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

roused unpleasantly at dawn by

the voices of his neighbors arguing, and the creaking of a pump worked

furiously by some one who was in a hurry to swill the yard and the stairs.

 

*

 

Justus Euler was a little bent old man, with uneasy, gloomy eyes, a red

face, all lines and pimples, gap-toothed, with an unkempt beard, with which

he was forever fidgeting with his hands. Very honest, quite able,

profoundly moral, he had been on quite good terms with Christophe’s

grandfather. He was said to be like him. And, in truth, he was of the same

generation and brought up with the same principles; but he lacked Jean

Michel’s strong physique, that is, while he was of the same opinion on many

points, fundamentally he was hardly at all like him, for it is temperament

far more than ideas that makes a man, and whatever the divisions,

fictitious or real, marked between men by intellect, the great divisions

between men and men are into those who are healthy and those who are not.

Old Euler was not a healthy man. He talked morality, like Jean Michel, but

his morals were not the same as Jean Michel’s; he had not his sound

stomach, his lungs, or his jovial strength. Everything in Euler and his

family was built on a more parsimonious and niggardly plan. He had been an

official for forty years, was now retired, and suffered from that

melancholy that comes from inactivity and weighs so heavily upon old men,

who have not made provision in their inner life for their last years. All

his habits, natural and acquired, all the habits of his trade had given him

a meticulous and peevish quality, which was reproduced to a certain extent

in each of his children.

 

His son-in-law, Vogel, a clerk at the Chancery Court, was fifty years old.

Tall, strong, almost bald, with gold spectacles, fairly good-looking, he

considered himself ill, and no doubt was so, although obviously he did not

have the diseases which he thought he had, but only a mind soured by the

stupidity of his calling and a body ruined to a certain extent by his

sedentary life. Very industrious, not without merit, even cultured up to a

point; he was a victim of our ridiculous modern life, or like so many

clerks, locked up in their offices, he had succumbed to the demon of

hypochondria. One of those unfortunates whom Goethe called “_ein trauriger,

ungriechischer Hypochondrist_”—“a gloomy and un-Greek hypochondriac,”—and

pitied, though he took good care to avoid them.

 

Amalia was neither the one nor the other. Strong, loud, and active, she

wasted no sympathy on her husband’s jeremiads; she used to shake him

roughly. But no human strength can bear up against living together, and

when in a household one or other is neurasthenic, the chances are that in

time they will both be so. In vain did Amalia cry out upon Vogel, in vain

did she go on protesting either from habit or because it was necessary;

next moment she herself was lamenting her condition more loudly even than

he, and, passing imperceptibly from scolding to lamentation, she did him no

good; she increased his ills tenfold by loudly singing chorus to his

follies. In the end not only did she crush the unhappy Vogel, terrified by

the proportions assumed by his own outcries sent sounding back by this

echo, but she crushed everybody, even herself. In her turn she caught the

trick of unwarrantably bemoaning her health, and her father’s, and her

daughter’s, and her son’s. It became a mania; by constant repetition she

came to believe what she said. She took the least chill tragically; she was

uneasy and worried about everybody. More than that, when they were well,

she still worried, because of the sickness that was bound to come. So life

was passed in perpetual fear. Outside that they were all in fairly good

health, and it seemed as though their state of continual moaning and

groaning did serve to keep them well. They all ate and slept and worked as

usual, and the life of this household was not relaxed for it all. Amalia’s

activity was not satisfied with working from morning to night up and down

the house; they all had to toil with her, and there was forever a moving of

furniture, a washing of floors, a polishing of wood, a sound of voices,

footsteps, quivering, movement.

 

The two children, crushed by such loud authority, leaving nobody alone,

seemed to find it natural enough to submit to it. The boy, Leonard, was

good looking, though insignificant of feature, and stiff in manner. The

girl, Rosa, fair-haired, with pretty blue eyes, gentle and affectionate,

would have been pleasing especially with the freshness of her delicate

complexion, and her kind manner, had her nose not been quite so large or so

awkwardly placed; it made her face heavy and gave her a foolish expression.

She was like a girl of Holbein, in the gallery at Basle—the daughter of

burgomaster Meier—sitting, with eyes cast down, her hands on her knees,

her fair hair falling down to her shoulders, looking embarrassed and

ashamed of her uncomely nose. But so far Rosa had not been troubled by it,

and it never had broken in upon her inexhaustible chatter. Always her

shrill voice was heard in the house telling stories, always breathless, as

though she had no time to say everything, always excited and animated, in

spite of the protests which she drew from her mother, her father, and even

her grandfather, exasperated, not so much because she was forever talking

as because she prevented them talking themselves. For these good people,

kind, loyal, devoted—the very cream of good people—had almost all the

virtues, but they lacked one virtue which is capital, and is the charm of

life: the virtue of silence.

