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

false gods, false humans. Never did more monstrous convention

appear than in that theater which was to upset all the conventions. Neither

eyes, nor mind, nor heart could be deceived by it for a moment: if they

were, then they must wish to be so.—They did wish to be so. Germany was

delighted with that doting, childish art, an art of brutes let loose, and

mystic, namby-pamby little girls.

 

And Christophe could do nothing: as soon as he heard the music he was

caught up like the others, more than the others, by the flood, and the

diabolical will of the man who had let it loose. He laughed, and he

trembled, and his cheeks burned, and he felt galloping armies rushing

through him! And he thought that those who bore such storms within

themselves might have all allowances made for them. What cries of joy

he uttered when in the hallowed works which he could not read without

trembling he felt once more his old emotion, ardent still, with nothing

to tarnish the purity of what he loved! These were glorious relics that

he saved from the wreck. What happiness they gave him! It seemed to him

that he had saved a part of himself. And was it not himself? These great

Germans, against whom he revolted, were they not his blood, his flesh, his

most precious life? He was only severe with them because he was severe with

himself. Who loved them better than he? Who felt more than he the goodness

of Schubert, the innocence of Haydn, the tenderness of Mozart, the great

heroic heart of Beethoven? Who more often than he took refuge in the

murmuring of the forests of Weber, and the cool shade of the cathedrals of

John Sebastian, raising against the gray sky of the North, above the plains

of Germany, their pile of stone, and their gigantic towers with their

sun-tipped spires?—But he suffered from their lies, and he could not

forget them. He attributed them to the race, their greatness to themselves.

He was wrong. Greatness and weaknesses belong equally to the race whose

great, shifting thought flows like the greatest river of music and poetry

at which Europe comes to drink.—And in what other people would he have

found the simple purity which now made it possible for him to condemn it so

harshly?

 

He had no notion of that. With the ingratitude of a spoiled child he turned

against his mother the weapons which he had received from her. Later,

later, he was to feel all that he owed to her, and how dear she was to

him….

 

But he was in a phase of blind reaction against all the idols of his

childhood. He was angry with himself and with them because he had believed

in them absolutely and passionately—and it was well that it was so. There

is an age in life when we must dare to be unjust, when we must make a

clean sweep of all admiration and respect got at second-hand, and deny

everything—truth and untruth—everything which we have not of ourselves

known for truth. Through education, and through everything that he sees and

hears about him, a child absorbs so many lies and blind follies mixed with

the essential verities of life, that the first duty of the adolescent who

wishes to grow into a healthy man is to sacrifice everything.

 

*

 

Christophe was passing through that crisis of healthy disgust. His instinct

was impelling him to eliminate from his life all the undigested elements

which encumbered it.

 

First of all to go was that sickening sweet tenderness which sucked away

the soul of Germany like a damp and moldy riverbed. Light! Light! A rough,

dry wind which should sweep away the miasmas of the swamp, the misty

staleness of the Lieder, Liedchen, Liedlein, as numerous as drops of rain

in which inexhaustibly the Germanic Gemüt is poured forth: the countless

things like Sehnsucht (Desire), Heimweh (Homesickness), Aufschwung

(Soaring), Trage (A question), Warum? (Why?), an den Mond (To

the Moon), an die Sterne (To the Stars), an die Nachtigall (To the

Nightingale), an den Frühling (To Spring), an den Sonnenschein (To

Sunshine): like Frühlingslied (Spring Song), Frühlingslust (Delights of

Spring), Frühlingsgruss (Hail to the Spring), Frülingsfahrt (A Spring

Journey), Frülingsnacht (A Spring Night), Frühlingsbotschaft (The

Message of Spring): like Stimme der Liebe (The Voice of Love), _Sprache

der Liebe_ (The Language of Love), Trauer der Liebe (Love’s Sorrow),

Geist der Liebe (The Spirit of Love), Fülle der Liebe (The Fullness

of Love): like Blumenlied (The Song of the Flowers), Blumenbrief (The

Letter of the Flowers), Blumengruss (Flowers’ Greeting): like Herzeleid

(Heart Pangs), Mein Herz ist schwer (My Heart is Heavy), _Mein Herz ist

betrübt_ (My Heart is Troubled), Mein Aug’ ist trüb (My Eye is Heavy):

like the candid and silly dialogues with the Röselein (The Little Rose),

with the brook, with the turtle dove, with the lark: like those idiotic

questions: _”If the briar could have no thorns?”—“Is an old husband like

a lark who has built a nest?”—“Is she newly plighted?“_: the whole deluge

of stale tenderness, stale emotion, stale melancholy, stale poetry…. How

many lovely things profaned, rare things, used in season or out! For the

worst of it was that it was all useless: a habit of undressing their hearts

in public, a fond and foolish propensity of the honest people of Germany

for plunging loudly into confidences. With nothing to say they were always

talking! Would their chatter never cease?—As well bid frogs in a pond be

silent.

