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Jean Christophe: In Paris

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But what was most alarming was to see honest men and real artists, men who
rightly enjoyed a high place in French literature, struggling in such a
traffic, for which they were not at all suited. Some of them with great
travail wrote, like the rest, the sort of trash that the newspapers
serialize. They had to produce it by a fixed time, once or twice a week:
and it had been going on for years. They went on producing and producing,
long after they had ceased to have anything to say, racking their brains to
find something new, something more sensational, more bizarre: for the
public was surfeited and sick of everything, and soon wearied of even the
most wanton imaginary pleasures: they had always to go one better--better
than the rest, better than their own best--and they squeezed out their very
life-blood, they squeezed out their guts: it was a pitiable sight, a
grotesque spectacle.

Christophe, who did not know the ins and outs of that melancholy traffic,
and if he had known them would not have been more indulgent; for in his
eyes nothing in the world could excuse an artist for selling his art for
thirty pieces of silver....

(Not even to assure the well-being of those whom he loves?

Not even then.

That is not human.

It is not a question of being human; it is a question of being a man....
Human!... May God have mercy on your white-livered humanitarianism, it is
so bloodless!... No man loves twenty things at once, no man can serve many
gods!...)

... Christophe, who, in his hard-working life, had hardly yet seen beyond
the limits of his little German town, could have no idea that this artistic
degradation, which showed so rawly in Paris, was common to nearly all the
great towns: and the hereditary prejudices of chaste Germany against Latin
immorality awoke in him once more. And yet Sylvain Kohn might easily have
pointed to what was going on by the banks of the Spree, and the impurity
of Imperial Germany, where brutality made shame and degradation even more
repulsive. But Sylvain Kohn never thought of it: he was no more shocked by
that than by the life of Paris. He thought ironically: "Every nation has
its little ways," and the ways of the world in which he lived seemed so
natural to him that Christophe could be excused for thinking it was in the
nature of the people. And so, like so many of his compatriots, he saw in
the secret sore which is eating away the intellectual aristocracies of
Europe the vice proper to French art, and the bankruptcy of the Latin
races.

Christophe was hurt by his first encounter with French literature, and it
took him some time to get over it. And yet there were plenty of books which
were not solely occupied with what one of these writers has nobly called
"the taste for fundamental entertainments." But he never laid hands on
the best and finest of them. Such books were not written, for the like of
Sylvain Kohn and his friends: they did not bother about them, and certainly
Kohn and the rest never bothered about the better class of books: they
ignored each other. Sylvain Kohn would never have thought of mentioning
them to Christophe. He was quite sincerely convinced that his friends
and himself were the incarnation of French Art, and thought there was no
talent, no art, no France outside the men who had been consecrated as great
by their opinion and the press of the boulevards. Christophe knew nothing
about the poets who were the glory of French literature, the very crown of
France. Very few of the novelists reached him, or emerged from the ocean of
mediocre writers: a few books of Barrès and Anatole France. But he was not
sufficiently familiar with the language to be able to enjoy the universal
dilettantism, and erudition, and irony of the one, or the unequal but
superior art of the other. He spent some time in watching the little
orange-trees in tubs growing in the hothouse of Anatole France, and the
delicate, perfect flowers clambering over the gravelike soul of Barrès. He
stayed for a moment or two before the genius, part sublime, part silly, of
Maeterlinck: from that there issued a polite mysticism, monotonous, numbing
like some vague sorrow. He shook himself, and plunged into the heavy,
sluggish stream, the muddy romanticism of Zola, with whom he was already
acquainted, and when he emerged from that it was to sink back and drown in
a deluge of literature.

The submerged lands exhaled an _odor di femina_. The literature of the day
teemed with effeminate men and women. It is well that women should write if
they are sincere enough to describe what no man has yet seen: the depths
of the soul of a woman. But only very few dared do that: most of them only
wrote to attract the men: they were as untruthful in their books as in
their drawing-rooms: they jockeyed their facts and flirted with the reader.
Since they were no longer religious, and had no confessor to whom to tell
their little lapses, they told them to the public. There was a perfect
shower of novels, almost all scabrous, all affected, written in a sort of
lisping style, a style scented with flowers and fine perfumes--sometimes
too fine--sometimes not fine at all--and the eternal stale, warm, sweetish
smell. Their books reeked of it. Christophe thought, like Goethe: "Let
women do what they like with poetry and writing: but men must not write
like women! That I cannot stand." He could not help being disgusted by
their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to
expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest,
their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their
hotch-potch of subtlety and brutality.

