Jean Christophe, Vol. I by Romain Rolland

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* * * * *

The day came. Christophe had no anxiety. He was too full of his music to
be able to judge it. He realized that some of his works in certain places
bordered on the ridiculous. But what did that matter? Nothing great can be
written without touching the ridiculous. To reach the heart of things it
is necessary to dare human respect, politeness, modesty, the timidity of
social lies under which the heart is stifled. If nobody is to be affronted
and success attained, a man must be resigned all his life to remain bound
by convention and to give to second-rate people the second-rate truth,
mitigated, diluted, which they are capable of receiving: he must dwell in
prison all his life. A man is great only when he has set his foot on such
anxieties. Christophe trampled them underfoot. Let them hiss him: he was
sure of not leaving them indifferent. He conjured up the faces that certain
people of his acquaintance would make as they heard certain rather bold
passages. He expected bitter criticism: he smiled at it already. In any
case they would have to be blind--or deaf--to deny that there was force
in it--pleasant or otherwise, what did it matter?--Pleasant! Pleasant!...
Force! That is enough. Let it go its way, and bear all before it, like the
Rhine!...

He had one setback. The Grand Duke did not come. The royal box was only
occupied by Court people, a few ladies-in-waiting. Christophe was irritated
by it. He thought: "The fool is cross with me. He does not know what to
think of my work: he is afraid of compromising himself." He shrugged his
shoulders, pretending not to be put out by such idiocy. Others paid more
attention to it: it was the first lesson for him, a menace of his future.

The public had not shown much more interest than the Grand Duke: quite a
third of the hall was empty. Christophe could not help thinking bitterly of
the crowded halls at his concerts when he was a child. He would not have
been surprised by the change if he had had more experience: it would have
seemed natural to him that there were fewer people come to hear him when
he made good music than when he made bad: for it is not music but the
musician in which the greater part of the public is interested: and it is
obvious that a musician who is a man and like everybody else is much less
interesting than a musician in a child's little trowsers or short frock,
who tickles sentimentality or amuses idleness.

After waiting in vain for the hall to fill, Christophe decided to begin.
He tried to pretend that it was better so, saying, "A few friends but
good."--His optimism did not last long.

His pieces were played in silence.--There is a silence in an audience
which seems big and overflowing with love. But there was nothing in this.
Nothing. Utter sleep. Blankness. Every phrase seemed to drop into depths
of indifference. With his back turned to the audience, busy with his
orchestra, Christophe was fully aware of everything that was happening in
the hall, with those inner antennae which every true musician is endowed, so
that he knows whether what he is playing is waking an echo in the hearts
about him. He went on conducting and growing excited while he was frozen by
the cold mist of boredom rising from the stalls and the boxes behind him.

At last the overture was ended: and the audience applauded. It applauded
coldly, politely, and was then silent. Christophe would rather have had
them hoot.... A hiss! One hiss! Anything to give a sign of life, or at
least of reaction against his work!... Nothing.--He looked at the audience.
The people were looking at each other, each trying to find out what the
other thought. They did not succeed and relapsed into indifference.

The music went on. The symphony was played.--Christophe found it hard to
go on to the end. Several times he was on the point of throwing down his
baton and running away. Their apathy overtook him: at last he could not
understand what he was conducting: he could not breathe: he felt that he
was falling into fathomless boredom. There was not even the whispered
ironic comment which he had anticipated at certain passages: the audience
were reading their programmes. Christophe heard the pages turned all
together with a dry rustling: and then, once more there was silence until
the last chord, when the same polite applause showed that they had not
understood that the symphony was finished.--And yet there were four pairs
of hands went on clapping when the others had finished: but they awoke no
echo, and stopped ashamed: that made the emptiness seem more empty, and the
little incident served to show the audience how bored it had been.

Christophe took a seat in the middle of the orchestra: he dared not look to
right or left. He wanted to cry: and at the same time he was quivering with
rage. He was fain to get up and shout at them: "You bore me! Ah! How you
bore me! I cannot bear it!... Go away! Go away, all of you!..."

The audience woke up a little: they were expecting the singer,--they were
accustomed to applauding her. In that ocean of new music in which they were
drifting without a compass, she at least was sure, a known land, and a
solid, in which there was no danger of being lost. Christophe divined their
thoughts exactly, and he laughed bitterly. The singer was no less conscious
of the expectancy of the audience: Christophe saw that in her regal airs
when he came and told her that it was her turn to appear. They looked at
each other inimically. Instead of offering her his arm, Christophe thrust
his hands into his pockets and let her go on alone. Furious and out of
countenance she passed him. He followed her with a bored expression. As
soon as she appeared the audience gave her an ovation: that made everybody
happier: every face brightened, the audience grew interested, and glasses
were brought into play. Certain of her power she tackled the _Lieder_, in
her own way, of course, and absolutely disregarded Christophe's remarks of
the evening before. Christophe, who was accompanying her, went pale. He had
foreseen her rebellion. At the first change that she made he tapped on the
piano and said angrily:

"No!"

