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Jean Christophe, Vol. I

R >> Romain Rolland >> Jean Christophe, Vol. I




"There, you beast!... There, there, there!..."

Then he would recover.

What exasperated him most in his compositions was their untruth. Not
a spark of feeling in them. A phraseology got by heart, a schoolboy's
rhetoric: he spoke of love like a blind man of color: he spoke of it from
hearsay, only repeating the current platitudes. And it was not only love:
it was the same with all the passions, which had been used for themes and
declamations.--And yet he had always tried to be sincere.--But it is not
enough to wish to be sincere: it is necessary to have the power to be so:
and how can a man be so when as yet he knows nothing of life? What had
revealed the falseness of his work, what had suddenly digged a pit between
himself and his past was the experience which he had had during the last
six months of life. He had left fantasy: there was now in him a real
standard to which he could bring all the thoughts for judgment as to their
truth or untruth.

The disgust which his old work, written without passion, roused in him,
made him decide with his usual exaggeration that he would write no more
until he was forced to write by some passionate need: and leaving the
pursuit of his ideas at that, he swore that he would renounce music
forever, unless creation were imposed upon him in a thunderclap.

* * * * *

He made this resolve because he knew quite well that the storm was coming.

Thunder falls when it will, and where it will. But there are peaks which
attract it. Certain places--certain souls--breed storms: they create them,
or draw them from all points of the horizon: and certain ages of life,
like certain months of the year, are so saturated with electricity, that
thunderstorms are produced in them,--if not at will--at any rate when they
are expected.

The whole being of a man is taut for it. Often the storm lies brooding for
days and days. The pale sky is hung with burning, fleecy clouds. No wind
stirs. The still air ferments, and seems to boil. The earth lies in a
stupor: no sound comes from it. The brain hums feverishly: all nature
awaits the explosion of the gathering forces, the thud of the hammer which
is slowly rising to fall back suddenly on the anvil of the clouds. Dark,
warm shadows pass: a fiery wind rises through the body, the nerves quiver
like leaves.... Then silence falls again. The sky goes on gathering
thunder.

In such expectancy there is voluptuous anguish. In spite of the discomfort
that weighs so heavily upon you, you feel in your veins the fire which is
consuming the universe. The soul surfeited boils in the furnace, like wine
in a vat. Thousands of germs of life and death are in labor in it. What
will issue from it? The soul knows not. Like a woman with child, it is
silent: it gazes in upon itself: it listens anxiously for the stirring in
its womb, and thinks: "What will be born of me?"...

Sometimes such waiting is in vain. The storm passes without breaking: but
you wake heavy, cheated, enervated, disheartened. But it is only postponed:
the storm will break: if not to-day, then to-morrow: the longer it is
delayed, the more violent will it be....

Now it comes!... The clouds have come up from all corners of the soul.
Thick masses, blue and black, torn by the frantic darting of the lightning:
they advance heavily, drunkenly, darkening the soul's horizon, blotting out
light. An hour of madness!... The exasperated Elements, let loose from
the cage in which they are held bound by the Laws which hold the balance
between the mind and the existence of things, reign, formless and colossal,
in the night of consciousness. The soul is in agony. There is no longer the
will to live. There is only longing for the end, for the deliverance of
death....

And suddenly there is lightning!

Christophe shouted for joy.

* * * * *

Joy, furious joy, the sun that lights up all that is and will be, the
godlike joy of creation! There is no joy but in creation. There are no
living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering
over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of
creation: love, genius, action,--quickened by flames issuing from one and
the same fire. Even those who cannot find a place by the great fireside:
the ambitious, the egoists, the sterile sensualists,--try to gain warmth in
the pale reflections of its light.

To create in the region of the body, or in the region of the mind, is to
issue from the prison of the body: it is to ride upon the storm of life: it
is to be He who Is. To create is to triumph over death.

Wretched is the sterile creature, that man or that woman who remains alone
and lost upon the earth, scanning their withered bodies, and the sight of
themselves from which no flame of life will ever leap! Wretched is the soul
that does not feel its own fruitfulness, and know itself to be big with
life and love, as a tree with blossom in the spring! The world may heap
honors and benefits upon such a soul: it does but crown a corpse.

