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

The exasperated Elements, let loose from

the cage in which they are held bound by the Laws which hold the balance

between the mind and the existence of things, reign, formless and colossal,

in the night of consciousness. The soul is in agony. There is no longer the

will to live. There is only longing for the end, for the deliverance of

death….

 

And suddenly there is lightning!

 

Christophe shouted for joy.

 

*

 

Joy, furious joy, the sun that lights up all that is and will be, the

godlike joy of creation! There is no joy but in creation. There are no

living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering

over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of

creation: love, genius, action,—quickened by flames issuing from one and

the same fire. Even those who cannot find a place by the great fireside:

the ambitious, the egoists, the sterile sensualists,—try to gain warmth in

the pale reflections of its light.

 

To create in the region of the body, or in the region of the mind, is to

issue from the prison of the body: it is to ride upon the storm of life: it

is to be He who Is. To create is to triumph over death.

 

Wretched is the sterile creature, that man or that woman who remains alone

and lost upon the earth, scanning their withered bodies, and the sight of

themselves from which no flame of life will ever leap! Wretched is the soul

that does not feel its own fruitfulness, and know itself to be big with

life and love, as a tree with blossom in the spring! The world may heap

honors and benefits upon such a soul: it does but crown a corpse.

 

*

 

When Christophe was struck by the flash of lightning, an electric fluid

coursed through his body: he trembled under the shock. It was as though

on the high seas, in the dark night, he had suddenly sighted land. Or it

was as though in a crowd he had gazed into two eyes saluting him. Often it

would happen to him after hours of prostration when his mind was leaping

desperately through the void. But more often still it came in moments

when he was thinking of something else, talking to his mother, or walking

through the streets. If he were in the street a certain human respect kept

him from too loudly demonstrating his joy. But if he were at home nothing

could keep him back. He would stamp. He would sound a blare of triumph: his

mother knew that well, and she had come to know what it meant. She used to

tell Christophe that he was like a hen that has laid an egg.

 

He was permeated with his musical imagination. Sometimes it took shape in

an isolated phrase complete in itself: more often it would appear as a

nebula enveloping a whole work: the structure of the work, its general

lines, could be perceived through a veil, torn asunder here and there

by dazzling phrases which stood out from the darkness with the clarity

of sculpture. It was only a flash: sometimes others would come in quick

succession: each lit up other corners of the night. But usually, the

capricious force haying once shown itself unexpectedly, would disappear

again for several days into its mysterious retreats, leaving behind it a

luminous ray.

 

This delight in inspiration was so vivid that Christophe was disgusted by

everything else. The experienced artist knows that inspiration is rare and

that intelligence is left to complete the work of intuition: he puts his

ideas under the press and squeezes out of them the last drop of the divine

juices that are in them—(and if need be sometimes he does not shrink from

diluting them with clear water)—Christophe was too young and too sure of

himself not to despise such contemptible practices. He dreamed impossibly

of producing nothing that was not absolutely spontaneous. If he had not

been deliberately blind he would certainly have seen the absurdity of his

aims. Ho doubt he was at that time in a period of inward abundance in which

there was no gap, no chink, through which boredom or emptiness could creep.

Everything served as an excuse to his inexhaustible fecundity: everything

that his eyes saw or his ears heard, everything with which he came in

contact in his daily life: every look, every word, brought forth a crop of

dreams. In the boundless heaven of his thoughts he saw circling millions

of milky stars, rivers of living light.—And yet, even then, there were

moments when everything was suddenly blotted out. And although the night

could not endure, although he had hardly time to suffer from these long

silences of his soul, he did not escape a secret terror of that unknown

power which came upon him, left him, came again, and disappeared…. How

long, this time? Would it ever come again?—His pride rejected that thought

and said: “This force is myself. When it ceases to be, I shall cease to be:

I shall kill myself.”—He never ceased to tremble: but it was only another

delight.

