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Jean Christophe: In Paris

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




* * * * *

The whole of the first floor was occupied by M. and Madame Félix Weil. They
were rich Jews, and had no children, and they spent six months of the year
in the country near Paris. Although they had lived in the house for twenty
years--(they stayed there as a matter of habit, although they could easily
have found a flat more in keeping with their fortune)--they were always
like passing strangers. They had never spoken a word to any of their
neighbors, and no one knew any more about them than on the day of their
arrival. But that was no reason why the other tenants should not pass
judgment on them: on the contrary. They were not liked. And no doubt they
did nothing to win popularity. And yet they were worthy of more
acquaintance: they were both excellent people and remarkably intelligent.
The husband, a man of sixty, was an Assyriologist, well known through his
famous excavations in Central Asia: like most of his race he was
open-minded and curious, and did not confine himself to his special
studies: he was interested in an infinite number of things: the arts,
social questions, every manifestation of contemporary thought. But these
were not enough to occupy his mind: for they all amused him, and none of
them roused passionate interest. He was very intelligent, too intelligent,
too much emancipated from all ties, always ready to destroy with one hand
what he had constructed with the other: for he was constructive, always
producing books and theories: he was a great worker: as a matter of habit
and spiritual health he was always patiently plowing his deep furrow in the
field of knowledge, without having any belief in the utility of what he was
doing. He had always had the misfortune to be rich, so that he had never
had the interest of the struggle for life, and, since his explorations in
the East, of which he had grown tired after a few years, he had not
accepted any official position. Outside his own personal work, however, he
busied himself with clairvoyance, contemporary problems, social reforms of
a practical and pressing nature, the reorganization of public education in
France: he flung out ideas and created lines of thought: he would set great
intellectual machines working, and would immediately grow disgusted with
them. More than once he had scandalized people, who had been converted to a
cause by his arguments, by producing the most incisive and discouraging
criticisms of the cause itself. He did not do it deliberately: it was a
natural necessity for him: he was very nervous and ironical in temper, and
found it hard to bear with the foibles of things and people which he saw
with the most disconcerting clarity. And, as there is no good cause, nor
any good man, who, seen at a certain angle or with a certain distortion,
does not present a ridiculous aspect, there was nothing that, with his
ironic disposition, he could go on respecting for long. All this was not
calculated to make him friends. And yet he was always well-disposed towards
people, and inclined to do good: he did much good: but no one was ever
grateful to him: even those whom he had helped could not in their hearts
forgive him, because they had seen that they were ridiculous in his eyes.
It was necessary for him not to see too much of men if he were to love
them. Not that he was a misanthrope. He was not sure enough of himself to
be that. Face to face with the world at which he mocked, he was timid and
bashful: at heart he was not at all sure that the world was not right and
himself wrong: he endeavored not to appear too different from other people,
and strove to base his manners and apparent opinions on theirs. But he
strove in vain: he could not help judging them: he was keenly sensible of
any sort of exaggeration and anything that was not simple: and he could
never conceal his irritation. He was especially sensible of the foibles of
the Jews, because he knew them best: and as, in spite of his intellectual
freedom, which did not admit of barriers between races, he was often
brought up sharp against those barriers which men of other races raised
against him,--as, in spite of himself, he was out of his element among
Christian ideas, he retired with dignity into his ironic labors and the
profound affection he had for his wife.

Worst of all, his wife was not secure against his irony. She was a kindly,
busy woman, anxious to be useful, and always taken up with various
charitable works. Her nature was much less complex than that of her
husband, and she was cramped by her moral benevolence and the rather
rigidly intellectual, though lofty, idea of duty that she had begotten. Her
whole life, which was sad enough, without children, with no great joy nor
great love, was based on this moral belief of hers, which was more than
anything else the will to believe. Her husband's irony had, of course,
seized on the element of voluntary self-deception in her faith, and--(it
was too strong for him)--he had made much fun at her expense. He was a mass
of contradictions. He had a feeling for duty no less lofty than his wife's,
and, at the same time, a merciless desire to analyze, to criticize, and to
avoid deception, which made him dismember and take to pieces his moral
imperative. He could not see that he was digging away the ground from under
his wife's feet: he used cruelly to discourage her. When he realized that
he had done so, he suffered even more than she: but the harm was done. It
did not keep them from loving each other faithfully, and working and doing
good. But the cold dignity of the wife was not more kindly judged than the
irony of the husband: and as they were too proud to publish abroad the good
they did, or their desire to do good, their reserve was regarded as
indifference, and their isolation as selfishness. And the more conscious
they became of the opinion that was held of them, the more careful were
they to do nothing to dispute it. Reacting against the coarse indiscretion
of so many of their race they were the victims of an excessive reserve
which covered a vast deal of pride.

