Jean-Christophe Journey's End Part 47

"And yet I have no complaint to make of the Parisians. They have given me a welcome altogether different from that which I received before. In my absence I seem to have become a kind of celebrity. I will say nothing of that, for I know what it is worth. I am touched by all the pleasant things which these people say and write of me, and am obliged to them.

But what shall I say to you? I felt much nearer the people who attacked me in old days than I do to the people who laud me now.... It is my own fault, I know. Don't scold me. I had a moment of uneasiness. It was to be expected. It is done now. I understand. Yes. You are right to have sent me back among men. I was in a fair way to be buried in my solitude.

It is unhealthy to play at Zarathustra. The flood of life moves on, moves on away from us. There comes a time when one is as a desert. Many weary days in the burning sun are needed to dig a new channel in the sand, to dig down to the river.--It has been done. I am no longer dizzy.

I am in the current again. I look and see.

"My dear, what a strange people are the French! Twenty years ago I thought they were finished.... They are just beginning again. My dear comrade, Jeannin, foretold it. But I thought he was deceiving himself.

How could one believe it then! France was, like their Paris, full of broken houses, plaster, and holes. I said: 'They have destroyed everything.... What a race of rodents!'--a race of beavers. Just when you think them prostrate on their ruins, lo, they are using the ruins to lay the foundations of a new city. I can see it now in the scaffoldings which are springing up on all sides....

_"Wenn ein Ding geschehen Selbst die Narren es verstehen,..."_ [Footnote: "When a thing has happened, even the fools can see it."]

"In truth there is just the same French disorder. One needs to be used to it to see in the rout seething up from all directions, the bands of workmen, each going about his appointed task. There are also people who can do nothing without vilifying what their neighbors are doing. All this is calculated to upset the stoutest head. But when you have lived, as I have, nearly ten years with them, you cannot be deceived by their uproar. You see then that it is their way of spurring themselves on to work. They talk, but they work, and as each builder's yard sets about building a house, in the end you find that the city has been re-builded.

What is most remarkable is that, taken together, all these buildings are not discordant. They may maintain opposing theses, but all their minds are cast in the same mold. So that, beneath their anarchy, there are common instincts, a racial logic which takes the place of discipline, and this discipline is, when all is told, probably more solid than that of a Prussian regiment.

"Everywhere the same enthusiasm, the same constructive fever: in politics, where Socialists and Nationalists vie with one another in tightening up the wheels of slackened power; in art, which some wish to make into an old aristocratic mansion for the privileged few, and others a vast hall open to the people, a hall where the collective soul can sing; they are reconstructors of the past, or constructors of the future. But whatever they do, these ingenious creatures are forever building the same cells. They have the instincts of beavers or bees, and through the ages are forever doing the same things, returning to the same forms. The most revolutionary among them are perhaps those who most closely cling, though they may not know it, to the most ancient traditions. Among the syndicates and the most striking of the young writers I have found purely medieval souls.

"Now that I have grown used to their tumultuous ways, I can watch them working with pleasure. Let us be frank: I am too old a bear ever to feel at ease in any of their houses: I need the open air. But what good workers they are! That is their highest virtue. It laves the most mediocre and the most corrupt: and then, in their artists, what a sense of beauty! I remarked that much less in the old days. You taught me to see. My eyes were opened in the light of Rome. Your Renaissance men have helped me to understand these. A page of Debussy, a torso of Rodin, a phrase of Suares, these are all in the direct line from your _cinquecestenti_.

"Not that there is not much that is distasteful to me here. I have found my old friends of the market-place, who used to drive me to fury. They have not changed. But, alas! I have changed. I cannot be severe. When I feel myself wanting to judge one of them harshly I say to myself: 'You have no right. You have done worse than these men, though you thought yourself so strong.' Also, I have learned that nothing exists in vain, and that even the vilest have their place in the scheme of the tragedy.

The depraved dilettantists, the foetid amoralists, have accomplished their termitic task; the tottering ruins must be brought down before they can be built up again. The Jews have been true to their sacred mission, which is, in the midst of other races, to be a foreign race, the race which, from end to end of the world, is to link up the network of human unity. They break down the intellectual barriers between the nations, to give Divine Reason an open field. The worst agents of corruption, the ironic destroyers who ruin our old beliefs and kill our well-beloved dead, toil, unwittingly, in the holy work of new life. So the ferocious self-interest of the cosmopolitan bankers, whose labors are attended with such and so many disasters, build, whether they will or no, the future peace of the world, side by side with the revolutionaries who combat them, far more surely than the idiotic pacifists.

