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

own

satisfaction.

 

They looked at each other smiling: he talking: she hardly listening.

Although she was proud of her son she attached no great importance to

his artistic projects: she was thinking: “He is happy: that matters

most.”—While he was growing more and more excited with his discourse he

watched his mother’s dear face, with her black shawl tightly tied round her

head, her white hair, her young eyes that devoured him lovingly, her sweet

and tranquil kindliness. He knew exactly what she was thinking. He said to

her jokingly:

 

“It is all one to you, eh? You don’t care about what I’m telling you?”

 

She protested weakly:

 

“Oh, no! Oh, no!”

 

He kissed her.

 

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! You need not defend yourself. You are right. Only love

me. There is no need to understand me—either for you or for anybody else.

I do not need anybody or anything now: I have everything in myself….”

 

“Oh!” said Louisa. “Another maggot in his brain!… But if he must have one

I prefer this to the other.”

 

*

 

What sweet happiness to float on the surface of the lake of his

thoughts!… Lying in the bottom of a boat with his body bathed in sun, his

face kissed by the light fresh wind that skims over the face of the waters,

he goes to sleep: he is swung by threads from the sky. Under his body lying

at full length, under the rocking boat he feels the deep, swelling water:

his hand dips into it. He rises: and with his chin on the edge of the boat

he watches the water flowing by as he did when he was a child. He sees the

reflection of strange creatures darting by like lightning…. More, and yet

more…. They are never the same. He laughs at the fantastic spectacle that

is unfolded within him: he laughs at his own thoughts: he has no need to

catch and hold them. Select? Why select among So many thousands of dreams?

There is plenty of time!… Later on!… He has only to throw out a line at

will to draw in the monsters whom he sees gleaming in the water. He lets

them pass…. Later on!…

 

The boat floats on at the whim of the warm wind and the insentient stream.

All is soft, sun, and silence.

 

*

 

At last languidly he throws out his line. Leaning out over the lapping

water he follows it with his eyes until it disappears. After a few moments

of torpor he draws it in slowly: as he draws it in it becomes heavier: just

as he is about to fish it out of the water he stops to take breath. He

knows that he has his prey: he does not know what it is: he prolongs the

pleasure of expectancy.

 

At last he makes up his mind: fish with gleaming, many-colored scales

appear from the water: they writhe like a nest of snakes. He looks at them

curiously, he stirs them with his finger: but hardly has he drawn them from

the water than their colors fade and they slip between his fingers. He

throws them back into the water and begins to fish for others. He is more

eager to see one after another all the dreams stirring in him than to catch

at any one of them: they all seem more beautiful to him when they are

freely swimming in the transparent lake….

 

He caught all kinds of them, each more extravagant than the last. Ideas had

been heaped up in him for months and he had not drawn upon them, so that he

was bursting with riches. But it was all higgledy-piggledy: his mind was

a Babel, an old Jew’s curiosity shop in which there were piled up in the

one room rare treasures, precious stuffs, scrap-iron, and rags. He could

not distinguish their values: everything amused him. There were thrilling

chords, colors which rang like bells, harmonies which buzzed like bees,

melodies smiling like lovers’ lips. There were visions of the country,

faces, passions, souls, characters, literary ideas, metaphysical ideas.

There were great projects, vast and impossible, tetralogies, decalogies,

pretending to depict everything in music, covering whole worlds. And, most

often there were obscure, flashing sensations, called forth by a trifle,

the sound of a voice, a man or a woman passing in the street, the pattering

of rain. An inward rhythm.—Many of these projects advanced no further

than their title: most of them were never more than a note or two: it was

enough. Like all very young people, he thought he had created what he

dreamed of creating.

 

*

 

But he was too keenly alive to be satisfied for long with such fantasies.

He wearied of an illusory possession: he wished to seize his dreams.—How

to begin? They seemed to him all equally important. He turned and turned

them: he rejected them, he took them up again…. No, he never took them up

again: they were no longer the same, they were never to be caught twice:

they were always changing: they changed in his hands, under his eyes, while

he was watching them. He must make haste: he could not: he was appalled by

the slowness with which he worked. He would have liked to do everything in

one day, and he found it horribly difficult to complete the smallest thing.

His dreams were passing and he was passing himself: while he was doing

one thing it worried him not to be doing another. It was as though it was

enough to have chosen one of his fine subjects for it to lose all interest

for him. And so all his riches availed him nothing. His thoughts had life

only on condition that he did not tamper with them: everything that he

succeeded in doing was still-born. It was the torment of Tantalus: within

reach were fruits that became stones as soon as he plucked them: near his

lips was a clear stream which sank away whenever he bent down, to drink.