* * * * *

As for the ground floor, which was a few steps higher than the little
garden, it was occupied by Commandant Chabran, a retired officer of the
Colonial Artillery: he was still young, a man of great vigor, who had
fought brilliantly in the Soudan and Madagascar: then suddenly, he had
thrown the whole thing up, and buried himself there: he did not even want
to hear the army mentioned, and spent his time in digging his flower-beds,
and practising the flute without making any progress, and growling about
politics, and scolding his daughter, whom he adored: she was a young woman
of thirty, not very pretty, but quite charming, who devoted herself to him,
and had not married so as not to leave him. Christophe used often to see
them leaning out of the window: and, naturally, he paid more attention to
the daughter than the father. She used to spend part of the afternoon in
the garden, sewing, dreaming, digging, always in high good humor with her
grumbling old father. Christophe could hear her soft clear voice laughingly
replying to the growling tones of the Commandant, whose footsteps ground
and scrunched on the gravel-paths: then he would go in, and she would stay
sitting on a seat in the garden, and sew for hours together, never
stirring, never speaking, smiling vaguely, while inside the house the bored
old soldier played flourishes on his shrill flute, or, by way of a change,
made a broken-winded old harmonium squeal and groan, much to Christophe's
amusement--or exasperation--(which, depended on the day and his mood).

* * * * *

All these people went on living side by side in that house with its
walled-in garden sheltered from all the buffets of the world, hermetically
sealed even against each other. Only Christophe, with his need of expansion
and his great fullness of life, unknown to them, wrapped them about with
his vast sympathy, blind, yet all-seeing. He could not understand them. He
had no means of understanding them. He lacked Olivier's psychological
insight and quickness. But he loved them. Instinctively he put himself in
their place. Slowly, mysteriously, there crept through him a dim
consciousness of these lives so near him and yet so far removed, the
stupefying sorrow of the mourning woman, the stoic silence of all their
proud thoughts, the priest, the Jew, the engineer, the revolutionary: the
pale and gentle flame of tenderness and faith which burned in silence in
the hearts of the two Arnauds: the naïve aspirations towards the light of
the man of the people: the suppressed revolt and fertile activity which
were stifled in the bosom of the old soldier: and the calm resignation of
the girl dreaming in the shade of the lilac. But only Christophe could
perceive and hear the silent music of their souls: they heard it not: they
were all absorbed in their sorrow and their dreams.

They all worked hard, the skeptical old scientist, the pessimistic
engineer, the priest, the anarchist, and all these proud or dispirited
creatures. And on the roof the mason sang.

* * * * *

In the district round the house among the best of the people Christophe
found the same moral solitude--even when the people were banded together.

Olivier had brought him in touch with a little review for which he wrote.
It was called _Ésope_, and had taken for its motto this quotation from
Montaigne:

"_Æsop was put up for sale with two other staves. The purchaser inquired of
the first what he could do; and he, to put a price upon himself, described
all sorts of marvels; the second said as much for himself, or more. When it
came to Æsop's turn, and he was asked what he could do:--Nothing, he said,
for these two have taken everything: they can do everything._"

Their attitude was that of pure reaction against "the impudence," as
Montaigne says, "of those who profess knowledge and their overweening
presumption!" The self-styled skeptics of the _Ésope_ review were at heart
men of the firmest faith. But their mask of irony and haughty ignorance,
naturally enough, had small attraction for the public: rather it repelled.
The people are only with a writer when he brings them words of simple,
clear, vigorous, and assured life. They prefer a sturdy lie to an anemic
truth. Skepticism is only to their liking when it is the covering of lusty
naturalism or Christian idolatry. The scornful Pyrrhonism in which the
_Ésope_ clothed itself could only be acceptable to a few minds--"_aeme
sdegnose_,"--who knew the solid worth beneath it. It was force absolutely
lost upon action and life.

