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

song of the stream. So being

both free, music and poesy would go side by side, dreaming, their dreams

mingling. Assuredly all music was not good for such a union, nor all

poetry. The opponents of melodrama had good ground for attack in the

coarseness of the attempts which had been made in that form, and of the

interpreters. Christophe had for long shared their dislike: the stupidity

of the actors who delivered these recitations spoken to an instrumental

accompaniment, without bothering about the accompaniment, without trying

to merge their voices in it, rather, on the contrary, trying to prevent

anything being heard but themselves, was calculated to revolt any musical

ear. But since he had tasted the beauty of Corinne’s harmonious voice—that

liquid and pure voice which played upon music like a ray of light on water,

which wedded every turn of a melody, which was like the most fluid and most

free singing,—he had caught a glimpse of the beauty of a new art.

 

Perhaps he was right, but he was still too inexperienced to venture

without peril upon a form which—if it is meant to be beautiful and really

artistic—is the most difficult of all. That art especially demands one

essential condition, the perfect harmony of the combined efforts of the

poet, the musicians, and the actors. Christophe had no tremors about it: he

hurled himself blindly at an unknown art of which the laws were only known

to himself.

 

His first idea had been to clothe in music a fairy fantasy of Shakespeare

or an act of the second part of Faust. But the theaters showed little

disposition to make the experiment. It would be too costly and appeared

absurd. They were quite willing to admit Christophe’s efficiency in music,

but that he should take upon himself to have ideas about poetry and the

theater made them smile. They did not take him seriously. The world of

music and the world of poesy were like two foreign and secretly hostile

states. Christophe had to accept the collaboration of a poet to be able to

set foot upon poetic territory, and he was not allowed to choose his own

poet. He would not have dared to choose himself. He did not trust his taste

in poetry. He had been told that he knew nothing about it; and, indeed, he

could not understand the poetry which was admired by those about him. With

his usual honesty and stubbornness, he had tried hard sometimes to feel the

beauty of some of these works, but he had always been bewildered and a

little ashamed of himself. No, decidedly he was not a poet. In truth, he

loved passionately certain old poets, and that consoled him a little. But

no doubt he did not love them as they should be loved. Had he not once

expressed, the ridiculous idea that those poets only are great who remain

great even when they are translated into prose, and even into the prose of

a foreign language, and that words have no value apart from the soul which

they express? His friends had laughed at him. Mannheim had called him a

goose. He did not try to defend himself. As every day he saw, through the

example of writers who talk of music, the absurdity of artists who attempt

to image any art other than their own, he resigned himself—though a little

incredulous at heart—to his incompetence in poetry, and he shut his eyes

and accepted the judgments of those whom he thought were better informed

than himself. So he let his friends of the Review impose one of their

number on him, a great man of a decadent coterie, Stephen von Hellmuth, who

brought him an Iphigenia. It was at the time when German poets (like

their colleagues in France) were recasting all the Greek tragedies. Stephen

von Hellmuth’s work was one of those astounding Græco-German plays in which

Ibsen, Homer, and Oscar Wilde are compounded—and, of course, a few manuals

of archeology. Agamemnon was neurasthenic and Achilles impotent: they

lamented their condition at length, and naturally their outcries produced

no change. The energy of the drama was concentrated in the rôle of

Iphigenia—a nervous, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigenia, who lectured the

hero, declaimed furiously, laid bare for the audience her Nietzschian

pessimism and, glutted with death, cut her throat, shrieking with laughter.

 

Nothing could be more contrary to Christophe’s mind than such pretentious,

degenerate, Ostrogothic stuff, in Greek dress. It was hailed as a

masterpiece by everybody about him. He was cowardly and was overpersuaded.

In truth, he was bursting with music and thinking much more of his music

than of the text. The text was a new bed into which to let loose the flood

of his passions. He was as far as possible from the state of abnegation and

intelligent impersonality proper to musical translation of a poetic work.

He was thinking only of himself and not at all of the work. He never

thought of adapting himself to it. He was under an illusion: he saw in the

poem something absolutely different from what was actually in it—just as

when he was a child he used to compose in his mind a play entirely

different from that which was upon the stage.

 

It was not until it came to rehearsal that he saw the real play. One day he

was listening to a scene, and he thought it so stupid that he fancied the

actors must be spoiling it, and went so far as to explain it to them in

the poet’s presence; but also to explain it to the poet himself, who was

defending his interpretation. The author refused bluntly to hear him, and

said with some asperity that he thought he knew what he had meant to write.

