knew Kossuth, Mazzini,Herzen, Ledin, Rollin, and Louis Blanc. Later, in Italy, she counted amongher friends Wagner, Liszt, Lenbach, Nietzsche, Garibaldi, and Ibsen. Shedied in 1908. Rolland came to her impregnated with Tolstoyan ideas, andwith her wide knowledge of men and movements she helped him to discover hisown ideas. In her "Mémoires d'une Idéaliste" she wrote of him: "In thisyoung Frenchman I discovered the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration,the same profound grasp of every great intellectual manifestation that Ihad already found in the greatest men of other nationalities."
The germ of "Jean-Christophe" was conceived during this period—the"Wanderjahre"—of M. Rolland's life. On his return to Paris