Jean Christophe, Vol. I by Romain Rolland

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And Christophe could do nothing: as soon as he heard the music he was
caught up like the others, more than the others, by the flood, and the
diabolical will of the man who had let it loose. He laughed, and he
trembled, and his cheeks burned, and he felt galloping armies rushing
through him! And he thought that those who bore such storms within
themselves might have all allowances made for them. What cries of joy
he uttered when in the hallowed works which he could not read without
trembling he felt once more his old emotion, ardent still, with nothing
to tarnish the purity of what he loved! These were glorious relics that
he saved from the wreck. What happiness they gave him! It seemed to him
that he had saved a part of himself. And was it not himself? These great
Germans, against whom he revolted, were they not his blood, his flesh, his
most precious life? He was only severe with them because he was severe with
himself. Who loved them better than he? Who felt more than he the goodness
of Schubert, the innocence of Haydn, the tenderness of Mozart, the great
heroic heart of Beethoven? Who more often than he took refuge in the
murmuring of the forests of Weber, and the cool shade of the cathedrals of
John Sebastian, raising against the gray sky of the North, above the plains
of Germany, their pile of stone, and their gigantic towers with their
sun-tipped spires?--But he suffered from their lies, and he could not
forget them. He attributed them to the race, their greatness to themselves.
He was wrong. Greatness and weaknesses belong equally to the race whose
great, shifting thought flows like the greatest river of music and poetry
at which Europe comes to drink.--And in what other people would he have
found the simple purity which now made it possible for him to condemn it so
harshly?

He had no notion of that. With the ingratitude of a spoiled child he turned
against his mother the weapons which he had received from her. Later,
later, he was to feel all that he owed to her, and how dear she was to
him....

But he was in a phase of blind reaction against all the idols of his
childhood. He was angry with himself and with them because he had believed
in them absolutely and passionately--and it was well that it was so. There
is an age in life when we must dare to be unjust, when we must make a
clean sweep of all admiration and respect got at second-hand, and deny
everything--truth and untruth--everything which we have not of ourselves
known for truth. Through education, and through everything that he sees and
hears about him, a child absorbs so many lies and blind follies mixed with
the essential verities of life, that the first duty of the adolescent who
wishes to grow into a healthy man is to sacrifice everything.

* * * * *

Christophe was passing through that crisis of healthy disgust. His instinct
was impelling him to eliminate from his life all the undigested elements
which encumbered it.

First of all to go was that sickening sweet tenderness which sucked away
the soul of Germany like a damp and moldy riverbed. Light! Light! A rough,
dry wind which should sweep away the miasmas of the swamp, the misty
staleness of the _Lieder, Liedchen, Liedlein_, as numerous as drops of rain
in which inexhaustibly the Germanic _Gemuet_ is poured forth: the countless
things like _Sehnsucht_ (Desire), _Heimweh_ (Homesickness), _Aufschwung_
(Soaring), _Trage_ (A question), _Warum_? (Why?), _an den Mond_ (To
the Moon), _an die Sterne_ (To the Stars), _an die Nachtigall_ (To the
Nightingale), _an den Fruehling_ (To Spring), _an den Sonnenschein_ (To
Sunshine): like _Fruehlingslied_ (Spring Song), _Fruehlingslust_ (Delights of
Spring), _Fruehlingsgruss_ (Hail to the Spring), _Fruelingsfahrt_ (A Spring
Journey), _Fruelingsnacht_ (A Spring Night), _Fruehlingsbotschaft_ (The
Message of Spring): like _Stimme der Liebe_ (The Voice of Love), _Sprache
der Liebe_ (The Language of Love), _Trauer der Liebe_ (Love's Sorrow),
_Geist der Liebe_ (The Spirit of Love), _Fuelle der Liebe_ (The Fullness
of Love): like _Blumenlied_ (The Song of the Flowers), _Blumenbrief_ (The
Letter of the Flowers), _Blumengruss_ (Flowers' Greeting): like _Herzeleid_
(Heart Pangs), _Mein Herz ist schwer_ (My Heart is Heavy), _Mein Herz ist
betruebt_ (My Heart is Troubled), _Mein Aug' ist trueb_ (My Eye is Heavy):
like the candid and silly dialogues with the _Roeselein_ (The Little Rose),
with the brook, with the turtle dove, with the lark: like those idiotic
questions: _"If the briar could have no thorns?"--"Is an old husband like
a lark who has built a nest?"--"Is she newly plighted?"_: the whole deluge
of stale tenderness, stale emotion, stale melancholy, stale poetry.... How
many lovely things profaned, rare things, used in season or out! For the
worst of it was that it was all useless: a habit of undressing their hearts
in public, a fond and foolish propensity of the honest people of Germany
for plunging loudly into confidences. With nothing to say they were always
talking! Would their chatter never cease?--As well bid frogs in a pond be
silent.