 

Christophe was in tolerant mood. His sorrow had softened his intolerant and

emphatic temper. His experience of the cruel indifference of the elegant

made him more conscious of the worth of these honest folk, graceless and

devilish tiresome, who had yet an austere conception of life, and because

they lived joylessly, seemed to him to live without weakness. Having

decided that they were excellent, and that he ought to like them, like the

German that he was, he tried to persuade himself that he did in fact like

them. But he did not succeed; he lacked that easy Germanic idealism, which

does not wish to see, and does not see, what would be displeasing to its

sight, for fear of disturbing the very proper tranquillity of its judgment

and the pleasantness of its existence. On the contrary, he never was so

conscious of the defects of these people as when he loved them, when he

wanted to love them absolutely without reservation; it was a sort of

unconscious loyalty, and an inexorable demand for truth, which, in spite of

himself, made him more clear-sighted, and more exacting, with what was

dearest to him. And it was not long before he began to be irritated by the

oddities of the family. They made no attempt to conceal them. Contrary to

the usual habit they displayed every intolerable quality they possessed,

and all the good in them was hidden. So Christophe told himself, for he

judged himself to have been unjust, and tried to surmount his first

impressions, and to discover in them the excellent qualities which they so

carefully concealed.

 

He tried to converse with old Justus Euler, who asked nothing better. He

had a secret sympathy with him, remembering that his grandfather had liked

to praise him. But good old Jean Michel had more of the pleasant faculty of

deceiving himself about his friends than Christophe, and Christophe soon

saw that. In vain did he try to accept Euler’s memories of his grandfather.

He could only get from him a discolored caricature of Jean Michel, and

scraps of talk that were utterly uninteresting. Euler’s stories used

invariably to begin with: “As I used to say to your poor grandfather…” He

could remember nothing else. He had heard only what he had said himself.

 

Perhaps Jean Michel used only to listen in the same way. Most friendships

are little more than arrangements for mutual satisfaction, so that each

party may talk about himself to the other. But at least Jean Michel,

however naïvely he used to give himself up to the delight of talking, had

sympathy which he was always ready to lavish on all sides. He was

interested in everything; he always regretted that he was no longer

fifteen, so as to be able to see the marvelous inventions of the new

generations, and to share their thoughts. He had the quality, perhaps the

most precious in life, a curiosity always fresh, sever changing with the

years, born anew every morning. He had not the talent to turn this gift to

account; but how many men of talent might envy him! Most men die at twenty

or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest

of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more

and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and

loved when they were alive.

 

It was so long since old Euler had been alive, and he had been such a small

thing then, that what was left of him now was very poor and rather

ridiculous. Outside his former trade and his family life he knew nothing,

and wished to know nothing. On every subject he had ideas ready-made,

dating from his youth. He pretended to some knowledge of the arts, but he

clung to certain hallowed names of men, about whom he was forever

reiterating his emphatic formulæ: everything else was naught and had never

been. When modern interests were mentioned he would not listen, and talked

of something else. He declared that he loved music passionately, and he

would ask Christophe to play. But as soon as Christophe, who had been

caught once or twice, began to play, the old fellow would begin to talk

loudly to his daughter, as though the music only increased his interest in

everything but music. Christophe would get up exasperated in the middle of

his piece, so one would notice it. There were only a few old airs—three or

four—some very beautiful, others very ugly, but all equally sacred, which

were privileged to gain comparative silence and absolute approval. With the

very first notes the old man would go into ecstasies, tears would come to

his eyes, not so much for the pleasure he was enjoying as for the pleasure

which once he had enjoyed. In the end Christophe had a horror of these

airs, though some of them, like the Adelaïde of Beethoven, were very dear

to him; the old man was always humming the first bars of them, and never

failed to declare, “There, that is music,” contemptuously comparing it with

“all the blessed modern music, in which there is no melody.” Truth to tell,

he knew nothing whatever about it.

 

His son-in-law was better educated and kept in touch with artistic

movements; but that was even worse, for in his judgment there was always a

disparaging tinge. He was lacking neither in taste nor intelligence; but he

could not bring himself to admire anything modern. He would have disparaged

Mozart and Beethoven, if they had been contemporary, just as he would have

acknowledged the merits of Wagner and Richard Strauss had they been dead

for a century. His discontented temper refused to allow that there might be

great men living during his own lifetime; the idea was distasteful to him.

He was so embittered by his wasted life that he insisted on pretending that

every life was wasted, that it could not be otherwise,