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Jean Christophe, Vol. I

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To have understood him she would have had to be able to understand that
his aim was not success but his own faith. He believed in art: he believed
in _his_ art: he believed in himself, as realities not only superior to
interest, but also to his own life. When he was a little out of patience
with her remarks and told her so in his naïve arrogance, she just shrugged
her shoulders: she did not take him seriously. She thought he was using
big words such as she was accustomed to hearing from her brother when
he announced periodically his absurd and ridiculous resolutions, which
he never by any chance put into practice. And then when she saw that
Christophe really believed in what he said, she thought him mad and lost
interest in him.

After that she took no trouble to appear to advantage, and she showed
herself as she was: much more German, and average German, than she seemed
to be at first, more perhaps than she thought.--The Jews are quite
erroneously reproached with not belonging to any nation and with forming
from one end of Europe to the other a homogeneous people impervious to the
influence of the different races with which they have pitched their tents.
In reality there is no race which more easily takes on the impress of the
country through which it passes: and if there are many characteristics in
common between a French Jew and a German Jew, there are many more different
characteristics derived from their new country, of which with incredible
rapidity they assimilate the habits of mind: more the habits than the mind,
indeed. But habit, which is a second nature to all men, is in most of them
all the nature that they have, and the result is that the majority of the
autochthonous citizens of any country have very little right to reproach
the Jews with the lack of a profound and reasonable national feeling of
which they themselves possess nothing at all.

The women, always more sensible to external influences, more easily
adaptable to the conditions of life and to change with them--Jewish women
throughout Europe assume the physical and moral customs, often exaggerating
them, of the country in which they live,--without losing the shadow and the
strange fluid, solid, and haunting quality of their race.--This idea came
to Christophe. At the Mannheims' he met Judith's aunts, cousins, and
friends. Though there was little of the German in their eyes, ardent and
too close together, their noses going down to their lips, their strong
features, their red blood coursing under their coarse brown skins: though
almost all of them seemed hardly at all fashioned to be German--they
were all extraordinarily German: they had the same way of talking, of
dressing,--of overdressing.--Judith was much the best of them all: and
comparison with them made all that was exceptional in her intelligence, all
that she had made of herself, shine forth. But she had most of their faults
just as much as they. She was much more free than they morally--almost
absolutely free--but socially she was no more free: or at least her
practical sense usurped the place of her freedom of mind. She believed in
society, in class, in prejudice, because when all was told she found them
to her advantage. It was idle for her to laugh at the German spirit: she
followed it like any German. Her intelligence made her see the mediocrity
of some artist of reputation: but she respected him none the less because
of his reputation: and if she met him personally she would admire him: for
her vanity was flattered. She had no love for the works of Brahms and she
suspected him of being an artist of the second rank: but his fame impressed
her: and as she had received five or six letters from him the result was
that she thought him the greatest musician of the day. She had no doubt as
to Christophe's real worth, or as to the stupidity of Lieutenant Detlev von
Fleischer: but she was more flattered by the homage the lieutenant deigned
to pay to her millions than by Christophe's friendship: for a dull officer
is a man of another caste: it is more difficult for a German Jewess to
enter that caste than for any other woman. Although she was not deceived
by these feudal follies, and although she knew quite well that if she did
marry Lieutenant Detlev von Fleischer she would be doing him a great honor,
she set herself to the conquest: she stooped so low as to make eyes at
the fool and to flatter his vanity. The proud Jewess, who had a thousand
reasons for her pride--the clever, disdainful daughter of Mannheim the
banker lowered herself, and acted like any of the little middle-class
German women whom she despised.

* * * * *

That experience was short. Christophe lost his illusions about Judith
as quickly as he had found them. It is only just to say that Judith did
nothing to preserve them. As soon as a woman of that stamp has judged a
man she is done with him: he ceases to exist for her: she will not see
him again. And she no more hesitates to reveal her soul to him, with calm
impudence, that to appear naked before her dog, her cat, or any other
domestic animal. Christophe saw Judith's egoism and coldness, and the
mediocrity of her character. He had not had time to be absolutely caught.
But he had been enough caught to make him suffer and to bring him to a sort
of fever. He did not so much love Judith as what she might have been--what
she ought to have been. Her fine eyes exercised a melancholy fascination
over him: he could not forget them: although he knew now the drab soul that
slumbered in their depths he went on seeing them as he wished to see them,
as he had first seen them. It was one of those loveless hallucinations
of love which take up so much of the hearts of artists when they are not
entirely absorbed by their work. A passing face is enough to create it:
they see in it all the beauty that is in it, unknown to its indifferent
possessor. And they love it the more for its indifference. They love it as
a beautiful thing that must die without any man having known its worth or
that it even had life.