But Christophe was ready to admit that he was not in a position to judge.
He was deafened by the row of this babel of words. It was impossible to
hear the little fluting sounds that were drowned in it all. For even among
such books as these there were some, from the pages of which, behind all
the nonsense, there shone the limpid sky and the harmonious outline of the
hills of Attica--so much talent, so much grace, a sweet breath of life, and
charm of style, a thought like the voluptuous women or the languid boys of
Perugino and the young Raphael, smiling, with half-closed eyes, at their
dream of love. But Christophe was blind to that. Nothing could reveal
to him the dominant tendencies, the currents of public opinion. Even a
Frenchman would have been hard put to it to see them. And the only definite
impression that he had at this time was that of a flood of writing which
looked like a national disaster. It seemed as though everybody wrote: men,
women, children, officers, actors, society people, blackguards. It was an
epidemic.

For the time being Christophe gave it up. He felt that such a guide as
Sylvain Kohn must lead him hopelessly astray. His experience of a literary
coterie in Germany gave him very properly a profound distrust of the people
whom he met: it was impossible to know whether or no they only represented
the opinion of a few hundred idle people, or even, in certain cases,
whether or no the author was his own public. The theater gave a more exact
idea of the society of Paris. It played an enormous part in the daily life
of the city. It was an enormous kitchen, a Pantagruelesque restaurant,
which could not cope with the appetite of the two million inhabitants.
There were thirty leading theaters, without counting the local houses, café
concerts, all sorts of shows--a hundred halls, all giving performances
every evening, and, every evening, almost all full. A whole nation of
actors and officials. Vast sums were swallowed up in the gulf. The four
State-aided theaters gave work to three thousand people, and cost the
country ten million francs. The whole of Paris re-echoed with the glory
of the play-actors. It was impossible to go anywhere without seeing
innumerable photographs, drawings, caricatures, reproducing their features
and mannerisms, gramophones reproducing their voices, and the newspapers
their opinions on art and politics. They had special newspapers devoted
to them. They published their heroic and domestic Memoirs. These big
self-conscious children, who spent their time in aping each other, these
wonderful apes reigned and held sway over the Parisians: and the dramatic
authors were their chief ministers. Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to
conduct him into the kingdom of shadows and reflections.

* * * * *

But Sylvain Kohn was no safer as a guide in that world than in the world
of books, and, thanks to him, Christophe's first impression was almost as
repulsive as that of his first essay in literature. It seemed that there
was everywhere the same spirit of mental prostitution.

The pleasure-mongers were divided into two schools. On the one hand there
was the good old way, the national way, of providing a coarse and unclean
pleasure, quite frankly; a delight in ugliness, strong meat, physical
deformities, a show of drawers, barrack-room jests, risky stories, red
pepper, high game, private rooms--"a manly frankness," as those people
say who try to reconcile looseness and morality by pointing out that,
after four acts of dubious fun, order is restored and the Code triumphs
by the fact that the wife is really with the husband whom she thinks
she is deceiving--(so long as the law is observed, then virtue is all
right):--that vicious sort of virtue which defends marriage by endowing it
with all the charm of lewdness:--the Gallic way.

The other school was in the modern style. It was much more subtle and much
more disgusting. The Parisianized Jews and the Judaicized Christians who
frequented the theater had introduced into it the usual hash of sentiment
which is the distinctive feature of a degenerate cosmopolitanism. Those
sons who blushed for their fathers set themselves to abnegate their racial
conscience: and they succeeded only too well. Having plucked out the soul
that was their birthright, all that was left them was a mixture of the
moral and intellectual values of other races: they made a _macédoine_ of
them, an _olla podrida_: it was their way of taking possession of them.
The men who who were at that time in control of the theaters in Paris were
extraordinarily skilful at beating up filth and sentiment, and giving
virtue a flavoring of vice, vice a flavoring of virtue, and turning upside
down every human relation of age, sex, the family, and the affections.
Their art, therefore, had an odor _sui generis_, which smelt both good and
bad at once--that is to say, it smelled very bad indeed: they called it
"amoralism."