Christophe would not give in, and maintained that Hellmuth knew nothing

about it. The general merriment told him that he was making himself

ridiculous. He said no more, agreeing that after all it was not he who had

written the poem. Then he saw the appalling emptiness of the play and was

overwhelmed by it: he wondered how he could ever have been persuaded to

try it. He called himself an idiot and tore his hair. He tried in vain to

reassure himself by saying: “You know nothing about it; it is not your

business. Keep to your music.” He was so much ashamed of certain idiotic

things in it, of the pretentious pathos, the crying falsity of the words,

the gestures and attitudes, that sometimes, when he was conducting the

orchestra, he hardly had the strength to raise his baton. He wanted to go

and hide in the prompter’s box. He was too frank and too little politic to

conceal what he thought. Every one noticed it: his friends, the actors, and

the author. Hellmuth said to him with a frigid smile:

 

“Is it not fortunate enough to please you?”

 

Christophe replied honestly:

 

“Truth to tell, no. I don’t understand it,”

 

“Then you did not read it when you set it to music?”

 

“Yes,” said Christophe naïvely, “but I made a mistake. I understood it

differently.”

 

“It is a pity you did not write what you understood yourself.”

 

“Oh! If only I could have done so!” said Christophe.

 

The poet was vexed, and in his turn criticised the music. He complained

that it was in the way and prevented his words being heard.

 

If the poet did not understand the musician, or the musician the poet, the

actors understood neither the one nor the other, and did not care. They

were only asking for sentences in their parts on which to bring in their

usual effects. They had no idea of adapting their declamation to the

formality of the piece and the musical rhythm. They went one way, the

music another. It was as though they were constantly singing out of tune.

Christophe ground his teeth and shouted the note at them until he was

hoarse. They let him shout and went on imperturbably, not even

understanding what he wanted them to do.

 

Christophe would have flung the whole thing up if the rehearsals had not

been so far advanced, and he had not been bound to go on by fear of legal

proceedings. Mannheim, to whom he confided his discouragement, laughed at

him:

 

“What is it?” he asked. “It is all going well. You don’t understand each

other? What does that matter? Who has ever understood his work but the

author? It is a toss-up whether he understands it himself!”

 

Christophe was worried about the stupidity of the poem, which, he said,

would ruin the music. Mannheim made no difficulty about admitting that

there was no common sense in the poem and that Hellmuth was “a muff,” but

he would not worry about him: Hellmuth gave good dinners and had a pretty

wife. What more did criticism want?

 

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that he had no time to listen to

nonsense.

 

“It is not nonsense!” said Mannheim, laughing. “How serious people are!

They have no idea of what matters in life.”

 

And he advised Christophe not to bother so much about Hellmuth’s business,

but to attend to his own. He wanted him to advertise a little. Christophe

refused indignantly. To a reporter who came and asked for a history of his

life, he replied furiously:

 

“It is not your affair!”

 

And when they asked for his photograph for a review, he stamped with rage

and shouted that he was not, thank God! an emperor, to have his face

passed from hand to hand. It was impossible to bring him into touch with

influential people. He never replied to invitations, and when he had been

forced by any chance to accept, he would forget to go or would go with such

a bad grace that he seemed to have set himself to be disagreeable to

everybody.

 

But the climax came when he quarreled with his review, two days before the

performance.

 

*

 

The thing was bound to happen. Mannheim had gone on revising Christophe’s

articles, and he no longer scrupled about deleting whole lines of criticism

and replacing them with compliments.

 

One day, out visiting, Christophe met a certain virtuoso—a foppish pianist

whom he had slaughtered. The man came and thanked him with a smile that

showed all his white teeth. He replied brutally that there was no reason

for it. The other insisted and poured forth expressions of gratitude.

Christophe cut him short by saying, that if he was satisfied with the

article that was his affair, but that the article had certainly not been

written with a view to pleasing him. And he turned his back on him. The

virtuoso thought him a kindly boor and went away laughing. But Christophe

remembered having received a card of thanks from another of his victims,

and a suspicion flashed upon him. He went out, bought the last number of

the Review at a news-stand, turned to his article, and read… At first he

wondered if he were going mad. Then he understood, and, mad with rage, he

ran to the office of the Dionysos.

 

Waldhaus and Mannheim were there, talking to an actress whom they knew.

They had no need to ask Christophe what brought him. Throwing a number of

the Review on the table, Christophe let fly at them without stopping to

take breath, with extraordinary violence, shouting, calling them rogues,

rascals, forgers, thumping on the floor with a chair. Mannheim began to

laugh. Christophe tried to kick him. Mannheim took refuge behind the table

and rolled with laughter. But Waldhaus took it very loftily. With dignity,

formally, he tried to make himself heard through the row, and said that