Perhaps he was deceiving himself, and Judith Mannheim could not have been
anything more than she was. But for a moment Christophe had believed in
her: and her charm endured: he could not judge her impartially. All her
beauty seemed to him to be hers, to be herself. All that was vulgar in her
he cast back upon her twofold race, Jew and German, and perhaps he was more
indignant with the German than with the Jew, for it had made him suffer
more. As he did not yet know any other nation, the German spirit was for
him a sort of scapegoat: he put upon it all the sins of the world. That
Judith had deceived him was a reason the more for combating it: he could
not forgive it for having crushed the life out of such a soul.

Such was his first encounter with Israel. He had hoped much from it. He
had hoped to find in that strong race living apart from the rest an ally
for his fight. He lost that hope. With the flexibility of his passionate
intuition, which made him leap from one extreme to another, he persuaded
himself that the Jewish race was much weaker than it was said to be, and
much more open--much too open--to outside influence. It had all its own
weaknesses augmented by those of the rest of the world picked up on its
way. It was not in them that he could find assistance in working the lever
of his art. Rather he was in danger of being swallowed with them in the
sands of the desert.

Having seen the danger, and not feeling sure enough of himself to brave it,
he suddenly gave up going to the Mannheims'. He was invited several times
and begged to be excused without giving any reason. As up till then he had
shown an excessive eagerness to accept, such a sudden change was remarked:
it was attributed to his "originality": but the Mannheims had no doubt
that the fair Judith had something to do with it: Lothair and Franz joked
about it at dinner. Judith shrugged her shoulders and said it was a fine
conquest, and she asked her brother frigidly not to make such a fuss about
it. But she left no stone unturned in her effort to bring Christophe back.
She wrote to him for some musical information which no one else could
supply: and at the end of her letter she made a friendly allusion to the
rarity of his visits and the pleasure it would give them to see him.
Christophe replied, giving the desired information, said that he was
very busy, and did not go. They met sometimes at the theater. Christophe
obstinately looked away from the Mannheims' box: and he would pretend not
to see Judith, who held herself in readiness to give him her most charming
smile. She did not persist. As she did not count on him for anything she
was annoyed that the little artist should let her do all the labor of their
friendship, and pure waste at that. If he wanted to come, he would. If
not--oh, well, they could do without him....

They did without him: and his absence left no very great gap in the
Mannheims' evenings. But in spite of herself Judith was really annoyed
with Christophe. It seemed natural enough not to bother about him when
he was there: and she could allow him to show his displeasure at being
neglected: but that his displeasure should go so far as to break off their
relationship altogether seemed to her to show a stupid pride and a heart
more egoistic than in love.--Judith could not tolerate her own faults in
others.

She followed the more attentively everything that Christophe did and wrote.
Without seeming to do so, she would lead her brother to the subject of
Christophe: she would make him tell her of his intercourse with him: and
she would punctuate the narrative with clever ironic comment, which never
let any ridiculous feature escape, and gradually destroyed Franz's
enthusiasm without his knowing it.

At first all went well with the Review. Christophe had not yet perceived
the mediocrity of his colleagues: and, since he was one of them, they
hailed him as a genius. Mannheim, who had discovered him, went everywhere
repeating that Christophe was an admirable critic, though he had never
read anything he had written, that he had mistaken his vocation, and that
he, Mannheim, had revealed it to him. They advertised his articles in
mysterious terms which roused curiosity: and his first effort was in fact
like a stone falling into a duck-pond in the atony of the little town. It
was called: _Too much music_.