She went on. He whispered behind her back in a low voice of fury:

"No! No! Not like that!... Not that!"

Unnerved by his fierce growls, which the audience could not hear, though
the orchestra caught every syllable, she stuck to it, dragging her notes,
making pauses like organ stops. He paid no heed to them and went ahead: in
the end they got out of time. The audience did not notice it: for some time
they had been saying that Christophe's music was not made to seem pleasant
or right to the ear: but Christophe, who was not of that opinion, was
making lunatic grimaces: and at last he exploded. He stopped short in the
middle of a bar:

"Stop," he shouted.

She was carried on by her own impetus for half a bar and then stopped:

"That's enough," he said dryly.

There was a moment of amazement in the audience. After a few seconds he
said icily:

"Begin again!"

She looked at him in stupefaction: her hands trembled: she thought for a
moment of throwing his book at his head: afterwards she did not understand
how it was that she did not do so. But she was overwhelmed by Christophe's
authority and his unanswerable tone of voice: she began again. She sang the
song-cycle, without changing one shade of meaning, or a single movement:
for she felt that he would spare her nothing: and she shuddered at the
thought of a fresh insult.

When she had finished the audience recalled her frantically. They were not
applauding the _Lieder_--(they would have applauded just the same if she
had sung any others)--but the famous singer who had grown old in harness:
they knew that they could safely admire her. Besides, they wanted to make
up to her for the insult she had just received. They were not quite sure,
but they did vaguely understand that the singer had made a mistake: and
they thought it indecent of Christophe to call their attention to it. They
encored the songs. But Christophe shut the piano firmly.

The singer did not notice his insolence: she was too much upset to think
of singing again. She left the stage hurriedly and shut herself up in her
box: and then for a quarter of an hour she relieved her heart of the flood
of wrath and rage that was pent up in it: a nervous attack, a deluge of
tears, indignant outcries and imprecations against Christophe,--she omitted
nothing. Her cries of anger could be heard through the closed door. Those
of her friends who had made their way there told everybody when they left
that Christophe had behaved like a cad. Opinion travels quickly in a
concert hall. And so when Christophe went to his desk for the last piece
of music the audience was stormy. But it was not his composition: it
was the _Festmarsch_ by Ochs, which Christophe had kindly included in
his programme. The audience--who were quite at their ease with the dull
music--found a very simple method of displaying their disapproval of
Christophe without going so far as to hiss him: they acclaimed Ochs
ostentatiously, recalled the composer two or three times, and he appeared
readily. And that was the end of the concert.

The Grand Duke and everybody at the Court--the bored, gossiping little
provincial town--lost no detail of what had happened. The papers which were
friendly towards the singer made no allusion to the incident: but they
all agreed in exalting her art while they only mentioned the titles of
the _Lieder_ which she had sung. They published only a few lines about
Christophe's other compositions, and they all said almost the same things:
"... Knowledge of counterpoint. Complicated writing. Lack of inspiration.
No melody. Written with the head, not with the heart. Want of sincerity.
Trying to be original...." Followed a paragraph on true originality, that
of the masters who are dead and buried, Mozart, Beethoven, Loewe, Schubert,
Brahms, "those who are original without thinking of it."--Then by a natural
transition they passed to the revival at the Grand Ducal Theater of the
_Nachtlager von Granada_ of Konradin Kreutzer: a long account was given of
"the delicious music, as fresh and jolly as when it was first written."

Christophe's compositions met with absolute and astonished lack of
comprehension from the most kindly disposed critics: veiled hostility from
those who did not like him, and were arming themselves for later ventures:
and from the general public, guided by neither friendly nor hostile
critics, silence. Left to its own thoughts the general public does not
think at all: that goes without saying.

* * * * *

Christophe was bowled over.