It was in the expression of love that Christophe was most rawly conscious
of untruth: for he was in a position to compare it with the reality. The
conventional love songs, lacrymose and proper, contained nothing like the
desires of man or the heart of woman. And yet the people who had written
them must have loved at least once in their lives! Was it possible that
they could have loved like that? No, no, they had lied, as they always did,
they had lied to themselves: they had tried to idealize themselves....
Idealism! That meant that they were afraid of looking at life squarely,
were incapable of seeing things like a man, as they are.--Everywhere the
same timidity, the same lack of manly frankness. Everywhere the same chilly
enthusiasm, the same pompous lying solemnity, in their patriotism, in
their drinking, in their religion. The _Trinklieder_ (Drinking Songs) were
prosopopeia to wine and the bowl: _"Du, herrlich Glas ..."_ ("Thou, noble
glass ..."). Faith--the one thing in the world which should be spontaneous,
springing from the soul like an unexpected sudden stream--was a
manufactured article, a commodity of trade. Their patriotic songs were made
for docile flocks of sheep basking in unison.... Shout, then!--What! Must
you go on lying--"_idealizing_"--till you are surfeited, till it brings you
to slaughter and madness!...

Christophe ended by hating all idealism. He preferred frank brutality to
such lying. But at heart he was more of an idealist than the rest, and he
had not--he could not have--any more real enemies than the brutal realists
whom he thought he preferred.

He was blinded by passion. He was frozen by the mist, the anaemic lying,
"the sunless phantom Ideas." With his whole being he reached upwards to
the sun. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy with which he was
surrounded, or for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high,
practical wisdom of the race which little by little had built up for itself
its grandiose idealism in order to suppress its savage instincts, or to
turn them to account. Not arbitrary reasons, not moral and religious codes,
not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, transform the
souls of peoples and often impose upon them a new nature: but centuries of
misfortune and experience, which forge the life of peoples who have the
will to live.

* * * * *

And yet Christophe went on composing: and his compositions were not
examples of the faults which he found in others. In him creation was an
irresistible necessity which would not submit to the rules which his
intelligence laid down for it. No man creates from reason, but from
necessity.--It is not enough to have recognized the untruth and affectation
inherent in the majority of the feelings to avoid falling into them: long
and painful endeavor is necessary: nothing is more difficult than to be
absolutely true in modern society with its crushing heritage of indolent
habits handed down through generations. It is especially difficult for
those people, those nations who are possessed by an indiscreet mania for
letting their hearts speak--for making them speak--unceasingly, when most
generally it had much better have been silent.

Christophe's heart was very German in that: it had not yet learned the
virtue of silence: and that virtue did not belong to his age. He had
inherited from his father a need for talking, and talking loudly. He
knew it and struggled against it: bat the conflict paralyzed part of his
forces.--And he had another gift of heredity, no less burdensome, which
had come to him from his grandfather: an extraordinary difficulty--in
expressing himself exactly.--He was the son of a _virtuoso_. He was
conscious of the dangerous attraction of virtuosity: a physical pleasure,
the pleasure of skill, of agility, of satisfied muscular activity, the
pleasure of conquering, of dazzling, of enthralling in his own person
the many-headed audience: an excusable pleasure, in a young man almost
an innocent pleasure, though none the less destructive of art and soul:
Christophe knew it: it was in his blood: he despised it, but all the same
he yielded to it.

And so, torn between the instincts of his race and those of his genius,
weighed down by the burden of a parasitical past, which covered him with
a crust that he could not break through, he floundered along, and was
much nearer than he thought to all that he shunned and banned. All his
compositions were a mixture of truth and turgidness, of lucid strength and
faltering stupidity. It was only in rare moments that his personality could
pierce the casing of the dead personality which hampered his movements.