* * * * *

When Christophe was struck by the flash of lightning, an electric fluid
coursed through his body: he trembled under the shock. It was as though
on the high seas, in the dark night, he had suddenly sighted land. Or it
was as though in a crowd he had gazed into two eyes saluting him. Often it
would happen to him after hours of prostration when his mind was leaping
desperately through the void. But more often still it came in moments
when he was thinking of something else, talking to his mother, or walking
through the streets. If he were in the street a certain human respect kept
him from too loudly demonstrating his joy. But if he were at home nothing
could keep him back. He would stamp. He would sound a blare of triumph: his
mother knew that well, and she had come to know what it meant. She used to
tell Christophe that he was like a hen that has laid an egg.

He was permeated with his musical imagination. Sometimes it took shape in
an isolated phrase complete in itself: more often it would appear as a
nebula enveloping a whole work: the structure of the work, its general
lines, could be perceived through a veil, torn asunder here and there
by dazzling phrases which stood out from the darkness with the clarity
of sculpture. It was only a flash: sometimes others would come in quick
succession: each lit up other corners of the night. But usually, the
capricious force haying once shown itself unexpectedly, would disappear
again for several days into its mysterious retreats, leaving behind it a
luminous ray.

This delight in inspiration was so vivid that Christophe was disgusted by
everything else. The experienced artist knows that inspiration is rare and
that intelligence is left to complete the work of intuition: he puts his
ideas under the press and squeezes out of them the last drop of the divine
juices that are in them--(and if need be sometimes he does not shrink from
diluting them with clear water)--Christophe was too young and too sure of
himself not to despise such contemptible practices. He dreamed impossibly
of producing nothing that was not absolutely spontaneous. If he had not
been deliberately blind he would certainly have seen the absurdity of his
aims. Ho doubt he was at that time in a period of inward abundance in which
there was no gap, no chink, through which boredom or emptiness could creep.
Everything served as an excuse to his inexhaustible fecundity: everything
that his eyes saw or his ears heard, everything with which he came in
contact in his daily life: every look, every word, brought forth a crop of
dreams. In the boundless heaven of his thoughts he saw circling millions
of milky stars, rivers of living light.--And yet, even then, there were
moments when everything was suddenly blotted out. And although the night
could not endure, although he had hardly time to suffer from these long
silences of his soul, he did not escape a secret terror of that unknown
power which came upon him, left him, came again, and disappeared.... How
long, this time? Would it ever come again?--His pride rejected that thought
and said: "This force is myself. When it ceases to be, I shall cease to be:
I shall kill myself."--He never ceased to tremble: but it was only another
delight.

But, if, for the moment, there was no danger of the spring running dry,
Christophe was able already to perceive that it was never enough to
fertilize a complete work. Ideas almost always appeared rawly: he had
painfully to dig them out of the ore. And always they appeared without any
sort of sequence, and by fits and starts: to unite them he had to bring to
bear on them an element of reflection and deliberation and cold will, which
fashioned them into new form. Christophe was too much of an artist not to
do so: but he would not accept it: he forced himself to believe that he
did no more than transcribe what was within himself, while he was always
compelled more or less to transform it so as to make it intelligible.--More
than that: sometimes he would absolutely forge a meaning for it. However
violently the musical idea might come upon him it would often have been
impossible for him to say what it meant. It would come surging up from the
depths of life, from far beyond the limits of consciousness: and in that
absolutely pure Force, which eluded common rhythms, consciousness could
never recognize in it any of the motives which stirred in it, none of the
human feelings which it defines and classifies: joys, sorrows, they were
all merged in one single passion which was unintelligible, because it
was above the intelligence. And yet, whether it understood or no, the
intelligence needed to give a name to this form, to bind it down to
one or other of the structures of logic, which man is forever building
indefatigably in the hive of his brain.

So Christophe convinced himself--he wished to do so--that the obscure power
that moved him had an exact meaning, and that its meaning was in accordance
with his will. His free instinct, risen from the unconscious depths, was
willy-nilly forced to plod on under the yoke of reason with perfectly clear
ideas which had nothing at all in common with it. And work so produced was
no more than a lying juxtaposition of one of those great subjects that
Christophe's mind had marked out for itself, and those wild forces which
had an altogether different meaning unknown to himself.

* * * * *

He groped his way, head down, borne on by the contradictory forces warring
in him, and hurling into his incoherent works a fiery and strong quality
of life which he could not express, though he was joyously and proudly
conscious of it.