There was no help for it. The more democratic France became, the more
aristocratic did her ideas, her art, her science seem to grow. Science
securely lodged behind its special languages, in the depths of its
sanctuary, wrapped about with a triple veil, which only the initiate had
the power to draw, was less accessible than at the time of Buffon and the
Encyclopedists. Art,--that art at least which had some respect for itself
and the worship of beauty,--was no less hermetically sealed: it despised
the people. Even among writers who cared less for beauty than for action,
among those who gave moral ideas precedence over esthetic ideas, there was
often a strange dominance of the aristocratic spirit. They seemed to be
more intent upon preserving the purity of their inward flame than to
communicate its warmth to others. It was as though they desired not to make
their ideas prevail but only to affirm them.

And yet among these writers there were some who applied themselves to
popular art. Among the most sincere some hurled into their writings
destructive anarchical ideas, truths of the distant future, which might be
beneficent in a century or so, but, for the time being, corroded and
scorched the soul: others wrote bitter or ironical plays, robbed of all
illusion, sad to the last degree. Christophe was left in a state of
collapse, ham-strung, for a day or two after he read them.

"And you give that sort of thing to the people?" he would ask, feeling
sorry for the poor audiences who had come to forget their troubles for a
few hours, only to be presented with these lugubrious entertainments. "It's
enough to make them all go and drown themselves!"

"You may be quite easy on that score," said Olivier, laughing. "The people
don't go."

"And a jolly good thing too! You're mad. Are you trying to rob them of
every scrap of courage to live?"

"Why? Isn't it right to teach them to see the sadness of things, as we do,
and yet to go on and do their duty without flinching?"

"Without flinching? I doubt that. But it's very certain that they'll do it
without pleasure. And you don't go very far when you've destroyed a man's
pleasure in living."

"What else can one do? One has no right to falsify the truth."

"Nor have you any right to tell the whole truth to everybody."

"_You_ say that? You who are always shouting the truth aloud, you who
pretend to love truth more than anything in the world!"

"Yes: truth for myself and those whose backs are strong enough to bear it
But it is cruel and stupid to tell it to the rest. Yes. I see that now. At
home that would never have occurred to me: in Germany people are not so
morbid about the truth as they are here: they're too much taken up with
living: very wisely they see only what they wish to see. I love you for not
being like that: you are honest and go straight ahead. But you are inhuman.
When you think you have unearthed a truth, you let it loose upon the world,
without stopping to think whether, like the foxes in the Bible with their
burning tails, it will not set fire to the world. I think it is fine of you
to prefer truth to your happiness. But when it comes to the happiness of
other people.... Then I say, 'Stop!' You are taking too much upon
yourselves. Thou shalt love truth, more than thyself, but thy neighbor more
than truth."

"Is one to lie to one's neighbor?"

Christophe replied with the words of Goethe:

"We should only express those of the highest truths which will be to the
good of the world. The rest we must keep to ourselves: like the soft rays
of a hidden sun, they will shed their light upon all our actions."

But they were not moved by these scruples. They never stopped to think
whether the bow in their hands shot "_ideas or death_," or both together.
They were too intellectual. They lacked love. When a Frenchman has ideas he
tries to impose them on others. He tries to do the same thing when he has
none. And when he sees that he cannot do it he loses interest in other
people, he loses interest in action. That was the chief reason why this
particular group took so little interest in politics, save to moan and
groan. Each of them was shut up in his faith, or want of faith.

