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

himself, as realities not only superior to

interest, but also to his own life. When he was a little out of patience

with her remarks and told her so in his naïve arrogance, she just shrugged

her shoulders: she did not take him seriously. She thought he was using

big words such as she was accustomed to hearing from her brother when

he announced periodically his absurd and ridiculous resolutions, which

he never by any chance put into practice. And then when she saw that

Christophe really believed in what he said, she thought him mad and lost

interest in him.

 

After that she took no trouble to appear to advantage, and she showed

herself as she was: much more German, and average German, than she seemed

to be at first, more perhaps than she thought.—The Jews are quite

erroneously reproached with not belonging to any nation and with forming

from one end of Europe to the other a homogeneous people impervious to the

influence of the different races with which they have pitched their tents.

In reality there is no race which more easily takes on the impress of the

country through which it passes: and if there are many characteristics in

common between a French Jew and a German Jew, there are many more different

characteristics derived from their new country, of which with incredible

rapidity they assimilate the habits of mind: more the habits than the mind,

indeed. But habit, which is a second nature to all men, is in most of them

all the nature that they have, and the result is that the majority of the

autochthonous citizens of any country have very little right to reproach

the Jews with the lack of a profound and reasonable national feeling of

which they themselves possess nothing at all.

 

The women, always more sensible to external influences, more easily

adaptable to the conditions of life and to change with them—Jewish women

throughout Europe assume the physical and moral customs, often exaggerating

them, of the country in which they live,—without losing the shadow and the

strange fluid, solid, and haunting quality of their race.—This idea came

to Christophe. At the Mannheims’ he met Judith’s aunts, cousins, and

friends. Though there was little of the German in their eyes, ardent and

too close together, their noses going down to their lips, their strong

features, their red blood coursing under their coarse brown skins: though

almost all of them seemed hardly at all fashioned to be German—they

were all extraordinarily German: they had the same way of talking, of

dressing,—of overdressing.—Judith was much the best of them all: and

comparison with them made all that was exceptional in her intelligence, all

that she had made of herself, shine forth. But she had most of their faults

just as much as they. She was much more free than they morally—almost

absolutely free—but socially she was no more free: or at least her

practical sense usurped the place of her freedom of mind. She believed in

society, in class, in prejudice, because when all was told she found them

to her advantage. It was idle for her to laugh at the German spirit: she

followed it like any German. Her intelligence made her see the mediocrity

of some artist of reputation: but she respected him none the less because

of his reputation: and if she met him personally she would admire him: for

her vanity was flattered. She had no love for the works of Brahms and she

suspected him of being an artist of the second rank: but his fame impressed

her: and as she had received five or six letters from him the result was

that she thought him the greatest musician of the day. She had no doubt as

to Christophe’s real worth, or as to the stupidity of Lieutenant Detlev von

Fleischer: but she was more flattered by the homage the lieutenant deigned

to pay to her millions than by Christophe’s friendship: for a dull officer

is a man of another caste: it is more difficult for a German Jewess to

enter that caste than for any other woman. Although she was not deceived

by these feudal follies, and although she knew quite well that if she did

marry Lieutenant Detlev von Fleischer she would be doing him a great honor,

she set herself to the conquest: she stooped so low as to make eyes at

the fool and to flatter his vanity. The proud Jewess, who had a thousand

reasons for her pride—the clever, disdainful daughter of Mannheim the

banker lowered herself, and acted like any of the little middle-class

German women whom she despised.

 

*

 

That experience was short. Christophe lost his illusions about Judith

as quickly as he had found them. It is only just to say that Judith did

nothing to preserve them. As soon as a woman of that stamp has judged a

man she is done with him: he ceases to exist for her: she will not see

him again. And she no more hesitates to reveal her soul to him, with calm

impudence, that to appear naked before her dog, her cat, or any other

domestic animal. Christophe saw Judith’s egoism and coldness, and the

mediocrity of her character. He had not had time to be absolutely caught.

But he had been enough caught to make him suffer and to bring him to a sort

of fever. He did not so much love Judith as what she might have been—what

she ought to have been. Her fine eyes exercised a melancholy fascination

over him: he could not forget them: although he knew now the drab soul that

slumbered in their depths he went on seeing them as he wished to see them,

as he had first seen them. It was one of those loveless hallucinations

of love which take up so much of the hearts of artists when they are not

entirely absorbed by their work. A passing face is enough to create it:

they see in it all the beauty that is in it, unknown to its indifferent

possessor. And they love it the more for its indifference. They love it as

a beautiful thing that must die without any man having known its worth or

that it even had life.

