Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

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And there was a young conductor, properly haggard and dressed for the part,
who produced these works: he flung himself about, darted lightnings, made
Michael Angelesque gestures as though he were summoning up the armies of
Beethoven or Wagner. The audience, which was composed of society people,
was bored to tears, though nothing would have induced them to renounce the
honor of paying a high price for such glorious boredom: and there were
young tyros who were only too glad to bring their school knowledge into
play as they picked up the threads of the music, and they applauded with
an enthusiasm as frantic as the gestures of the conductor, and the fearful
noise of the music....

"What rot!" said Christopher. (For he was well up in Parisian slang by
now.)

* * * * *

But it is easier to penetrate the mystery of Parisian slang than the
mystery of Parisian music. Christophe judged it with the passion which he
brought to bear on everything, and the native incapacity of the Germans to
understand French art. At least, he was sincere, and only asked to be put
right if he was mistaken. And he did not regard himself as bound by his
judgment, but left it open to any new impression that might alter it.

As matters stood, he readily admitted that there was much talent in the
music he heard, interesting stuff, certain odd happy rhythms and harmonies,
an assortment of fine materials, mellow and brilliant, glittering colors,
a perpetual outpouring of invention and cleverness. Christophe was
entertained by it, and learned a thing or two. All these small masters had
infinitely more freedom of thought than the musicians of Germany: they
bravely left the highroad and plunged through the woods. They did their
best to lose themselves. But they were so clever that they could not manage
it. Some of them found themselves on the road again in twenty yards. Others
tired at once, and stopped wherever they might be. There were a few who
almost discovered new paths, but instead of following them up they sat down
at the edge of the wood and fell to musing under a tree. What they most
lacked was will-power, force: they had all the gifts save one--vigor and
life. And all their multifarious efforts were confusedly directed, and were
lost on the road. It was only rarely that these artists became conscious of
the nature of their efforts, and could join forces to a common and a given
end. It was the usual result of French anarchy, which wastes the enormous
wealth of talent and good intentions through the paralyzing influence of
its uncertainty and contradictions. With hardly an exception, all the great
French musicians, like Berlioz and Saint-Saens--to mention only the most
recent--have been hopelessly muddled, self-destructive, and forsworn, for
want of energy, want of faith, and, above all, for want of an inward guide.

Christophe, with the insolence and disdain of the latter-day German,
thought:

"The French do no more than fritter away their energy in inventing things
which they are incapable of using. They need a master of another race, a
Gluck or a Napoleon, to turn their Revolutions to any account."

And he smiled at the notion of an Eighteenth of Brumaire.

* * * * *

And yet, in the midst of all this anarchy, there was a group striving to
restore order and discipline to the minds of artists and public. By way
of a beginning, they had taken a Latin name reminiscent of a clerical
institution which had flourished thirteen or fourteen centuries ago at the
time of the great Invasion of the Goths and Vandals. Christophe was rather
surprised at their going back so far. It was a good thing, certainly, to
dominate one's generation. But it looked as though a watch-tower fourteen
centuries high might be, a little inconvenient, and more suitable perhaps
for observing the movements of the stars than those of the men of the
present day. But Christophe was soon reassured when he saw that the sons of
St. Gregory spent very little time on their tower: they only went up it to
ring the bells, and spent the rest of their time in the church below. It
was some time before Christophe, who attended some of their services, saw
that it was a Catholic cult: he had been sure at the outset that their
rites were those of some little Protestant sect. The audience groveled: the
disciples were pious, intolerant, aggressive on the smallest provocation:
at their head was a man of a cold sort of purity, rather childish and
wilful, maintaining the integrity of his doctrine, religious, moral, and
artistic, explaining in abstract terms the Gospel of music to the small
number of the Elect, and calmly damning Pride and Heresy. To these two
states of mind he attributed every defect in art and every vice of
humanity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and present-day Judaism, which
he lumped together in one category. The Jews of music were burned in
effigy after being ignominiously dressed. The colossal Handel was soundly
trounced. Only Johann Sebastian Bach attained salvation by the grace of the
Lord, who recognized that he had been a Protestant by mistake.

