Jean-Christophe, vol 1, Romain Rolland [book club recommendations .txt] 📗

*

 

He reckoned without the malevolence of small towns. They are tenacious

in their spite—all the more tenacious because their spite is aimless. A

healthy hatred which knows what it wants is appeased when it has achieved

its end. But men who are mischievous from boredom never lay down their

arms, for they are always bored. Christophe was a natural prey for their

want of occupation. He was beaten without a doubt; but he was bold enough

not to seem crushed. He did not bother anybody, but then he did not bother

about anybody. He asked nothing. They were impotent against him. He was

happy with his new friends and indifferent to anything that was said or

thought of him. That was intolerable.—Frau Reinhart roused even more

irritation. Her open friendship with Christophe in the face of the whole

town seemed, like his attitude, to be a defiance of public opinion. But the

good Lili Reinhart defied nothing and nobody. She had no thought to provoke

others; she did what she thought fit without asking anybody else’s advice.

That was the worst provocation.

 

All their doings were watched. They had no idea of it. He was extravagant,

she scatterbrained, and both even wanting in prudence when they went out

together, or even at home in the evening, when they leaned over the balcony

talking and laughing. They drifted innocently into a familiarity of speech

and manner which could easily supply food for calumny.

 

One morning Christophe received an anonymous letter. He was accused in

basely insulting terms of being Frau Reinhart’s lover. His arms fell by his

sides. He had never had the least thought of love or even of flirtation

with her. He was too honest. He had a Puritanical horror of adultery. The

very idea of such a dirty sharing gave him a physical and moral feeling of

nausea. To take the wife of a friend would have been a crime in his eyes,

and Lili Reinhart would have been the last person in the world with whom he

could have been tempted to commit such an offense. The poor woman was not

beautiful, and he would not have had even the excuse of passion.

 

He went to his friends ashamed and embarrassed. They also were embarrassed.

Each of them had received a similar letter, but they had not dared to tell

each other, and all three of them were on their guard and watched each

other and dared not move or speak, and they just talked nonsense. If Lili

Reinhart’s natural carelessness took the ascendant for a moment, or if

she began to laugh and talk wildly, suddenly a look from her husband or

Christophe would stop her dead; the letter would cross her mind; she would

stop in the middle of a familiar gesture and grow uneasy. Christophe and

Reinhart were in the same plight. And each of them was thinking: “Do the

others know?”

 

However, they said nothing to each other and tried to go on as though

nothing had happened.

 

But the anonymous letters went on, growing more and mores insulting and

dirty. They were plunged into a condition of depression and intolerable

shame. They hid themselves when they received the letters, and had not the

strength to burn them unopened. They opened them with trembling hands, and

as they unfolded the letters their hearts would sink; and when they read

what they feared to read, with some new variation on the same theme—the

injurious and ignoble inventions of a mind bent on causing a hurt—they

wept in silence. They racked their brains to discover who the wretch might

be who so persistently persecuted them..

 

One day Frau Reinhart, at the end of her letter, confessed the persecution

of which she was the victim to her husband, and with tears in his eyes he

confessed that he was suffering in the same way. Should they mention it

to Christophe? They dared not. But they had to warn him to make him be

cautious.—At the first words that Frau Reinhart said to him, with a blush,

she saw to her horror that Christophe had also received letters. Such utter

malignance appalled them. Frau Reinhart had no doubt that the whole town

was in the secret. Instead of helping each other, they only undermined

each other’s fortitude. They did not know what to do. Christophe talked of

breaking somebody’s head. But whose? And besides, that would be to justify

the calumny!… Inform the police of the letters?—That would make their

insinuations public…—Pretend to ignore them? It was no longer possible.

Their friendly relations were now disturbed. It was useless for Reinhart to

have absolute faith in the honesty of his wife and Christophe. He suspected

them in spite of himself. He felt that his suspicions were shameful and

absurd, and tried hard not to pay any heed to them, and to leave Christophe

and his wife alone together. But he suffered, and his wife saw that he was

suffering.

 

It was even worse for her. She had never thought of flirting with

Christophe, any more than he had thought of it with her. The calumnious

letters brought her imperceptibly to the ridiculous idea that after

all Christophe was perhaps in love with her; and although he was never

anywhere near showing any such feeling for her, she thought she must defend

herself, not by referring directly to it, but by clumsy precautions, which

Christophe did not understand at first, though, when he did understand, he

was beside himself. It was so stupid that it made him laugh and cry at the

same time! He in love with the honest little woman, kind enough as she was,

but plain and common!… And to think that she should believe it!… And

that he could not deny it, and tell her and her husband:

 

“Come! There is no danger! Be calm!…” But no; he could not offend these

good people. And besides, he was beginning to think that if she held out

against being loved by him it was because she was secretly on the point of

loving him. The anonymous letters had had the fine result of having given

him so foolish and fantastic an idea.

