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Jean Christophe: In Paris

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Christophe discovered the mighty power of idealism which animated the
French poets, musicians, and men of science of his time. While the
temporary masters of the country with their coarse sensuality drowned the
voice of the French genius, it showed itself too aristocratic to vie with
the presumptuous shouts of the rabble and sang on with burning ardor in
its own praise and the praise of its God. It was as though in its desire
to escape the revolting uproar of the outer world it had withdrawn to the
farthest refuge in the innermost depths of its castle-keep.

The poets--that is, those only who were worthy of that splendid name, so
bandied by the Press and the Academies and doled out to divers windbags
greedy of money and flattery--the poets, despising impudent rhetoric
and that slavish realism which nibbles at the surface of things without
penetrating to reality, had intrenched themselves in the very center of
the soul, in a mystic vision into which was drawn the universe of form
and idea, like a torrent falling into a lake, there to take on the color
of the inward life. The very intensity of this idealism, which withdrew
into itself to recreate the universe, made it inaccessible to the mob.
Christophe himself did not understand it at first. The transition was
too abrupt after the market-place. It was as though he had passed from a
furious rush and scramble in the hot sunlight into silence and the night.
His ears buzzed. He could see nothing. At first, with his ardent love of
life, he was shocked by the contrast. Outside was the roaring of the
rushing streams of passion overturning France and stirring all humanity.
And at the first glance there was not a trace of it in this art of theirs.
Christophe asked Olivier:

"You have been lifted to the stars and hurled down to the depths of hell by
your Dreyfus affair. Where is the poet in whose soul the height and depth
of it were felt? Now, at this very moment, in the souls of your religious
men and women there is the mightiest struggle there has been for centuries
between the authority of the Church and the rights of conscience. Where is
the poet in whose soul this sacred agony is reflected? The working classes
are preparing for war, nations are dying, nations are springing to new
life, the Armenians are massacred, Asia, awaking from its sleep of a
thousand years, hurls down the Muscovite colossus, the keeper of the keys
of Europe: Turkey, like Adam, opens its eyes on the light of day: the air
is conquered by man: the old earth cracks under our feet and opens: it
devours a whole people.... All these prodigies, accomplished in twenty
years, enough to supply material for twenty _Iliads_: but where are they,
where shall their fiery traces be found in the books of your poets? Are
they of all men unable to see the poetry of the world?"

"Patience, my friend, patience!" replied Olivier. "Be silent, say nothing,
listen...."

Slowly the creaking of the axle-tree of the world died away and the
rumbling over the stones of the heavy car of action was lost in the
distance. And there arose the divine song of silence....

_The hum of bees, and the perfume of the limes....
The wind,
With his golden lips kissing the earth of the plains...
The soft sound of the rain and the scent of the roses._

There rang out the hammer and chisel of the poets carving the sides of a
vase with

_The fine majesty of simple things,_

solemn, joyous life,

_With its flutes of gold and flutes of ebony,_

religious joy, faith welling up like a fountain of souls

_For whom the very darkness is clear,..._

and great sweet sorrow, giving comfort and smiling,

_With her austere face from which there shines
A clearness beyond nature,..._

and

_Death serene with her great, soft eyes._

A symphony of harmonious and pure voices. Not one of them had the full
sonorousness of such national trumpets as were Corneille and Hugo: but how
much deeper and more subtle in expression was their music! The richest
music in Europe of to-day.

Olivier said to Christophe, who was silent:

"Do you understand now?"

Christophe in his turn bade him be silent. In spite of himself, and
although he preferred more manly music, yet he drank in the murmuring of
the woods and fountains of the soul which came whispering to his ears. Amid
the passing struggles of the nations they sang the eternal youth of the
world, the

_Sweet goodness of Beauty._

While humanity,

_Screaming with terror and yelping its complaint
Marched round and round a barren gloomy field,_

while millions of men and women wore themselves out in wrangling for the
bloody rags of liberty, the fountains and the woods sang on:

"Free!... Free!... _Sanctus, Sanctus...._"

And yet they slept not in any dream selfishly serene. In the choir of the
poets there were not wanting tragic voices: voices of pride, voices of
love, voices of agony.