"You see, I am getting old. I have lost my bite. My teeth have lost their sharpness. When I go to the theater I am now only one of those simple spectators who apostrophize the actors and cry shame on the traitor.

"My tranquil Grace, I am only talking about myself: and yet I think only of you. If you knew how importunate is my ego! It is oppressive and absorbing. It is like a millstone that G.o.d has tied round my neck. How I should have loved to lay it at your feet! But what would you have done with it? It is a poor kind of present.... Your feet were made to tread the soft earth and the sand sinking beneath the tread. I see your feet carelessly pa.s.sing over the lawns dappled with anemones.... (Have you been again to the Villa Doria?)... And you are tired! I see you now half-reclining in your favorite retreat, in your drawing-room, propped up on your elbow, holding a book which you do not read. You listen to me kindly, without paying much attention to what I say; for I am tiresome, and, for patience, you turn every now and then to your own thoughts; but you are courteous, and, taking care not to upset me, when a chance word brings you back from your distant journeying, your eyes, so absent before, quickly take on an expression of interest. And I am as far from what I am saying as you: I, too, hardly hear the sound of my words: and while I follow their reflection in your lovely face, in my heart I listen to other words which I do not speak to you. Those words, my tranquil Grace, unlike the others, you hear quite clearly, but you pretend not to hear them.

"Adieu. I think you will see me again in a little while, I shall not languish here. What should I do now that my concerts are over?--I kiss your children on their little cheeks. They are yours and you. I must be content!...

"CHRISTOPHE."

"Tranquil Grace" replied:

"My dear,

"I received your letter in the little corner of the drawing-room that you remember so well, and I read it, as I am clever at reading, by letting your letter fall every now and then and resting. Don't laugh at me. I did that to make it last a long time. In that way we spent a whole afternoon together. The children asked me what it was I kept on reading.

I told them it was a letter from you. Aurora looked at the paper pityingly and said: 'How tiresome it must be to write such a long letter!' I tried to make her understand that it was not an imposition I had set you, but a conversation we were having together. She listened without a word, then ran away with her brother to play in the next room, and a little later, when Lionello began to shout, I heard Aurora say: 'You mustn't make such a noise: mamma is talking to M. Christophe.'

"What you tell me about the French interests me, but it does not surprise me. You remember that I often used to reproach you with being unjust towards them. It is impossible to like them. But what an intelligent people they are! There are mediocre nations who are preserved by their goodness of heart or their physical vigor. The French are saved by their intelligence. It laves all their weaknesses, and regenerates them. When you think they are down, beaten, perverted, they find new youth in the ever-bubbling spring of their minds.

"But I must scold you. You ask my pardon for speaking only of yourself.

You are an _ingannatore_. You tell me nothing about yourself.

Nothing of what you have been doing. Nothing of what you have been seeing. My cousin Colette--(why did not you go and see her?)--had to send me press-cuttings about your concerts, or I should have known nothing of your success. You only mentioned it by the way. Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic.

That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian, and I don't like you tormenting yourself with the past. The present is quite enough. I don't know exactly what it was that you did. You told me the story in a very few words, and I think I guessed the rest. It was not a nice story, but you are none the less dear to me for it. My poor, dear Christophe, a woman does not reach my age without knowing that an honest man is often very weak. If one did not know his weakness one would not love him so much. Don't think any more about what you have done. Think of what you are going to do.

Repentance is quite useless. Repentance means going back. And in good as in evil, we must always go forward. _Sempre avanti, Savoia!_... So you think I am going to let you come back to Rome! You have nothing to do here. Stay in Paris, work, do: play your part in its artistic life. I will not have you throw it all up. I want you to make beautiful things, I want them to succeed, I want you to be strong and to help the new young Christophes who are setting out on the same struggles, and pa.s.sing through the same trials. Look for them, help them, be kinder to your juniors than your seniors were to you.--In fine, I want you to be strong because I know that you are strong: you have no idea of the strength that gives me.

"Almost every day I go with the children to the Villa Borghese.

Yesterday we drove to Ponte Molle, and walked round the tower of Monte Mario. You slander my powers of walking and my legs cry out against you: 'What did the fellow mean by saying at the Villa Doria that we get tired in ten paces? He knows nothing about it. If we are not p.r.o.ne to give ourselves trouble, it is because we are lazy, and not because we cannot....' You forget, my dear, that I am a little peasant....

"Go and see my cousin Colette. Are you still angry with her? She is a good creature at heart, and she swears by you! Apparently the Parisian women are crazy about your music. (Perhaps they were in the old days.) My Berne bear may, and he will, be the lion of Paris. Have you had letters? And declarations? You don't mention any woman. Can you be in love? Tell me. I am not jealous. Your friend,

"G."

