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Jean Christophe: In Paris

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That would not have mattered much if Kohn had been able to refrain from
inviting his friends to hear Christophe. But he could not help wanting to
show off his musician. The first time Christophe found in Kohn's rooms
three or four little Jews and Kohn's mistress--a large florid woman, all
paint and powder, who repeated idiotic jokes and talked about her food, and
thought herself a musician because she showed her legs every evening in the
Revue of the Variétés--Christophe looked black. Next time he told Sylvain
Kohn curtly that he would never again play in his rooms. Sylvain Kohn swore
by all his gods that he would not invite anybody again. But he did so by
stealth, and hid his guests in the next room. Naturally, Christophe found
that out, and went away in a fury, and this time did not return.

And yet he had to accommodate Kohn, who had introduced him to various
cosmopolitan families, and found him pupils.

* * * * *

A few days after Théophile Goujart hunted Christophe up in his lair. He did
not seem to mind his being in such a horrible place. On the contrary, he
was charming. He said:

"I thought perhaps you would like to hear a little music from time to time:
and as I have tickets for everything, I came to ask if you would care to
come with me."

Christophe was delighted. He was glad of the kindly attention, and thanked
him effusively. Goujart was a different man from what he had been at their
first meeting. He had dropped his conceit, and, man to man, he was timid,
docile, anxious to learn. It was only when they were with others that he
resumed his superior manner and his blatant tone of voice. His eagerness to
learn had a practical side to it. He had no curiosity about anything that
was not actual. He wanted to know what Christophe thought of a score he had
received which he would have been hard put to it to write about, for he
could hardly read a note.

They went to a symphony concert. They had to go in by the entrance to a
music-hall. They went down a winding passage to an ill-ventilated hall:
the air was stifling: the seats were very narrow, and placed too close
together: part of the audience was standing and blocking up every way
out:--the uncomfortable French. A man who looked as though he were
hopelessly bored was racing through a Beethoven symphony as though he
were in a hurry to get to the end of it. The voluptuous strains of a
stomach-dance coming from the music-hall next door were mingled with the
funeral march of the _Eroica_. People kept coming in and taking their
seats, and turning their glasses on the audience. As soon as the last
person had arrived, they began to go out again. Christophe strained every
nerve to try and follow the thread of the symphony through the babel;
and he did manage to wrest some pleasure from it--(for the orchestra was
skilful, and Christophe had been deprived of symphony music for a long
time)--and then Goujart took his arm and, in the middle of the concert,
said:

"Now let us go. We'll go to another concert."

Christophe frowned: but he made no reply and followed his guide. They went
half across Paris, and then reached another hall, that smelled of stables,
in which at other times fairy plays and popular pieces were given--(in
Paris music is like those poor workingmen who share a lodging: when one
of them leaves the bed, the other creeps into the warm sheets). No air,
of course: since the reign of Louis XIV the French have considered air
unhealthy: and the ventilation of the theaters, like that of old at
Versailles, makes it impossible for people to breathe. A noble old man,
waving his arms like a lion-tamer, was letting loose an act of Wagner: the
wretched beast--the act--was like the lions of a menagerie, dazzled and
cowed by the footlights, so that they have to be whipped to be reminded
that they are lions. The audience consisted of female Pharisees and foolish
women, smiling inanely. After the lion had gone through its performance,
and the tamer had bowed, and they had both been rewarded by the applause of
the audience, Goujart suggested that they should go to yet another concert.
But this time Christophe gripped the arms of his stall, and declared that
he would not budge: he had had enough of running from concert to concert,
picking up the crumbs of a symphony and scraps of a concert on the way.
In vain did Goujart try to explain to him that musical criticism in Paris
was a trade in which it was more important to see than to hear. Christophe
protested that music was not written to be heard in a cab, and needed more
concentration. Such a hotch-potch of concerts was sickening to him: one at
a time was enough for him.