A blind hurricane, mad, intoxicated

_With its own rough force or gentleness profound,_

tumultuous forces, the epic of the illusions of those who sing the wild
fever of the crowd, the conflicts of human gods, the breathless toilers,

_Faces inky black and golden peering through darkness and mist,
Muscular backs stretching, or suddenly crouching
Round mighty furnaces and gigantic anvils..._

forging the City of the Future.

In the flickering light and shadow falling on the glaciers of the mind
there was the heroic bitterness of those solitary souls which devour
themselves with desperate joy.

* * * * *

Many of the characteristics of these idealists seemed to the German more
German than French. But all of them had the love for the "fine speech of
France" and the sap of the myths of Greece ran through their poetry. Scenes
of France and daily life were by some hidden magic transformed in their
eyes into visions of Attica. It was as though antique souls had come to
life again in these twentieth-century Frenchmen, and longed to fling off
their modern garments to appear again in their lovely nakedness.

Their poetry as a whole gave out the perfume of a rich civilization that
has ripened through the ages, a perfume such as could not be found anywhere
else in Europe. It were impossible to forget it once it had been breathed.
It attracted foreign artists from every country in the world. They became
French poets, almost bigotedly French: and French classical art had no more
fervent disciples than these Anglo-Saxons and Flemings and Greeks.

Christophe, under Olivier's guidance, was impregnated with the pensive
beauty of the Muse of France, while in his heart he found the aristocratic
lady a little too intellectual for his liking, and preferred a pretty girl
of the people, simple, healthy, robust, who thinks and argues less, but is
more concerned with love.

* * * * *

The same _odor di bellezza_ arose from all French art, as the scent of ripe
strawberries and raspberries ascends from autumn woods warmed by the sun.
French music was like one of those little strawberry plants, hidden in
the grass, the scent of which sweetens all the air of the woods. At first
Christophe had passed it by without seeing it, for in his own country
he had been used to whole thickets of music, much fuller and bearing
more brilliant fruits. But now the delicate perfume made him turn: with
Olivier's help among the stones and brambles and dead leaves which usurped
the name of music, he discovered the subtle and ingenuous art of a handful
of musicians. Amid the marshy fields and the factory chimneys of democracy,
in the heart of the Plaine-Saint-Denis, in a little magic wood fauns were
dancing blithely. Christophe was amazed to hear the ironic and serene notes
of their flutes which were like nothing he had ever heard:

"_A little reed sufficed for me
To make the tall grass quiver,
And all the meadow,
The willows sweet.
And the singing stream also:
A little reed sufficed, for me
To make the forest sing._"

Beneath the careless grace and the seeming dilettantism of their little
piano pieces, and songs, and French chamber-music, which German art
never deigned to notice, while Christophe himself had hitherto failed to
see the poetic accomplishment of it all, he now began to see the fever
of renovation, and the uneasiness,--unknown on the other side of the
Rhine,--with which French musicians were seeking in the unfilled fields
of their art the germs from which the future might grow. While German
musicians sat stolidly in the encampments of their forebears, and
arrogantly claimed to stay the evolution of the world at the barrier of
their past victories, the world was moving onwards: and in the van the
French plunged onward to discovery: they explored the distant realms of
art, dead suns and suns lit up once more, and vanished Greece, and the Far
East, after its age-long slumber, once more opening its slanting eyes, full
of vasty dreams, upon the light of day. In the music of the West, run off
into channels by the genius of order and classic reason, they opened up the
sluices of the ancient fashions: into their Versailles pools they turned
all the waters of the universe: popular melodies and rhythms, exotic and
antique scales, new or old beats and intervals. Just as, before them, the
impressionist painters had opened up a new world to the eyes,--Christopher
Columbuses of light,--so the musicians were rushing on to the conquest of
the world of Sound; they pressed on into mysterious recesses of the world
of Hearing: they discovered new lands in that inward ocean. It was more
than probable that they would do nothing with their conquests. As usual the
French were the harbingers of the world.

Christophe admired the initiative of their music born of yesterday and
already marching in the van of art. What valiance there was in the elegant
tiny little creature! He found indulgence for the follies that he had
lately seen in her. Only those who attempt nothing never make mistakes.
But error struggling on towards the living truth is more fruitful and more
blessed than dead truth.