The consciousness of his new vigor made him able for the first time to
envisage squarely everything about him, everything that he had been taught
to honor, everything that he had respected without question: and he judged
it all with insolent freedom. The veil was rent: he saw the German lie.

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little
truth and many lies. The human mind is feeble: pure truth agrees with it
but ill: its religion, its morality, its states, its poets, its artists,
must all be presented to it swathed in lies. These lies are adapted to the
mind of each race: they vary from one to the other: it is they that make it
so difficult for nations to understand each other, and so easy for them to
despise each other. Truth is the same for all of us: but every nation has
its own lie, which it calls its idealism: every creature therein breathes
it from birth to death: it has become a condition of life: there are only
a few men of genius who can break free from it through heroic moments of
crisis, when they are alone in the free world of their thoughts.

It was a trivial thing which suddenly revealed to Christophe the lie of
German art. It was not because it had not always been visible that he had
not seen it: he was not near it, he had not recoiled from it. Now the
mountain appeared to his gaze because he had moved away from it.

He was at a concert of the _Städtische Townhalle_. The concert was given
in a large hall occupied by ten or twelve rows of little tables--about two
or three hundred of them. At the end of the room was a stage where the
orchestra was sitting. All round Christophe were officers dressed up in
their long, dark coats,--with broad, shaven faces, red, serious, and
commonplace: women talking and laughing noisily, ostentatiously at their
ease: jolly little girls smiling and showing all their teeth: and large men
hidden behind their beards and spectacles, looking like kindly spiders with
round eyes. They got up with every fresh glass to drink a toast: they did
this almost religiously: their faces, their voices changed: it was as
though they were saying Mass: they offered each other the libations, they
drank of the chalice with a mixture of solemnity and buffoonery. The music
was drowned under the conversation and the clinking of glasses. And yet
everybody was trying to talk and eat quietly. The _Herr Konzertmeister_, a
tall, bent old man, with a white beard hanging like a tail from his chin,
and a long aquiline nose, with spectacles, looked like a philologist.--All
these types were familiar to Christophe. But on that day he had an
inclination--he did not know why--to see them as caricatures. There are
days like that when, for no apparent reason, the grotesque in people and
things which in ordinary life passes unnoticed, suddenly leaps into view.

The programme of the music included the _Egmont_ overture, a valse of
Waldteufel, _Tannhäuser's Pilgrimage to Rome_, the overture to the _Merry
Wives_ of Nicolai, the religious march of _Athalie_, and a fantasy on the
_North Star_. The orchestra played the Beethoven overture correctly, and
the valse deliciously. During the _Pilgrimage of Tannhäuser_, the uncorking
of bottles was heard. A big man sitting at the table next to Christophe
beat time to the _Merry Wives_ by imitating Falstaff. A stout old lady, in
a pale blue dress, with a white belt, golden pince-nez on her flat nose,
red arms, and an enormous waist, sang in a loud voice _Lieder_ of Schumann
and Brahms. She raised her eyebrows, made eyes at the wings, smiled with
a smile that seemed to curdle on her moon-face, made exaggerated gestures
which must certainly have called to mind the _café-concert_ but for the
majestic honesty which shone in her: this mother of a family played the
part of the giddy girl, youth, passion: and Schumann's poetry had a faint
smack of the nursery. The audience was in ecstasies.--But they grew solemn
and attentive when there appeared the Choral Society of the Germans of the
South (_Süddeutschen Männer Liedertafel_), who alternately cooed and roared
part songs full of feeling. There were forty and they sang four parts: it
seemed as though they had set themselves to free their execution of every
trace of style that could properly be called choral: a hotch-potch of
little melodious effects, little timid puling shades of sound, dying
_pianissimos_, with sudden swelling, roaring _crescendos_, like some one
heating on an empty box: no breadth or balance, a mawkish style: it was
like Bottom:

"Let me play the lion. I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I
will roar you as it were a nightingale."

Christophe listened: foam the beginning with growing amazement. There was
nothing new in it all to him. He knew these concerts, the orchestra, the
audience. But suddenly it all seemed to him false. All of it: even to
what he most loved, the _Egmont_ overture, in which the pompous disorder
and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No
doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd
interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread
about their works like a heavy mist.--No matter, there was in the works,
even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had
never before felt.--What was it? He dared not analyze it, deeming it a
sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But in vain did he shut his eyes
to it: he had seen it. And, in spite of himself, he went on seeing it: like
the _Vergognosa_ at Pisa he looked: between his fingers.

