Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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But Olivier shrugged his shoulders, and said, wearily and ironically:

"Grapple with them? No. That is not our game: we have better things to do.
Violence disgusts me. I know only too well what would happen. All the old
embittered failures, the young Royalist idiots, the odious apostles of
brutality and hatred, would seize on anything I did and bring it to
dishonor. Do you want me to adopt the old device of hate: _Fuori Barbari_,
or: _France for the French_?"

"Why not?" asked Christophe.

"No. Such a device is not for the French. Any attempt to propagate it among
our people under cover of patriotism must fail. It is good enough for
barbarian countries! But our country has no use for hatred. Our genius
never yet asserted itself by denying or destroying the genius of other
countries, but by absorbing them. Let the troublous North and the
loquacious South come to us...."

"And the poisonous East?"

"And the poisonous East: we will absorb it with the rest: we have absorbed
many others! I just laugh at the air of triumph they assume, and the
pusillanimity of some of my fellow-countrymen. They think they have
conquered us, they strut about our boulevards, and in our newspapers and
reviews, and in our theaters and in the political arena. Idiots! It is they
who are conquered! They will be assimilated after having fed us. Gaul has a
strong stomach: in these twenty centuries she has digested more than one
civilization. We are proof against poison.... It is meet that you Germans
should be afraid! You must be pure or impure. But with us it is not a
matter of purity but of universality. You have an Emperor: Great Britain
calls herself an Empire: but, in fact, it is our Latin Genius that is
Imperial. We are the citizens of the City of the Universe. _Urbis, Orbis_."

"That is all very well," said Christophe, "as long as the nation is healthy
and in the flower of its manhood. But there will come a day when its energy
declines: and then there is a danger of its being submerged by the influx
of foreigners. Between ourselves, does it not seem as though that day had
arrived?"

"People have been saying that for ages. Again and again our history has
given the lie to such fears. We have passed through many different trials
since the days of the Maid of Orleans, when Paris was deserted, and bands
of wolves prowled through the streets. Neither in the prevalent immorality,
nor the pursuit of pleasure, nor the laxness, nor the anarchy of the
present day, do I see any cause for fear. Patience! Those who wish to live
must endure in patience. I am sure that presently there will be a moral
reaction,--which will not be much better, and will probably lead to an
equal degree of folly; those who are now living on the corruptness of
public life will not be the least clamorous in the reaction!... But what
does that matter to us? All these movements do not touch the real people of
France. Rotten fruit does not corrupt the tree. It falls. Besides, all
these people are such a small part of the nation! What does it matter to us
whether they live or die? Why should I bother to organize leagues and
revolutions against them? The existing evil is not the work of any form of
government. It is the leprosy of luxury, a contagion spread by the
parasites of intellectual and material wealth. Such parasites will perish."

"After they have sapped your vitality."

"It is impossible to despair of such a race. There is in it such hidden
virtue, such a power of light and practical idealism, that they creep into
the veins even of those who are exploiting and ruining the nation. Even the
grasping, self-seeking politicians succumb to its fascination. Even the
most mediocre of men when they are in power are gripped by the greatness of
its Destiny: it lifts them out of themselves: the torch is passed on from
hand to hand among them: one after another they resume the holy war against
darkness. They are drawn onward by the genius of the people: willy-nilly
they fulfil the law of the God whom they deny, _Gesta Dei per Francos_....
O my beloved country, I will never lose my faith in thee! And though in thy
trials thou didst perish, yet would I find in that only a reason the more
for my proud belief, even to the bitter end, in our mission in the world. I
will not have my beloved France fearfully shutting herself up in a
sickroom, and closing every inlet to the outer air. I have no mind to
prolong a sickly existence. When a nation has been so great as we have
been, then it were far better to die rather than to sink from greatness.
Therefore let the ideas of the world rush into the channels of our minds! I
am not afraid. The floor will go down of its own accord after it has
enriched the soil of France with its ooze."

"My poor dear fellow," said Christophe, "but it's a grim prospect in the
meanwhile. Where will you be when your France emerges from the Nile? Don't
you think it would be better to fight against it? You wouldn't risk
anything except defeat, and you seem inclined to impose that on yourself as
long as you like."