Whatever the results, the effort was amazing. Olivier showed Christophe the
work done in the last thirty-five years, and the amount of energy expended
in raising French music from the void in which it had slumbered before
1870: no symphonic school, no profound culture, no traditions, no masters,
no public: the whole reduced to poor Berlioz, who died of suffocation and
weariness. And now Christophe felt a great respect for those who had been
the laborers in the national revival: he had no desire now to jeer at their
esthetic narrowness or their lack of genius. They had created something
much greater than music: a musical people. Among all the great toilers who
had forged the new French music one man was especially dear to him: César
Franck, who died without seeing the victory for which he had paved the way,
and yet, like old Schütz, through the darkest years of French art, had
preserved intact the treasure of his faith and the genius of his race. It
was a moving thing to see: amid pleasure-seeking Paris, the angelic master,
the saint of music, in a life of poverty and work despised, preserving the
unimpeachable serenity of his patient soul, whose smile of resignation lit
up his music in which is such great goodness.

* * * * *

To Christophe, knowing nothing of the depths of the life of France, this
great artist, adhering to his faith in the midst of a country of atheists,
was a phenomenon, almost a miracle.

But Olivier would gently shrug his shoulders and ask if any other country
in Europe could show a painter so wholly steeped in the spirit of the Bible
as François Millet;--a man of science more filled with burning faith and
humility than the clear-sighted Pasteur, bowing down before the idea of the
infinite, and, when that idea possessed his mind, "in bitter agony"--as he
himself has said--"praying that his reason might be spared, so near it was
to toppling over into the sublime madness of Pascal." Their deep-rooted
Catholicism was no more a bar in the way of the heroic realism of the first
of these two men, than of the passionate reason of the other, who, sure of
foot and not deviating by one step, went his way through "the circles of
elementary nature, the great night of the infinitely little, the ultimate
abysses of creation, in which life is born." It was among the people of the
provinces, from which they sprang, that they had found this faith, which is
for ever brooding on the soil of France, while in vain do windy demagogues
struggle to deny it. Olivier knew well that faith: it had lived in his own
heart and mind.

He revealed to Christophe the magnificent movement towards a Catholic
revival, which had been going on for the last twenty-five years, the mighty
effort of the Christian idea in France to wed reason, liberty, and life:
the splendid priests who had the courage, as one of their number said, "to
have themselves baptized as men," and were claiming for Catholicism the
right to understand everything and to join in every honest idea: for "every
honest idea, even when it is mistaken, is sacred and divine": the thousands
of young Catholics banded by the generous vow to build a Christian
Republic, free, pure, in brotherhood, open to all men of good-will: and, in
spite of the odious attacks, the accusations of heresy, the treachery on
all sides, right and left,--(especially on the right),--which these great
Christians had to suffer, the intrepid little legion advancing towards the
rugged defile which leads to the future, serene of front, resigned to all
trials and tribulations, knowing that no enduring edifice can be built,
except it be welded together with tears and blood.

The same breath of living idealism and passionate liberalism brought new
life to the other religions in France. The vast slumbering bodies of
Protestantism and Judaism were thrilling with new life. All in generous
emulation had set themselves to create the religion of a free humanity
which should sacrifice neither its power for reason, nor its power for
enthusiasm.

This religious exaltation was not the privilege of the religious: it
was the very soul of the revolutionary movement. There it assumed a
tragic character. Till now Christophe had only seen the lowest form of
socialism,--that of the politicians who dangled in front of the eyes of
their famished constituents the coarse and childish dreams of Happiness,
or, to be frank, of universal Pleasure, which Science in the hands of
Power could, according to them, procure. Against such revolting optimism
Christophe saw the furious mystic reaction of the élite arise to lead the
Syndicates of the working-classes on to battle. It was a summons to "war,
which engenders the sublime," to heroic war "which alone can give the dying
worlds a goal, an aim, an ideal." These great Revolutionaries, spitting
out such "bourgeois, peddling, peace-mongering, English" socialism, set up
against it a tragic conception of the universe, "whose law is antagonism,"
since it lives by sacrifice, perpetual sacrifice, eternally renewed.--If
there was reason to doubt that the army, which these leaders urged on to
the assault upon the old world, could understand such warlike mysticism,
which applied both Kant and Nietzsche to violent action, nevertheless it
was a stirring sight to see the revolutionary aristocracy, whose blind
pessimism, and furious desire for heroic life, and exalted faith in war and
sacrifice, were like the militant religious ideal of some Teutonic Order or
the Japanese Samurai.