"... So you think I am likely to be pleased with your last sentence! I would to G.o.d you were jealous! But don't look to me to make you so. I have no taste for these mad Parisiennes, as you call them. Mad? They would like to be so. But they are nothing like it. You need not hope that they will turn my head. There would be more chance of it perhaps if they were indifferent to my music. But it is only too true that they love it; and how am I to keep my illusions? When any one tells you that he understands you, you may be very sure that he will never do so....

"Don't take my joking too seriously. The feeling I have for you does not make me unjust to other women. I have never had such true sympathy for them as I have now since I ceased to look at them with lover's eyes. The tremendous effort they have been making during the last thirty years to escape from the degrading and unwholesome semi-domesticity, to which our stupid male egoism condemned them, to their and our unhappiness, seems to me to be one of the most splendid facts of our time. In a town like this one learns to admire the new generation of young women, who, in spite of so many obstacles, with so much fresh ardor rush on to the conquest of knowledge and diplomas,--the knowledge, the diplomas which, they think, must liberate them, open to them the arcana of the unknown world and make them the equals of men....

"No doubt their faith is illusory and rather ridiculous. But progress is never realized as we expect it to be: it is none the less realized because it takes entirely different paths from those we have marked out for it. This effort of the women will not be wasted. It will make women completer and more human, as they were in the great ages. They will no longer be without interest in the living questions of the world, as most scandalously and monstrously they have been, for it is intolerable that a woman, though she be never so careful in her domestic duties, should think herself absolved from thinking of her civic duties in the modern city. Their great-great-grandmothers of the time of Joan of Arc and Catherine Sforza were not of this way of thinking. Woman has withered.

We have refused her air and sun. She is taking them from us again by force. Ah! the brave little creatures!... Of course, many of those who are now struggling will die and many will be led astray. It is an age of crisis. The effort is too violent for those whose strength has too much gone to seed. When a plant has been for a long time without water, the first shower of rain is apt to scald it. But what would you? It is the price of progress. Those who come after will flourish through their sufferings. The poor little warlike virgins of our time, many of whom will never marry, will be more fruitful for posterity than the generations of matrons who gave birth before them; for, at the cost of their sacrifices, there will issue from them the women of a new cla.s.sic age.

"I have not found these working bees in your cousin Colette's drawing-room. What whim was it made you send me to her? I had to obey you; but it is not well: you are abusing your power. I had refused three of her invitations, left two of her letters unanswered. She came and hunted me up at one of my rehearsals--(they were going through my sixth symphony). I saw her, during the interval, come in with her nose in the air, sniffing and crying: 'That smacks of love! Ah! How I love such music!...'

"She has changed, physically; only her cat-like eyes with their bulging pupils, and her fantastic nose, always wrinkling up and never still, are the same. But her face is wider, big-boned, highly colored, and coa.r.s.ened. Sport has transformed her. She gives herself up to sport of all kinds. Her husband, as you know, is one of the swells at the Automobile Club and the Aero Club. There is not an aviation meeting, nor a race by air, land, or water, but the Stevens-Delestrades think themselves compelled to be present at it. They are always out on the highways and byways. Conversation is quite impossible; they talk of nothing but Racing, Rowing, Rugby, and the Derby. They belong to a new race of people. The days of _Pelleas_ are forever gone for the women. Souls are no longer in fashion. All the girls hoist a red, swarthy complexion, tanned by driving in the open air and playing games in the sun: they look at you with eyes like men's eyes: they laugh and their laughter is a little coa.r.s.e. In tone they have become more brutal, more crude. Every now and then your cousin will quite calmly say the most shocking things. She is a great eater, where she used to eat hardly anything. She still complains about her digestion, merely out of habit, but she never misses a mouthful for it. She reads nothing. No one reads among these people. Only music has found favor in their sight. Music has even profited by the neglect of literature. When these people are worn out, music is a Turkish bath to them, a warm vapor, ma.s.sage, tobacco.

They have no need to think. They pa.s.s from sport to love, and love also is a sport. But the most popular sport among their esthetic entertainments is dancing. Russian dancing, Greek dancing, Swiss dancing, American dancing, everything is set to a dance in Paris: Beethoven's symphonies, the tragedies of aeschylus, the _Clavecin bien Tempere_, the antiques of the Vatican, _Orpheus_, Tristan, the Pa.s.sion, and gymnastics. These people are suffering from vertigo.

