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

contrast French

and German culture and to decry the German to the advantage of the French,

just to annoy her husband and to avenge herself for the boredom she had to

suffer in the little town.

 

Reinhart was really amused. Notwithstanding his learning, he had stopped

short at the ideas he had learned at school. To him the French were a

clever people, skilled in practical things, amiable, talkative, but

frivolous, susceptible, and boastful, incapable of being serious,

or sincere, or of feeling strongly—a people without music, without

philosophy, without poetry (except for l’Art Poétique, Béranger and

François Coppée)—a people of pathos, much gesticulation, exaggerated

speech, and pornography. There were not words strong enough for the

denunciation–of Latin Immorality; and for want of a better he always came

back to frivolity, which for him, as for the majority of his compatriots,

had a particularly unpleasant meaning. And he would end with the

usual couplet in praise of the noble German people,—the moral people

(“By that,” Herder has said, “_it is distinguished from all other

nations_.”)—the faithful people (_treues Volk … Treu_ meaning

everything: sincere, faithful, loyal and upright)—_the People par

excellence_, as Fichte says—German Force, the symbol of justice and

truth—German thought—the German Gemüt—the German language, the only

original language, the only language that, like the race itself, has

preserved its purity—German women, German wine, German song … “_Germany,

Germany above everything in the world_!”

 

Christophe would protest. Frau Reinhart would cry out. They would all

shout. They did not get on the less for it. They knew quite well that they

were all three good Germans.

 

Christophe used often to go and talk, dine and walk with his new friends.

Lili Reinhart made much of him, and used to cook dainty suppers for him.

She was delighted to have the excuse for satisfying her own greediness. She

paid him all sorts of sentimental and culinary attentions. For Christophe’s

birthday she made a cake, on which were twenty candles and in the middle

a little wax figure in Greek costume which was supposed to represent

Iphigenia holding a bouquet. Christophe, who was profoundly German in spite

of himself, was touched by these rather blunt and not very refined marks of

true affection.

 

The excellent Reinharts found other more subtle ways of showing their real

friendship. On his wife’s instigation Reinhart, who could hardly read a

note of music, had bought twenty copies of Christophe’s Lieder—(the

first to leave the publisher’s shop)—he had sent them to different parts

of Germany to university acquaintances. He had also sent a certain number

to the libraries of Leipzig and Berlin, with which he had dealings through

his classbooks. For the moment at least their touching enterprise, of

which Christophe knew nothing, bore no fruit. The Lieder which had been

scattered broadcast seemed to miss fire; nobody talked of them; and the

Reinharts, who were hurt by this indifference, were glad they had not told

Christophe about what they had done, for it would have given him more pain

than consolation. But in truth nothing is lost, as so often appears in

life; no effort is in vain. For years nothing happens. Then one day it

appears that your idea has made its way. It was impossible to be sure

that Christophe’s Lieder had not reached the hearts of a few good people

buried in the country, who were too timid or too tired to tell him so.

 

One person wrote to him. Two or three months after the Reinharts had sent

them, a letter came for Christophe. It was warm, ceremonious, enthusiastic,

old-fashioned in form, and came from a little town in Thuringia, and was

signed “Universitäts Musikdirektor Professor Dr. Peter Schulz.”

 

It was a great joy for Christophe, and even greater for the Reinharts, when

at their house he opened the letter, which he had left lying in his pocket

for two days. They read it together. Reinhart made signs to his wife which

Christophe did not notice. He looked radiant, until suddenly Reinhart saw

his face grow gloomy, and he stopped dead in the middle of his reading.

 

“Well, why do you stop?” he asked.

 

(They used the familiar du.)

 

Christophe flung the letter on the table angrily.

 

“No. It is too much!” he said.

 

“What is?”

 

“Read!”

 

He turned away and went and sulked in a corner.

 

Reinhart and his wife read the letter, and could find in it only fervent

admiration.

 

“I don’t see,” he said in astonishment.

 

“You don’t see? You don’t see?…” cried Christophe, taking the letter and

thrusting it in his face. “Can’t you read? Don’t you see that he is a

‘Brahmin’”?

 

And then Reinhart noticed that in one sentence the _Universitäts

Musikdirektor_ compared Christophe’s Lieder with those of Brahms.

Christophe moaned:

 

“A friend! I have found a friend at last!… And I have hardly found him

when I have lost him!…”

 

The comparison revolted him. If they had let him, he would have replied

with a stupid letter, or perhaps, upon reflection, he would have thought

himself very prudent and generous in not replying at all. Fortunately, the

Reinharts were amused by his ill-humor, and kept him from committing any

further absurdity. They succeeded in making him write a letter of thanks.