The temple of the _Rue Saint-Jacques_ fulfilled an apostolic function:
souls and music found salvation there. The rules of genius were taught
there most methodically. Laborious pupils applied the formulas with
infinite pains and absolute certainty. It looked as though by their pious
labors they were trying to regain the criminal levity of their ancestors:
the Aubers, the Adams, and the trebly damned, the diabolical Berlioz, the
devil himself, _diabolus in musica_. With laudable ardor and a sincere
piety they spread the cult of the acknowledged masters. In ten years the
work they had to show was considerable: French music was transformed. Not
only the French critics, but the musicians themselves had learned something
about music. There were now composers, and even virtuosi, who were
acquainted with the works of Bach. And that was not so common even in
Germany! But, above all, a great effort had been made to combat the
stay-at-home spirit of the French, who will shut themselves up in their
homes, and cannot be induced to go out. So their music lacks air: it is
sealed-chamber music, sofa music, music with no sort of vigor. Think
of Beethoven composing as he strode across country, rushing down the
hillsides, swinging along through sun and rain, terrifying the cattle with
his wild shouts and gestures! There was no danger of the musicians of Paris
upsetting their neighbors with the noise of their inspiration, like the
bear of Bonn. When they composed they muted the strings of their thought:
and the heavy hangings of their rooms prevented any sound from outside
breaking in upon them.

The _Schola_ had tried to let in fresh air, and had opened the windows upon
the past. But only on the past. The windows were opened upon a courtyard,
not into the street. And it was not much use. Hardly had they opened the
windows than they closed the shutters, like old women afraid of catching
cold. And there came up a gust or two of the Middle Ages, Bach, Palestrina,
popular songs. But what was the good of that? The room still smelt of stale
air. But really that suited them very well: they were afraid of the great
modern draughts of air. And if they knew more than other people, they also
denied more in art. Their music took on a doctrinal character: there was no
relaxation: their concerts were history lectures, or a string of edifying
examples. Advanced ideas became academic. The great Bach, he whose music is
like a torrent, was received into the bosom of the Church and then tamed.
His music was submitted to a transformation in the minds of the _Schola_
very like the transformation to which the savagely sensual Bible has been
submitted in the minds of the English. As for modern music, the doctrine
promulgated was aristocratic and eclectic, an attempt to compound the
distinctive characteristics of the three or four great periods of music
from the sixth to the twentieth century. If it had been possible to carry
it out, the resulting music would have been like those hybrid structures
raised by a Viceroy of India on his return from his travels, with rare
materials collected in every corner of the earth. But the good sense of
the French saved them from any such barbarically erudite excesses: they
carefully avoided any application of their theories: they treated them as
Moliere treated his doctors: they took their prescriptions, but did not
carry them out. The best of them went their own way. The rest of them
contented themselves in practice with very intricate and difficult
exercises in counterpoint: they called them sonatas, quartets, and
symphonies.... "Sonata, what do you desire of me?" The poor thing desired
nothing at all except to be a sonata. The idea behind it was abstract
and anonymous, heavy and joyless. So might a lawyer conceive an art.
Christophe, who had at first been by way of being pleased with the French
for not liking Brahms, now thought that there were many, many little
Brahms in France. These laborious, conscientious, honest journeymen had
many qualities and virtues. Christophe left them edified, but bored to
distraction. It was all very good, very good....

How fine it was outside!

* * * * *

And yet there were a few independent musicians in Paris, men belonging to
no school; They alone were interesting to Christophe. It was only through
them that he could gauge the vitality of the art. Schools and coteries only
express some superficial fashion or manufactured theory. But the
independent men who stand apart have more chance of really discovering the
ideas of their race and time. It is true that that makes them all the more
difficult for a foreigner to understand.

That was, in fact, what happened when Christophe first heard the famous
work which the French had so extravagantly praised, while some of them were
announcing the coming of the greatest musical revolution of the last ten
centuries. (It was easy for them to talk about centuries: they knew hardly
anything of any except their own.)

Theophile Goujart and Sylvain Kohn took Christophe to the Opera Comique
to hear _Pelleas and Melisande_. They were proud to display the opera
to him--as proud as though they had written it themselves. They gave
Christophe to understand that it would be the road to Damascus for him. And
they went on eulogizing it even after the piece had begun. Christophe shut
them up and listened intently. After the first act he turned to Sylvain
Kohn, who asked him, with glittering eyes:

"Well, old man, what do you think of it?"