"The queer thing is to see how your cousin reconciles everything, her estheticism, her sport, and her practical sense (for she has inherited from her mother her sense of business and her domestic despotism). All these things ought to make an incredible mixture, but she is quite at her ease with them all: her most foolish eccentricities leave her mind quite clear, just as she keeps her eyes and hands sure when she goes whirling along in her motor. She is a masterful woman: her husband, her guests, her servants, she leads them all, with drums beating and colors flying. She is also busy with politics: she is for 'Monseigneur'; not that I believe her to be a royalist, but it is another excuse for bestirring herself. And although she is incapable of reading more than ten pages of a book, she arranges the elections to the Academies.--She set about extending her patronage to me. You may guess that that was not at all to my liking. What is most exasperating is that the fact of my having visited her in obedience to you has absolutely convinced her of her power over me. I take my revenge in thrusting home truths at her.

She only laughs, and is never at a loss for a reply. 'She is a good creature at heart....' Yes, provided she is occupied. She admits that herself: if the machine has nothing to grind she is capable of anything and everything to keep it going.--I have been to her house twice. I shall not go again. Twice is enough to prove my obedience to you. You don't want me to die? I leave her house broken, crushed, cramped. Last time I saw her I had a frightful nightmare after it: I dreamed I was her husband, all my life tied to that living whirlwind.... A foolish dream, and it need not trouble her real husband, for of all who go to the house he is the last to be seen with her, and when they are together they only talk of sport. They get on very well.

"How could these people make my music a success? I try not to understand.

I suppose it shocked them in a new way. They liked it for brutalizing them. For the time being they like art with a body to it.

But they have not the faintest conception of the soul in the body: they will pa.s.s from the infatuation of to-day to the indifference of to-morrow, from the indifference of to-morrow to the abuse of the day after, without ever having known it. That is the history of all artists.

I am under no illusion as to my success, and have not been for a long time: and they will make me pay for it.--Meanwhile I see the most curious things going on. The most enthusiastic of my admirers is ... (I give him you among a thousand) ... our friend Levy-Coeur. You remember the gentleman with whom I fought a ridiculous duel? Now he instructs those who used not to understand me. He does it very well too. He is the most intelligent of all the men talking about me. You may judge what the others are worth. There is nothing to be proud of, I a.s.sure you.

"I don't want to be proud of it. I am too humiliated when I hear the work for which I am belauded. I see myself in it, and what I see is not beautiful. What a merciless mirror is a piece of music to those who can see into it! Happily they are blind and deaf. I have put so much of my troubles and weaknesses into my work that sometimes it seems to me wicked to let loose upon the world such hordes of demons. I am comforted when I see the tranquillity of the audience: they are trebly armored: nothing can reach them: were it not so, I should be d.a.m.ned.... You reproach me with being too hard on myself. You do not know me as I know myself. They see what we are: they do not see what we might have been, and we are honored for what is not so much the effect of our qualities as of the events that bear us along, and the forces which control us.

Let me tell you a story....

"The other evening I was in one of the cafes where they play fairly good music, though in a queer way: with five or six instruments, filled out with a piano, they play all the symphonies, the ma.s.ses, the oratorios.

It is just like the stonecutters in Rome, where they sell the Medici chapel as an ornament for the mantelpiece. Apparently this is useful to art, which, if it is to circulate among men, must be turned into base coin. For the rest there is no deception in these concerts. The programs are copious, the musicians conscientious. I found a violoncellist there and entered into conversation with him: his eyes reminded me strangely of my father's; he told me the story of his life. He was the grandson of a peasant, the son of a small official, a clerk in a _mairie_ in a village in the North. They wanted to make him a gentleman, a lawyer, and he was sent to school in the neighboring town. He was a st.u.r.dy country boy, not at all fitted for being cooped up over the small work of a notary's office, and he could not stay caged in: he used to jump over the wall, and wander through the fields, and run after the girls, and spend his strength in brawling: the rest of the time he lounged and dreamed of things he would never do. Only one thing had any attraction for him: music. G.o.d knows why! There was not a single musician in his family, except a rather cracked great-uncle, one of those odd, provincial characters, whose often remarkable intelligence and gifts are spent, in their proud isolation, on whims, and cranks, and trivialities.

This great-uncle had invented a new system of notation--(yet another!)--which was to revolutionize music; he even claimed to have found a system of stenography by which words, tune, and accompaniment could be written simultaneously; but he never managed to transcribe it correctly himself. They just laughed at the old man in the family, but all the same, they were proud of him. They thought: 'He is an old madman. Who knows? Perhaps he is a genius.'--It was no doubt from him that the grandnephew had his mania for music. What music could he hear in the little town?... But bad music can inspire a love as pure as good music.