He saw German art stripped. All of them--the great and the idiots--laid
bare their souls with a complacent tenderness. Emotion overflowed, moral
nobility trickled down, their hearts melted in distracted effusions: the
sluice gates were opened to the fearful German tender-heartedness: it
weakened the energy of the stronger, it drowned the weaker under its
grayish waters: it was a flood: in the depths of it slept German thought.
And, what thoughts were those of a Mendelssohn, a Brahms, a Schumann, and,
following them, the whole legion of little writers of affected and tearful
_Lieder_! Built on sand. Never rock. Wet and shapeless clay.--It was all
so foolish, so childish often, that Christophe could not believe that it
never occurred to the audience. He looked about him: but he saw only gaping
faces, convinced in advance of the beauties they were hearing and the
pleasure that they ought to find in it. How could they admit their own
right to judge for themselves? They were filled with respect for these
hallowed names. What did they not respect? They were respectful before
their programmes, before their glasses, before themselves. It was clear
that mentally they dubbed everything excellent that remotely or nearly
concerned them.

Christophe passed in review the audience and the music alternately: the
music reflected the audience, the audience reflected the music. Christophe
felt laughter overcoming him and he made faces. However, he controlled
himself. But when the Germans of the South came and solemnly sang the
_Confession_ that reminded him of the blushes of a girl in love, Christophe
could not contain himself. He shouted with laughter. Indignant cries of
"Ssh!" were raised. His neighbors looked at him, scared: their honest,
scandalized faces filled him with joy: he laughed louder than ever, he
laughed, he laughed until he cried. Suddenly the audience grew angry. They
cried: "Put him out!" He got up, and went, shrugging his shoulders, shaking
with suppressed laughter. His departure caused a scandal. It was the
beginning of hostilities between Christophe and his birthplace.

* * * * *

After that experience Christophe shut himself up and set himself to read
once more the works of the "hallowed" musicians. He was appalled to find
that certain of the masters whom he loved most had _lied_. He tried hard
to doubt it at first, to believe that he was mistaken.--But no, there was
no way out of it. He was staggered by the conglomeration of mediocrity and
untruth which constitutes the artistic treasure of a great people. How many
pages could bear examination!

From that time on he could begin to read other works, other masters, who
were dear to him, only with a fluttering heart.... Alas! There was some
spell cast upon him: always there was the same discomfiture. With some of
them his heart was rent: it was as though he had lost a dear friend, as if
he had suddenly seen that a friend in whom he had reposed entire confidence
had been deceiving him for years. He wept for it. He did not sleep at
night: he could not escape his torment. He blamed himself: perhaps he had
lost his judgment? Perhaps he had become altogether an idiot?--No, no. More
than ever he saw the radiant beauty of the day and with more freshness and
love than ever he felt the generous abundance of life: his heart was not
deceiving him....

But for a long time he dared not approach those who were the best for him,
the purest, the Holy of Holies. He trembled at the thought of bringing his
faith in them to the test. But how resist the pitiless instinct of a brave
and truthful soul, which will go on to the end, and see things as they are,
whatever suffering may be got in doing so?--So he opened the sacred works,
he called upon the last reserve, the imperial guard.... At the first glance
he saw that they were no more immaculate than the others. He had not the
courage to go on. Every now and then he stopped and closed the book: like
the son of Noah, he threw his cloak about his father's nakedness....

Then he was prostrate in the midst of all these ruins. He would rather have
lost an arm, than have tampered with his blessed illusions. In his heart he
mourned. But there was so much sap in him, so much reserve of life, that
his confidence in art was not shaken. With a young man's naïve presumption
he began life again as though no one had ever lived it before him.
Intoxicated by his new strength, he felt--not without reason, perhaps--that
with a very few exceptions there is almost no relation between living
passion and the expression which art has striven to give to it. But he was
mistaken in thinking himself more happy or more true when he expressed it.
As he was filled with passion it was easy for him to discover it at the
back of what he had written: but no one else would have recognized it
through the imperfect vocabulary with which he designated its variations.
Many artists whom he condemned were in the same case. They had had, and had
translated profound emotions: but the secret of their language had died
with them.