Many attempts had been made to break down their individualism and to form
groups of these men: but the majority of these groups had immediately
resolved themselves into literary clubs, or split up into absurd factions.
The best of them were mutually destructive. There were among them some
first-rate men of force and faith, men well fitted to rally and guide those
of weaker will. But each man had his following, and would not consent to
merging it with that of other men. So they were split up into a number of
reviews, unions, associations, which had all the moral virtues, save one:
self-denial; for not one of them would give way to the others: and, while
they wrangled over the crumbs that fell from an honest and well-meaning
public, small in numbers and poor in purse, they vegetated for a short
time, starved and languished, and at last collapsed never to rise again,
not under the assault of the enemy, but--(most pitiful!)--under the weight
of their own quarrels.--The various professions,--men of letters, dramatic
authors, poets, prose writers, professors, members of the Institute,
journalists--were divided up into a number of little castes, which they
themselves split up again into smaller castes, each one of which closed its
doors against the rest. There was no sort of mutual interchange. There was
no unanimity on any subject in France, except at those very rare moments
when unanimity assumed an epidemic character, and, as a rule, was in the
wrong: for it was morbid. A crazy individualism predominated in every kind
of French activity: in scientific research as well as in commerce, in which
it prevented business men from combining and organizing working agreements.
This individualism was not that of a rich and bustling vitality, but that
of obstinacy and self-repression. To be alone, to owe nothing to others,
not to mix with others for fear of feeling their inferiority in their
company, not to disturb the tranquillity of their haughty isolation: these
were the secret thoughts of almost all these men who founded "outside"
reviews, "outside" theaters, "outside" groups: reviews, theaters, groups,
all most often had no other reason for existing than the desire not to be
with the general herd, and an incapacity for joining with other people in a
common idea or course of action, distrust of other people, or, at the very
worst, party hostility, setting one against the other the very men who were
most fitted to understand each other.

Even when men who thought highly of each other were united in some common
task, like Olivier and his colleagues on the _Ésope_ review, they always
seemed to be on their guard with each other: they had nothing of that
open-handed geniality so common in Germany, where it is apt to become a
nuisance. Among these young men there was one especially who attracted
Christophe because he divined him to be a man of exceptional force: he was
a writer of inflexible logic and will, with a passion for moral ideas, in
the service of which he was absolutely uncompromising and ready in their
cause to sacrifice the whole world and himself: he had founded and
conducted almost unaided a review in which to uphold them: he had sworn to
impose on Europe and on France the idea of a pure, heroic, and free France:
he firmly believed that the world would one day recognize that he was
responsible for one of the boldest pages in the history of French
thought:--and he was not mistaken. Christophe would have been only too glad
to know him better and to be his friend. But there was no way of bringing
it about. Although Olivier had a good deal to do with him they saw very
little of each other except on business: they never discussed any intimate
matter, and never got any farther than the exchange of a few abstract
ideas: or rather--(for, to be exact, there was no exchange, and each
adhered to his own ideas)--they soliloquized in each other's company in
turn. However, they were comrades in arms and knew their worth.

There were innumerable reasons for this reservedness, reasons difficult to
discern, even for their own eyes. The first reason was a too great critical
faculty, which saw too clearly the unalterable differences between one mind
and another, backed by an excessive intellectualism which attached too much
importance to those differences: they lacked that puissant and naïve
sympathy whose vital need is of love, the need of giving out its
overflowing love. Then, too, perhaps overwork, the struggle for existence,
the fever of thought, which so taxes strength that by the evening there is
none left for friendly intercourse, had a great deal to do with it. And
there was that terrible feeling, which every Frenchman is afraid to admit,
though too often it is stirring in his heart, the feeling of _not being of
one race_, the feeling that the nation consists of different races
established at different epochs on the soil of France, who, though all
bound together, have few ideas in common, and therefore ought not, in the
common interest, to ponder them too much. But above all the reason was to
seek in the intoxicating and dangerous passion for liberty, to which, when
a man has once tasted it, there is nothing that he will not sacrifice. Such
solitary freedom is all the more precious for having been bought by years
of tribulation. The select few have taken refuge in it to escape the
slavishness of the mediocre. It is a reaction against the tyranny of the
political and religious masses, the terrific crushing weight which
overbears the individual in France: the family, public opinion, the State,
secret societies, parties, coteries, schools. Imagine a prisoner who, to
escape, has to scale twenty great walls hemming him in. If he manages to
clear them all without breaking his neck, and, above all, without losing
heart, he must be strong indeed. A rough schooling for free-will! But those
who have gone through it bear the marks of it all their life in the mania
for independence, and the impossibility of their ever living in the lives
of others.