"I should be risking much more than defeat," said Olivier. "I should be
running the risk of losing my peace of mind, which I prize far more than
victory. I will not be a party to hatred. I will be just to all my enemies.
In the midst of passion I wish to preserve the clarity of my vision, to
understand and love everything."

* * * * *

But Christophe, to whom this love of life, detached from life, seemed to be
very little different from resignation and acceptance of death, felt in his
heart, as in Empedocles of old, the stirring of a hymn to Hatred and to
Love, the brother of Hate, fruitful Love, tilling and sowing good seed in
the earth. He did not share Olivier's calm fatalism: he had no such
confidence in the continuance of a race which did not defend itself, and
his desire was to appeal to all the healthy forces of the nation, to call
forth and band together all the honest men in the whole of France.

* * * * *

Just as it is possible to learn more of a human being in one minute of love
than in months of observation, so Christophe had learned more about France
in a week of intimacy with Olivier, hardly ever leaving the house, than
during a whole year of blind wandering through Paris, and standing at
attention at various intellectual and political gatherings. Amid the
universal anarchy in which he had been floundering, a soul like that of his
friend seemed to him veritably to be the "_Ile de France_"--the island of
reason and serenity in the midst of the ocean. The inward peace which was
in Olivier was all the more striking, inasmuch as it had no intellectual
support,--as it existed amid unhappy circumstances,--(in poverty and
solitude, while the country of its birth was decadent),--and as its body
was weak, sickly, and nerve-ridden. That serenity was apparently not the
fruit of any effort of will striving to realize it,--(Olivier had little
will);--it came from the depths of his being and his race. In many of the
men of Olivier's acquaintance Christophe perceived the distant light of
that [Greek: sophrosynae],--"the silent calm of the motionless sea";--and
he, who knew, none better, the stormy, troublous depths of his own soul,
and how he had to stretch his will-power to the utmost to maintain the
balance in his lusty nature, marveled at its veiled harmony.

What he had seen of the inner France had upset all his preconceived ideas
about the character of the French. Instead of a gay, sociable, careless,
brilliant people, he saw men of a headstrong and close temper, living in
isolation, wrapped about with a seeming optimism, like a gleaming mist,
while they were in fact steeped in a deep-rooted and serene pessimism,
possessed by fixed ideas, intellectual passions, indomitable souls, which
it would have been easier to destroy than to alter. No doubt these men were
only the select few among the French: but Christophe wondered where they
could have come by their stoicism and their faith. Olivier told him:

"In defeat. It is you, my dear Christophe, who have forged us anew. Ah! But
we suffered for it, too. You can have no idea of the darkness in which we
grew up in a France humiliated and sore, which had come face to face with
death, and still felt the heavy weight of the murderous menace of force.
Our life, our genius, our French civilization, the greatness of a thousand
years,--we were conscious that France was in the hands of a brutal
conqueror who did not understand her, and hated her in his heart, and at
any moment might crush the life out of her for ever. And we had to live for
that and no other destiny! Have you ever thought of the French children
born in houses of death in the shadow of defeat, fed with ideas of
discouragement, trained to strike for a bloody, fatal, and perhaps futile
revenge: for even as babies, the first thing they learned was that there
was no justice, there was no justice in the world: might prevailed against
right! For a child to open its eyes upon such things is for its soul to be
degraded or uplifted for ever. Many succumbed: they said: 'Since it is so,
why struggle against it? Why do anything? Everything is nothing. We'll not
think of it. Let us enjoy ourselves.'--But those who stood out against it
are proof against fire: no disillusion can touch their faith: for from
their earliest childhood they have known that their road could never lead
them near the road to happiness, and that they had no choice but to follow
it, else they would suffocate. Such assurance is not come by all at once.
It is not to be expected of boys of fifteen. There is bitter agony before
it is attained, and many tears are shed. But it is well that it should be
so. It must be so....

"_O Faith, virgin of steel...._

"Dig deep with thy lance into the downtrodden hearts of the peoples!
peoples!..."