But the letter, written reluctantly, was cold and constrained. The

enthusiasm of Peter Schulz was not shaken by it. He sent two or three

more letters, brimming, over with affection. Christophe was not a good

correspondent, and although he was a little reconciled to his unknown

friend by the sincerity and real sympathy which he could feel behind his

words, he let the correspondence drop. Schulz wrote no more. Christophe

never thought about him.

 

*

 

He now saw the Reinharts every day and frequently several times a day. They

spent almost all the evenings together. After spending the day alone in

concentration he had a physical need of talking, of saying everything that

was in his mind, even if he were not understood, and of laughing with or

without reason, of expanding and stretching himself.

 

He played for them. Having no other means of showing his gratitude, he

would sit at the piano and play for hours together. Frau Reinhart was no

musician, and she had difficulty in keeping herself from yawning; but she

sympathized with Christophe, and pretended to be interested in everything

he played. Reinhart was not much more of a musician than his wife, but was

sometimes touched quite materially by certain pieces of music, certain

passages, certain bars, and then he would be violently moved sometimes

even to tears, and that seemed silly to him. The rest of the time he felt

nothing; it was just music to him. That was the general rule. He was never

moved except by the least good passages of a composition—absolutely

insignificant passages. Both of them persuaded themselves that they

understood Christophe, and Christophe tried to pretend that it was so.

Every now and then he would be seized by a wicked desire to make fun of

them. He would lay traps for them and play things without any meaning,

inapt potpourris; and he would let them think that he had composed them.

Then, when they had admired it, he would tell them what it was. Then they

would grow wary, and when Christophe played them a piece with an air of

mystery, they would imagine that he was trying to catch them again, and

they would criticise it. Christophe would let them go on and back them up,

and argue that such music was worthless, and then he would break out:

 

“Rascals! You are right!… It is my own!” He would be as happy as a boy at

having taken them in. Frau Reinhart would be cross and come and give him

a little slap; but he would laugh so good-humoredly that they would laugh

with him. They did not pretend to be infallible. And as they had no leg to

stand on, Lili Reinhart would criticise everything and her husband would

praise everything, and so they were certain that one or other of them would

always be in agreement with Christophe.

 

For the rest, it was not so much the musician that attracted them in

Christophe as the crack-brained boy, with his affectionate ways and true

reality of life. The ill that they had heard spoken of him had rather

disposed them in his favor. Like him, they were rather oppressed by the

atmosphere of the little town; like him, they were frank, they judged for

themselves, and they regarded him as a great baby, not very clever in the

ways of life, and the victim of his own frankness.

 

Christophe was not under many illusions concerning his new friends, and

it made him sad to think that they did not understand the depths of his

character, and that they would never understand it. But he was so much

deprived of friendship and he stood in such sore need of it, that he was

infinitely grateful to them for wanting to like him a little. He had

learned wisdom in his experiences of the last year; he no longer thought

he had the right to be overwise. Two years earlier he would not have been

so patient. He remembered with amusement and remorse his severe judgment

of the honest and tiresome Eulers! Alas! How wisdom had grown in him! He

sighed a little. A secret voice whispered: “Yes, but for how long?”

 

That made him smile and consoled him a little. What would he not have given

to have a friend, one friend who would understand him and share his soul!

But although he was still young he had enough experience of the world to

know that his desire was one of those which are most difficult to realize

in life, and that he could not hope to be happier than the majority of the

true artists who had gone before him. He had learned the histories of some

of them. Certain books, borrowed from the Reinharts, had told him about

the terrible trials through which the German musicians of the seventeenth

century had passed, and the calmness and resolution with which one of

these great souls—the greatest of all, the heroic Schutz—had striven,

as unshakably he went on his way in the midst of wars and burning towns,

and provinces ravaged by the plague, with his country invaded, trampled

underfoot by the hordes of all Europe, and—worst of all—broken, worn out,

degraded by misfortune, making no fight, indifferent to everything, longing

only for rest. He thought: “With such as example, what right has any man

to complain? They had no audience, they had no future; they wrote for

themselves and God. What they wrote one day would perhaps be destroyed by

the next. And yet they went on writing and they were not sad. Nothing made

them lose their intrepidity, their joviality. They were satisfied with

their song; they asked nothing of life but to live, to earn their daily

bread, to express their ideas, and to find a few honest men, simple, true,

not artists, who no doubt did not understand them, but had confidence in

them and won their confidence in return. How dared he have demanded more

than they? There is a minimum of happiness which it is permitted to demand.

But no man has the right to more; it rests with a man’s self to gain the

surplus of happiness, not with others.”

 

Such thoughts brought him new serenity, and he loved his good friends the

Reinharts the more for them. He had no idea that even this affection was to

be denied him.