And yet they were all Frenchmen: they were of a French stock whose
characteristics have endured unchanged for centuries. Seeing with
Olivier's eyes Christophe marked them in the tribunes and proconsuls of
the Convention, in certain of the thinkers and men of action and French
reformers of the _Ancien Régime_. Calvinists, Jansenists, Jacobins,
Syndicalists, in all there was the same spirit of pessimistic idealism,
struggling against nature, without illusions and without loss of
courage:--the iron bands which uphold the nation.

Christophe drank in the breath of these mystic struggles, and he began to
understand the greatness of that fanaticism, into which France brought
uncompromising faith and honesty, such as were absolutely unknown to
other nations more familiar with _combinazioni_. Like all foreigners
it had pleased him at first to be flippant about the only too obvious
contradiction between the despotic temper of the French and the magic
formula which their Republic wrote up on the walls of their buildings. Now
for the first time he began to grasp the meaning of the bellicose Liberty
which they adored as the terrible sword of Reason. No: it was not for
them, as he had thought, mere sounding rhetoric and vague ideology. Among
a people for whom the demands of reason transcend all others the fight for
reason dominated every other. What did it matter whether the fight appeared
absurd to nations who called themselves practical? To eyes that see deeply
it is no less vain to fight for empire, or money, or the conquest of the
world: in a million years there will be nothing left of any of these
things. But if it is the fierceness of the fight that gives its worth to
life, and uplifts all the living forces to the point of sacrifice to a
superior Being, then there are few struggles that do more honor life than
the eternal battle waged in France for or against reason. And for those who
have tasted the bitter savor of it the much-vaunted apathetic tolerance
of the Anglo-Saxons is dull and unmanly. The Anglo-Saxons paid for it by
finding elsewhere an outlet for their energy. Their energy is not in their
tolerance, which is only great when, between factions, it becomes heroism.
In Europe of to-day it is most often indifference, want of faith, want of
vitality. The English, adapting a saying of Voltaire, are fain to boast
that "diversity of belief has produced more tolerance in England" than the
Revolution has done in France.--The reason is that there is more faith in
the France of the Revolution than in all the creeds of England.

* * * * *

From the circle of brass of militant idealism and the battles of
Reason,--like Virgil leading Dante, Olivier led Christophe by the hand to
the summit of the mountain where, silent and serene, dwelt the small band
of the elect of France who were really free.

Nowhere in the world are there men more free. They have the serenity of a
bird soaring in the still air. On such a height the air was so pure and
rarefied that Christophe could hardly breathe. There he met artists who
claimed the absolute and limitless liberty of dreams,--men of unbridled
subjectivity, like Flaubert, despising "the poor beasts who believe in
the reality of things":--thinkers, who, with supple and many-sided minds,
emulating the endless flow of moving things, went on "ceaselessly trickling
and flowing," staying nowhere, nowhere coming in contact with stubborn
earth or rock, and "depicted not the essence of life, but the _passage_,"
as Montaigne said, "the eternal passage, from day to day, from minute to
minute";--men of science who knew the emptiness and void of the universe,
wherein man has builded his idea, his God, his art, his science, and went
on creating the world and its laws, that vivid day's dream. They did not
demand of science either rest, or happiness, or even truth:--for they
doubted whether it were attainable: they loved it for itself, because it
was beautiful, because it alone was beautiful, and it alone was real.
On the topmost pinnacles of thought these men of science, passionately
Pyrrhonistic, indifferent to all suffering, all deceit, almost indifferent
to reality, listened, with closed eyes, to the silent music of souls,
the delicate and grand harmony of numbers and forms. These great
mathematicians, these free philosophers,--the most rigorous and positive
minds in the world,--had reached the uttermost limit of mystic ecstasy:
they created a void about themselves, they hung over the abyss, they were
drunk with its dizzy depths: into the boundless night with joy sublime they
flashed the lightnings of thought.

Christophe leaned forward and tried to look over as they did: and his head
swam. He who thought himself free because he had broken away from all laws
save those of his own conscience, now became fearfully conscious of how
little he was free compared with these Frenchmen who were emancipated from
every absolute law of mind, from every categorical imperative, from every
reason for living. Why, then, did they live?