He was alone. He had no guide to help him out of the mire. When he thought
he was out of it he slipped back again. He went blindly on, wasting his
time and strength in futile efforts. He was spared no trial: and in the
disorder of his creative striving he never knew what was of greatest worth
in what he created. He tied himself up in absurd projects, symphonic poems,
which pretended to philosophy and were of monstrous dimensions. He was too
sincere to be able to hold to them for long together: and he would discard
them in disgust before he had stretched out a single movement. Or he would
set out to translate into overtures the most inaccessible works of poetry.
Then he would flounder about in a domain which was not his own. When
he drew up scenarios for himself--(for he stuck at nothing)--they were
idiotic: and when he attacked the great works of Goethe, Hebbel, Kleist, or
Shakespeare, he understood them all wrong. It was not want of intelligence
but want of the critical spirit: he could not yet understand others, he was
too much taken up with himself: he found himself everywhere with his naive
and turgid soul.

But besides these monsters who were not really begotten, he wrote a
quantity of small pieces, which were the immediate expression of passing
emotions--the most eternal of all: musical thoughts, _Lieder_. In this as
in other things he was in passionate reaction against current practices.
He would take up the most famous poems, already set to music, and was
impertinent enough to try to treat them differently and with greater truth
than Schumann and Schubert. Sometimes he would try to give to the poetic
figures of Goethe--to Mignon, the Harpist in _Wilhelm Meister_, their
individual character, exact and changing. Sometimes he would tackle certain
love songs which the weakness of the artists and the dullness of the
audience in tacit agreement had clothed about with sickly sentimentality:
and he would unclothe them: he would restore to them their rough, crude
sensuality. In a word, he set out to make passions and people live for
themselves and not to serve as toys for German families seeking an easy
emotionalism on Sundays when they sat about in some _Biergarten_.

But generally he would find the poets, even the greatest of them, too
literary: and he would select the simplest texts for preference: texts of
old _Lieder_, jolly old songs, which he had read perhaps in some improving
work: he would take care not to preserve their choral character: he would
treat them with a fine, lively, and altogether lay audacity. Or he would
take words from the Gospel, or proverbs, sometimes even words heard by
chance, scraps of dialogues of the people, children's thoughts: words often
awkward and prosaic in which there was only pure feeling. With them he was
at his ease, and he would reach a depth with them which was not in his
other compositions, a depth which he himself never suspected.

Good or bad, more often bad than good, his works as a whole had abounding
vitality. They were not altogether new: far from it. Christophe was often
banal, through his very sincerity: he repeated sometimes forms already used
because they exactly rendered his thought, because he also felt in that way
and not otherwise. Nothing would have induced him to try to be original: it
seemed to him that a man must be very commonplace to burden himself with
such an idea. He tried to be himself, to say what he felt, without worrying
as to whether what he said had been said before him or not. He took a pride
in believing that it was the best way of being original and that Christophe
had only been and only would be alive once. With the magnificent impudence
of youth, nothing seemed to him to have been done before: and everything
seemed to him to be left for doing--or for doing again. And the feeling
of this inward fullness of life, of a life stretching endless before him,
brought him to a state of exuberant and rather indiscreet happiness. He
was perpetually in a state of jubilation, which had no need of joy: it
could adapt itself to sorrow: its source overflowed with life, was, in its
strength, mother of all happiness and virtue. To live, to live too much!...
A man who does not feel within himself this intoxication of strength, this
jubilation in living--even in the depths of misery,--is not an artist.
That is the touchstone. True greatness is shown in this power of rejoicing
through joy and sorrow. A Mendelssohn or a Brahms, gods of the mists of
October, and of fine rain, have never known the divine power.

Christophe was conscious of it: and he showed his joy simply, impudently.
He saw no harm in it, he only asked to share it with others. He did not
see how such joy hurts the majority of men, who never can possess it and
are always envious of it. For the rest he never bothered about pleasing
or displeasing: he was sure of himself, and nothing seemed to him simpler
than to communicate his conviction to others,--to conquer. Instinctively he
compared his riches with the general poverty of the makers of music: and he
thought that it would be very easy to make his superiority recognized. Too
easy, even. He had only to show himself.

He showed himself.

* * * * *

They were waiting for him.