He was much surprised at the extraordinary number of concerts in Paris.
Like most Germans, he thought that music held a subordinate place in
France: and he expected that it would be served up in small delicate
portions. By way of a beginning, he was given fifteen concerts in seven
days. There was one for every evening in the week, and often two or three
an evening at the same time in different quarters of the city. On Sundays
there were four, all at the same time. Christophe marveled at this appetite
for music. And he was no less amazed at the length of the programs. Till
then he had thought that his fellow-countrymen had a monopoly of these
orgies of sound which had more than once disgusted him in Germany. He
saw now that the Parisians could have given them points in the matter of
gluttony. They were given full measure: two symphonies, a concerto, one
or two overtures, an act from an opera. And they came from all sources:
German, Russian, Scandinavian, French--beer, champagne, orgeat, wine--they
gulped down everything without winking. Christophe was amazed that these
indolent Parisians should have had such capacious stomachs. They did not
suffer for it at all. It was the cask of the Danaïdes. It held nothing.

It was not long before Christophe perceived that this mass of music
amounted to very little really. He saw the same faces and heard the
same pieces at every concert. Their copious programs moved in a circle.
Practically nothing earlier than Beethoven. Practically nothing later than
Wagner. And what gaps between them! It seemed as though music were reduced
to five or six great German names, three or four French names, and, since
the Franco-Russian alliance, half a dozen Muscovites. None of the old
French Masters. None of the great Italians. None of the German giants of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. No contemporary German music,
with the single exception of Richard Strauss, who was more acute than the
rest, and came once a year to plant his new works on the Parisian public.
No Belgian music. No Tschek music. But, most surprising of all, practically
no contemporary French music. And yet everybody was talking about it
mysteriously as a thing that would revolutionize the world. Christophe was
yearning for an opportunity of hearing it: he was very curious about it,
and absolutely without prejudice: he was longing to hear new music, and to
admire the works of genius. But he never succeeded in hearing any of it:
for he did not count a few short pieces, quite cleverly written, but cold
and brain-spun, to which he had not listened very attentively.

* * * * *

While he was waiting to form an opinion, Christophe tried to find out
something about it from musical criticism.

That was not easy. It was like the Court of King Pétaud. Not only did
the various papers lightly contradict each other: but they contradicted
themselves in different articles--almost on different pages. To read
them all was enough to drive a man crazy. Fortunately, the critics only
read their own articles, and the public did not read any of them. But
Christophe, who wanted to gain a clear idea about French musicians, labored
hard to omit nothing: and he marveled at the agility of the critics, who
darted about in a sea of contradictions like fish in water.

But amid all these divergent opinions one thing struck him: the pedantic
manner of most of the critics. Who was it said that the French were amiable
fantastics who believed in nothing? Those whom Christophe saw were more
hag-ridden by the science of music--even when they knew nothing--than all
the critics on the other side of the Rhine.

At that time the French musical critics had set about learning what music
was. There were even a few who knew something about it: they were men of
original thought, who had taken the trouble to think about their art, and
to think for themselves. Naturally, they were not very well known: they
were shelved in their little reviews: with only one or two exceptions,
the newspapers were not for them. They were honest men--intelligent,
interesting, sometimes driven by their isolation to paradox and the habit
of thinking aloud, intolerance, and garrulity. The rest had hastily learned
the rudiments of harmony: and they stood gaping in wonder at their newly
acquired knowledge. Like Monsieur Jourdain when he learned the rules of
grammar, they marvelled at their knowledge:

"_D, a, Da; F, a, Fa; R, a, Ra.... Ah! How fine it is!... Ah! How splendid
it is to know something!..._"

They only babbled of theme and counter-theme, of harmonies and resultant
sounds, of consecutive ninths and tierce major. When they had labeled the
succeeding harmonies which made up a page of music, they proudly mopped
their brows: they thought they had explained the music, and almost believed
that they had written it. As a matter of fact, they had only repeated it
in school language, like a boy making a grammatical analysis of a page of
Cicero. But it was so difficult for the best of them to conceive music as
a natural language of the soul that, when they did not make it an adjunct
to painting, they dragged it into the outskirts of science, and reduced it
to the level of a problem in harmonic construction. Some who were learned
enough took upon themselves to show a thing or two to past musicians. They
found fault with Beethoven, and rapped Wagner over the knuckles. They
laughed openly at Berlioz and Gluck. Nothing existed for them just then but
Johann Sebastian Bach, and Claude Debussy. And Bach, who had lately been
roundly abused, was beginning to seem pedantic, a periwig, and in fine, a
hack. Quite distinguished men extolled Rameau in mysterious terms--Rameau
and Couperin, called the Great.

