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Jean Christophe, Vol. I

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




When she had disappeared he felt the emptiness that her strange eyes had
left in him, and he did not understand why; but the emptiness was there.
Sleepy, with eyes half-closed, lying in a corner of the carriage, he felt
her eyes looking into his, and all other thoughts ceased, to let him feel
them more keenly. The image of Corinne fluttered outside his heart like an
insect breaking its wings against a window; but he did not let it in.

He found it again when he got out of the train on his arrival, when the
keen night air and his walk through the streets of the sleeping town had
shaken off his drowsiness. He scowled at the thought of the pretty actress,
with a mixture of pleasure and irritation, according as he recalled her
affectionate ways or her vulgar coquetries.

"Oh! these French people," he growled, laughing softly, while he was
undressing quietly, so as not to waken his mother, who was asleep in the
next room.

A remark that he had heard the other evening in the box occurred to him:

"There are others also."

At his first encounter with France she laid before him the enigma of her
double nature. But, like all Germans, he did not trouble to solve it, and
as he thought of the girl in the train he said quietly:

"She does not look like a Frenchwoman."

As if a German could say what is French and what is not.

* * * * *

French or not, she filled his thoughts; for he woke in the middle of the
night with a pang: he had just remembered the valise on the seat by the
girl's side; and suddenly the idea that she had gone forever crossed his
mind. The idea must have come to him at the time, but he had not thought of
it. It filled him with a strange sadness. He shrugged his shoulders.

"What does it matter to me?" he said. "It is not my affair."

He went to sleep.

But next day the first person he met when he went out was Mannheim, who
called him "Blücher," and asked him if he had made up his mind to conquer
all France. From the garrulous newsmonger he learned that the story of the
box had had a success exceeding all Mannheim's expectations.

"Thanks to you! Thanks to you!" cried Mannheim. "You are a great man. I am
nothing compared with you."

"What have I done?" said Christophe.

"You are wonderful!" Mannheim replied. "I am jealous of you. To shut the
box in the Grünebaums' faces, and then to ask the French governess instead
of them--no, that takes the cake! I should never have thought of that!"

"She was the Grünebaums' governess?" said Christophe in amazement.

"Yes. Pretend you don't know, pretend to be innocent. You'd better!... My
father is beside himself. The Grünebaums are in a rage!... It was not for
long: they have sacked the girl."

"What!" cried Christophe. "They have dismissed her? Dismissed her because
of me?"

"Didn't you know?" said Mannheim. "Didn't she tell you?"

Christophe was in despair.

"You mustn't be angry, old man," said Mannheim. "It does not matter.
Besides, one had only to expect that the Grünebaums would find out..."

"What?" cried Christophe. "Find out what?"

"That she was your mistress, of course!"

"But I do not even know her. I don't know who she is."

Mannheim smiled, as if to say:

"You take me for a fool."

Christophe lost his temper and bade Mannheim do him the honor of believing
what he said. Mannheim said:

"Then it is even more humorous."

Christophe worried about it, and talked of going to the Grünebaums and
telling them the facts and justifying the girl. Mannheim dissuaded him.

"My dear fellow," he said, "anything you may say will only convince them of
the contrary. Besides, it is too late. The girl has gone away."

Christophe was utterly sick at heart and tried to trace the young
Frenchwoman. He wanted to write to her to beg her pardon. But nothing was
known of her. He applied to the Grünebaums, but they snubbed him. They did
not know themselves where she had gone, and they did not care. The idea
of the harm he had done in trying to do good tortured Christophe: he was
remorseful. But added to his remorse was a mysterious attraction, which
shone upon him from the eyes of the woman who was gone. Attraction and
remorse both seemed to be blotted out, engulfed in the flood of the day's
new thoughts. But they endured in the depths of his heart. Christophe did
not forget the woman whom he called his victim. He had sworn to meet her
again. He knew how small were the chances of his ever seeing her again: and
he was sure that he would see her again.

As for Corinne, she never answered his letters. But three months later,
when he had given up expecting to hear from her, he received a telegram
of forty words of utter nonsense, in which she addressed him in little
familiar terms, and asked "if they were still fond of each other." Then,
after nearly a year's silence, there came a scrappy letter scrawled in her
enormous childish zigzag writing, in which she tried to play the lady,--a
few affectionate, droll words. And there she left it. She did not forget
him, but she had no time to think of him.