"The unhappy part of it was that there seemed no possibility of confessing to such a pa.s.sion in such surroundings: and the boy had not his great-uncle's cracked brains. He hid away to read the old lunatic's lucubrations which formed the basis of his queer musical education. Vain and fearful of his father and of public opinion, he would say nothing of his ambitions until he had succeeded. He was crushed by his family, and did as so many French people of the middle-cla.s.s have to do when, out of weakness or kindness, they dare not oppose the will of their relations: they submit to all appearance, and live their true life in perpetual secrecy. Instead of following his bent, he struggled on, against his inclination, in the work they had marked out for him. He was as incapable of succeeding in it as he was of coming to grief. Somehow or other he managed to pa.s.s the necessary examinations. The main advantage to him was that he escaped from the spying of his father and the neighbors. The law crushed him: he was determined not to spend his life in it. But while his father was alive he dared not declare his desire.

Perhaps it was not altogether distasteful to him to have to wait a little before he took the decisive step. He was one of those men who all their lives long dazzle themselves with what they will do later on, with the things they could do. For the moment he did nothing. He lost his bearings, and, intoxicated by his new life in Paris, gave himself up with all his young peasant brutality to his two pa.s.sions, woman and music; he was crazed with the concerts he went to, no less than with pleasure. He wasted years doing this without even turning to account the means at hand of completing his musical education. His umbrageous pride, his unfortunate independent and susceptible character kept him from taking any course of lessons or asking anybody's advice.

"When his father died he sent Themis and Justinian packing. He began to compose without having had the courage to acquire the necessary technique. His inveterate habit of idle lounging and his taste for pleasure had made him incapable of any serious effort. He felt keenly: but his idea, and its form, would at once slip away: when all was told he expressed nothing but the commonplace. The worst of all was that there was really something great in this mediocrity. I read two of his old compositions. Here and there were striking ideas, left in the rough and then deformed. They were like fireflies over a bog.... And what a strange mind he had! He tried to explain Beethoven's sonatas to me. He saw them as absurd, childish stories. But such pa.s.sion as there was in him, such profound seriousness! Tears would come to his eyes as he talked. He would die for the thing he loves. He is, touching and grotesque. Just as I was on the point of laughing in his face, I wanted to take him to my arms.... He is fundamentally honest, and has a healthy contempt for the charlatanry of the Parisian groups and their sham reputations,--(though at the same time he cannot help having the bourgeois admiration for successful men)....

"He had a small legacy. In a few months it was all gone, and, finding himself without resources, he had, like so many others of his kind, the criminal honesty to marry a girl, also without resources, whom he had seduced; she had a fine voice, and played music without any love for it.

He had to live on her voice and her mediocre talent until he had learned how to play the 'cello. Naturally it was not long before they saw their mediocrity, and could not bear each other. They had a little girl. The father transferred his power of illusion to the child, and thought that she would be what he had failed to be. The little girl took after her mother: she was made to play the piano, though she had not a shadow of talent; she adored her father, and applied herself to her work to please him. For several years they plied the hotels in the watering-places, picking up more insults than money. The child was ailing and overworked, and died. The wife grew desperate, and became more shrewish every day.

So his life became one of endless misery, with no hope of escape, brightened only by an ideal which he knew himself to be incapable of attaining....

"And, my dear, when I saw that poor broken devil, whose life has been nothing but a series of disappointments, I thought: 'That is what I might have been.' There was much in common in our boyhood, and certain adventures in our two lives are the same; I have even found a certain kinship in some of our musical ideas: but his have stopped short. What is it that has kept me from foundering as he has done? My will, no doubt. But also the chances of life. And even taking my will, is that due only to my merits? Is it not rather due to my descent, my friends, and G.o.d who has aided me?... Such thoughts make a man humble. With such thoughts he feels brotherly to all who love his art, and suffer for it.

"Prom lowest to highest the distance is not so great....

"On that I thought of what you said in your letter. You are right: an artist has no right to hold aloof, so long as he can help others. So I shall stay: I shall force myself to spend a few months in every year here, or in Vienna, or Berlin, although it is hard for me to grow accustomed to these cities again. But I must not abdicate. If I do not succeed in being of any great service, as I have good reason to think I shall not, perhaps my sojourn in these cities will be useful to me, myself. And I shall console myself with the thought that it was your wish. Besides ... (I will not lie)... I am beginning to find it pleasant.

Adieu, tyrant. You have triumphed. I am beginning not only to do what you want me to do, but to love doing it.

"CHRISTOPHE."