In silence Christophe pressed Olivier's hand.

"Dear Christophe," said Olivier, "your Germany has made us suffer indeed."

And Christophe begged for forgiveness almost as though he had been
responsible for it.

"There's nothing for you to worry about," said Olivier, smiling. "The good
it has unintentionally done us far outweighs the ill. You have rekindled
our idealism, you have revived in us the keen desire for knowledge and
faith, you have filled our France with schools, you have raised to the
highest pitch the creative powers of a Pasteur, whose discoveries are alone
worth more than your indemnity of two hundred million; you have given new
life to our poetry, our painting, our music: to you we owe the new
awakening of the consciousness of our race. We have reward enough for the
effort needed to learn to set our faith before our happiness: for, in doing
so, we have come by a feeling of such moral force, that, amid the apathy of
the world, we have no doubt, even of victory in the end. Though we are few
in number, my dear Christophe, though we seem so weak,--a drop of water in
the ocean of German power--we believe that the drop of water will in the
end color the whole ocean. The Macedonian phalanx will destroy the mighty
armies of the plebs of Europe."

Christophe looked down at the puny Olivier, in whose eyes there shone the
light of faith, and he said:

"Poor weakly little Frenchmen! You are stronger than we are."

"O beneficent defeat," Olivier went on. "Blessed be that disaster! We will
no more deny it! We are its children."

II

Defeat new-forges the chosen among men: it sorts out the people: it winnows
out those who are purest and strongest, and makes them purer and stronger.
But it hastens the downfall of the rest, or cuts short their flight. In
that way it separates the mass of the people, who slumber or fall by the
way, from the chosen few who go marching on. The chosen few know it and
suffer: even in the most valiant there is a secret melancholy, a feeling of
their own impotence and isolation. Worst of all,--cut off from the great
mass of their people, they are also cut off from each other. Each must
fight for his own hand. The strong among them think only of
self-preservation. _O man, help thyself!_... They never dream that the
sturdy saying means: _O men, help yourselves!_ In all there is a want of
confidence, they lack free-flowing sympathy, and do not feel the need of
common action which makes a race victorious, the feeling of overflowing
strength, of reaching upward to the zenith.

Christophe and Olivier knew something of all this. In Paris, full of men
and women who could have understood them, in the house peopled with unknown
friends, they were as solitary as in a desert of Asia.

* * * * *

They were very poor. Their resources were almost nil. Christophe had only
the copying and transcriptions of music given him by Hecht. Olivier had
very unwisely thrown up his post at the University during the period of
depression following on his sister's death, which had been accentuated by
an unhappy love affair with a young lady he had met at Madame
Nathan's:--(he had never mentioned it to Christophe, for he was modest
about his troubles: part of his charm lay in the little air of mystery
which he always preserved about his private affairs, even with his friend,
from whom, however, he made no attempt to conceal anything).--In his
depressed condition when he had longed for silence his work as a lecturer
became intolerable to him. He had never cared for the profession, which
necessitates a certain amount of showing off, and thinking aloud, while it
gives a man no time to himself. If teaching in a school is to be at all a
noble thing it must be a matter of a sort of apostolic vocation, and that
Olivier did not possess in the slightest degree: and lecturing for any of
the Faculties means being perpetually in contact with the public, which is
a grim fate for a man, like Olivier, with a desire for solitude. On several
occasions he had had to speak in public: it gave him a singular feeling of
humiliation. At first he loathed being exhibited on a platform. He _saw_
the audience, felt it, as with antennae, and knew that for the most part it
was composed of idle people who were there only for the sake of having
something to do: and the role of official entertainer was not at all to his
liking. Worst of all, speaking from a platform is almost bound to distort
ideas: if the speaker does not take care there is a danger of his passing
gradually from a certain theatricality in gesture, diction, attitude, and
the form in which he presents his ideas--to mental trickery. A lecture is a
thing hovering in the balance between tiresome comedy and polite pedantry.
For an artist who is rather bashful and proud, a lecture, which is a
monologue shouted in the presence of a few hundred unknown, silent people,
a ready-made garment warranted to fit all sizes, though it actually fits no
one, is a thing intolerably false. Olivier, being more and more under the
necessity of withdrawing into himself and saying nothing which was not
wholly the expression of his thought, gave up the profession of teaching,
which he had had so much difficulty in entering: and, as he no longer had
his sister to check him in his tendency to dream, he began to write. He was
naive enough to believe that his undoubted worth as an artist could not
fail to be recognized without his doing anything to procure recognition.