One of their favorite heroes at that time was the amorous old man. Their
theaters presented a rich gallery of portraits of the type: and in painting
it they introduced a thousand pretty touches. Sometimes the sexagenarian
hero would take his daughter into his confidence, and talk to her about
his mistress: and she would talk about her lovers: and they would give
each other friendly advice: the kindly father would aid his daughter in
her indiscretions: and the precious daughter would intervene with the
unfaithful mistress, beg her to return, and bring her back to the fold.
Sometimes the good old man would listen to the confidences of his
mistress: he would talk to her about her lovers, or, if nothing better
was forthcoming, he would listen to the tale of her gallantries, and even
take a delight in them. And there were portraits of lovers, distinguished
gentlemen, who presided in the houses of their former mistresses, and
helped them in their nefarious business. Society women were thieves. The
men were bawds, the girls were Lesbian. And all these things happened in
the highest society: the society of rich people--the only society that
mattered. For that made it possible to offer the patrons of the theater
damaged goods under cover of the delights of luxury. So tricked out, it was
displayed in the market, to the joy of old gentlemen and young women. And
it all reeked of death and the seraglio.

Their style was not less mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a
composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every
country under the sun--pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious,
prurient, and low--a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and
wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted
with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: but they were
clever enough, and they manufactured their goods in imitation of Paris. If
the stone was not always of the first water, and if the setting was always
strange and overdone, at least it shone in artificial light, and that was
all it was meant to do. They were intelligent, keen, though short-sighted
observers--their eyes had been dulled by centuries of the life of the
counting-house--turning the magnifying-glass on human sentiments, enlarging
small things, not seeing big things. With a marked predilection for finery,
they were incapable of depicting anything but what seemed to their upstart
snobbishness the ideal of polite society: a little group of worn-out rakes
and adventurers, who quarreled among themselves for the possession of
certain stolen moneys and a few virtueless females.

And yet upon occasion the real nature of these Jewish writers would
suddenly awake, come to the surface from the depths of their being, in
response to some mysterious echo called forth by some vivid word or
sensation. Then there appeared a strange hotch-potch of ages and races, a
breath of wind from the Desert, bringing over the seas to their Parisian
rooms the musty smell of a Turkish bazaar, the dazzling shimmer of the
sands, the mirage, blind sensuality, savage invective, nervous disorder
only a hair's-breadth away from epilepsy, a destructive frenzy--Samson,
suddenly rising like a lion--after ages of squatting in the shade--and
savagely tearing down the columns of the Temple, which comes crashing down
on himself and on his enemies.

Christophe blew his nose and said to Sylvain Kohn:

"There's power in it: but it stinks. That's enough! Let's go and see
something else."

"What?" asked Sylvain Kohn.

"France."

"That's it!" said Kohn.

"Can't be," replied Christophe. "France isn't like that."

"It's France, and Germany, too."

"I don't believe it. A nation that was anything like that wouldn't last for
twenty years: why, it's decomposing already. There must be something else."

"There's nothing better."

"There must be something else," insisted Christophe.

"Oh, yes," said Sylvain Kohn. "We have fine people, of course, and theaters
for them, too. Is that what you want? We can give you that."

He took Christophe to the Théâtre Français.

* * * * *

That evening they happened to be playing a modern comedy, in prose, dealing
with some legal problem.