* * * * *

Still under the spell of Corinne and full of the ideas they had exchanged
about art, Christophe dreamed of writing the music for a play in which
Corinne should act and sing a few airs--a sort of poetic melodrama. That
form of art once so much in favor in Germany, passionately admired by
Mozart, and practised by Beethoven, Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann, and
all the great classics, had fallen into discredit since the triumph of
Wagnerism, which claimed to have realized the definite formula of the
theater and music. The Wagnerian pedants, not content with proscribing
every new melodrama, busied themselves with dressing up the old melodramas
and operas. They carefully effaced every trace of spoken dialogue and wrote
for Mozart, Beethoven, or Weber, recitations in their own manner; they were
convinced that they were doing a service to the fame of the masters and
filling out their thoughts by the pious deposit of their dung upon
masterpieces.

Christophe, who had been made more sensible of the heaviness, and often
the ugliness, of Wagnerian declamation by Corinne, had for some time been
debating whether it was not nonsense and an offense against nature to
harness and yoke together the spoken word and the word sung in the theater:
it was like harnessing a horse and a bird to a cart. Speech and singing
each had its rhythm. It was comprehensible that an artist should sacrifice
one of the two arts to the triumph of that which he preferred. But to try
to find a compromise between them was to sacrifice both: it was to want
speech no longer to be speech, and singing no longer to be singing; to want
singing to let its vast flood be confined between the banks of monotonous
canals, to want speech to cloak its lovely naked limbs with rich, heavy
stuffs which must paralyze its gestures and movements. Why not leave both
with their spontaneity and freedom of movement? Like a beautiful girl
walking tranquilly, lithely along a stream, dreaming as she goes: the gay
murmur of the water lulls her dreams, and unconsciously she brings her
steps and her thoughts in tune with the song of the stream. So being
both free, music and poesy would go side by side, dreaming, their dreams
mingling. Assuredly all music was not good for such a union, nor all
poetry. The opponents of melodrama had good ground for attack in the
coarseness of the attempts which had been made in that form, and of the
interpreters. Christophe had for long shared their dislike: the stupidity
of the actors who delivered these recitations spoken to an instrumental
accompaniment, without bothering about the accompaniment, without trying
to merge their voices in it, rather, on the contrary, trying to prevent
anything being heard but themselves, was calculated to revolt any musical
ear. But since he had tasted the beauty of Corinne's harmonious voice--that
liquid and pure voice which played upon music like a ray of light on water,
which wedded every turn of a melody, which was like the most fluid and most
free singing,--he had caught a glimpse of the beauty of a new art.

Perhaps he was right, but he was still too inexperienced to venture
without peril upon a form which--if it is meant to be beautiful and really
artistic--is the most difficult of all. That art especially demands one
essential condition, the perfect harmony of the combined efforts of the
poet, the musicians, and the actors. Christophe had no tremors about it: he
hurled himself blindly at an unknown art of which the laws were only known
to himself.

His first idea had been to clothe in music a fairy fantasy of Shakespeare
or an act of the second part of _Faust_. But the theaters showed little
disposition to make the experiment. It would be too costly and appeared
absurd. They were quite willing to admit Christophe's efficiency in music,
but that he should take upon himself to have ideas about poetry and the
theater made them smile. They did not take him seriously. The world of
music and the world of poesy were like two foreign and secretly hostile
states. Christophe had to accept the collaboration of a poet to be able to
set foot upon poetic territory, and he was not allowed to choose his own
poet. He would not have dared to choose himself. He did not trust his taste
in poetry. He had been told that he knew nothing about it; and, indeed, he
could not understand the poetry which was admired by those about him. With
his usual honesty and stubbornness, he had tried hard sometimes to feel the
beauty of some of these works, but he had always been bewildered and a
little ashamed of himself. No, decidedly he was not a poet. In truth, he
loved passionately certain old poets, and that consoled him a little. But
no doubt he did not love them as they should be loved. Had he not once
expressed, the ridiculous idea that those poets only are great who remain
great even when they are translated into prose, and even into the prose of
a foreign language, and that words have no value apart from the soul which
they express? His friends had laughed at him. Mannheim had called him a
goose. He did not try to defend himself. As every day he saw, through the
example of writers who talk of music, the absurdity of artists who attempt
to image any art other than their own, he resigned himself--though a little
incredulous at heart--to his incompetence in poetry, and he shut his eyes
and accepted the judgments of those whom he thought were better informed
than himself. So he let his friends of the Review impose one of their
number on him, a great man of a decadent coterie, Stephen von Hellmuth, who
brought him an _Iphigenia_. It was at the time when German poets (like
their colleagues in France) were recasting all the Greek tragedies. Stephen
von Hellmuth's work was one of those astounding Græco-German plays in which
Ibsen, Homer, and Oscar Wilde are compounded--and, of course, a few manuals
of archeology. Agamemnon was neurasthenic and Achilles impotent: they
lamented their condition at length, and naturally their outcries produced
no change. The energy of the drama was concentrated in the rôle of
Iphigenia--a nervous, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigenia, who lectured the
hero, declaimed furiously, laid bare for the audience her Nietzschian
pessimism and, glutted with death, cut her throat, shrieking with laughter.