He was quickly undeceived. He found it impossible to get anything
published. He had a jealous love of liberty, which gave him a horror of
everything that might impinge on it, and made him live apart, like a poor
starved plant, among the solid masses of the political churches whose
baleful associations divided the country and the Press between them. He was
just as much cut off from all the literary coteries and rejected by them.
He had not, nor could he have, a single friend among them. He was repelled
by the hardness, the dryness, the egoism of the intellectuals--(except for
the very few who were following a real vocation, or were absorbed by a
passionate enthusiasm for scientific research). That man is a sorry
creature who has let his heart atrophy for the sake of his mind--when his
mind is small. In such a man there is no kindness, only a brain like a
dagger in a sheath: there is no knowing but it will one day cut your
throat. Against such a man it is necessary to be always armed. Friendship
is only possible with honest men, who love fine things for their own sake,
and not for what they can make out of them,--those who live outside their
art. The majority of men cannot breathe the atmosphere of art. Only the
very great can live in it without loss of love, which is the source of
life.

Olivier could only count on himself. And that was a very precarious
support. Any fresh step was a matter of extreme difficulty to him. He was
not disposed to accept humiliation for the sake of his work. He went hot
with shame at the base and obsequious homage which young authors forced
themselves to pay to a well-known theater manager, who took advantage of
their cowardice, and treated them as he would never dare to treat his
servants. Olivier could never have done that to save his life. He just sent
his manuscripts by post, or left them at the offices of the theaters or the
reviews, where they lay for months unread. However, one day by chance he
met one of his old schoolfellows, an amiable loafer, who had still a sort
of grateful admiration for him for the ease and readiness with which
Olivier had done his exercises: he knew nothing at all about literature:
but he knew several literary men, which was much better: he was rich and in
society, something of a snob, and so he let them, discreetly, exploit him.
He put in a word for Olivier with the editor of an important review in
which he was a shareholder: and at once one of his forgotten manuscripts
was disinterred and read: and, after much temporization,--(for, if the
article seemed to be worth something, the author's name, being unknown, was
valueless),--they decided to accept it. When he heard the good news Olivier
thought his troubles were over. They were only just beginning.

It is comparatively easy to have an article accepted in Paris: but getting
it published is quite a different matter. The unhappy writer has to wait
and wait, for months, if need be for life, if he has not acquired the trick
of flattering people, or bullying them, and showing himself from time to
time at the receptions of these petty monarchs, and reminding them of his
existence, and making it clear that he means to go on being a nuisance to
them as long as they make it necessary. Olivier just stayed at home, and
wore himself out with waiting. At best he would write a letter or two which
were never answered. He would lose heart, and be unable to work. It was
quite absurd, but there was nothing to be done. He would wait for post
after post, sitting at his desk, with his mind blanketed by all sorts of
vague injuries: then he would get up and go downstairs to the porter's
room, and look hopefully in his letter-box, only to meet with
disappointment: he would walk blindly about with no thought in his head but
to go back and look again: and when the last post had gone, when the
silence of his room was broken only by the heavy footsteps of the people in
the room above, he would feel strangled by the cruel indifference of it
all. Only a word of reply, only a word! Could that be refused him if only
in charity? And yet those who refused him that had no idea of the hurt they
were dealing him. Every man sees the world in his own image. Those who have
no life in their hearts see the universe as withered and dry: and they
never dream of the anguish of expectation, hope, and suffering which rends
the hearts of the young: or if they give it a thought, they judge them
coldly, with the weary, ponderous irony of those who are surfeited and
beyond the freshness of life.