 

But, if, for the moment, there was no danger of the spring running dry,

Christophe was able already to perceive that it was never enough to

fertilize a complete work. Ideas almost always appeared rawly: he had

painfully to dig them out of the ore. And always they appeared without any

sort of sequence, and by fits and starts: to unite them he had to bring to

bear on them an element of reflection and deliberation and cold will, which

fashioned them into new form. Christophe was too much of an artist not to

do so: but he would not accept it: he forced himself to believe that he

did no more than transcribe what was within himself, while he was always

compelled more or less to transform it so as to make it intelligible.—More

than that: sometimes he would absolutely forge a meaning for it. However

violently the musical idea might come upon him it would often have been

impossible for him to say what it meant. It would come surging up from the

depths of life, from far beyond the limits of consciousness: and in that

absolutely pure Force, which eluded common rhythms, consciousness could

never recognize in it any of the motives which stirred in it, none of the

human feelings which it defines and classifies: joys, sorrows, they were

all merged in one single passion which was unintelligible, because it

was above the intelligence. And yet, whether it understood or no, the

intelligence needed to give a name to this form, to bind it down to

one or other of the structures of logic, which man is forever building

indefatigably in the hive of his brain.

 

So Christophe convinced himself—he wished to do so—that the obscure power

that moved him had an exact meaning, and that its meaning was in accordance

with his will. His free instinct, risen from the unconscious depths, was

willy-nilly forced to plod on under the yoke of reason with perfectly clear

ideas which had nothing at all in common with it. And work so produced was

no more than a lying juxtaposition of one of those great subjects that

Christophe’s mind had marked out for itself, and those wild forces which

had an altogether different meaning unknown to himself.

 

*

 

He groped his way, head down, borne on by the contradictory forces warring

in him, and hurling into his incoherent works a fiery and strong quality

of life which he could not express, though he was joyously and proudly

conscious of it.

 

The consciousness of his new vigor made him able for the first time to

envisage squarely everything about him, everything that he had been taught

to honor, everything that he had respected without question: and he judged

it all with insolent freedom. The veil was rent: he saw the German lie.

 

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little

truth and many lies. The human mind is feeble: pure truth agrees with it

but ill: its religion, its morality, its states, its poets, its artists,

must all be presented to it swathed in lies. These lies are adapted to the

mind of each race: they vary from one to the other: it is they that make it

so difficult for nations to understand each other, and so easy for them to

despise each other. Truth is the same for all of us: but every nation has

its own lie, which it calls its idealism: every creature therein breathes

it from birth to death: it has become a condition of life: there are only

a few men of genius who can break free from it through heroic moments of

crisis, when they are alone in the free world of their thoughts.

 

It was a trivial thing which suddenly revealed to Christophe the lie of

German art. It was not because it had not always been visible that he had

not seen it: he was not near it, he had not recoiled from it. Now the

mountain appeared to his gaze because he had moved away from it.

 

He was at a concert of the Städtische Townhalle. The concert was given

in a large hall occupied by ten or twelve rows of little tables—about two

or three hundred of them. At the end of the room was a stage where the

orchestra was sitting. All round Christophe were officers dressed up in

their long, dark coats,—with broad, shaven faces, red, serious, and

commonplace: women talking and laughing noisily, ostentatiously at their

ease: jolly little girls smiling and showing all their teeth: and large men

hidden behind their beards and spectacles, looking like kindly spiders with

round eyes. They got up with every fresh glass to drink a toast: they did

this almost religiously: their faces, their voices changed: it was as

though they were saying Mass: they offered each other the libations, they

drank of the chalice with a mixture of solemnity and buffoonery. The music

was drowned under the conversation and the clinking of glasses. And yet

everybody was trying to talk and eat quietly. The Herr Konzertmeister, a

tall, bent old man, with a white beard hanging like a tail from his chin,

and a long aquiline nose, with spectacles, looked like a philologist.—All

these types were familiar to Christophe. But on that day he had an

inclination—he did not know why—to see them as caricatures. There are

days like that when, for no apparent reason, the grotesque in people and

things which in ordinary life passes unnoticed, suddenly leaps into view.

 

The programme of the music included the Egmont overture, a valse of

Waldteufel, Tannhäuser’s Pilgrimage to Rome, the overture to the _Merry

Wives_ of Nicolai, the religious march of Athalie, and a fantasy on the

North Star. The orchestra played the Beethoven overture correctly, and

the valse deliciously. During the Pilgrimage of Tannhäuser, the uncorking

of bottles was heard. A big man sitting at the table next to Christophe

beat time to the Merry Wives by imitating Falstaff. A stout old lady, in

a pale blue dress, with a white belt, golden pince-nez on her flat nose,

red arms, and an enormous waist, sang in a loud voice Lieder of Schumann

and Brahms. She raised her eyebrows, made eyes at the wings, smiled with

a smile that seemed to curdle on her moon-face, made exaggerated gestures

which must certainly have called to mind the café-concert but for the

majestic honesty which shone in her: this