"For the joy of being free," replied Olivier.

But Christophe, who was unsteadied by such liberty, thought regretfully of
the mighty spirit of discipline and German authoritarianism: and he said:

"Your joy is a snare, the dream of an opium-smoker. You make yourselves
drunk with liberty, and forget life. Absolute liberty means madness to the
mind, anarchy to the State ... Liberty! What man is free in this world?
What man in your Republic is free?--Only the knaves. You, the best of the
nation, are stilled. You can do nothing but dream. Soon you will not be
able even to dream."

"No matter!" said Olivier. "My poor dear Christophe, you cannot know the
delight of being free. It is worth while paying for it with so much danger,
and suffering, and even death. To be free, to feel that every mind about
you--yes, even the knave's--is free, is a delicious pleasure which it is
impossible to express: it is as though your soul were soaring through
the infinite air. It could not live otherwise. What should I do with the
security you offer me, and your order and your impeccable discipline,
locked up in the four walls of your Imperial barracks? I should die of
suffocation. Air! give me air, more and more of it! Liberty, more and more
of that!"

"There must be law in the world," replied Christophe. "Sooner or later the
master cometh."

But Olivier laughed and reminded Christophe of the saying of old Pierre de
l'Estoile:

_It is as little in the power of all the
dominions of the earth to curb the French
liberty of speech, as
to bury the sun in the earth
or to shut it up
inside a
hole._

* * * * *

Gradually Christophe grew accustomed to the air of boundless liberty. From
the lofty heights of French thought, where those minds dream that are all
light, he looked down upon the slopes of the mountain at his feet, where
the heroic elect, fighting for a living faith, whatever faith it be,
struggle eternally to reach the summit:--those who wage the holy war
against ignorance, disease, and poverty: the fever of invention, the mental
delirium of the modern Prometheus and Icarus conquering the light and
marking out roads in the air: the Titanic struggle between Science and
Nature, being tamed;--lower down, the little silent band, the men and women
of good faith, those brave and humble hearts, who, after a thousand
efforts, have climbed half-way, and can climb no farther, being held bound
in a dull and difficult existence, while in secret they burn away in
obscure devotion:--lower still, at the foot of the mountain, in a narrow
gorge between rocky crags, the endless battle, the fanatics of abstract
ideas and blind instincts, fiercely wrestling, with never a suspicion that
there may be something beyond, above the wall of rocks which hems them
in:--still lower, swamps and brutish beasts wallowing in the mire.--And
everywhere, scattered about the sides of the mountain, the fresh flowers of
art, the scented strawberry-plants of music, the song of the streams and
the poet birds.

And Christophe asked Olivier:

"Where are your people? I see only the elect, all sorts, good and bad."

Olivier replied:

"The people? They are tending their gardens. They never bother about us.
Every group and faction among the elect strives to engage their attention.
They pay no heed to any one. There was a time when it amused them to listen
to the humbug of the political mountebanks. But now they never worry about
it. There are several millions who do not even make use of their rights as
electors. The parties may break each other's heads as much as they like,
and the people don't care one way or another so long as they don't trample
the crops in their wrangling: if that happens then they lose their tempers,
and smash the parties indiscriminately. They do not act: they react in one
way or another against all the exaggerations which disturb their work and
their rest. Kings, Emperors, republics, priests, Freemasons, Socialists,
whatever their leaders may be, all that they ask of them is to be protected
against the great common dangers: war, riots, epidemics,--and, for the
rest, to be allowed to go on tending their gardens. When all is said and
done they think:

"'Why won't these people leave us in peace?'

"But the politicians are so stupid that they worry the people, and won't
leave off until they are pitched out with a fork,--as will happen some day
to our members of Parliament. There was a time when the people were
embarked upon great enterprises. Perhaps that will happen again, although
they sowed their wild oats long ago: in any case their embarkations are
never for long: very soon they return to their age-old companion: the
earth. It is the soil which binds the French to France, much more than the
French. There are so many different races who for centuries have been
tilling that brave soil side by side, that it is the soil which unites
them, the soil which is their love. Through good times and bad they
cultivate it unceasingly: and it is all good to them, even the smallest
scrap of ground."

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