And yet there was nothing surprising in his defeat. There were reasons,
three to one, why his compositions should not please. They were immature.
They were, secondly, too advanced to be understood at once. And,
lastly, people were only too glad to give a lesson to the impertinent
youngster.--But Christophe was not cool-headed enough to admit that his
reverse was legitimate. He had none of that serenity which the true artist
gains from the mournful experience of long misunderstanding at the hands of
men and their incurable stupidity. His naive confidence in the public and
in success which he thought he could easily gain because he deserved it,
crumbled away. He would have thought it natural to have enemies. But what
staggered him was to find that he had not a single friend. Those on whom he
had counted, those who hitherto had seemed to be interested in everything
that he wrote, had not given him a single word of encouragement since the
concert. He tried to probe them: they took refuge behind vague words. He
insisted, he wanted to know what they really thought: the most sincere of
them referred back to his former works, his foolish early efforts.--More
than once in his life he was to hear his new works condemned by comparison,
with the older ones,--and that by the same people who, a few years before,
had condemned his older works when they were new: that is the usual
ordering of these things. Christophe did not like it: he exclaimed loudly.
If people did not like him, well and good: he accepted that: it even
pleased him since he could not be friends with everybody. But that people
should pretend to be fond of him and not allow him to grow up, that they
should try to force him all his life to remain a child, was beyond the
pale! What is good at twelve is not good at twenty: and he hoped not
to stay at that, but to change and to go on changing always.... These
idiots who tried to stop life!... What was interesting in his childish
compositions was not their childishness and silliness, but the force in
them hungering for the future. And they were trying to kill his future!...
No, they had never understood what he was, they had never loved him, never
then or now: they only loved the weakness and vulgarity in him, everything
that he had in common with others, and not _himself_, not what he really
was: their friendship was a misunderstanding....

He was exaggerating, perhaps. It often happens with quite nice people who
are incapable of liking new work which they sincerely love when it is
twenty years old. New life smacks too strong for their weak senses--the
scent of it must evaporate in the winds of Time. A work of art only becomes
intelligible to them when it is crusted over with the dust of years.

But Christophe could not admit of not being understood when he was
_present_ and of being understood when he was _past_. He preferred to think
that he was not understood at all, in any case, even. And he raged against
it. He was foolish enough to want to make himself understood, to explain
himself, to argue. Although no good purpose was served thereby: he would
have had to reform the taste of his time. But he was afraid of nothing. He
was determined by hook or by crook to clean up German taste. But it was
utterly impossible: he could not convince anybody by means of conversation,
in which he found it difficult to find words, and expressed himself with an
excess of violence about the great musicians and even about the men to whom
he was talking: he only succeeded in making a few more enemies. He would
have had to prepare his ideas beforehand, and then to force the public to
hear him....

And just then, at the appointed hour, his star--his evil star--gave him the
means of doing so.

* * * * *

He was sitting in the restaurant of the theater in a group of musicians
belonging to the orchestra whom he was scandalizing by his artistic
judgments. They were not all of the same opinion: but they were all ruffled
by the freedom of his language. Old Krause, the alto, a good fellow
and a good musician, who sincerely loved Christophe, tried to turn the
conversation: he coughed, then looked out for an opportunity of making a
pun. But Christophe did not hear him: he went on: and Krause mourned and
thought:

"What makes him say such things? God bless him! You can think these things:
but you must not say them."

The odd thing was that he also thought "these things": at least, he had a
glimmering of them, and Christophe's words roused many doubts in him: but
he had not the courage to confess it, or openly to agree--half from fear of
compromising himself, half from modesty and distrust of himself.

Weigl, the cornet-player, did not want to know anything: he was ready to
admire anything, or anybody, good or bad, star or gas-jet: everything was
the same to him: there were no degrees in his admiration: he admired,
admired, admired. It was a vital necessity to him: it hurt him when anybody
tried to curb him.

Old Kuh, the violoncellist, suffered even more. He loved bad music with
all his heart. Everything that Christophe hounded down with his sarcasm
and invective was infinitely dear to him: instinctively his choice pitched
on the most conventional works: his soul was a reservoir of tearful and
high-flown emotion. Indeed, he was not dishonest in his tender regard for
all the sham great men. It was when he tried to pretend that he liked the
real great men that he was lying to himself--in perfect innocence. There
are "Brahmins" who think to find in their God the breath of old men of
genius: they love Beethoven in Brahms. Kuh went one better: he loved Brahms
in Beethoven.

But the most enraged of all with. Christophe's paradoxes was Spitz, the
bassoon. It was not so much his musical instinct that was wounded as his
natural servility. One of the Roman Emperors wished to die standing. Spitz
wished to die, as he had lived, crawling: that was his natural position:
it was delightful to him to grovel at the feet of everything that was
official, hallowed, "arrived": and he was beside himself when anybody tried
to keep him from playing the lackey, comfortably.