From the very beginning Christophe was baffled to make out in what sort of
world the action was taking place. The voices of the actors were out of all
reason, full, solemn, slow, formal: they rounded every syllable as though
they were giving a lesson in elocution, and they seemed always to be
scanning Alexandrines with tragic pauses. Their gestures were solemn and
almost hieratic. The heroine, who wore her gown as though it were a Greek
peplus, with arm uplifted, and head lowered, was nothing else but Antigone,
and she smiled with a smile of eternal sacrifice, carefully modulating
the lower notes of her beautiful contralto voice. The heavy father
walked about like a fencing-master, with automatic gestures, a funereal
dignity,--romanticism in a frock-coat. The juvenile lead gulped and gasped
and squeezed out a sob or two. The piece was written in the style of a
tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic
periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it
was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not
a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions
that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was hopelessly
middle-class and respectable.

The heroine had divorced an unworthy husband, by whom she had had a child,
and she had married a good man whom she loved. The point was, that even in
such a case as this divorce was condemned by Nature, as it is by prejudice.
Nothing could be easier than to prove it: the author contrived that the
woman should be surprised, for one occasion only, into yielding to the
first husband. After that, instead of a perfectly natural remorse, perhaps
a profound sense of shame, together with a greater desire to love and
honor the second and good husband, the author trotted out an heroic case
of conscience, altogether beyond Nature. French writers never seem to be
on good terms with virtue: they always force the note when they talk of
it: they make it quite incredible. They always seem to be dealing with
the heroes of Corneille, and tragedy Kings. And are they not Kings and
Queens, these millionaire heroes, and these heroines who would not be
interesting unless they had at least a mansion in Paris and two or three
country-houses? For such writers and such a public wealth itself is a
beauty, and almost a virtue.

The audience was even more amazing than the play. They were never bored
by all the tiresomely repeated improbabilities. They laughed at the good
points, when the actors said things that were _meant_ to be laughed at: it
was made obvious that they were coming, so that the audience could be ready
to laugh. They mopped their eyes and coughed, and were deeply moved when
the puppets gasped, and gulped, and roared, and fainted away in accordance
with the hallowed tragic ritual.

"And people say the French are gay!" exclaimed Christophe as they left the
theater.

"There's a time for everything," said Sylvain Kohn chaffingly. "You wanted
virtue. You see, there's still virtue in France."

"But that's not virtue!" cried Christophe. "That's rhetoric!"

"In France," said Sylvain Kohn. "Virtue in the theater is always
rhetorical."

"A pretorium virtue," said Christophe, "and the prize goes to the best
talker. I hate lawyers. Have you no poets in France?"

Sylvain Kohn took him to the poetic drama.

* * * * *

There were poets in France. There were even great poets. But the theater
was not for them. It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what
the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: _Sicut amori lupanar._

Christophe saw Princesses who were virtuously promiscuous, who prostituted
themselves for their honor, who were compared with Christ ascending
Calvary:--friends who deceived their friends out of devotion to
them:--glorified triangular relations:--heroic cuckoldry: (the cuckold,
like the blessed prostitute, had become a European commodity: the example
of King Mark had turned the heads of the poets: like the stag of Saint
Hubert, the cuckold never appeared without a halo.) And Christophe saw
also lovely damsels torn between passion and duty: their passion bade them
follow a new lover: duty bade them stay with the old one, an old man who
gave them money and was deceived by them. And in the end they plumped
heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid
interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them:
they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word
for it.

The summit of art was reached and the greatest pleasure was given when,
most paradoxically, sexual immorality and Corneillian heroics could be
combined. In that way every need of the Parisian public was satisfied:
mind, senses, rhetoric. But it is only just to say that the public was
fonder even of words than of lewdness. Eloquence could send it into
ecstasies. It would have suffered anything for a fine tirade. Virtue or
vice, heroics hobnobbing with the basest prurience, there was no pill that
it would not swallow if it were gilded with sonorous rhymes and redundant
words. Anything that came to hand was ground into couplets, antitheses,
arguments: love, suffering, death. And when that was done, they thought
they had felt love, suffering, and death. Nothing but phrases. It was all
a game. When Hugo brought thunder on to the stage, at once (as one of
his disciples said) he muted it so as not to frighten even a child. (The
disciple fancied he was paying him a compliment.) It was never possible to
feel any of the forces of Nature in their art. They made everything polite.
Just as in music--and even more than in music, which was a younger art
in France, and therefore relatively more simple--they were terrified of
anything that had been "already said." The most gifted of them coldly
devoted themselves to working contrariwise. The process was childishly
simple: they pitched on some beautiful legend or fairy-story, and turned
it upside down. Thus, Bluebeard was beaten by his wives, or Polyphemus
was kind enough to pluck out his eye by way of sacrificing himself to the
happiness of Acis and Galatea. And they thought of nothing but form. And
once more it seemed to Christophe (though he was not a good judge) that
these masters of form were rather coxcombs and imitators than great writers
creating their own style and giving breadth and depth to their work.