 

To slake his thirst lie tried to sip at the springs that he had conquered,

his old compositions…. Loathsome in taste! At the first gulp, he spat it

out again, cursing. What! That tepid water, that insipid music, was that

his music?—He read through all his compositions: he was horrified: he

understood not a note of them, he could not even understand how he had come

to write them. He blushed. Once after reading through a page more foolish

than the rest he turned round to make sure that there was nobody in the

room, and then he went and hid his face in his pillow like a child ashamed.

Sometimes they seemed to him so preposterously silly that they were quite

funny, and he forgot that they were his own….

 

“What an idiot!” he would cry, rocking with laughter.

 

But nothing touched him more than those compositions in which he had set

out to express his own passionate feelings: the sorrows and joys of love.

Then he would bound in his chair as though a fly had stung him: he would

thump on the table, beat his head, and roar angrily: he would coarsely

apostrophize himself: he would vow himself to be a swine, trebly a

scoundrel, a clod, and a clown—a whole litany of denunciation. In the end

he would go and stand before his mirror, red with shouting, and then he

would take hold of his chin and say:

 

“Look, look, you scurvy knave, look at the ass-face that is yours! I’ll

teach you to lie, you blackguard! Water, sir, water.”

 

He would plunge his face into his basin, and hold it under water until he

was like to choke. When he drew himself up, scarlet, with his eyes starting

from his head, snorting like a seal, he would rush to his table, without

bothering to sponge away the water trickling down him: he would seize the

unhappy compositions, angrily tear them in pieces, growling:

 

“There, you beast!… There, there, there!…”

 

Then he would recover.

 

What exasperated him most in his compositions was their untruth. Not

a spark of feeling in them. A phraseology got by heart, a schoolboy’s

rhetoric: he spoke of love like a blind man of color: he spoke of it from

hearsay, only repeating the current platitudes. And it was not only love:

it was the same with all the passions, which had been used for themes and

declamations.—And yet he had always tried to be sincere.—But it is not

enough to wish to be sincere: it is necessary to have the power to be so:

and how can a man be so when as yet he knows nothing of life? What had

revealed the falseness of his work, what had suddenly digged a pit between

himself and his past was the experience which he had had during the last

six months of life. He had left fantasy: there was now in him a real

standard to which he could bring all the thoughts for judgment as to their

truth or untruth.

 

The disgust which his old work, written without passion, roused in him,

made him decide with his usual exaggeration that he would write no more

until he was forced to write by some passionate need: and leaving the

pursuit of his ideas at that, he swore that he would renounce music

forever, unless creation were imposed upon him in a thunderclap.

 

*

 

He made this resolve because he knew quite well that the storm was coming.

 

Thunder falls when it will, and where it will. But there are peaks which

attract it. Certain places—certain souls—breed storms: they create them,

or draw them from all points of the horizon: and certain ages of life,

like certain months of the year, are so saturated with electricity, that

thunderstorms are produced in them,—if not at will—at any rate when they

are expected.

 

The whole being of a man is taut for it. Often the storm lies brooding for

days and days. The pale sky is hung with burning, fleecy clouds. No wind

stirs. The still air ferments, and seems to boil. The earth lies in a

stupor: no sound comes from it. The brain hums feverishly: all nature

awaits the explosion of the gathering forces, the thud of the hammer which

is slowly rising to fall back suddenly on the anvil of the clouds. Dark,

warm shadows pass: a fiery wind rises through the body, the nerves quiver

like leaves…. Then silence falls again. The sky goes on gathering

thunder.

 

In such expectancy there is voluptuous anguish. In spite of the discomfort

that weighs so heavily upon you, you feel in your veins the fire which is

consuming the universe. The soul surfeited boils in the furnace, like wine

in a vat. Thousands of germs of life and death are in labor in it. What

will issue from it? The soul knows not. Like a woman with child, it is

silent: it gazes in upon itself: it listens anxiously for the stirring in

its womb, and thinks: “What will be born of me?”…

 

Sometimes such waiting is in vain. The storm passes without breaking: but

you wake heavy, cheated, enervated, disheartened. But it is only postponed:

the storm will break: if not to-day, then to-morrow: the longer it is

delayed, the more violent will it be….

 

Now it comes!… The clouds have come up from all corners of the soul.

Thick masses, blue and black, torn by the frantic darting of the lightning:

they advance heavily, drunkenly, darkening the soul’s horizon, blotting out

light. An hour of madness!…