 

It was in the expression of love that Christophe was most rawly conscious

of untruth: for he was in a position to compare it with the reality. The

conventional love songs, lacrymose and proper, contained nothing like the

desires of man or the heart of woman. And yet the people who had written

them must have loved at least once in their lives! Was it possible that

they could have loved like that? No, no, they had lied, as they always did,

they had lied to themselves: they had tried to idealize themselves….

Idealism! That meant that they were afraid of looking at life squarely,

were incapable of seeing things like a man, as they are.—Everywhere the

same timidity, the same lack of manly frankness. Everywhere the same chilly

enthusiasm, the same pompous lying solemnity, in their patriotism, in

their drinking, in their religion. The Trinklieder (Drinking Songs) were

prosopopeia to wine and the bowl: “Du, herrlich Glas …” (“Thou, noble

glass …”). Faith—the one thing in the world which should be spontaneous,

springing from the soul like an unexpected sudden stream—was a

manufactured article, a commodity of trade. Their patriotic songs were made

for docile flocks of sheep basking in unison…. Shout, then!—What! Must

you go on lying—”idealizing“—till you are surfeited, till it brings you

to slaughter and madness!…

 

Christophe ended by hating all idealism. He preferred frank brutality to

such lying. But at heart he was more of an idealist than the rest, and he

had not—he could not have—any more real enemies than the brutal realists

whom he thought he preferred.

 

He was blinded by passion. He was frozen by the mist, the anæmic lying,

“the sunless phantom Ideas.” With his whole being he reached upwards to

the sun. In his youthful contempt for the hypocrisy with which he was

surrounded, or for what he took to be hypocrisy, he did not see the high,

practical wisdom of the race which little by little had built up for itself

its grandiose idealism in order to suppress its savage instincts, or to

turn them to account. Not arbitrary reasons, not moral and religious codes,

not legislators and statesmen, priests and philosophers, transform the

souls of peoples and often impose upon them a new nature: but centuries of

misfortune and experience, which forge the life of peoples who have the

will to live.

 

*

 

And yet Christophe went on composing: and his compositions were not

examples of the faults which he found in others. In him creation was an

irresistible necessity which would not submit to the rules which his

intelligence laid down for it. No man creates from reason, but from

necessity.—It is not enough to have recognized the untruth and affectation

inherent in the majority of the feelings to avoid falling into them: long

and painful endeavor is necessary: nothing is more difficult than to be

absolutely true in modern society with its crushing heritage of indolent

habits handed down through generations. It is especially difficult for

those people, those nations who are possessed by an indiscreet mania for

letting their hearts speak—for making them speak—unceasingly, when most

generally it had much better have been silent.

 

Christophe’s heart was very German in that: it had not yet learned the

virtue of silence: and that virtue did not belong to his age. He had

inherited from his father a need for talking, and talking loudly. He

knew it and struggled against it: bat the conflict paralyzed part of his

forces.—And he had another gift of heredity, no less burdensome, which

had come to him from his grandfather: an extraordinary difficulty—in

expressing himself exactly.—He was the son of a virtuoso. He was

conscious of the dangerous attraction of virtuosity: a physical pleasure,

the pleasure of skill, of agility, of satisfied muscular activity, the

pleasure of conquering, of dazzling, of enthralling in his own person

the many-headed audience: an excusable pleasure, in a young man almost

an innocent pleasure, though none the less destructive of art and soul:

Christophe knew it: it was in his blood: he despised it, but all the same

he yielded to it.

 

And so, torn between the instincts of his race and those of his genius,

weighed down by the burden of a parasitical past, which covered him with

a crust that he could not break through, he floundered along, and was

much nearer than he thought to all that he shunned and banned. All his

compositions were a mixture of truth and turgidness, of lucid strength and

faltering stupidity. It was only in rare moments that his personality could

pierce the casing of the dead personality which hampered his movements.

 

He was alone. He had no guide to help him out of the mire. When he thought

he was out of it he slipped back again. He went blindly on, wasting his

time and strength in futile efforts. He was spared no trial: and in the

disorder of his creative striving he never knew what was of greatest worth

in what he created. He tied himself up in absurd projects, symphonic poems,

which pretended to philosophy and were of monstrous dimensions. He was too

sincere to be able to hold to them for long together: and he would discard

them in disgust before he had stretched out a single movement. Or he would

set out to translate into overtures the most inaccessible works of poetry.

Then he would flounder about in a domain which was not his own. When

he drew up scenarios for himself—(for he stuck at nothing)—they were

idiotic: and when he attacked the great works of Goethe, Hebbel, Kleist, or

Shakespeare, he understood them all wrong. It was not want of intelligence

but want of the critical spirit: he could not yet understand others, he was

too much taken up with himself: he found himself everywhere with his naïve

and turgid soul.

 

But besides these monsters who were not really begotten, he wrote a

quantity of small pieces, which were the immediate expression of passing

emotions—the most eternal of all: musical