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

mother of a family played the

part of the giddy girl, youth, passion: and Schumann’s poetry had a faint

smack of the nursery. The audience was in ecstasies.—But they grew solemn

and attentive when there appeared the Choral Society of the Germans of the

South (_Süddeutschen Männer Liedertafel_), who alternately cooed and roared

part songs full of feeling. There were forty and they sang four parts: it

seemed as though they had set themselves to free their execution of every

trace of style that could properly be called choral: a hotch-potch of

little melodious effects, little timid puling shades of sound, dying

pianissimos, with sudden swelling, roaring crescendos, like some one

heating on an empty box: no breadth or balance, a mawkish style: it was

like Bottom:

 

“Let me play the lion. I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I

will roar you as it were a nightingale.”

 

Christophe listened: foam the beginning with growing amazement. There was

nothing new in it all to him. He knew these concerts, the orchestra, the

audience. But suddenly it all seemed to him false. All of it: even to

what he most loved, the Egmont overture, in which the pompous disorder

and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No

doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd

interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread

about their works like a heavy mist.—No matter, there was in the works,

even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had

never before felt.—What was it? He dared not analyze it, deeming it a

sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But in vain did he shut his eyes

to it: he had seen it. And, in spite of himself, he went on seeing it: like

the Vergognosa at Pisa he looked: between his fingers.

 

He saw German art stripped. All of them—the great and the idiots—laid

bare their souls with a complacent tenderness. Emotion overflowed, moral

nobility trickled down, their hearts melted in distracted effusions: the

sluice gates were opened to the fearful German tender-heartedness: it

weakened the energy of the stronger, it drowned the weaker under its

grayish waters: it was a flood: in the depths of it slept German thought.

And, what thoughts were those of a Mendelssohn, a Brahms, a Schumann, and,

following them, the whole legion of little writers of affected and tearful

Lieder! Built on sand. Never rock. Wet and shapeless clay.—It was all

so foolish, so childish often, that Christophe could not believe that it

never occurred to the audience. He looked about him: but he saw only gaping

faces, convinced in advance of the beauties they were hearing and the

pleasure that they ought to find in it. How could they admit their own

right to judge for themselves? They were filled with respect for these

hallowed names. What did they not respect? They were respectful before

their programmes, before their glasses, before themselves. It was clear

that mentally they dubbed everything excellent that remotely or nearly

concerned them.

 

Christophe passed in review the audience and the music alternately: the

music reflected the audience, the audience reflected the music. Christophe

felt laughter overcoming him and he made faces. However, he controlled

himself. But when the Germans of the South came and solemnly sang the

Confession that reminded him of the blushes of a girl in love, Christophe

could not contain himself. He shouted with laughter. Indignant cries of

“Ssh!” were raised. His neighbors looked at him, scared: their honest,

scandalized faces filled him with joy: he laughed louder than ever, he

laughed, he laughed until he cried. Suddenly the audience grew angry. They

cried: “Put him out!” He got up, and went, shrugging his shoulders, shaking

with suppressed laughter. His departure caused a scandal. It was the

beginning of hostilities between Christophe and his birthplace.

 

*

 

After that experience Christophe shut himself up and set himself to read

once more the works of the “hallowed” musicians. He was appalled to find

that certain of the masters whom he loved most had lied. He tried hard

to doubt it at first, to believe that he was mistaken.—But no, there was

no way out of it. He was staggered by the conglomeration of mediocrity and

untruth which constitutes the artistic treasure of a great people. How many

pages could bear examination!

 

From that time on he could begin to read other works, other masters, who

were dear to him, only with a fluttering heart…. Alas! There was some

spell cast upon him: always there was the same discomfiture. With some of

them his heart was rent: it was as though he had lost a dear friend, as if

he had suddenly seen that a friend in whom he had reposed entire confidence

had been deceiving him for years. He wept for it. He did not sleep at

night: he could not escape his torment. He blamed himself: perhaps he had

lost his judgment? Perhaps he had become altogether an idiot?—No, no. More

than ever he saw the radiant beauty of the day and with more freshness and

love than ever he felt the generous abundance of life: his heart was not

deceiving him….

 

But for a long time he dared not approach those who were the best for him,

the purest, the Holy of Holies. He trembled at the thought of bringing his

faith in them to the test. But how resist the pitiless instinct of a brave

and truthful soul, which will go on to the end, and see things as they are,

whatever suffering may be got in doing so?—So he opened the sacred works,

he called upon the last reserve, the imperial guard…. At the first glance

he saw that they were no more immaculate than the others. He had not the

courage to go on. Every now and then he stopped and closed the book: like

the son of Noah, he threw his cloak about his father’s nakedness….