They played at being artists. They played at being poets. Nowhere was the
poetic lie more insolently reared than in the heroic drama. They put up a
burlesque conception of a hero:

"_The great thing is to have a soul magnificent.
An eagel's eye; broad brow like portico; present
An air of strength, grave mien, most touchingly to show
A heart that throbs, eyes full of dreams of worlds they know._"

Verses like that were taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such
fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the
swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a
Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history.
When in the world was the like of the heroism of Cyrano ever to be found?
These writers moved heaven and earth; they summoned from their tombs the
Emperor and his legions, the bandits of the Ligue, the _condottieri_ of
the Renaissance, called up the human cyclones that once devastated the
universe:--just to display a puppet, standing unmoved through frightful
massacres, surrounded by armies, soldiers, and whole hosts of captive
women, dying of a silly calfish love for a woman whom he had seen ten or
fifteen years before--or King Henri IV submitting to assassination because
his mistress no longer loved him.

So, and no otherwise, did these good people present their parlor Kings,
and _condottieri_, and heroic passion. They were worthy scions of the
illustrious nincompoops of the days of _Grand Cyrus_, those Gascons of the
ideal--Scudéry, La Calprenède--an everlasting brood, the songsters of sham
heroism, impossible heroism, which is the enemy of truth. Christophe
observed to his amazement that the French, who are said to be so clever,
had no sense of the ridiculous.

He was lucky when religion was not dragged in to fit the fashion! Then,
during Lent, certain actors read the sermons of Bossuet at the Gaîté
to the accompaniment of an organ. Jewish authors wrote tragedies about
Saint Theresa for Jewish actresses. The _Way of the Cross_ was acted at
the Bodinière, the _Child Jesus_ at the Ambigu, the _Passion_ at the
Porte-Saint-Martin, _Jesus_ at the Odéon, orchestral suites on the subject
of _Christ_ at the Botanical Gardens. And a certain brilliant talker--a
poet who wrote passionate love-songs--gave a lecture on the _Redemption_
at the Châtelet. And, of course, the passages of the Gospel that were most
carefully preserved by these people were those relating to Pilate and
Mary Magdalene:--"_What is truth_?" and the story of the blessed foolish
virgin.--And their boulevard Christs were horribly loquacious and well up
in all the latest tricks of worldly casuistry.

Christophe said:

"That is the worst yet. It is untruth incarnate. I'm stifling. Let's get
out."

And yet there was a great classic art that held its ground among all these
modern industries, like the ruins of the splendid ancient temples among all
the pretentious buildings of modern Rome. But, outside Molière, Christophe
was not yet able to appreciate it. He was not yet familiar enough with the
language, and, therefore, could not grasp the genius of the race. Nothing
baffled him so much as the tragedy of the seventeenth century--one of the
least accessible provinces of French art to foreigners, precisely because
it lies at the very heart of France. It bored him horribly; he found it
cold, dry, and revolting in its tricks and pedantry. The action was thin or
forced, the characters were rhetorical abstractions or as insipid as the
conversation of society women. They were caricatures of the ancient legends
and heroes: a display of reason, arguments, quibbling, and antiquated
psychology and archeology. Speeches, speeches, speeches; the eternal
loquacity of the French. Christophe ironically refused to say whether it
was beautiful or not: there was nothing to interest him in it: whatever the
arguments put forward in turn by the orators of _Cinna_, he did not care a
rap which of the talking-machines won in the end.

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