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Jean Christophe: In Paris

R >> Romain Rolland >> Jean Christophe: In Paris




And to crown it all the intellectuals amused themselves by discovering that
this national suicide was based on reason and right, in the sacred right
of every human being to be happy. There was a morbid humanitarianism
which broke down the distinction between Good and Evil, and developed a
sentimental pity for the "sacred and irresponsible human" in the criminal,
the doting sentimentality of an old man:--it was a capitulation to crime,
the surrender of society to its mercies.

Christophe thought:

"France is drunk with liberty. When she has raved and screamed, she will
fall down dead-drunk. And when she wakes up she will find herself in
prison."

* * * * *

What hurt Christophe most in this demagogy was to see the most violent
political measures coldly carried through by these men whose fundamental
instability he knew perfectly well. The disproportion between the
shiftiness of these men and the rigorous Acts that they passed or
authorized was too scandalous. It was as though there were in them two
contradictory things: an inconsistent character, believing in nothing,
and discursive Reason, intent on truncating, mowing down, and crushing
life, without regard for anything. Christophe wondered why the peaceful
middle-class, the Catholics, the officials who were harassed in every
conceivable way, did not throw them all out by the window. He dared not
tell Roussin what he thought: but, as he was incapable of concealing
anything, Roussin had no difficulty in guessing it. He laughed and said:

"No doubt that is what you or I would do. But there is no danger of them
doing it. They are just a set of poor devils who haven't the energy:
they can't do much more than grumble. They're just the fag end of
an aristocracy, idiotic, stultified by their clubs and their sport,
prostituted by the Americans and the Jews, and, by way of showing how up to
date they are, they play the degraded parts allotted to them in fashionable
plays, and support those who have degraded them. They're an apathetic and
surly middle-class: they read nothing, understand nothing, don't want
to understand anything; they only know how to vilify, vilify, vaguely,
bitterly, futilely--and they have only one passion: sleep, to lie huddled
in sleep on their moneybags, hating anybody who disturbs them, and even
anybody whose tastes differ from theirs, for it does upset them to think of
other people working while they are snoozing! If you knew them you would
sympathize with us."

But Christophe could find nothing but disgust with both: for he did not
hold that the baseness of the oppressed was any excuse for that of the
oppressor. Only too frequently had he met at the Stevens' types of the rich
dull middle-class that Roussin described,

"... _L'anime triste di coloro,
Che visser senza infamia esenza lodo_,..."

He saw only too clearly the reason why Roussin and his friends were sure
not only of their power over these people, but of their right to abuse it.
They had to hand all the instruments of tyranny. Thousands of officials,
who had renounced their will and every vestige of personality, and obeyed
blindly. A loose, vulgar way of living, a Republic without Republicans:
Socialist papers and Socialist leaders groveling before Royalties when they
visited Paris: the souls of servants gaping at titles, and gold lace, and
orders: they could be kept quiet by just having a bone to gnaw, or the
Legion of Honor flung at them. If the Kings had ennobled all the citizens
of France, all the citizens of France would have been Royalist.

The politicians were having a fine time. Of the Three Estates of '89 the
first was extinct: the second was proscribed, suspect, or had emigrated:
the third was gorged by its victory and slept. And, as for the Fourth
Estate, which had come into existence at a later date, and had become a
public menace in its jealousy, there was no difficulty about squaring that.
The decadent Republic treated it as decadent Rome treated the barbarian
hordes, that she no longer had the power to drive from her frontiers;
she assimilated them, and they quickly became her best watch-dogs. The
Ministers of the middle-class called themselves Socialists, lured away
and annexed to their own party the most intelligent and vigorous of the
working-class: they robbed the proletariat of their leaders, infused
their new blood into their own system, and, in return, gorged them with
indigestible science and middle-class culture.

* * * * *

One of the most curious features of these attempts at distraint by the
middle-class on the people were the Popular Universities. They were little
jumble-sales of scraps of knowledge of every period and every country. As
one syllabus declared, they set out to teach "every branch of physical,
biological, and sociological science: astronomy, cosmology, anthropology,
ethnology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, geography, languages,
esthetics, logic, etc." Enough to split the skull of Pico della Mirandola.