Nothing could be more contrary to Christophe's mind than such pretentious,
degenerate, Ostrogothic stuff, in Greek dress. It was hailed as a
masterpiece by everybody about him. He was cowardly and was overpersuaded.
In truth, he was bursting with music and thinking much more of his music
than of the text. The text was a new bed into which to let loose the flood
of his passions. He was as far as possible from the state of abnegation and
intelligent impersonality proper to musical translation of a poetic work.
He was thinking only of himself and not at all of the work. He never
thought of adapting himself to it. He was under an illusion: he saw in the
poem something absolutely different from what was actually in it--just as
when he was a child he used to compose in his mind a play entirely
different from that which was upon the stage.

It was not until it came to rehearsal that he saw the real play. One day he
was listening to a scene, and he thought it so stupid that he fancied the
actors must be spoiling it, and went so far as to explain it to them in
the poet's presence; but also to explain it to the poet himself, who was
defending his interpretation. The author refused bluntly to hear him, and
said with some asperity that he thought he knew what he had meant to write.
Christophe would not give in, and maintained that Hellmuth knew nothing
about it. The general merriment told him that he was making himself
ridiculous. He said no more, agreeing that after all it was not he who had
written the poem. Then he saw the appalling emptiness of the play and was
overwhelmed by it: he wondered how he could ever have been persuaded to
try it. He called himself an idiot and tore his hair. He tried in vain to
reassure himself by saying: "You know nothing about it; it is not your
business. Keep to your music." He was so much ashamed of certain idiotic
things in it, of the pretentious pathos, the crying falsity of the words,
the gestures and attitudes, that sometimes, when he was conducting the
orchestra, he hardly had the strength to raise his baton. He wanted to go
and hide in the prompter's box. He was too frank and too little politic to
conceal what he thought. Every one noticed it: his friends, the actors, and
the author. Hellmuth said to him with a frigid smile:

"Is it not fortunate enough to please you?"

Christophe replied honestly:

"Truth to tell, no. I don't understand it,"

"Then you did not read it when you set it to music?"

"Yes," said Christophe naïvely, "but I made a mistake. I understood it
differently."

"It is a pity you did not write what you understood yourself."

"Oh! If only I could have done so!" said Christophe.

The poet was vexed, and in his turn criticised the music. He complained
that it was in the way and prevented his words being heard.

If the poet did not understand the musician, or the musician the poet, the
actors understood neither the one nor the other, and did not care. They
were only asking for sentences in their parts on which to bring in their
usual effects. They had no idea of adapting their declamation to the
formality of the piece and the musical rhythm. They went one way, the
music another. It was as though they were constantly singing out of tune.
Christophe ground his teeth and shouted the note at them until he was
hoarse. They let him shout and went on imperturbably, not even
understanding what he wanted them to do.

Christophe would have flung the whole thing up if the rehearsals had not
been so far advanced, and he had not been bound to go on by fear of legal
proceedings. Mannheim, to whom he confided his discouragement, laughed at
him:

"What is it?" he asked. "It is all going well. You don't understand each
other? What does that matter? Who has ever understood his work but the
author? It is a toss-up whether he understands it himself!"