"Too much music, too much drinking, too much eating," wrote Christophe.
"Eating, drinking, hearing, without hunger, thirst, or need, from sheer
habitual gormandizing. Living like Strasburg geese. These people are sick
from a diseased appetite. It matters little what you give them: _Tristram_
or the _Trompeter von Säkkingen_, Beethoven or Mascagni, a fugue or a
two-step, Adam, Bach, Puccini, Mozart, or Marschner: they do not know what
they are eating: the great thing is to eat. They find no pleasure in it.
Look at them at a concert. Talk of German gaiety! These people do not know
what gaiety means: they are always gay! Their gaiety, like their sorrow,
drops like rain: their joy is dust: there is neither life nor force in it.
They would stay for hours smilingly and vaguely drinking in sounds, sounds,
sounds. They think of nothing: they feel nothing: they are sponges. True
joy, or true sorrow--strength--is not drawn out over hours like beer from
a cask. They take you by the throat and have you down: after they are gone
there is no desire left in a man to drink in anything: he is full!...

"Too much music! You are slaying each other and it. If you choose to murder
each other that is your affair: I can't help it. But where music is
concerned,--hands off! I will not suffer you to debase the loveliness of
the world by heaping up in the same basket things holy and things shameful,
by giving, as you do at present, the prelude to _Parsifal_ between a
fantasia on the _Daughter of the Regiment_ and a saxophone quartette, or an
adagio of Beethoven between a cakewalk and the rubbish of Leoncavallo. You
boast of being a musical people. You pretend to love music. What sort of
music do you love? Good or bad? You applaud both equally. Well, then,
choose! What exactly do you want? You do not know yourselves. You do
not want to know: you are too fearful of taking sides and compromising
yourselves.... To the devil with your prudence!--You are above party, do
you say?--Above? You mean below...."

And he quoted the lines of old Gottfried Keller, the rude citizen of
Zurich--one of the German writers who was most dear to him by reason of his
vigorous loyalty and his keen savor of the soil:

"_Wer über den Parlein sich wähnt mit stolzen Mienen Der steht zumeist
vielmehr beträchtlich unter ihnen._"

("He who proudly preens himself on being above parties is rather
immeasurably beneath them.")

"Have courage and be true," he went on. "Have courage and be ugly. If you
like bad music, then say so frankly. Show yourselves, see yourselves as you
are. Kid your souls of the loathsome burden of all your compromise and
equivocation. Wash it in pure water. How long is it since you have seen.
yourselves in a mirror? I will show you yourselves. Composers, _virtuosi_,
conductors, singers, and you, dear public. You shall for once know
yourselves.... Be what you like: but, for any sake, be true! Be true even
though art and artists--and I myself--have to suffer for it! If art and
truth cannot live together, then let art disappear. Truth is life. Lies are
death."

Naturally, this youthful, wild outburst, which was all of a piece, and in
very bad taste, produced an outcry. And yet, as everybody was attacked and
nobody in particular, its pertinency was not recognized. Every one is, or
believes himself to be, or says that he is the best friend of truth: there
was therefore no danger of the conclusions of the article being attacked.
Only people were shocked by its general tone: everybody agreed that it
was hardly proper, especially from an artist in a semi-official position.
A few musicians began to be uneasy and protested bitterly: they saw that
Christophe would not stop at that. Others thought themselves more clever
and congratulated Christophe on his courage: they were no less uneasy about
his next articles.

Both tactics produced the same result. Christophe had plunged: nothing
could stop him: and as he had promised, everybody was passed in survey,
composers and interpreters alike.

The first victims were the _Kapellmeisters_. Christophe did not confine
himself to general remarks on the art of conducting an orchestra. He
mentioned his colleagues of his own town and the neighboring towns by name:
or if he did not name them his allusions were so transparent that nobody
could be mistaken. Everybody recognized the apathetic conductor of the
Court, Alois von Werner, a cautious old man, laden with honors, who was
afraid of everything, dodged everything, was too timid to make a remark to
his musicians and meekly followed whatever they chose to do,--who never
risked anything on his programme that had not been consecrated by twenty
years of success, or, at least, guaranteed by the official stamp of some
academic dignity. Christophe ironically applauded his boldness: he
congratulated him on having discovered Gade, Dvorak, or Tschaikowsky: he
waxed enthusiastic over his unfailing correctness, his metronomic equality,
the always _fein-nuanciert_ (finely shaded) playing of his orchestra:
he proposed to orchestrate the _École de la Vélocité_ of Czerny for his
next concert, and implored him not to try himself so much, not to give
rein to his passions, to look after his precious health.--Or he cried
out indignantly upon the way in which he had conducted the _Eroica_ of
Beethoven:

"A cannon! A cannon! Mow me down these people!... But have you then no idea
of the conflict, the fight between human stupidity and human ferocity,--and
the strength which tramples them underfoot with a glad shout of
laughter?--How could you know it? It is you against whom it fights! You
expend all the heroism that is in you in listening or in playing the
_Eroica_ of Beethoven without a yawn--(for it bores you.... Confess that it
bores you to death!)--or in risking a draught as you stand with bare head
and bowed back to let some Serene Highness pass."

He could not be sarcastic enough about the pontiffs of the Conservatories
who interpreted the great men of the past as "classics."

"Classical! That word expresses everything. Free passion, arranged and
expurgated for the use of schools! Life, that vast plain swept by the
winds,--inclosed within the four walls of a school playground! The fierce,
proud beat of a heart in anguish, reduced to the tic-tacs of a four-tune
pendulum, which goes its jolly way, hobbling and imperturbably leaning on
the crutch of time!... To enjoy the Ocean you need to put it in a bowl with
goldfish. You only understand life when you have killed it."

If he was not kind to the "bird-stuffers" as he called them, he was even
less kind to the ringmen of the orchestra, the illustrious _Kapellmeisters_
who toured the country to show off their flourishes and their dainty hands,
those who exercised their virtuosity at the expense of the masters, tried
hard to make the most familiar works unrecognizable, and turned somersaults
through the hoop of the _Symphony in C minor_. He made them appear as old
coquettes, _prima donnas_ of the orchestra, gipsies, and rope-dancers.

The _virtuosi_ naturally provided him with splendid material. He declared
himself incompetent when he had to criticise their conjuring performances.
He said that such mechanical exercises belonged to the School of Arts and
Crafts, and that not musical criticism but charts registering the duration,
and number of the notes, and the energy expended, could decide the merit of
such labors. Sometimes he would set at naught some famous piano _virtuoso_
who during a two hours' concert had surmounted the formidable difficulties,
with a smile on his lips and his hair hanging down into his eyes--of
executing a childish _andante_ of Mozart.--He did not ignore the pleasure
of overcoming difficulties. He had tasted it himself: it was one of the
joys of life to him. But only to see the most material aspect of it,
and to reduce all the heroism of art to that, seemed to him grotesque
and degrading. He could not forgive the "lions" or "panthers" of the
piano.--But he was not very indulgent either towards the town pedants,
famous in Germany, who, while they are rightly anxious not to alter the
text of the masters, carefully suppress every flight of thought, and, like
E. d'Albert and H. von Bülow, seem to be giving a lesson in diction when
they are rendering a passionate sonata.

The singers had their turn. Christophe was full to the brim of things to
say about their barbarous heaviness and their provincial affectations. It
was not only because of his recent misadventures with the enraged lady, but
because of all the torture he had suffered during so many performances. It
was difficult to know which had suffered most, ears or eyes. And Christophe
had not enough standards of comparison to be able to have any idea of the
ugliness of the setting, the hideous costumes, the screaming colors. He was
only shocked by the vulgarity of the people, their gestures and attitudes,
their unnatural playing, the inability of the actors to take on other souls
than their own, and by the stupefying indifference with which they passed
from one rôle to another, provided they were written more or less in
the same register. Matrons of opulent flesh, hearty and buxom, appeared
alternately as Ysolde and Carmen. Amfortas played Figaro.--But what most
offended Christophe was the ugliness of the singing, especially in the
classical works in which the beauty of melody is essential. No one in
Germany could sing the perfect music of the eighteenth century: no one
would take the trouble. The clear, pure style of Gluck and Mozart which,
like that of Goethe, seems to be bathed in the light of Italy--the style
which begins to change and to become vibrant and dazzling with Weber--the
style ridiculed by the ponderous caricatures of the author of
_Crociato_--had been killed by the triumph of Wagner. The wild flight of
the Valkyries with their strident cries had passed over the Grecian sky.
The heavy clouds of Odin dimmed the light. No one now thought of singing
music: they sang poems. Ugliness and carelessness of detail, even false
notes were let pass under pretext that only the whole, only the thought
behind it mattered....