Christophe had made no secret of his feelings. Since he had become aware
of German Pharisaism, which refuses to see things as they are, he had
made it a law for himself that he should be absolutely, continually,
uncompromisingly sincere in everything without regard for anything or
anybody or himself. And as he could do nothing without going to extremes,
he was extravagant in his sincerity: he would say outrageous things and
scandalize people a thousand times less naive than himself. He never
dreamed that it might annoy them. When he realized the idiocy of some
hallowed composition he would make haste to impart his discovery to
everybody he encountered: musicians of the orchestra, or amateurs of his
acquaintance. He would pronounce the most absurd judgments with a beaming
face. At first no one took him seriously: they laughed at his freaks. But
it was not long before they found that he was always reverting to them,
insisting on them in a way that was really bad taste. It became evident
that Christophe believed in his paradoxes: and they became less amusing. He
was a nuisance: at concerts he would make ironic remarks in a loud voice,
or would express his scorn for the glorious masters in no veiled fashion
wherever he might be.

Everything passed from mouth to mouth in the little town: not a word was
lost. People were already affronted by his conduct during the past year.
They had not forgotten the scandalous fashion in which he had shown himself
abroad with Ada and the troublous times of the sequel. He had forgotten,
it himself: one day wiped out another, and he was very different from what
he had been two months before. But others had not forgotten: those who, in
all small towns, take upon themselves scrupulously to note down all the
faults, all the imperfections, all the sad, ugly, and unpleasant happenings
concerning their neighbors, so that nothing is ever forgotten. Christophe's
new extravagances were naturally set, side by side with his former
indiscretions, in the scroll. The former explained the latter. The outraged
feelings of offended morality were now bolstered up by those of scandalized
good taste. The kindliest of them said:

"He is trying to be particular."

But most alleged:

_"Total verrueckt!"_ (Absolutely mad.)

An opinion no less severe and even more dangerous was beginning to find
currency--an opinion assured of success by reason of its illustrious
origin: it was said that, at the Palace, whither Christophe still went upon
his official duties, he had had the bad taste in conversation with the
Grand Duke himself, with revolting lack of decency, to give vent to his
ideas concerning the illustrious masters: it was said that he had called
Mendelssohn's _Elijah_ "a clerical humbug's paternoster," and he had called
certain _Lieder_ of Schumann "_Backfisch Musik_": and that in the face of
the declared preference of the august Princess for those works! The Grand
Duke had cut short his impertinences by saying dryly:

"To hear you, sir, one would doubt your being a German." This vengeful
utterance, coming from so lofty an eminence, reached the lowest depths: and
everybody who thought he had reason to be annoyed with Christophe, either
for his success, or for some more personal if not more cogent reason, did
not fail to call to mind that he was not in fact pure German. His father's
family, it was remembered, came originally from Belgium. It was not
surprising, therefore, that this immigrant should decry the national
glories. That explained everything and German vanity found reasons therein
for greater self-esteem, and at the same time for despising its adversary.

Christophe himself most substantially fed this Platonic vengeance. It is
very imprudent to criticise others when you are yourself on the point of
challenging criticism. A cleverer or less frank artist would have shown
more modesty and more respect for his predecessors. But Christophe could
see no reason for hiding his contempt for mediocrity or his joy in his
own strength, and his joy was shown in no temperate fashion. Although
from childhood Christophe had been turned in upon himself for want of any
creature to confide in, of late he had come by a need of expansiveness. He
had too much joy for himself: his breast was too small to contain it: he
would have burst if he had not shared his delight. Failing a friend, he had
confided in his colleague in the orchestra, the second _Kapellmeister_,
Siegmund Ochs, a young Wurtemberger, a good fellow, though crafty, who
showed him an effusive deference. Christophe did not distrust him: and,
even if he had, how could it have occurred to him that it might be harmful
to confide his joy to one who did not care, or even to an enemy? Ought they
not rather to be grateful to him? Was it not for them also that he was
working? He brought happiness for all, friends and enemies alike.--He had
no idea that there is nothing more difficult than to make men accept a new
happiness: they almost prefer their old misery: they need food that has
been masticated for ages. But what is most intolerable to them is the
thought that they owe such happiness to another. They cannot forgive that
offense until there is no way of evading it: and in any case, they do
contrive to make the giver pay dearly for it.