Christophe was worried about the stupidity of the poem, which, he said,
would ruin the music. Mannheim made no difficulty about admitting that
there was no common sense in the poem and that Hellmuth was "a muff," but
he would not worry about him: Hellmuth gave good dinners and had a pretty
wife. What more did criticism want?

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that he had no time to listen to
nonsense.

"It is not nonsense!" said Mannheim, laughing. "How serious people are!
They have no idea of what matters in life."

And he advised Christophe not to bother so much about Hellmuth's business,
but to attend to his own. He wanted him to advertise a little. Christophe
refused indignantly. To a reporter who came and asked for a history of his
life, he replied furiously:

"It is not your affair!"

And when they asked for his photograph for a review, he stamped with rage
and shouted that he was not, thank God! an emperor, to have his face
passed from hand to hand. It was impossible to bring him into touch with
influential people. He never replied to invitations, and when he had been
forced by any chance to accept, he would forget to go or would go with such
a bad grace that he seemed to have set himself to be disagreeable to
everybody.

But the climax came when he quarreled with his review, two days before the
performance.

* * * * *

The thing was bound to happen. Mannheim had gone on revising Christophe's
articles, and he no longer scrupled about deleting whole lines of criticism
and replacing them with compliments.

One day, out visiting, Christophe met a certain virtuoso--a foppish pianist
whom he had slaughtered. The man came and thanked him with a smile that
showed all his white teeth. He replied brutally that there was no reason
for it. The other insisted and poured forth expressions of gratitude.
Christophe cut him short by saying, that if he was satisfied with the
article that was his affair, but that the article had certainly not been
written with a view to pleasing him. And he turned his back on him. The
virtuoso thought him a kindly boor and went away laughing. But Christophe
remembered having received a card of thanks from another of his victims,
and a suspicion flashed upon him. He went out, bought the last number of
the Review at a news-stand, turned to his article, and read... At first he
wondered if he were going mad. Then he understood, and, mad with rage, he
ran to the office of the _Dionysos_.

Waldhaus and Mannheim were there, talking to an actress whom they knew.
They had no need to ask Christophe what brought him. Throwing a number of
the Review on the table, Christophe let fly at them without stopping to
take breath, with extraordinary violence, shouting, calling them rogues,
rascals, forgers, thumping on the floor with a chair. Mannheim began to
laugh. Christophe tried to kick him. Mannheim took refuge behind the table
and rolled with laughter. But Waldhaus took it very loftily. With dignity,
formally, he tried to make himself heard through the row, and said that he
would not allow any one to talk to him in such a tone, that Christophe
should hear from him, and he held out his card. Christophe flung it in his
face.

"Mischief-maker!--I don't need your card to know what you are.... You are a
rascal and a forger!... And you think I would fight with you ... a
thrashing is all you deserve!..."

His voice could be heard in the street. People stopped to listen. Mannheim
closed the windows. The actress tried to escape, but Christophe was
blocking the way. Waldhaus was pale and choking. Mannheim was stuttering
and stammering and trying to reply. Christophe did not let them speak. He
let loose upon them every expression he could think of, and never stopped
until he was out of breath and had come to an end of his insults. Waldhaus
and Mannheim only found their tongues after he had gone. Mannheim quickly
recovered himself: insults slipped from him like water from a duck's back.
But Waldhaus was still sore: his dignity had been outraged, and what made
the affront more mortifying was that there had been witnesses. He would
never forgive it. His colleagues joined chorus with him. Mannheim only of
the staff of the Review was not angry with Christophe. He had had his fill
of entertainment out of him: it did not seem to him a heavy price to pay
for his pound of flesh, to suffer a few violent words. It had been a good
joke. If he had been the butt of it he would have been the first to laugh.
And so he was quite ready to shake hands with Christophe as though nothing
had happened. But Christophe was more rancorous and rejected all advances.
Mannheim did not care. Christophe was a toy from which he had extracted all
the amusement possible. He was beginning to want a new puppet. From that
very day all was over between them. But that did not prevent Mannheim still
saying, whenever Christophe was mentioned in his presence, that they were
intimate friends. And perhaps he thought they were.