And he said:

"Is it like that all through?"

"Yes."

"But it's nothing."

Kohn protested loudly, and called him a Philistine.

"Nothing at all," said Christophe. "No music. No development. No sequence.
No cohesion. Very nice harmony. Quite good orchestral effects, quite good.
But it's nothing--nothing at all...."

He listened through the second act. Little by little the lantern gathered
light and glowed: and he began to perceive something through the twilight.
Yes: he could understand the sober-minded rebellion against the Wagnerian
ideal which swamped the drama with floods of music; but he wondered a
little ironically if the ideal of sacrifice did not mean the sacrifice of
something which one does not happen to possess. He felt the easy fluency
of the opera, the production of an effect with the minimum of trouble, the
indolent renunciation of the sturdy effort shown in the vigorous Wagnerian
structures. And he was quite struck by the unity of it, the simple, modest,
rather dragging declamation, although it seemed monotonous to him, and, to
his German ears, it sounded false:--(and it even seemed to him that the
more it aimed at truth the more it showed how little the French language
was suited to music: it is too logical, too precise, too definite,--a world
perfect in itself, but hermetically sealed).--However, the attempt was
interesting, and Christophe gladly sympathized with the spirit of revolt
and reaction against the over-emphasis and violence of Wagnerian art.
The French composer seemed to have devoted his attention discreetly and
ironically to all the things that sentiment and passion only whisper. He
showed love and death inarticulate. It was only by the imperceptible
throbbing of a melody, a little thrill from the orchestra that was no more
than a quivering of the corners of the lips, that the drama passing through
the souls of the characters was brought home to the audience. It was as
though the artist were fearful of letting himself go. He had the genius of
taste--except at certain moments when the Massenet slumbering in the heart
of every Frenchman awoke and waxed lyrical. Then there showed hair that was
too golden, lips that were too red--the Lot's wife of the Third Republic
playing the lover. But such moments were the exception: they were a
relaxation of the writer's self-imposed restraint: throughout the rest of
the opera there reigned a delicate simplicity, a simplicity which was not
so very simple, a deliberate simplicity, the subtle flower of an ancient
society. That young Barbarian, Christophe, only half liked it. The whole
scheme of the play, the poem, worried him. He saw a middle-aged Parisienne
posing childishly and having fairy-tales told to her. It was not the
Wagnerian sickliness, sentimental and clumsy, like a girl from the Rhine
provinces. But the Franco-Belgian sickliness was not much better, with
its simpering parlor-tricks:--"the hair," "the little father," "the
doves,"--and the whole trick of mystery for the delectation of society
women. The soul of the Parisienne was mirrored in the little piece, which,
like a flattering picture, showed the languid fatalism, the boudoir
Nirvana, the soft, sweet melancholy. Nowhere a trace of will-power. No one
knew what he wanted. No one knew what he was doing.

"It is not my fault! It is not my fault!" these grown-up children groaned.
All through the five acts, which took place in a perpetual
half-light--forests, caves, cellars, death-chambers--little sea-birds
struggled: hardly even that. Poor little birds! Pretty birds, soft, pretty
birds.... They were so afraid of too much light, of the brutality of deeds,
words, passions--life! Life is not soft and pretty. Life is no kid-glove
matter....

Christophe could hear in the distance the rumbling of cannon, coming to
batter down that worn-out civilization, that perishing little Greece.