In truth there had been originally, and still was in some of them, a
certain grand idealism, a keen desire to bring truth, beauty, and morality
within the reach of all, which was a very fine thing. It was wonderful and
touching to see workmen, after a hard day's toil, crowding into narrow,
stuffy lecture-rooms, impelled by a thirst for knowledge that was stronger
than fatigue and hunger. But how the poor fellows had been tricked!
There were a few real apostles, intelligent human beings, a few upright
warm-hearted men, with more good intentions than skill to accomplish them;
but, as against them, there were hundreds of fools, idiots, schemers,
unsuccessful authors, orators, professors, parsons, speakers, pianists,
critics, anarchists, who deluged the people with their productions. Every
man jack of them was trying to unload his stock-in-trade. The most thriving
of them were naturally the nostrum-mongers, the philosophical lecturers
who ladled out general ideas, leavened with a few facts, a scientific
smattering, and cosmological conclusions.

The Popular Universities were also an outlet for the ultra-aristocratic
works of art: decadent etchings, poetry, and music. The aim was the
elevation of the people for the rejuvenation of thought and the
regeneration of the race. They began by inoculating them with all the fads
and cranks of the middle-class. They gulped them down greedily, not because
they liked them, but because they were middle-class. Christophe, who was
taken to one of these Popular Universities by Madame Roussin, heard her
play Debussy to the people between _la Bonne Chanson_ of Gabriel Fauré and
one of the later quartets of Beethoven. He who had only begun to grasp the
meaning of the later works of Beethoven after many years, and long weary
labor, asked some one who sat near him pityingly:

"Do you understand it?"

The man drew himself up like an angry cock, and said:

"Certainly. Why shouldn't I understand it as well as you?"

And by way of showing that he understood it he encored a fugue, glaring
defiantly at Christophe.

Christophe went away. He was amazed. He said to himself that the swine had
succeeded in poisoning even the living wells of the nation: the People had
ceased to be--"People yourselves!" as a working-man said to one of the
would-be founders of the Theaters of the People. "I am as much of the
middle-class as you."

* * * * *

One fine evening when above the darkening town the soft sky was like an
Oriental carpet, rich in warm faded colors, Christophe walked along by the
river from Notre Dame to the Invalides. In the dim fading light the tower
of the cathedral rose like the arms of Moses held up during the battle.
The carved golden spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, the flowering Holy Thorn,
flashed out of the labyrinth of houses. On the other side of the water
stretched the royal front of the Louvre, and its windows were like weary
eyes lit up with the last living rays of the setting sun. At the back of
the great square of the Invalides behind its trenches and proud walls,
majestic, solitary, floated the dull gold dome, like a symphony of bygone
victories. And at the top of the hill there stood the Arc de Triomphe,
bestriding the hill with the giant stride of the Imperial legions.

And suddenly Christophe thought of it all as of a dead giant lying prone
upon the plain. The terror of it clutched at his heart; he stopped to gaze
at the gigantic fossils of a fabulous race, long since extinct, that in its
life had made the whole earth ring with the tramp of its armies,--the race
whose helmet was the dome of the Invalides, whose girdle was the Louvre,
the thousand arms of whose cathedrals had clutched at the heavens, who
traversed the whole world with the triumphant stride of the Arch of
Napoleon, under whose heel there now swarmed Lilliput.




III


Without any deliberate effort on his part, Christophe had gained a certain
celebrity in the Parisian circles to which he had been introduced by
Sylvain Kohn and Goujart. He was seen everywhere with one or other of his
friends at first nights, and at concerts, and his extraordinary face, his
ugliness, the absurdity of his figure and costume, his brusque, awkward
manners, the paradoxical opinions to which he gave vent from time to
time, his undeveloped, but large and healthy intellect, and the romantic
stories spread by Sylvain Kohn about his escapades in Germany, and his
complications with the police and flight to France, had marked him out for
the idle, restless curiosity of the great cosmopolitan hotel drawing-room
that Paris has become. As long as he held himself in check, observing,
listening, and trying to understand before expressing any opinion, as
long as nothing was known of his work or what he really thought, he was
tolerated. The French were pleased with him for having been unable to
stay in Germany. And the French musicians especially were delighted with
Christophe's unjust pronouncements on German music, and took them all
as homage to themselves:--(as a matter of fact, they heard only his old
youthful opinions, to many of which he would no longer have subscribed:
a few articles published in a German Review which had been amplified and
circulated by Sylvain Kohn).--Christophe was interesting and did not
interfere with anybody: there was no danger of his supplanting anybody.
He needed only to become the great man of a coterie. He needed only not
to write anything, or as little as possible, and not to have anything
performed, and to supply Goujart and his like with ideas, Goujart and the
whole set of men whose motto is the famous quip--adapted a little:

_"My glass is small: but I drink ... the wine of others."_

A strong personality sheds its rays especially on young people who are more
concerned with feeling than with action. There were plenty of young people
about Christophe. They were for the most part idle, will-less, aimless,
purposeless. Young men, living in dread of work, fearful of being left
alone with themselves, who sought an armchair immortality, wandering from
café to theater, from theater to café, finding all sorts of excuses for not
going home, to avoid coming face to face with themselves. They came and
stayed for hours, dawdling, talking, making aimless conversation, and going
away empty, aching, disgusted, satiated, and yet famishing, forced to go
on with it in spite of loathing. They surrounded Christophe, like Goethe's
water-spaniel, the "lurking specters," that lie in wait and seize upon a
soul and fasten upon its vitality. A vain fool would have found pleasure
in such a circle of parasites. But Christophe had no taste for pedestals.
He was revolted by the idiotic subtlety of his admirers, who read into
anything he did all sorts of absurd meanings, Renanian, Nietzschean,
hermaphroditic. He kicked them out. He was not made for passivity.
Everything in him cried aloud for action. He observed so as to understand:
he wished to understand so as to act. He was free of the constraint of
any school, and of any prejudice, and he inquired into everything, read
everything, and studied all the forms of thought and the resources of the
expression of other countries and other ages in his art. He seized on all
those which seemed to him effective and true. Unlike the French artists
whom he studied, who were ingenious inventors of new forms, and wore
themselves out in the unceasing effort of invention, and gave up the
struggle half-way, he endeavored not so much to invent a new musical
language as to speak the authentic language of music with more energy: his
aim was not to be particular, but to be strong. His, passion for strength
was the very opposite of the French genius of subtlety and moderation. He
scorned style for the sake of style and art for art's sake. The best French
artists seemed to him to be no more than pleasure-mongers. One of the
most perfect poets in Paris had amused himself with drawing up a "list
of the workers in contemporary French poetry, with their talents, their
productions, and their earnings": and he enumerated "the crystals, the
Oriental fabrics, the gold and bronze medals, the lace for dowagers, the
polychromatic sculpture, the painted porcelain," which had been produced in
the workshops of his various colleagues. He pictured himself "in the corner
of a vast factory of letters, mending old tapestry, or polishing up rusty
halberds."--Such a conception of the artist as a good workman, thinking
only of the perfection of his craft, was not without an element of
greatness. But it did not satisfy Christophe: and while he admitted in it
a certain professional dignity, he had a contempt for the poor quality of
life which most often it disguised. He could not understand writing for the
sake of writing, or talking for the sake of talking. He never said words;
he said--or wanted to say--the things themselves.

_"Ei dice cose, e voi dite parole...."_

After a long period of rest, during which he had been entirely occupied
with taking in a new world, Christophe suddenly became conscious of an
imperious need for creation. The antagonism which he felt between himself
and Paris called up all his reserve of force by its challenge of his
personality. All his passions were brimming in him, and imperiously
demanding expression. They were of every kind: and they were all equally
insistent. He tried to create, to fashion music, into which to turn the
love and hatred that were swelling in his heart, and the will and the
renunciation, and all the daimons struggling within him, all of whom
had an equal right to live. Hardly had he assuaged one passion in
music,--(sometimes he hardly had the patience to finish it)--than he hurled
himself at the opposite passion. But the contradiction was only apparent:
if they were always changing, they were in truth always the same. He
beat out roads in music, roads that led to the same goal: his soul was a
mountain: he tried every pathway up it; on some he wound easily, dallying
in the shade: on others he mounted toilsomely with the hot sun beating up
from the dry, sandy track: they all led to God enthroned on the summit.
Love, hatred, evil, renunciation, all the forces of humanity at their
highest pitch, touched eternity, and were a part of it. For every man the
gateway to eternity is in himself: for the believer as for the atheist, for
him who sees life everywhere as for him who everywhere denies it, and for
him who doubts both life and the denial of it,--and for Christophe in whose
soul there met all these opposing views of life. All the opposites become
one in eternal Force. For Christophe the chief thing was to wake that Force
within himself and in others, to fling armfuls of wood upon the fire, to
feed the flames of Eternity, and make them roar and flicker. Through the
voluptuous night of Paris a great flame darted in his heart. He thought
himself free of Faith, and he was a living torch of Faith.