Two days after the quarrel the first performance of _Iphigenia_ took place.
It was an utter failure. Waldhaus' review praised the poem and made no
mention of the music. The other papers and reviews made merry over it. They
laughed and hissed. The piece was withdrawn after the third performance,
but the jokes at its expense did not disappear so quickly. People were
only too glad of the opportunity of having a fling at Christophe, and for
several weeks the _Iphigenia_ remained an unfailing subject for joking.
They knew that Christophe had no weapon of defense, and they took advantage
of it. The only thing which held them back a little was his position at the
Court. Although his relation with the Grand Duke had become quite cold, for
the Prince had several times made remarks to which he had paid no attention
whatever, he still went to the Palace at intervals, and still enjoyed, in
the eye of the public, a sort of official protection, though it was more
visionary than real. He took upon himself to destroy even that last
support.

He suffered from the criticisms. They were concerned not only with his
music, but also with his idea of a new form of art, which the writers did
not take the trouble to understand. It was very easy to travesty it and
make fun of it. Christophe was not yet wise enough to know that the best
reply to dishonest critics is to make none and to go on working. For some
months past he had fallen into the bad habit of not letting any unjust
attack go unanswered. He wrote an article in which he did not spare certain
of his adversaries. The two papers to which he took it returned it with
ironically polite excuses for being unable to publish it. Christophe stuck
to his guns. He remembered that the socialist paper in the town had made
advances to him. He knew one of the editors. They used to meet and talk
occasionally. Christophe was glad to find some one who would talk freely
about power, the army and oppression and archaic prejudices. But they could
not go far with each other, for the socialist always came back to Karl
Marx, about whom Christophe cared not a rap. Moreover, Christophe used to
find in his speeches about the free man--besides a materialism which was
not much to his taste--a pedantic severity and a despotism of thought, a
secret cult of force, an inverse militarism, all of which did not sound
very different from what he heard every day in German.

However, he thought of this man and his paper when he saw all other doors
in journalism closed to him. He knew that his doing so would cause a
scandal. The paper was violent, malignant, and always being condemned. But
as Christophe never read it, he only thought of the boldness of its ideas,
of which he was not afraid, and not of the baseness of its tone, which
would have repelled him. Besides, he was so angry at seeing the other
papers in alliance to suppress him that perhaps he would have gone on even
if he had been warned. He wanted to show people that he was not so easily
got rid of. So he took his article to the socialist paper, which received
it with open arms. The next day the article appeared, and the paper
announced in large letters that it had engaged the support of the young and
talented maestro, Jean-Christophe Krafft, whose keen sympathy with the
demands of the working classes was well known.

Christophe read neither the note nor the article, for he had gone out
before dawn for a walk in the country, it being Sunday. He was in fine
fettle. As he saw the sun rise he shouted, laughed, yodeled, leaped, and
danced. No more review, no more criticisms to do! It was spring and there
was once more the music of the heavens and the earth, the most beautiful
of all. No more dark concert rooms, stuffy and smelly, unpleasant people,
dull performers. Now the marvelous song of the murmuring forests was to be
heard, and over the fields like waves there passed the intoxicating scents
of life, breaking through the crust of the earth and issuing from the
grave.

He went home with his head buzzing with light and music, and his mother
gave him a letter which had been brought from the Palace while he was away.
The letter was in an impersonal form, and told Herr Krafft that he was to
go to the Palace that morning. The morning was past, it was nearly one
o'clock. Christophe was not put about.

"It is too late now," he said. "It will do to-morrow."

But his mother said anxiously:

"No, no. You cannot put off an appointment with His Highness like that: you
must go at once. Perhaps it is a matter of importance."

Christophe shrugged his shoulders.

"Important! As if those people could have anything important to say!...
He wants to tell me his ideas about music. That will be funny!... If only
he has not taken it into his head to rival Siegfried Meyer [Footnote: A
nickname given by German pamphleteers to H.M. (His Majesty) the Emperor.]
and wants to show me a _Hymn to Aegis_! I vow that I will not spare him.
I shall say: 'Stick to politics. You are master there. You will always
be right. But beware of art! In art you are seen without your plumes,
your helmet, your uniform, your money, your titles, your ancestors, your
policemen--and just think for a moment what will be left of you then!'"

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