So, Kuh groaned, Weigl threw up his hands in despair, Krause made jokes,
and Spitz shouted in a shrill voice. But Christophe went on imperturbably
shouting louder than the rest: and saying monstrous things about Germany
and the Germans.

At the next table a young man was listening to him and rocking with
laughter. He had black curly hair, fine, intelligent eyes, a large nose,
which at its end could not make up its mind to go either to right or left,
and rather than go straight on, went to both sides at once, thick lips,
and a clever, mobile face: he was following everything that Christophe
said, hanging on his lips, reflecting every word with a sympathetic and
yet mocking attention, wrinkling up his forehead, his temples, the corners
of his eyes, round his nostrils and cheeks, grimacing with laughter,
and every now and then shaking all over convulsively. He did not join in
the conversation, but he did not miss a word of it. He showed his joy
especially when he saw Christophe, involved in some argument and heckled by
Spitz, flounder about, stammer, and stutter with anger, until he had found
the word he was seeking,--a rock with which to crush his adversary. And his
delight knew no bounds when Christophe, swept along by his passions far
beyond the capacity of his thought, enunciated monstrous paradoxes which
made his hearers snort.

At last they broke up, each of them tired out with feeling and alleging his
own superiority. As Christophe, the last to go, was leaving the room he was
accosted by the young man who had listened to his words with such pleasure.
He had not yet noticed him. The other politely removed his hat, smiled, and
asked permission to introduce himself:

"Franz Mannheim."

He begged pardon for his indiscretion in listening to the argument, and
congratulated Christophe on the _maestria_ with which he had pulverized his
opponents. He was still laughing at the thought of it. Christophe was glad
to hear it, and looked at him a little distrustfully:

"Seriously?" he asked. "You are not laughing at me?"

The other swore by the gods. Christophe's face lit up.

"Then you think I am right? You are of my opinion?"

"Well," said Mannheim, "I am not a musician. I know nothing of music. The
only music I like--(if it is not too flattering to say so)--is yours....
That may show you that my taste is not so bad...."

"Oh!" said Christophe skeptically, though he was flattered all the same,
"that proves nothing."

"You are difficult to please.... Good!... I think as you do: that proves
nothing. And I don't venture to judge what you say of German musicians.
But, anyhow, it is so true of the Germans in general, the old Germans, all
the romantic idiots with their rancid thought, their sloppy emotion, their
senile reiteration which we are asked to admire, '_the eternal Yesterday,
which has always been, and always will be, and will be law to-morrow
because it is law to-day._' ...!"

He recited a few lines of the famous passage in Schiller:

"... _Das ewig Gestrige,
Das immer war imd immer wiederkehrt_...."

"Himself, first of all!" He stopped in the middle of his recitation.

"Who?" asked Christophe.

"The pump-maker who wrote that!"

Christophe did not understand. But Mannheim went on:

"I should like to have a general cleaning up of art and thought every fifty
years--nothing to be left standing."

"A little drastic," said Christophe, smiling.

"No, I assure you. Fifty years is too much: I should say thirty.... And
even less!... It is a hygienic measure. One does not keep one's ancestors
in one's house. One gets rid of them, when they are dead, and sends, them
elsewhere,--there politely to rot, and one places stones on them to be
quite sure that they will not come back. Nice people put flowers on them,
too. I don't mind if they like it. All I ask is to be left in peace. I
leave them alone! Each for his own side, say I: the dead and the living."

"There are some dead who are more alive than the living."

"No, no! It would be more true to say that there are some living who are
more dead than the dead."

"Maybe. In any case, there are old things which are still young."

"Then if they are still young we can find them for ourselves.... But I
don't believe it. What has been good once never is good again. Nothing is
good but change. Before all we have to rid ourselves of the old men and
things. There are too many of them in Germany. Death to them, say I!"

Christophe listened to these squibs attentively and labored to discuss
them: he was in part in sympathy with them, he recognized certain of his
own thoughts in them: and at the same time he felt a little embarrassed at
having them so blown out to the point of caricature. But as he assumed that
everybody else was as serious as himself, he thought that perhaps Mannheim,
who seemed to be more learned than himself and spoke more easily, was
right, and was drawing the logical conclusions from his principles. Vain
Christophe, whom so many people could not forgive for his faith in himself,
was really most naively modest often tricked by his modesty when he was
with those who were better educated than himself,--especially, when they
consented not to plume themselves on it to avoid an awkward discussion.
Mannheim, who was amusing himself with his own paradoxes, and from one
sally to another had reached extravagant quips and cranks, at which he
was laughing immensely, was not accustomed to being taken seriously: he
was delighted with the trouble that Christophe was taking to discuss his
nonsense, and even to understand it: and while he laughed, he was grateful
for the importance which Christophe gave him: he thought him absurd and
charming.