Nothing was more calculated to outrage the French spirit of irony. Faith is
one of the feelings which a too civilized society can least forgive: for
it has lost it and hates others to possess it. In the blind or mocking
hostility of the majority of men towards the dreams of youth there is for
many the bitter thought that they themselves were once even as they, and
had ambitions and never realized them. All those who have denied their
souls, all those who had the seed of work within them, and have not brought
it forth rather to accept the security of an easy, honorable life, think:

"Since I could not do the thing I dreamed, why should they do the things
they dream? I will not have them do it."

How many Hedda Gablers are there among men! What a relentless struggle
is there to crush out strength in its new freedom, with what skill is it
killed by silence, irony, wear and tear, discouragement,--and, at the
crucial moment, betrayed by some treacherous seductive art!...

The type is of all nations. Christophe knew it, for he had met it in
Germany. Against such people he was armed. His method of defense was
simple: he was the first to attack; pounced on the first move, and declared
war on them: he forced these dangerous friends to become his enemies.
But if such a policy of frankness was an excellent safeguard for his
personality, it was not calculated to advance his career as an artist. Once
more Christophe began his German tactics. It was too strong for him. Only
one thing was altered: his temper: he was in fine fettle.

Lightheartedly, for the benefit of anybody who cared to listen, he
expressed his unmeasured criticism of French artists: and so he made many
enemies. He did not take the precaution, as a wise man would have done,
of surrounding himself with a little coterie. He would have found no
difficulty in gathering about him a number of artists who would gladly
have admired him if he had admired them. There were some who admired him
in advance, investing admiration as it were. They considered any man
they praised as a debtor, of whom, at a given moment, they could demand
repayment. But it was a good investment.--But Christophe was a very bad
investment. He never paid back. Worse than that, he was barefaced enough to
consider poor the works of men who thought his good. Unavowedly they were
rancorous, and engaged themselves on the next opportunity to pay him back
in kind.

Among his other indiscretions Christophe was foolish enough to declare war
on Lucien Lévy-Coeur. He found him in the way, everywhere, and he could not
conceal an extraordinary antipathy for the gentle, polite creature who was
doing no apparent harm, and even seemed to be kinder than himself, and was,
at any rate, far more moderate. He provoked him into argument: and, however
insignificant the subject of it might be, Christophe always brought into
it a sudden heat and bitterness which surprised their hearers. It was as
though Christophe were seizing every opportunity of battering at Lucien
Lévy-Coeur, head down: but he could never reach him. His enemy had an
extraordinary skill, even when he was most obviously in the wrong, in
carrying it off well: he would defend himself with a courtesy which showed
up Christophe's bad manners. Christophe still spoke French very badly,
interlarding it with slang, and often with very coarse expressions which
he had picked up, and, like many foreigners, used wrongly, and he was
incapable of outwitting the tactics of Lucien Lévy-Coeur and he raged
furiously against his gentle irony. Everybody thought him in the wrong,
for they could not see what Christophe vaguely felt: the hypocrisy of that
gentleness, which when it was brought up against a force which it could not
hold in check, tried quietly to stifle it by silence. He was in no hurry,
for, like Christophe, he counted on time, not, as Christophe did, to build,
but to destroy. He had no difficulty in detaching Sylvain Kohn and Goujart
from Christophe, just as he had gradually forced him out of the Stevens'
circle. He was isolating Christophe.