There were tremendous conflicts waged between these learned men. They were
all musicians: but as they all affected different styles, each of them
claimed that his was the only true style, and cried "Raca!" to that of
their colleagues. They accused each other of sham writing and sham culture,
and hurled at each other's heads the words "idealism" and "materialism,"
"symbolism" and "verism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism." Christophe
thought it was hardly worth while leaving Germany to find the squabbles
of the Germans in Paris. Instead of being grateful for having good music
presented in so many different fashions, they would only tolerate their own
particular fashion: and a new _Lutrin_, a fierce war, divided musicians
into two hostile camps, the camp of counterpoint and the camp of harmony.
Like the _Gros-boutiens_ and the _Petits-boutiens_, one side maintained
with acrimony that music should be read horizontally, and the other that
it should be read vertically. One party would only hear of full-sounding
chords, melting concatenations, succulent harmonies: they spoke of music as
though it were a confectioner's shop. The other party would not hear of the
ear, that trumpery organ, being considered: music was for them a lecture,
a Parliamentary assembly, in which all the orators spoke at once without
bothering about their neighbors, and went on talking until they had done:
if people could not hear, so much the worse for them! They could read their
speeches next day in the _Official Journal_: music was made to be read, and
not to be heard. When Christophe first heard of this quarrel between the
_Horizontalists_ and the _Verticalists_, he thought they were all mad. When
he was summoned to join in the fight between the army of _Succession_ and
the army of _Superposition_, he replied, with his usual formula, which was
very different from that of Sosia:

"Gentlemen, I am everybody's enemy."

And when they insisted, saying:

"Which matters most in music, harmony or counterpoint?"

He replied:

"Music. Show me what you have done."

They were all agreed about their own music. These intrepid warriors who,
when they were not pummeling each other, were whacking away at some dead
Master whose fame had endured too long, were reconciled by the one passion
which was common to them all: an ardent musical patriotism. France was to
them _the_ great musical nation. They were perpetually proclaiming the
decay of Germany. That did not hurt Christophe. He had declared so himself,
and therefore was not in a position to contradict them. But he was a little
surprised to hear of the supremacy of French music: there was, in fact,
very little trace of it in the past. And yet French musicians maintained
that their art had been admirable from the earliest period. By way of
glorifying French music, they set to work to throw ridicule on the famous
men of the last century, with the exception of one Master, who was very
good and very pure--and a Belgian. Having done that amount of slaughter,
they were free to admire the archaic Masters, who had been forgotten, while
a certain number of them were absolutely unknown. Unlike the lay schools
of France which date the world from the French Revolution, the musicians
regarded it as a chain of mighty mountains, to be scaled before it could
be possible to look back on the Golden Age of music, the Eldorado of art.
After a long eclipse the Golden Age was to emerge again: the hard wall
was to crumble away: a magician of sound was to call forth in full flower
a marvelous spring: the old tree of music was to put forth young green
leaves: in the bed of harmony thousands of flowers were to open their
smiling eyes upon the new dawn: and silvery trickling springs were to
bubble forth with the vernal sweet song of streams--a very idyl.

Christophe was delighted. But when he looked at the bills of the Parisian
theaters, he saw the names of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet, and Mascagni and
Leoncavallo--names with which he was only too familiar: and he asked his
friends if all this brazen music, with its girlish rapture, its artificial
flowers, like nothing so much as a perfumery shop, was the garden of Armide
that they had promised him. They were hurt and protested: if they were to
be believed, these things were the last vestiges of a moribund age: no
one attached any value to them. But the fact remained that _Cavalleria
Rusticana_ flourished at the Opéra Comique, and _Pagliacci_ at the Opéra:
Massenet and Gounod were more frequently performed than anybody else, and
the musical trinity--_Mignon_, _Les Huguenots_, and _Faust_--had safely
crossed the bar of the thousandth performance. But these were only trivial
accidents: there was no need to go and see them. When some untoward fact
upsets a theory, nothing is more simple than to ignore it. The French
critics shut their eyes to these blatant works and to the public which
applauded them: and only a very little more was needed to make them ignore
the whole music-theater in France. The music-theater was to them a literary
form, and therefore impure. (Being all literary men, they set a ban on
literature.) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive--in
short, any music with any meaning--was condemned as impure. In every
Frenchman there is a Robespierre. He must be for ever chopping the head
off something or somebody to purify it. The great French critics only
recognized pure music: the rest they left to the rabble.