 

The situation had become at once so painful and so silly that it was

impossible for this to go on. Besides, Lili Reinhart, who, in spite of her

brave words, had no strength of character, lost her head in the face of the

dumb hostility of the little town. They made shamefaced excuses for not

meeting:

 

“Frau Reinhart was unwell…. Reinhart was busy…. They were going away

for a few days….”

 

Clumsy lies which were always unmasked by chance, which seemed to take a

malicious pleasure in doing so.

 

Christophe was more frank, and said:

 

“Let us part, my friends. We are not strong enough.”

 

The Reinharts wept.—But they were happier when the breach was made.

 

The town had its triumph. This time Christophe was quite alone. It had

robbed him of his last breath of air:—the affection, however humble,

without which no heart can live.

III DELIVERANCE

He had no one. All his friends had disappeared. His dear Gottfried, who had

come to his aid in times of difficulty, and whom now he so sorely needed,

had gone some months before. This time forever. One evening in the summer

of the last year a letter in large handwriting, bearing the address of a

distant village, had informed Louisa that her brother had died upon one of

his vagabond journeys which the little peddler had insisted on making, in

spite of his ill health. He was buried there in the cemetery of the place.

The last manly and serene friendship which could have supported Christophe

had been swallowed up. He was left alone with his old mother, who cared

nothing for his ideas—could only love him and not understand him. About

him was the immense plain of Germany, the green ocean. At every attempt to

climb out of it he only slipped back deeper than ever. The hostile town

watched him drown….

 

And as he was struggling a light flashed upon him in the middle of the

night, the image of Hassler, the great musician whom he had loved so much

when he was a child. His fame shone over all Germany now. He remembered

the promises that Hassler had made him then. And he clung to this piece of

wreckage in desperation. Hassler could save him! Hassler must save him!

What was he asking? Not help, nor money, nor material assistance of any

kind. Nothing but understanding. Hassler had been persecuted like him.

Hassler was a free man. He would understand a free man, whom German

mediocrity was pursuing with its spite and trying to crush. They were

fighting the same battle.

 

He carried the idea into execution as soon as it occurred to him. He told

his mother that he would be away for a week, and that very evening he took

the train for the great town in the north of Germany where Hassler was

Kapellmeister, He could not wait. It was a last effort to breathe.

 

*

 

Hassler was famous. His enemies had not disarmed, but his friends cried

that he was the greatest musician, present, past and future. He was

surrounded by partisans and detractors who were equally absurd. As he was

not of a very firm character, he had been embittered by the last, and

mollified by the first. He devoted his energy to writing things to annoy

his critics and make them cry out. He was like an urchin playing pranks.

These pranks were often in the most detestable taste. Not only did he

devote his prodigious talent to musical eccentricities which made the

hair of the pontiffs stand on end, but he showed a perverse predilection

for queer themes, bizarre subjects, and often for equivocal and scabrous

situations; in a word, for everything which could offend ordinary good

sense and decency. He was quite happy when the people howled, and the

people did not fail him. Even the Emperor, who dabbled in art, as every

one knows, with the insolent presumption of upstarts and princes, regarded

Hassler’s fame as a public scandal, and let no opportunity slip of showing

his contemptuous indifference to his impudent works. Hassler was enraged

and delighted by such august opposition, which had almost become a

consecration for the advanced paths in German art, and went on smashing

windows. At every new folly his friends went into ecstasies and cried that

he was a genius.

 

Hassler’s coterie was chiefly composed of writers, painters, and decadent

critics who certainly had the merit of representing the party of revolt

against the reaction—always a menace in North Germany—of the pietistic

spirit and State morality; but in the struggle the independence had been

carried to a pitch of absurdity of which they were unconscious. For, if

many of them were not lacking in a rude sort of talent, they had little

intelligence and less taste. They could not rise above the fastidious

atmosphere which they had created, and like all cliques, they had ended by

losing all sense of real life. They legislated for themselves and hundreds

of fools who read their reviews and gulped down everything they were

pleased to promulgate. Their adulation had been fatal to Hassler, for it

had made him too pleased with himself. He accepted without examination

every musical idea that came into his head, and he had a private

conviction, however he might fall below his own level, he was still

superior to that of all other musicians. And though that idea was only too

true in the majority of cases, it did not follow that it was a very fit

state of mind for the creation of great