Christophe himself helped him. He pleased nobody, for he would not join any
party, but was rather against all parties. He did not like the Jews: but he
liked the anti-Semites even less. He was revolted by the cowardice of the
masses stirred up against a powerful minority, not because it was bad,
but because it was powerful, and by the appeal to the basest instincts of
jealousy and hatred. The Jews came to regard him as an anti-Semite, and
the anti-Semites looked on him as a Jew. As for the artists, they felt his
hostility. Instinctively Christophe made himself more German than he was,
in art. Revolting against the voluptuous ataraxia of a certain class of
Parisian music, he set up, with violence, a manly, healthy pessimism. When
joy appeared in his music, it was with a want of taste, a vulgar ardor,
which were well calculated to disgust even the aristocratic patrons of
popular art. An erudite, crude form. In his reaction he was not far from
affecting an apparent carelessness in style and a disregard of external
originality, which were bound to be offensive to the French musicians. And
so those of them, to whom he sent some of his work, without any careful
consideration, visited on it the contempt they had for the belated
Wagnerism of the contemporary German school. Christophe did not care: he
laughed inwardly, and repeated the lines of a charming musician of the
French Renaissance--adapted to his own case:

* * * * *
_"Come, come, don't worry about those who will say:
'Christophe has not the counterpoint of A,
And he has not such harmony as Monsieur B.'
I have something else which they never will see."_

But when he tried to have some of his music performed, he found the doors
shut against him. They had quite enough to do to play--or not to play--the
works of young French musicians, and could not bother about those of an
unknown German.

Christophe did not go on trying. He shut himself up in his room and went on
writing. He did not much care whether the people of Paris heard him or not.
He wrote for his own pleasure and not for success. The true artist is not
concerned with the future of his work. He is like those painters of the
Renaissance who joyously painted mural decorations, knowing full well that
in ten years nothing would be left of them. So Christophe worked on in
peace, quite good-humoredly resigned to waiting for better times, when help
would come to him from some unexpected source.

* * * * *

Christophe was then attracted by the dramatic form. He dared not yet
surrender freely to the flood of his own lyrical impulse. He had to run it
into definite channels. And, no doubt, it is a good thing for a young man
of genius, who is not yet master of himself, and does not even know exactly
what he is, to set voluntary bounds upon himself, and to confine therein
the soul of which he has so little hold. They are the dikes and sluices
which allow the course of thought to be directed. Unfortunately Christophe
had not a poet: he had himself to fashion his subjects out of legend and
history.

Among the visions which had been floating before his mind for some months
past were certain figures from the Bible.--That Bible, which his mother had
given him as a companion in his exile, had been a source of dreams to him.
Although he did not read it in any religious spirit, the moral, or, rather,
vital energy of that Hebraic Iliad had been to him a spring in which, in
the evenings, he washed his naked soul of the smoke and mud of Paris. He
was concerned with the sacred meaning of the book: but it was not the
less a sacred book to him, for the breath of savage nature and primitive
individualities that he found in its pages. He drew in its hymns of the
earth, consumed with faith, quivering mountains, exultant skies, and human
lions.

One of the characters in the book for whom he had an especial tenderness
was the young David. He did not give him the ironic smile of the Florentine
boy, or the tragic intensity of the sublime works of Michael Angelo and
Verrochio: he knew them not. His David was a young shepherd-poet, with
a virgin soul, in which heroism slumbered, a Siegfried of the South, of
a finer race, and more beautiful, and of greater harmony in mind and
body.--For his revolt against the Latin spirit was in vain: unconsciously
he had been permeated by that spirit. Not only art influences art, not
only mind and thought, but everything about the artist:--people, things,
gestures, movements, lines, the light of each town. The atmosphere of Paris
is very powerful: it molds even the most rebellious souls. And the soul of
a German is less capable than any other of resisting it: in vain does he
gird himself in his national pride: of all Europeans the German is the most
easily denationalized. Unwittingly the soul of Christophe had already begun
to assimilate from Latin art a clarity, a sobriety, an understanding of the
emotions, and even, up to a point, a plastic beauty, which otherwise it
never would have had. His _David_ was the proof of it.

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