 

Perhaps he was deceiving himself, and Judith Mannheim could not have been

anything more than she was. But for a moment Christophe had believed in

her: and her charm endured: he could not judge her impartially. All her

beauty seemed to him to be hers, to be herself. All that was vulgar in her

he cast back upon her twofold race, Jew and German, and perhaps he was more

indignant with the German than with the Jew, for it had made him suffer

more. As he did not yet know any other nation, the German spirit was for

him a sort of scapegoat: he put upon it all the sins of the world. That

Judith had deceived him was a reason the more for combating it: he could

not forgive it for having crushed the life out of such a soul.

 

Such was his first encounter with Israel. He had hoped much from it. He

had hoped to find in that strong race living apart from the rest an ally

for his fight. He lost that hope. With the flexibility of his passionate

intuition, which made him leap from one extreme to another, he persuaded

himself that the Jewish race was much weaker than it was said to be, and

much more open—much too open—to outside influence. It had all its own

weaknesses augmented by those of the rest of the world picked up on its

way. It was not in them that he could find assistance in working the lever

of his art. Rather he was in danger of being swallowed with them in the

sands of the desert.

 

Having seen the danger, and not feeling sure enough of himself to brave it,

he suddenly gave up going to the Mannheims’. He was invited several times

and begged to be excused without giving any reason. As up till then he had

shown an excessive eagerness to accept, such a sudden change was remarked:

it was attributed to his “originality”: but the Mannheims had no doubt

that the fair Judith had something to do with it: Lothair and Franz joked

about it at dinner. Judith shrugged her shoulders and said it was a fine

conquest, and she asked her brother frigidly not to make such a fuss about

it. But she left no stone unturned in her effort to bring Christophe back.

She wrote to him for some musical information which no one else could

supply: and at the end of her letter she made a friendly allusion to the

rarity of his visits and the pleasure it would give them to see him.

Christophe replied, giving the desired information, said that he was

very busy, and did not go. They met sometimes at the theater. Christophe

obstinately looked away from the Mannheims’ box: and he would pretend not

to see Judith, who held herself in readiness to give him her most charming

smile. She did not persist. As she did not count on him for anything she

was annoyed that the little artist should let her do all the labor of their

friendship, and pure waste at that. If he wanted to come, he would. If

not—oh, well, they could do without him….

 

They did without him: and his absence left no very great gap in the

Mannheims’ evenings. But in spite of herself Judith was really annoyed

with Christophe. It seemed natural enough not to bother about him when

he was there: and she could allow him to show his displeasure at being

neglected: but that his displeasure should go so far as to break off their

relationship altogether seemed to her to show a stupid pride and a heart

more egoistic than in love.—Judith could not tolerate her own faults in

others.

 

She followed the more attentively everything that Christophe did and wrote.

Without seeming to do so, she would lead her brother to the subject of

Christophe: she would make him tell her of his intercourse with him: and

she would punctuate the narrative with clever ironic comment, which never

let any ridiculous feature escape, and gradually destroyed Franz’s

enthusiasm without his knowing it.

 

At first all went well with the Review. Christophe had not yet perceived

the mediocrity of his colleagues: and, since he was one of them, they

hailed him as a genius. Mannheim, who had discovered him, went everywhere

repeating that Christophe was an admirable critic, though he had never

read anything he had written, that he had mistaken his vocation, and that

he, Mannheim, had revealed it to him. They advertised his articles in

mysterious terms which roused curiosity: and his first effort was in fact

like a stone falling into a duck-pond in the atony of the little town. It

was called: Too much music.

 

“Too much music, too much drinking, too much eating,” wrote Christophe.

“Eating, drinking, hearing, without hunger, thirst, or need, from sheer

habitual gormandizing. Living like Strasburg geese. These people are sick

from a diseased appetite. It matters little what you give them: Tristram

or the Trompeter von Säkkingen, Beethoven or Mascagni, a fugue or a

two-step, Adam, Bach, Puccini, Mozart, or Marschner: they do not know what

they are eating: the great thing is to eat. They find no pleasure in it.

Look at them at a concert. Talk of German gaiety! These people do not know

what gaiety means: they are always gay! Their gaiety, like their sorrow,

drops like rain: their joy is dust: there is neither life nor force in it.

They would stay for hours smilingly and vaguely drinking in sounds,