Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE MARKET-PLACE, I, part 6

* * * * * 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 Molière 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.

) Théophile Goujart and Sylvain Kohn took Christophe to the Opéra 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 César 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.

But what was most alarming was to see honest men and real artists, men who rightly enjoyed a high place in French literature, struggling in such a traffic, for which they were not at all suited.

Some of them with great travail wrote, like the rest, the sort of trash that the newspapers serialize.

They had to produce it by a fixed time, once or twice a week: and it had been going on for years.

They went on producing and producing, long after they had ceased to have anything to say, racking their brains to find something new, something more sensational, more bizarre: for the public was surfeited and sick of everything, and soon wearied of even the most wanton imaginary pleasures: they had always to go one better--better than the rest, better than their own best--and they squeezed out their very life-blood, they squeezed out their guts: it was a pitiable sight, a grotesque spectacle.

Christophe, who did not know the ins and outs of that melancholy traffic, and if he had known them would not have been more indulgent; for in his eyes nothing in the world could excuse an artist for selling his art for thirty pieces of silver....

(Not even to assure the well-being of those whom he loves?

Not even then.

That is not human.

It is not a question of being human; it is a question of being a man....

Human!...

May God have mercy on your white-livered humanitarianism, it is so bloodless!...

No man loves twenty things at once, no man can serve many gods!...

) Christophe, who, in his hard-working life, had hardly yet seen beyond the limits of his little German town, could have no idea that this artistic degradation, which showed so rawly in Paris, was common to nearly all the great towns: and the hereditary prejudices of chaste Germany against Latin immorality awoke in him once more.

And yet Sylvain Kohn might easily have pointed to what was going on by the banks of the Spree, and the impurity of Imperial Germany, where brutality made shame and degradation even more repulsive.

But Sylvain Kohn never thought of it: he was no more shocked by that than by the life of Paris.

He thought ironically: "Every nation has its little ways," and the ways of the world in which he lived seemed so natural to him that Christophe could be excused for thinking it was in the nature of the people.

And so, like so many of his compatriots, he saw in the secret sore which is eating away the intellectual aristocracies of Europe the vice proper to French art, and the bankruptcy of the Latin races.

Christophe was hurt by his first encounter with French literature, and it took him some time to get over it.

And yet there were plenty of books which were not solely occupied with what one of these writers has nobly called "the taste for fundamental entertainments."

But he never laid hands on the best and finest of them.

Such books were not written, for the like of Sylvain Kohn and his friends: they did not bother about them, and certainly Kohn and the rest never bothered about the better class of books: they ignored each other.

Sylvain Kohn would never have thought of mentioning them to Christophe.

He was quite sincerely convinced that his friends and himself were the incarnation of French Art, and thought there was no talent, no art, no France outside the men who had been consecrated as great by their opinion and the press of the boulevards.

Christophe knew nothing about the poets who were the glory of French literature, the very crown of France.

Very few of the novelists reached him, or emerged from the ocean of mediocre writers: a few books of Barrès and Anatole France.

But he was not sufficiently familiar with the language to be able to enjoy the universal dilettantism, and erudition, and irony of the one, or the unequal but superior art of the other.

He spent some time in watching the little orange-trees in tubs growing in the hothouse of Anatole France, and the delicate, perfect flowers clambering over the gravelike soul of Barrès. He stayed for a moment or two before the genius, part sublime, part silly, of Maeterlinck: from that there issued a polite mysticism, monotonous, numbing like some vague sorrow.

He shook himself, and plunged into the heavy, sluggish stream, the muddy romanticism of Zola, with whom he was already acquainted, and when he emerged from that it was to sink back and drown in a deluge of literature.

The submerged lands exhaled an _odor di femina_.

The literature of the day teemed with effeminate men and women.

It is well that women should write if they are sincere enough to describe what no man has yet seen: the depths of the soul of a woman.

But only very few dared do that: most of them only wrote to attract the men: they were as untruthful in their books as in their drawing-rooms: they jockeyed their facts and flirted with the reader.

Since they were no longer religious, and had no confessor to whom to tell their little lapses, they told them to the public.

There was a perfect shower of novels, almost all scabrous, all affected, written in a sort of lisping style, a style scented with flowers and fine perfumes--sometimes too fine--sometimes not fine at all--and the eternal stale, warm, sweetish smell.

Their books reeked of it.

Christophe thought, like Goethe: "Let women do what they like with poetry and writing: but men must not write like women!

That I cannot stand."

He could not help being disgusted by their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest, their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their hotch-potch of subtlety and brutality.

But Christophe was ready to admit that he was not in a position to judge.

He was deafened by the row of this babel of words.

It was impossible to hear the little fluting sounds that were drowned in it all.

For even among such books as these there were some, from the pages of which, behind all the nonsense, there shone the limpid sky and the harmonious outline of the hills of Attica--so much talent, so much grace, a sweet breath of life, and charm of style, a thought like the voluptuous women or the languid boys of Perugino and the young Raphael, smiling, with half-closed eyes, at their dream of love.

But Christophe was blind to that.

Nothing could reveal to him the dominant tendencies, the currents of public opinion.

Even a Frenchman would have been hard put to it to see them.

And the only definite impression that he had at this time was that of a flood of writing which looked like a national disaster.

It seemed as though everybody wrote: men, women, children, officers, actors, society people, blackguards.

It was an epidemic.

For the time being Christophe gave it up.

He felt that such a guide as Sylvain Kohn must lead him hopelessly astray.

His experience of a literary coterie in Germany gave him very properly a profound distrust of the people whom he met: it was impossible to know whether or no they only represented the opinion of a few hundred idle people, or even, in certain cases, whether or no the author was his own public.

The theater gave a more exact idea of the society of Paris.

It played an enormous part in the daily life of the city.

It was an enormous kitchen, a Pantagruelesque restaurant, which could not cope with the appetite of the two million inhabitants.

There were thirty leading theaters, without counting the local houses, café concerts, all sorts of shows--a hundred halls, all giving performances every evening, and, every evening, almost all full.

A whole nation of actors and officials.

Vast sums were swallowed up in the gulf.

The four State-aided theaters gave work to three thousand people, and cost the country ten million francs.

The whole of Paris re-echoed with the glory of the play-actors.

It was impossible to go anywhere without seeing innumerable photographs, drawings, caricatures, reproducing their features and mannerisms, gramophones reproducing their voices, and the newspapers their opinions on art and politics.

They had special newspapers devoted to them.

They published their heroic and domestic Memoirs.

These big self-conscious children, who spent their time in aping each other, these wonderful apes reigned and held sway over the Parisians: and the dramatic authors were their chief ministers.

Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to conduct him into the kingdom of shadows and reflections.