Christophe was no psychologist: he was not bothered with all these
arguments: what was dead for him had always been so. He revised his
judgment of the past with all the confident and fierce injustice of youth.
He stripped the noblest souls, and had no pity for their foibles. There
were the rich melancholy, the distinguished fantasy, the kindly thinking
emptiness of Mendelssohn. There were the bead-stringing and the affectation
of Weber, his dryness of heart, his cerebral emotion. There was Liszt, the
noble priest, the circus rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in
equal doses of real and false nobility, of serene idealism and disgusting
virtuosity. Schubert, swallowed up by his sentimentality, drowned at the
bottom of leagues of stale, transparent water. The men of the heroic ages,
the demi-gods, the Prophets, the Fathers of the Church, were not spared.
Even the great Sebastian, the man of ages, who bore in himself the past
and the future,--Bach,--was not free of untruth, of fashionable folly, of
school-chattering. The man who had seen God, the man who lived in God,
seemed sometimes to Christophe to have had an insipid and sugared religion,
a Jesuitical style, rococo. In his cantatas there were languorous and
devout airs--(dialogues of the Soul coquetting with Jesus)--which sickened
Christophe: then he seemed to see chubby cherubim with round limbs, and
flying draperies. And also he had a feeling that the genial _Cantor_
always wrote in a closed room: his work smacked of stuffiness: there was
not in his music that brave outdoor air that was breathed in others,
not such great musicians, perhaps, but greater men--more human--than
he. Like Beethoven or Händel. What hurt him in all of them, especially
in the classics, was their lack of freedom: almost all their works
were "constructed." Sometimes an emotion was filled out with all the
commonplaces of musical rhetoric, sometimes with a simple rhythm,
an ornamental design, repeated, turned upside down, combined in
every conceivable way in a mechanical fashion. These symmetrical and
twaddling constructions--classical, and neo-classical sonatas and
symphonies--exasperated Christophe, who, at that time, was not very
sensible of the beauty of order, and vast and well-conceived plans. That
seemed to him to be rather masons' work than musicians'.

But he was no less severe with the romantics. It was a strange thing, and
he was more surprised by it than anybody,--but no musicians irritated him
more than those who had pretended to be--and had actually been--the most
free, the most spontaneous, the least constructive,--those, who, like
Schumann, had poured drop by drop, minute by minute, into their innumerable
little works, their whole life. He was the more indignantly in revolt
against them as he recognized in them his adolescent soul and all the
follies that he had vowed to pluck out of it. In truth, the candid Schumann
could not be taxed with falsity: he hardly ever said anything that he had
not felt. But that was just it: his example made Christophe understand that
the worst falsity in German art came into it not when the artists tried to
express something which they had not felt, but rather when they tried to
express the feelings which they did in fact feel--_feelings which were
false_. Music is an implacable mirror of the soul. The more a German
musician is naïve and in good faith, the more he displays the weaknesses
of the German soul, its uncertain depths, its soft tenderness, its want of
frankness, its rather sly idealism, its incapacity for seeing itself, for
daring to come face to face with itself. That false idealism is the secret
sore even of the greatest--of Wagner. As he read his works Christophe
ground his teeth. _Lohengrin_ seemed to him a blatant lie. He loathed the
huxtering chivalry, the hypocritical mummery, the hero without fear and
without a heart, the incarnation of cold and selfish virtue admiring itself
and most patently self-satisfied. He knew it too well, he had seen it in
reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing
down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about
sacrificing others. The _Flying Dutchman_ overwhelmed him with its massive
sentimentality and its gloomy boredom. The loves of the barbarous decadents
of the _Tetralogy_ were of a sickening staleness. Siegmund carrying off
his sister sang a tenor drawing-room song. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, like
respectable German married people, in the _Götterdämmerung_ laid bare
before each other, especially for the benefit of the audience, their
pompous and voluble conjugal passion. Every sort of lie had arranged to
meet in that work: false idealism, false Christianity, false Gothicism,
false legend, false gods, false humans. Never did more monstrous convention
appear than in that theater which was to upset all the conventions. Neither
eyes, nor mind, nor heart could be deceived by it for a moment: if they
were, then they must wish to be so.--They did wish to be so. Germany was
delighted with that doting, childish art, an art of brutes let loose, and
mystic, namby-pamby little girls.

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