The New Dawn by Romain Rolland (1912)

This final volume in the massive Jean Christophe sequence shares the feeling one gets from all the others, namely that this gigantic work is of the nature of an ecstatic tirade. It is heightened, rolling and flowing in a poetic swirl which, given its musical subject, may be likenable to a particular musical form of which I'm not cognizant. There is an immensity to it which I think may deafen the reader to some of its weaknesses, while at the same time engendering a kind of wonder. A problem is psychology: there is a manner in which Rolland gets up too much steam, his engine is too supremely primed, in describing the moods and tensions of the characters, that he becomes capable of intra-character contradictions. I'm sure he could poetically claim that red was blue, and up, down; he does seem to claim that his people have a guiding mainspring of a particular kind, only for us to find a few pages later that some quite opposite influence or tendency is inspiring them. Because the matter of which he is dealing is humanity in all its colours and shades there are 'escape routes' in simply saying that he's showing both faces of the human dualism, but I think the truth is probably a lot more prosaic: he gets lost in the ecstatic poetry. But there is no doubting the enquiring intellect and great beauty here. His management of Christopher's last illness is fascinating and reaches high. The portrait of late nineteenth century Europe in flux, the winds of history blowing over it, is rich and fascinating. The whole work is terribly underrated in its standing in world literature.