"Thought! Let us talk of that. As if you understood it!... But whether or
no you do understand it, I pray you respect the form that thought has
chosen for itself. Above all, let music be and remain music!"

And the great concern of German artists with expression and profundity of
thought was, according to Christophe, a good joke. Expression? Thought?
Yes, they introduced them into everything--everything impartially. They
would have found thought in a skein of wool just as much--neither more nor
less--as in a statue of Michael Angelo. They played anything, anybody's
music with exactly the same energy. For most of them the great thing in
music--so he declared--was the volume of sound, just a musical noise. The
pleasure of singing so potent in Germany was in some sort a pleasure of
vocal gymnastics. It was just a matter of being inflated with air and
then letting it go vigorously, powerfully, for a long time together and
rhythmically.--And by way of compliment he accorded a certain great singer
a certificate of good health. He was not content with flaying the artists.
He strode over the footlights and trounced the public for coming, gaping,
to such performances. The public was staggered and did not know whether
it ought to laugh or be angry. They had every right to cry out upon his
injustice: they had taken care not to be mixed up in any artistic conflict:
they stood aside prudently from any burning question: and to avoid making
any mistake they applauded everything! And now Christophe declared that
it was a crime to applaud!... To applaud bad works?--That would have been
enough! But Christophe went further: he stormed at them for applauding
great works:

"Humbugs!" he said. "You would have us believe that you have as much
enthusiasm as that?... Oh! Come! Spare yourselves the trouble! You only
prove exactly the opposite of what you are trying to prove. Applaud if you
like those works and passages which in some measure deserve applause.
Applaud those loud final movements which are written, as Mozart said, 'for
long ears.' Applaud as much as you like, then: your braying is anticipated:
it is part of the concert.--But after the _Missa Solemnis_ of Beethoven!...
Poor wretches!... It is the Last Judgment. You have just seen the maddening
_Gloria_ pass like a storm over the ocean. You have seen the waterspout of
an athletic and tremendous well, which stops, breaks, reaches up to the
clouds clinging by its two hands above the abyss, then plunging once more
into space in full swing. The squall shrieks and whirls along. And when
the hurricane is at its height there is a sudden modulation, a radiance of
sound which cleaves the darkness of the sky and falls upon the livid sea
like a patch of light. It is the end: the furious flight of the destroying
angel stops short, its wings transfixed by these flashes of lightning.
Around you all is buzzing and quivering. The eye gazes fixedly forward in
stupor. The heart beats, breathing stops, the limbs are paralyzed.... And
hardly has the last note sounded than already you are gay and merry. You
shout, you laugh, you criticise, you applaud.... But you have seen nothing,
heard nothing, felt nothing, understood nothing, nothing, nothing,
absolutely nothing! The sufferings of an artist are a show to you. You
think the tears of agony of a Beethoven are finely painted. You would cry
'Encore' to the Crucifixion. A great soul struggles all its life long in
sorrow to divert your idleness for an hour!..."

So, without knowing it, he confirmed Goethe's great words: but he had not
yet attained his lofty serenity:

"The people make a sport of the sublime. If they could see it as it is,
they would be unable to bear its aspect."

If he had only stopped at that!--But, whirled along by his enthusiasm, he
swept past the public and plunged like a cannon ball into the sanctuary,
the tabernacle, the inviolable refuge of mediocrity: Criticism. He
bombarded his colleagues. One of them had taken upon himself to attack
the most gifted of living composers, the most advanced representative of
the new school, Hassler, the writer of programme symphonies, extravagant
in truth, but full of genius. Christophe who--as perhaps will be
remembered--had been presented to him when he was a child, had always had a
secret tenderness for him in his gratitude for the enthusiasm and emotion
that he had had then. To see a stupid critic, whose ignorance he knew,
instructing a man of that caliber, calling him to order, and reminding him
of set principles, infuriated him:

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