Christophe was rather mortified when he thought how vulgar his taste must
be. But he found some comfort in the discovery that all these musicians who
despised the theater spent their time in writing for it: there was not one
of them who did not compose operas. But no doubt that was also a trivial
accident. They were to be judged, as they desired, by their pure music.
Christophe looked about for their pure music.

* * * * *

Théophile Goujart took him to the concerts of a Society dedicated to
the national art. There the new glories of French music were elaborated
and carefully hatched. It was a club, a little church, with several
side-chapels. Each chapel had its saint, each saint his devotees, who
blackguarded the saint in the next chapel. It was some time before
Christophe could differentiate between the various saints. Naturally
enough, being accustomed to a very different sort of art, he was at first
baffled by the new music, and the more he thought he understood it, the
farther was he from a real understanding.

It all seemed to him to be bathed in a perpetual twilight. It was a dull
gray ground on which were drawn lines, shading off and blurring into
each other, sometimes starting from the mist, and then sinking back into
it again. Among all these lines there were stiff, crabbed, and cramped
designs, as though they were drawn with a set-square--patterns with sharp
corners, like the elbow of a skinny woman. There were patterns in curves
floating and curling like the smoke of a cigar. But they were all enveloped
in the gray light. Did the sun never shine in France? Christophe had only
had rain and fog since his arrival, and was inclined to believe so; but
it is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails. These
men lit up their little lanterns, it is true: but they were like the
glow-worm's lamp, giving no warmth and very little light. The titles of
their works were changed: they dealt with Spring, the South, Love, the Joy
of Living, Country Walks; but the music never changed: it was uniformly
soft, pale, enervated, anemic, wasting away. It was then the mode in
France, among the fastidious, to whisper in music. And they were quite
right: for as soon as they tried to talk aloud they shouted: there was no
mean. There was no alternative but distinguished somnolence and
melodramatic declamation.

Christophe shook off the drowsiness that was creeping over him, and looked
at his program; and he was surprised to read that the little puffs of cloud
floating across the gray sky claimed to represent certain definite things.
For, in spite of theory, all their pure music was almost always program
music, or at least music descriptive of a certain subject. It was in vain
that they denounced literature: they needed the support of a literary
crutch. Strange crutches they were, too, as a rule! Christophe observed
the odd puerility of the subjects which they labored to depict--orchards,
kitchen-gardens, farmyards, musical menageries, a whole Zoo. Some musicians
transposed for orchestra or piano the pictures in the Louvre, or the
frescoes of the Opéra: they turned into music Cuyp, Baudry, and Paul
Potter: explanatory notes helped the hearer to recognize the apple of
Paris, a Dutch inn, or the crupper of a white horse. To Christophe it was
like the production of children obsessed by images, who, not knowing how to
draw, scribble down in their exercise-books anything that comes into their
heads, and naïvely write down under it in large letters an inscription to
the effect that it is a house or a tree.

But besides these blind image-fanciers who saw with their ears, there were
the philosophers: they discussed metaphysical problems in music: their
symphonies were composed of the struggle between abstract principles and
stated symbols or religions. And in their operas they affected to study the
judicial and social questions of the day: the Declaration of the Rights of
Woman and the Citizen, elaborated by the metaphysicians of the Butte and
the Palais-Bourbon. They did not shrink from bringing the question of
divorce on to the platform together with the inquiry into the birth-rate
and the separation of the Church and State. Among them were to be found
lay symbolists and clerical symbolists. They introduced philosophic
rag-pickers, sociological grisettes, prophetic bakers, and apostolic
fishermen to the stage. Goethe spoke of the artists of his day, "who
reproduced the ideas of Kant in allegorical pictures." The artists of
Christophe's day wrote sociology in semi-quavers. Zola, Nietzsche,
Maeterlinck, Barrès, Jaurès, Mendès, the Gospel, and the Moulin Rouge, all
fed the cistern whence the writers of operas and symphonies drew their
ideas. Many of them, intoxicated by the example of Wagner, cried: "And I,
too, am a poet!" And with perfect assurance they tacked on to their music
verses in rhyme, or unrhymed, written in the style of an elementary school
or a decadent feuilleton.

