Jean-Christophe, vol 1

Jean-Christophe, Vol. I, by
Romain Rolland

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Title: Jean-Christophe, Vol. I
Author: Romain Rolland
Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7979] [This file was first posted on

June 8, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VOLUME I
DAWN, MORNING, YOUTH, REVOLT
by Romain Rolland
Translated by Gilbert Cannan

PREFACE
"Jean-Christophe" is the history of the development of a musician of
genius. The present volume comprises the first four volumes of the
original French, viz.: "L'Aube," "Le Matin," "L'Adolescent," and "La
Révólte," which are 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 from the moment of his birth to the day when, after his
first encounter with Woman, at the age of fifteen, he falls back upon a
Puritan creed. Parts III and IV describe the succeeding five years of his
life, when, at the age of twenty, his sincerity, integrity, and unswerving
honesty have made existence impossible for him in the little Rhine
town of his birth. An act of open revolt against German militarism

compels him to cross the frontier and take refuge in Paris, and the
remainder of this vast book is devoted to the adventures of
Jean-Christophe in France.
His creator has said that he has always conceived and thought of the
life of his hero and of the book as a river. So far as the book has a plan,
that is its plan. It has no literary artifice, no "plot." The words of it hang
together in defiance of syntax, just as the thoughts of it follow one on
the other in defiance of every system of philosophy. Every phase of the
book is pregnant with the next phase. It is as direct and simple as life
itself, for life is simple when the truth of it is known, as it was known
instinctively by Jean-Christophe. The river is explored as though it
were absolutely uncharted. Nothing that has ever been said or thought
of life is accepted 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 of the processes of human growth or decay which are not analysed,
there is disclosed to the reader the most comprehensive survey of
modern life which has appeared in literature in this century.
To leave M. Rolland's simile of the river, and to take another, the book
has seemed to me like a, mighty bridge leading from the world of ideas
of the nineteenth century to the world of ideas of the twentieth. The
whole thought of the nineteenth century seems to be gathered together
to make the starting-point for Jean-Christophe's leap into the future. All
that was most 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 has it by direct inheritance.
M. Rolland was born in 1866 at Clamecy, in the center of France, of a
French family of pure descent, and educated in Paris and Rome. At
Rome, in 1890, he met Malwida von Meysenburg, a German lady who
had taken refuge in England after the Revolution of 1848, and there
knew Kossuth, Mazzini, Herzen, Ledin, Rollin, and Louis Blanc. Later,
in Italy, she counted among her friends Wagner, Liszt, Lenbach,
Nietzsche, Garibaldi, and Ibsen. She died in 1908. Rolland came to her
impregnated with Tolstoyan ideas, and with her wide knowledge of
men and movements she helped him to discover his own ideas. In her

"Mémoires d'une Idéaliste" she wrote of him: "In this young
Frenchman I discovered the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration,
the same profound grasp of every great intellectual manifestation that I