Was it that proud feeling of melancholy and pity that made him in spite of
all sympathize with the opera? It interested him more than he would admit.
Although he went on telling Sylvain Kohn, as they left the theater, that it
was "very fine, very fine, but lacking in _Schwung_ (impulse), and did not
contain enough music for him," he was careful not to confound _Pelleas_
with the other music of the French. He was attracted by the lamp shining
through the fog. And then he saw other lights, vivid and fantastic,
flickering round it. His attention was caught by these will-o'-the-wisps:
he would have liked to go near them to find out how it was that they
shone: but they were not easy to catch. These independent musicians, whom
Christophe did not understand, were not very approachable. They seemed to
lack that great need of sympathy which possessed Christophe. With a few
exceptions they seemed to read very little, know very little, desire very
little. They almost all lived in retirement, some outside Paris, others in
Paris, but isolated, by circumstances or purposely, shut up in a narrow
circle--from pride, shyness, disgust, or apathy. There were very few of
them, but they were split up into rival groups, and could not tolerate
each other. They were extremely susceptible, and could not bear with their
enemies, or their rivals, or even their friends, when they dared to admire
any other musician than themselves, or when they admired too coldly,
or too fervently, or in too commonplace or too eccentric a manner. It
was extremely difficult to please them. Every one of them had actually
sanctioned a critic, armed with letters patent, who kept a jealous watch
at the foot of the statue. Visitors were requested not to touch. They did
not gain any greater understanding from being understood only by their own
little groups. They were deformed by the adulation and the opinion that
their partisans and they themselves held of their work, and they lost
grip of their art and their genius. Men with a pleasing fantasy thought
themselves reformers, and Alexandrine artists posed as rivals of Wagner.
They were almost all the victims of competition. Every day they had to leap
a little higher than the day before, and, especially, higher than their
rivals, These exercises in high jumping were not always successful, and
were certainly not attractive except to professionals. They took no account
of the public, and the public never bothered about them. Their art was
out of touch with the people, music which was only fed from music. Now,
Christophe was under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that there was no
music that had a greater need of outside support than French music. That
supple climbing plant needed a prop: it could not do without literature,
but did not find in it enough of the breath of life. French music was
breathless, bloodless, will-less. It was like a woman languishing for her
lover. But, like a Byzantine Empress, slender and feeble in body, laden
with precious stones, it was surrounded with eunuchs: snobs, esthetes,
and critics. The nation was not musical: and the craze, so much talked of
during the last twenty years, for Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, or Debussy,
never reached farther than a certain class. The enormous increase in the
number of concerts, the flowing tide of music at all costs, found no real
response in the development of public taste. It was just a fashionable
craze confined to the few, and leading them astray. There was only a
handful of people who really loved music, and these were not the people
who were most occupied with it, composers and critics. There are so few
musicians in France who really love music!

So thought Christophe: but it did not occur to him that it is the same
everywhere, that even in Germany there are not many more real musicians,
and that the people who matter in art are not the thousands who understand
nothing about it, but the few who love it and serve it in proud humility.
Had he ever set eyes on them in France? Creators and critics--the best of
them were working in silence, far from the racket, as Cesar Franck had
done, and the most gifted composers of the day were doing, and a number of
artists who would live out their lives in obscurity, so that some day in
the future some journalist might have the glory of discovering them and
posing as their friend--and the little army of industrious and obscure men
of learning who, without ambition and careless of their fame, were building
stone by stone the greatness of the past history of France, or, being vowed
to the musical education of the country, were preparing the greatness of
the France of the future. There were minds there whose wealth and liberty
and world-wide curiosity would have attracted Christophe if he had been
able to discover them! But at most he only caught a cursory glimpse of
two or three of them: he only made their acquaintance in the villainous
caricatures of their ideas. He saw only their defects copied and
exaggerated by the apish mimics of art and the bagmen of the Press.

But what most disgusted him with these vulgarians of music was their
formalism. They never seemed to consider anything but form. Feeling,
character, life--never a word of these! It never seemed to occur to them
that every real musician lives in a world of sound, as other men live in a
visible world, and that his days are lived in and borne onward by a flood
of music. Music is the air he breathes, the sky above him. Nature wakes
answering music in his soul. His soul itself is music: music is in all that
it loves, hates, suffers, fears, hopes. And when the soul of a musician
loves a beautiful body, it sees music in that, too. The beloved eyes are
not blue, or brown, or gray: they are music: their tenderness is like
caressing, notes, like a delicious chord. That inward music is a thousand
times more rich than the music that finds expression, and the instrument
is inferior to the player. Genius is measured by the power of life, by the
power of evoking life through the imperfect instrument of art. But to how
many men in France does that ever occur? To these chemists music seems to
be no more than the art of resolving sounds. They mistake the alphabet
for a book. Christophe shrugged his shoulders when he heard them say
complacently that to understand art it must be abstracted from the man.
They were extraordinarily pleased with this paradox: for by it they fancied
they were proving their own musical quality. And even Goujart subscribed
to it--Goujart, the idiot who had never been able to understand how people
managed to learn by heart a piece of music--(he had tried to get Christophe
to explain the mystery to him)--and had tried to prove to him that
Beethoven's greatness of soul and Wagner's sensuality had no more to do
with their music than a painter's model has to do with his portraits.