They parted very good friends: and Christophe was not a little surprised
three hours later at rehearsal to see Mannheim's head poked through the
little door leading to the orchestra, smiling and grimacing, and making
mysterious signs at him. When the rehearsal was over Christophe went to
him. Mannheim took his arm familiarly.

"You can spare a moment?... Listen. I have an idea. Perhaps you will think
it absurd.... Would not you like for once in a way to write what you think
of music and the musicos? Instead of wasting your breath in haranguing four
dirty knaves of your band who are good for nothing but scraping and blowing
into bits of wood, would it not be better to address the general public?"

"Not better? Would I like?... My word! And when do you want me to write? It
is good of you!..."

"I've a proposal for you.... Some friends and I: Adalbert von Waldhaus,
Raphael Goldenring, Adolf Mai, and Lucien Ehrenfeld,--have started a
Review, the only intelligent Review in the town: the _Dionysos_.--(You must
know it....)--We all admire each other and should be glad if you would join
us. Will you take over our musical criticism?"

Christophe was abashed by such an honor: he was longing to accept: he was
only afraid of not being worthy: he could not write.

"Oh! come," said Mannheim, "I am sure you can. And besides, as soon as you
are a critic you can do anything you like. You've no need to be afraid of
the public. The public is incredibly stupid. It is nothing to be an artist:
an artist is only a sort of comedian: an artist can be hissed. But a critic
has the right to say: 'Hiss me that man!' The whole audience lets him do
its thinking. Think whatever you like. Only look as if you were thinking
something. Provided you give the fools their food, it does not much matter
what, they will gulp down anything."

In the end Christophe consented, with effusive thanks. He only made it a
condition that he should be allowed to say what he liked.

"Of course, of course," said Mannheim. "Absolute freedom! We are all free."

He looked him up at the theater once more after the performance to
introduce him to Adalbert von Waldhaus and his friends. They welcomed him
warmly.

With the exception of Waldhaus, who belonged to one of the noble families
of the neighborhood, they were all Jews and all very rich: Mannheim
was the son of a banker: Mai the son of the manager of a metallurgical
establishment: and Ehrenfeld's father was a great jeweler. Their fathers
belonged to the older generation of Jews, industrious and acquisitive,
attached to the spirit of their race, building their fortunes with keen
energy, and enjoying their energy much more than their fortunes. Their sons
seemed to be made to destroy what their fathers had builded: they laughed
at family prejudice and their ant-like mania for economy and delving: they
posed as artists, affected to despise money and to fling it out of window.
But in reality they hardly ever let it slip through their fingers: and in
vain did they do all sorts of foolish things: they never could altogether
lead astray their lucidity of mind and practical sense. For the rest, their
parents kept an eye on them, and reined them in. The most prodigal of them,
Mannheim, would sincerely have given away all that he had: but he never had
anything: and although he was always loudly inveighing against his father's
niggardliness, in his heart he laughed at it and thought that he was right.
In fine, there was only Waldhaus really who was in control of his fortune,
and went into it wholeheartedly and reckless of cost, and bore that of the
Review. He was a poet. He wrote "_Polymetres_" in the manner of Arno Holz
and Walt Whitman, with lines alternately very long and very short, in which
stops, double and triple stops, dashes, silences, commas, italics and
italics, played a great part. And so did alliteration and repetition--of
a word--of a line--of a whole phrase. He interpolated words of every
language. He wanted--(no one has ever known why)--to render the _Cezanne_
into verse. In truth, he was poetic enough and had a distinguished taste
for stale things. He was sentimental and dry, naive and foppish: his
labored verses affected a cavalier carelessness. He would have been a
good poet for men of the world. But there are too many of the kind in the
Reviews and artistic circles: and he wished to be alone. He had taken it
into his head to play the great gentleman who is above the prejudices of
his caste. He had more prejudices than anybody. He did not admit their
existence. He took a delight in surrounding himself with Jews in the Review
which he edited, to rouse the indignation of his family, who were very
anti-Semite, and to prove his own freedom of mind to himself. With his
colleagues, he assumed a tone of courteous equality. But in his heart he
had a calm and boundless contempt for them. He was not unaware that they
were very glad to make use of his name and money: and he let them do so
because it pleased him to despise them.