All these thinkers and poets were partisans of pure music. But they
preferred talking about it to writing it. And yet they did sometimes manage
to write it. Then they wrote music that was not intended to say anything.
Unfortunately, they often succeeded: their music was meaningless--at least,
to Christophe. It is only fair to say that he had not the key to it.

In order to understand the music of a foreign nation a man must take the
trouble to learn the language, and not make up his mind beforehand that he
knows it. Christophe, like every good German, thought he knew it. That was
excusable. Many Frenchmen did not understand it any more than he. Like the
Germans of the time of Louis XIV, who tried so hard to speak French that
in the end they forgot their own language, the French musicians of the
nineteenth century had taken so much pains to unlearn their language that
their music had become a foreign lingo. It was only of recent years that a
movement had sprung up to speak French in France. They did not all succeed:
the force of habit was very strong: and with a few exceptions their French
was Belgian, or still smacked faintly of Germany. It was quite natural,
therefore, that a German should be mistaken, and declare, with his usual
assurance, that it was very bad German, and meant nothing, since he could
make nothing of it.

Christophe was in exactly that case. The symphonies of the French seemed
to him to be abstract, dialectic, and musical themes were opposed and
superposed arithmetically in them: their combinations and permutations
might just as well have been expressed in figures or the letters of the
alphabet. One man would construct a symphony on the progressive development
of a sonorous formula which did not seem to be complete until the last page
of the last movement, so that for nine-tenths of the work it never advanced
beyond the grub stage of its existence. Another would erect variations on a
theme which was not stated until the end, so that the symphony gradually
descended from the complex to the simple. They were very clever toys. But a
man would need to be both very old and very young to be able to enjoy them.
They had cost their inventors untold effort. They took years to write a
fantasy. They worried their hair white in the search for new combinations
of chords--to express ...? No matter! New expressions. As the organ creates
the need, they say, so the expression must in the end create the idea: the
chief thing is that the expression should be novel. Novelty at all costs!
They had a morbid horror of anything that "had been said." The best of them
were paralyzed by it all. They seemed always to be keeping a fearful guard
on themselves, and crossing out what they had written, wondering: "Good
Lord! Where did I read that?" ... There are some musicians--especially in
Germany--who spend their time in piecing together other people's music. The
musicians of France were always looking out at every bar to see that they
had not included in their catalogues melodies that had already been used by
others, and erasing, erasing, changing the shape of the note until it was
like no known note, and even ceased to be like a note at all.

But they did not take Christophe in: in vain did they muffle themselves
up in a complicated language, and make superhuman and prodigious efforts,
go into orchestral fits, or cultivate inorganic harmonies, an obsessing
monotony, declamations à la Sarah Bernhardt, beginning in a minor key, and
going on for hours plodding along like mules, half asleep, along the edge
of the slippery slope--always under the mask Christophe found the souls of
these men, cold, weary, horribly scented, like Gounod and Massenet, but
even less natural. And he repeated the unjust comment on the French of
Gluck:

"Let them be: they always go back to their giddy-go-round."

Only they did try so hard to be learned. They took popular songs as themes
for learned symphonies, like dissertations for the Sorbonne. That was the
great game at the time. All sorts and kinds of popular songs, songs of all
nations, were pressed into the service. And they worked them up into things
like the _Ninth Symphony_ and the _Quartet_ of César Franck, only much more
difficult. A musician would conceive quite a simple air. At once he would
mix it up with another, which meant nothing at all, though it jarred
hideously with the first. And all these people were obviously so calm, so
perfectly balanced!...

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