 

Then he was prostrate in the midst of all these ruins. He would rather have

lost an arm, than have tampered with his blessed illusions. In his heart he

mourned. But there was so much sap in him, so much reserve of life, that

his confidence in art was not shaken. With a young man’s naïve presumption

he began life again as though no one had ever lived it before him.

Intoxicated by his new strength, he felt—not without reason, perhaps—that

with a very few exceptions there is almost no relation between living

passion and the expression which art has striven to give to it. But he was

mistaken in thinking himself more happy or more true when he expressed it.

As he was filled with passion it was easy for him to discover it at the

back of what he had written: but no one else would have recognized it

through the imperfect vocabulary with which he designated its variations.

Many artists whom he condemned were in the same case. They had had, and had

translated profound emotions: but the secret of their language had died

with them.

 

Christophe was no psychologist: he was not bothered with all these

arguments: what was dead for him had always been so. He revised his

judgment of the past with all the confident and fierce injustice of youth.

He stripped the noblest souls, and had no pity for their foibles. There

were the rich melancholy, the distinguished fantasy, the kindly thinking

emptiness of Mendelssohn. There were the bead-stringing and the affectation

of Weber, his dryness of heart, his cerebral emotion. There was Liszt, the

noble priest, the circus rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in

equal doses of real and false nobility, of serene idealism and disgusting

virtuosity. Schubert, swallowed up by his sentimentality, drowned at the

bottom of leagues of stale, transparent water. The men of the heroic ages,

the demi-gods, the Prophets, the Fathers of the Church, were not spared.

Even the great Sebastian, the man of ages, who bore in himself the past

and the future,—Bach,—was not free of untruth, of fashionable folly, of

school-chattering. The man who had seen God, the man who lived in God,

seemed sometimes to Christophe to have had an insipid and sugared religion,

a Jesuitical style, rococo. In his cantatas there were languorous and

devout airs—(dialogues of the Soul coquetting with Jesus)—which sickened

Christophe: then he seemed to see chubby cherubim with round limbs, and

flying draperies. And also he had a feeling that the genial Cantor

always wrote in a closed room: his work smacked of stuffiness: there was

not in his music that brave outdoor air that was breathed in others,

not such great musicians, perhaps, but greater men—more human—than

he. Like Beethoven or Händel. What hurt him in all of them, especially

in the classics, was their lack of freedom: almost all their works

were “constructed.” Sometimes an emotion was filled out with all the

commonplaces of musical rhetoric, sometimes with a simple rhythm,

an ornamental design, repeated, turned upside down, combined in

every conceivable way in a mechanical fashion. These symmetrical and

twaddling constructions—classical, and neo-classical sonatas and

symphonies—exasperated Christophe, who, at that time, was not very

sensible of the beauty of order, and vast and well-conceived plans. That

seemed to him to be rather masons’ work than musicians’.

 

But he was no less severe with the romantics. It was a strange thing, and

he was more surprised by it than anybody,—but no musicians irritated him

more than those who had pretended to be—and had actually been—the most

free, the most spontaneous, the least constructive,—those, who, like

Schumann, had poured drop by drop, minute by minute, into their innumerable

little works, their whole life. He was the more indignantly in revolt

against them as he recognized in them his adolescent soul and all the

follies that he had vowed to pluck out of it. In truth, the candid Schumann

could not be taxed with falsity: he hardly ever said anything that he had

not felt. But that was just it: his example made Christophe understand that

the worst falsity in German art came into it not when the artists tried to

express something which they had not felt, but rather when they tried to

express the feelings which they did in fact feel—_feelings which were

false_. Music is an implacable mirror of the soul. The more a German

musician is naïve and in good faith, the more he displays the weaknesses

of the German soul, its uncertain depths, its soft tenderness, its want of

frankness, its rather sly idealism, its incapacity for seeing itself, for

daring to come face to face with itself. That false idealism is the secret

sore even of the greatest—of Wagner. As he read his works Christophe

ground his teeth. Lohengrin seemed to him a blatant lie. He loathed the

huxtering chivalry, the hypocritical mummery, the hero without fear and

without a heart, the incarnation of cold and selfish virtue admiring itself

and most patently self-satisfied. He knew it too well, he had seen it in

reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing

down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about

sacrificing others. The Flying Dutchman overwhelmed him with its massive

sentimentality and its gloomy boredom. The loves of the barbarous decadents

of the Tetralogy were of a sickening staleness. Siegmund carrying off

his sister sang a tenor drawing-room song. Siegfried and Brünnhilde, like

respectable German married people, in the Götterdämmerung laid bare

before each other, especially for the benefit of the audience, their

pompous and voluble conjugal passion. Every sort of lie had arranged to

meet in that work: false idealism, false Christianity, false Gothicism,

false legend,