There were, then, a thousand reasons why Christophe's confidences should
not be kindly received by anybody. But there were a thousand and one
reasons why they should not be acceptable to Siegmund Ochs. The first
_Kapellmeister_, Tobias Pfeiffer, was on the point of retiring: and, in
spite of his youth, Christophe had every chance of succeeding him. Ochs
was too good a German not to recognize that Christophe was worthy of the
position, since the Court was on his side. But he had too good an opinion
of himself not to believe that he would have been more worthy had the Court
known him better. And so he received Christophe's effusions with a strange
smile when, he arrived at the theater in the morning with a face that he
tried hard to make serious, though it beamed in spite of himself.

"Well?" he would say slyly as he came up to him, "another masterpiece?"

Christophe would take his arm.

"Ah! my friend. It is the best of all ... If you could hear it!... Devil
take me, it is too beautiful! There has never been anything like it. God
help the poor audience! They will only long for one thing when they have
heard it: to die."

His words did not fall upon deaf ears. Instead of smiling, or of chaffing
Christophe about his childish enthusiasm--he would have been the first
to laugh at it and beg pardon if he had been made to feel the absurdity
of it--Ochs went into ironic ecstasies: he drew Christophe on to further
enormities: and when he left him made haste to repeat them all, making them
even more grotesque. The little circle of musicians chuckled over them: and
every one was impatient for the opportunity of judging the unhappy
compositions.--They were all judged beforehand.

At last they appeared--Christophe had chosen from the better of his works
an overture to the _Judith_ of Hebbel, the savage energy of which had
attracted him, in his reaction against German atony, although he was
beginning to lose his taste for it, knowing intuitively the unnaturalness
of such assumption of genius, always and at all costs. He had added a
symphony which bore the bombastic title of the Basle Boecklin, "_The Dream
of Life_," and the motto: "_Vita somnium breve_." A song-cycle completed
the programme, with a few classical works, and a _Festmarsch_ by Ochs,
which Christophe had kindly offered to include in his concert, though he
knew it to be mediocre.

Nothing much happened during the rehearsals. Although the orchestra
understood absolutely nothing of the composition it was playing and
everybody was privately disconcerted by the oddities of the new music, they
had no time to form an opinion: they were not capable of doing so until
the public had pronounced on it. Besides, Christophe's confidence imposed
on the artists, who, like every good German orchestra, were docile and
disciplined. His only difficulties were with the singer. She was the
blue lady of the _Townhalle_ concert. She was famous through Germany:
the domestic creature sang Bruennhilde Kundry at Dresden and Bayreuth
with undoubted lung-power. But if in the Wagnerian school she had
learned the art of which that school is justly proud, the art of good
articulation, of projecting the consonants through space, and of
battering the gaping audience with the vowels as with a club, she had not
learned--designedly--the art of being natural. She provided for every word:
everything was accentuated: the syllables moved with leaden feet, and there
was a tragedy in every sentence. Christophe implored her to moderate her
dramatic power a little. She tried at first graciously enough: but her
natural heaviness and her need for letting her voice go carried her away.
Christophe became nervous. He told the respectable lady that he had tried
to make human beings speak with his speaking-trumpet and not the dragon
Fafner. She took his insolence in bad part--naturally. She said that,
thank Heaven! she knew what singing was, and that she had had the honor of
interpreting the _Lieder_ of Maestro Brahms, in the presence of that great
man, and that he had never tired of hearing her.

"So much the worse! So much the worse!" cried Christophe.

She asked him with a haughty smile to be kind enough to explain the meaning
of his energetic remark. He replied that never in his life had Brahms
known what it was to be natural, that his eulogies were the worst possible
censure, and that although he--Christophe--was not very polite, as she had
justly observed, never would he have gone so far as to say anything so
unpleasant.

The argument went on in this fashion: and the lady insisted on singing in
her own way, with heavy pathos and melodramatic effects--until one day when
Christophe declared coldly that he saw the truth: it was her nature and
nothing could change it: but since the _Lieder_ could not be sung properly,
they should not be sung at all: he withdrew them from the programme.--It
was on the eve of the concert and they were counting on the _Lieder_: she
had talked about them: she was musician enough to appreciate certain of
their qualities: Christophe insulted her: and as she was not sure that the
morrow's concert would not set the seal on the young man's fame, she did
not wish to quarrel with a rising star. She gave way suddenly: and during
the last rehearsal she submitted docilely to all Christophe's wishes. But
she had made up her mind--at the concert--to have her own way.