Christophe lost patience with him, and said:

"That only proves that a beautiful body is of no more artistic value to
you than a great passion. Poor fellow!... You have no notion of the beauty
given to a portrait by the beauty of a perfect face, or of the glow of
beauty given to music by the beauty of the great soul which is mirrored in
it?... Poor fellow!... You are interested only in the handiwork? So long
as it is well done you are not concerned with the meaning of a piece of
work.... Poor fellow!... You are like those people who do not listen to
what an orator says, but only to the sound of his voice, and watch his
gestures without understanding them, and then say he speaks devilish
well.... Poor fellow! Poor wretch!... Oh, you rotten swine!"

But it was not only a particular theory that irritated Christophe; it was
all their theories. He was appalled by their unending arguments, their
Byzantine discussions, the everlasting talk, talk, talk, of musicians
about music, and nothing else. It was enough to make the best of musicians
heartily sick of music. Like Moussorgski, Christophe thought that it would
be as well for musicians every now and then to leave their counterpoint and
harmony in favor of books or experience of life. Music is not enough for a
present-day musician; not thus will he dominate his age and raise his head
above the stream of time.... Life! All life! To see everything, to know
everything, to feel everything. To love, to seek, to grasp Truth--the
lovely Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, whose teeth bite in answer to a
kiss!

Away with your musical discussion-societies, away with your
chord-factories! Not all the twaddle of the harmonic kitchens would ever
help him to find a new harmony that was alive, alive, and not a monstrous
birth.

He turned his back on these Doctor Wagners, brooding on their alembics to
hatch out some homunculus in bottle: and, running away from French music,
he sought to enter literary circles and Parisian society. Like many
millions of people in France, Christophe made his first acquaintance
with modern French literature through the newspapers. He wanted to get
the measure of Parisian thought as quickly as possible, and at the same
time to perfect his knowledge of the language. And so he set himself
conscientiously to read the papers which he was told were most Parisian. On
the first day after a horrific chronicle of events, which filled several
pages with paragraphs and snapshots, he read a story about a father and a
daughter, a girl of fifteen: it was narrated as though it were a matter
of course, and even rather moving. Next day, in the same paper, he read a
story about a father and a son, a boy of twelve, and the girl was mixed up
in it again. On the following day he read a story about a brother and a
sister. Next day, the story was about two sisters. On the fifth day.... On
the fifth day he hurled the paper away with a shudder, and said to Sylvain
Kohn:

"But what's the matter with you all? Are you ill?"

Sylvain Kohn began to laugh, and said:

"That is art."

Christophe shrugged his shoulders:

"You're pulling my leg."

Kohn laughed once more:

"Not at all. Read a little more."

And he pointed to the report of a recent inquiry into Art and Morality,
which set out that "Love sanctified everything," that "Sensuality was
the leaven of Art," that "Art could not be Immoral," that "Morality was
a convention of Jesuit education," and that nothing mattered except "the
greatness of Desire." A number of letters from literary men witnessed
the artistic purity of a novel depicting the life of bawds. Some of the
signatories were among the greatest names in contemporary literature, or
the most austere of critics. A domestic poet, _bourgeois_ and a Catholic,
gave his blessing as an artist to a detailed description of the decadence
of the Greeks. There were enthusiastic praises of novels in which the
course of Lewdness was followed through the ages: Rome, Alexandria,
Byzantium, the Italian and French Renaissance, the Age of Greatness ...
Nothing was omitted. Another cycle of studies was devoted to the various
countries of the world: conscientious writers had devoted their energies,
with a monkish patience, to the study of the low quarters of the five
continents. And it was no matter for surprise to discover among these
geographers and historians of Pleasure distinguished poets and very
excellent writers. They were only marked out from the rest by their
erudition. In their most impeccable style they told archaic stories, highly
spiced.

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