Side by side with this loneliness of pride, there was the loneliness of
renunciation. There were many, many good men in France whose goodness and
pride and affection came to nothing in withdrawal from life! A thousand
reasons, good and bad, stood in the way of action for them. With some it
was obedience, timidity, force of habit. With others human respect, fear of
ridicule, fear of being conspicuous, of being a mark for the comments of
the gallery, of meddling with things that did not concern them, of having
their disinterested actions attributed to motives of interest. There were
men who would not take part in any political or social struggle, women who
declined to undertake any philanthropic work, because there were too many
people engaged in these things who lacked conscience and even common sense,
and because they were afraid of the taint of these charlatans and fools. In
almost all such people there are disgust, weariness, dread of action,
suffering, ugliness, stupidity, risks, responsibilities: the terrible
"What's the use?" which destroys the good-will of so many of the French of
to-day. They are too intelligent,--(their intelligence has no wide sweep of
the wings),--they are too intent upon reasons for and against. They lack
force. They lack vitality. When a man's life beats strongly he never
wonders why he goes on living: he lives for the sake of living,--because it
is a splendid thing to be alive!

In fine, the best of them were a mixture of sympathetic and average
qualities: a modicum of philosophy, moderate desires, fond attachment to
the family, the earth, moral custom; discretion, dread of intruding, of
being a nuisance to other people: modesty of feeling, unbending reserve.
All these amiable and charming qualities could, in certain cases, be
brought into line with serenity, courage, and inward joy; but at bottom
there was a certain connection between them and poverty in the blood, the
progressive ebb of French vitality.

The pretty garden, beneath the house in which Christophe and Olivier lived,
tucked away between the four walls, was symbolical of that part of the life
of France. It was a little patch of green earth shut off from the outer
world. Only now and then did the mighty wind of the outer air, whirling
down, bring to the girl dreaming there the breath of the distant fields and
the vast earth.

* * * * *

Now that Christophe was beginning to perceive the hidden resources of
France he was furious that she should suffer the oppression of the rabble.
The half-light, in which the select and silent few were huddled away,
stifled him. Stoicism is a fine thing for those whose teeth are gone. But
he needed the open air, the great public, the sunshine of glory, the love
of thousands of men and women: he needed to hold close to him those whom he
loved, to pulverize his enemies, to fight and to conquer.

"You can," said Olivier. "You are strong. You were born to conquer through
your faults--(forgive me!)--as well as through your qualities. You are
lucky enough not to belong to a race and a nation which are too
aristocratic. Action does not repel you. If need be you could even become a
politician.--Besides, you have the inestimable good fortune to write music.
Nobody understands you, and so you can say anything and everything. If
people had any idea of the contempt for themselves which you put into your
music, and your faith in what they deny, and your perpetual hymn in praise
of what they are always trying to kill, they would never forgive you, and
you would be so fettered, and persecuted, and harassed, that you would
waste most of your strength in fighting them: when you had beaten them back
you would have no breath left for going on with your work: your life would
be finished. The great men who triumph have the good luck to be
misunderstood. They are admired for the very opposite of what they are."

"Pooh!" said Christophe. "You don't understand how cowardly your masters
are. At first I thought you were alone, and I used to find excuses for your
inaction. But, as a matter of fact, there's a whole army of you all of the
same mind. You are a hundred times stronger than your oppressors, you are a
thousand times more worthy, and you let them impose on you with their
effrontery! I don't understand you. You live in a most beautiful country,
you are gifted with the finest intelligence and the most human quality of
mind, and with it all you do nothing: you allow yourselves to be overborne
and outraged and trampled underfoot by a parcel of fools. Good Lord! Be
yourselves! Don't wait for Heaven or a Napoleon to come to your aid! Arise,
band yourselves together! Get to work, all of you! Sweep out your house!"

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