At last the article appeared. Olivier had waited so long that it gave him
no pleasure: the thing was dead for him. And yet he hoped desperately that
it would be a living thing for others. There were flashes of poetry and
intelligence in it which could not pass unnoticed. It fell upon absolute
silence.--He made two or three more attempts. Being attached to no clique
he met with silence or hostility everywhere. He could not understand it. He
had thought simply that everybody must be naturally well-disposed towards
the work of a new man, even if it was not very good. It always represents
such an amount of work, and surely people would be grateful to a man who
has tried to give others a little beauty, a little force, a little joy. But
he only met with indifference or disparagement. And yet he knew that he
could not be alone in feeling what he had written, and that it must be in
the minds of other good men. He did not know that such good men did not
read him, and had nothing to do with literary opinion, or with anything, or
with anything. If here and there there were a few men whom his words had
reached, men who sympathized with him, they would never tell him so: they
remained immured in their unnatural silence. Just as they refrained from
voting, so they took no share in art: they did not read books, which
shocked them: they did not go to the theater, which disgusted them: but
they let their enemies vote, elect their enemies, engineer a scandalous
success and a vulgar celebrity for books and plays and ideas which only
represented an impudent minority of the people of France.

Since Olivier could not count on those who were mentally akin to himself,
as they did not read, he was delivered up to the hosts of the enemy, to the
mercy of men of letters, who were for the most part hostile to his ideas,
and the critics who were at their beck and call.

His first bouts with them left him bleeding. He was as sensitive to
criticism as old Bruchner, who could not bear to have his work performed,
because he had suffered so much from the malevolence of the Press. He did
not even win the support of his former colleagues at the University, who,
thanks to their profession, did preserve a certain sense of the
intellectual traditions of France, and might have understood him. But for
the most part these excellent young men, cramped by discipline, absorbed in
their work, often rather embittered by their thankless duties, could not
forgive Olivier for trying to break away and do something else Like good
little officials, many of them were inclined only to admit the superiority
of talent when it was consonant with hierarchic superiority.

In such a position three courses were open to him: to break down resistance
by force: to submit to humiliating compromises: or to make up his mind to
write only for himself. Olivier was incapable of the two first: he
surrendered to the third. To make a living he went through the drudgery of
teaching and went on writing, and as there was no possibility of his work
attaining full growth in publicity, it became more and more involved,
chimerical, and unreal.

Christophe dropped like a thunderbolt into the midst of his dim crepuscular
life. He was furious at the wickedness of people and Olivier's patience.

"Have you no blood in your veins?" he would say. "How can you stand such a
life? You know your own superiority to these swine, and yet you let them
squeeze the life out of you without a murmur!"

"What can I do?" Olivier would say. "I can't defend myself. It revolts me
to fight with people I despise: I know that they can use every weapon
against me: and I can't. Not only should I loathe to stoop to use the means
they employ, but I should be afraid of hurting them. When I was a boy I
used to let my schoolfellows beat me as much as they liked. They used to
think me a coward, and that I was afraid of being hit. I was more afraid of
hitting than of being hit. I remember some one saying to me one day, when
one of my tormentors was bullying me: 'Why don't you stop it once and for
all, and give him a kick in the stomach?' That filled me with horror. I
would much rather be thrashed."

"There's no blood in your veins," said Christophe. "And on top of that, all
sorts of Christian ideas!... Your religious education in France is reduced
to the Catechism: the emasculate Gospel, the tame, boneless New
Testament.... Humanitarian clap-trap, always tearful.... And the
Revolution, Jean-Jacques, Robespierre, '48, and, on top of that, the
Jews!... Take a dose of the full-blooded Old Testament every morning."

Olivier protested. He had a natural antipathy for the Old Testament, a
feeling which dated back to his childhood, when he used secretly to pore
over an illustrated Bible, which had been in the library at home, where it
was never read, and the children were even forbidden to open it. The
prohibition was useless! Olivier could never keep the book open for long.
He used quickly to grow irritated and saddened by it, and then he would
close it: and he would find consolation in plunging into the _Iliad_, or
the _Odyssey_, or the _Arabian Nights_.

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