Jean-Christophe Part 48

And suddenly there is lightning!

Christophe shouted for joy.

Joy, furious joy, the sun that lights up all that is and will be, the G.o.dlike joy of creation! There is no joy but in creation. There are no living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of creation: love, genius, action,--quickened by flames issuing from one and the same fire. Even those who cannot find a place by the great fireside: the ambitious, the egoists, the sterile sensualists,--try to gain warmth in the pale reflections of its light.

To create in the region of the body, or in the region of the mind, is to issue from the prison of the body: it is to ride upon the storm of life: it is to be He who Is. To create is to triumph over death.

Wretched is the sterile creature, that man or that woman who remains alone and lost upon the earth, scanning their withered bodies, and the sight of themselves from which no flame of life will ever leap! Wretched is the soul that does not feel its own fruitfulness, and know itself to be big with life and love, as a tree with blossom in the spring! The world may heap honors and benefits upon such a soul: it does but crown a corpse.

When Christophe was struck by the flash of lightning, an electric fluid coursed through his body: he trembled under the shock. It was as though on the high seas, in the dark night, he had suddenly sighted land. Or it was as though in a crowd he had gazed into two eyes saluting him. Often it would happen to him after hours of prostration when his mind was leaping desperately through the void. But more often still it came in moments when he was thinking of something else, talking to his mother, or walking through the streets. If he were in the street a certain human respect kept him from too loudly demonstrating his joy. But if he were at home nothing could keep him back. He would stamp. He would sound a blare of triumph: his mother knew that well, and she had come to know what it meant. She used to tell Christophe that he was like a hen that has laid an egg.

He was permeated with his musical imagination. Sometimes it took shape in an isolated phrase complete in itself: more often it would appear as a nebula enveloping a whole work: the structure of the work, its general lines, could be perceived through a veil, torn asunder here and there by dazzling phrases which stood out from the darkness with the clarity of sculpture. It was only a flash: sometimes others would come in quick succession: each lit up other corners of the night. But usually, the capricious force haying once shown itself unexpectedly, would disappear again for several days into its mysterious retreats, leaving behind it a luminous ray.

This delight in inspiration was so vivid that Christophe was disgusted by everything else. The experienced artist knows that inspiration is rare and that intelligence is left to complete the work of intuition: he puts his ideas under the press and squeezes out of them the last drop of the divine juices that are in them--(and if need be sometimes he does not shrink from diluting them with clear water)--Christophe was too young and too sure of himself not to despise such contemptible practices. He dreamed impossibly of producing nothing that was not absolutely spontaneous. If he had not been deliberately blind he would certainly have seen the absurdity of his aims. Ho doubt he was at that time in a period of inward abundance in which there was no gap, no c.h.i.n.k, through which boredom or emptiness could creep.

Everything served as an excuse to his inexhaustible fecundity: everything that his eyes saw or his ears heard, everything with which he came in contact in his daily life: every look, every word, brought forth a crop of dreams. In the boundless heaven of his thoughts he saw circling millions of milky stars, rivers of living light.--And yet, even then, there were moments when everything was suddenly blotted out. And although the night could not endure, although he had hardly time to suffer from these long silences of his soul, he did not escape a secret terror of that unknown power which came upon him, left him, came again, and disappeared.... How long, this time? Would it ever come again?--His pride rejected that thought and said: "This force is myself. When it ceases to be, I shall cease to be: I shall kill myself."--He never ceased to tremble: but it was only another delight.

But, if, for the moment, there was no danger of the spring running dry, Christophe was able already to perceive that it was never enough to fertilize a complete work. Ideas almost always appeared rawly: he had painfully to dig them out of the ore. And always they appeared without any sort of sequence, and by fits and starts: to unite them he had to bring to bear on them an element of reflection and deliberation and cold will, which fas.h.i.+oned them into new form. Christophe was too much of an artist not to do so: but he would not accept it: he forced himself to believe that he did no more than transcribe what was within himself, while he was always compelled more or less to transform it so as to make it intelligible.--More than that: sometimes he would absolutely forge a meaning for it. However violently the musical idea might come upon him it would often have been impossible for him to say what it meant. It would come surging up from the depths of life, from far beyond the limits of consciousness: and in that absolutely pure Force, which eluded common rhythms, consciousness could never recognize in it any of the motives which stirred in it, none of the human feelings which it defines and cla.s.sifies: joys, sorrows, they were all merged in one single pa.s.sion which was unintelligible, because it was above the intelligence. And yet, whether it understood or no, the intelligence needed to give a name to this form, to bind it down to one or other of the structures of logic, which man is forever building indefatigably in the hive of his brain.

So Christophe convinced himself--he wished to do so--that the obscure power that moved him had an exact meaning, and that its meaning was in accordance with his will. His free instinct, risen from the unconscious depths, was w.i.l.l.y-nilly forced to plod on under the yoke of reason with perfectly clear ideas which had nothing at all in common with it. And work so produced was no more than a lying juxtaposition of one of those great subjects that Christophe's mind had marked out for itself, and those wild forces which had an altogether different meaning unknown to himself.

He groped his way, head down, borne on by the contradictory forces warring in him, and hurling into his incoherent works a fiery and strong quality of life which he could not express, though he was joyously and proudly conscious of it.

The consciousness of his new vigor made him able for the first time to envisage squarely everything about him, everything that he had been taught to honor, everything that he had respected without question: and he judged it all with insolent freedom. The veil was rent: he saw the German lie.

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little truth and many lies. The human mind is feeble: pure truth agrees with it but ill: its religion, its morality, its states, its poets, its artists, must all be presented to it swathed in lies. These lies are adapted to the mind of each race: they vary from one to the other: it is they that make it so difficult for nations to understand each other, and so easy for them to despise each other. Truth is the same for all of us: but every nation has its own lie, which it calls its idealism: every creature therein breathes it from birth to death: it has become a condition of life: there are only a few men of genius who can break free from it through heroic moments of crisis, when they are alone in the free world of their thoughts.

It was a trivial thing which suddenly revealed to Christophe the lie of German art. It was not because it had not always been visible that he had not seen it: he was not near it, he had not recoiled from it. Now the mountain appeared to his gaze because he had moved away from it.

He was at a concert of the _Stadtische Townhalle_. The concert was given in a large hall occupied by ten or twelve rows of little tables--about two or three hundred of them. At the end of the room was a stage where the orchestra was sitting. All round Christophe were officers dressed up in their long, dark coats,--with broad, shaven faces, red, serious, and commonplace: women talking and laughing noisily, ostentatiously at their ease: jolly little girls smiling and showing all their teeth: and large men hidden behind their beards and spectacles, looking like kindly spiders with round eyes. They got up with every fresh gla.s.s to drink a toast: they did this almost religiously: their faces, their voices changed: it was as though they were saying Ma.s.s: they offered each other the libations, they drank of the chalice with a mixture of solemnity and buffoonery. The music was drowned under the conversation and the clinking of gla.s.ses. And yet everybody was trying to talk and eat quietly. The _Herr Konzertmeister_, a tall, bent old man, with a white beard hanging like a tail from his chin, and a long aquiline nose, with spectacles, looked like a philologist.--All these types were familiar to Christophe. But on that day he had an inclination--he did not know why--to see them as caricatures. There are days like that when, for no apparent reason, the grotesque in people and things which in ordinary life pa.s.ses unnoticed, suddenly leaps into view.

The programme of the music included the _Egmont_ overture, a valse of Waldteufel, _Tannhauser's Pilgrimage to Rome_, the overture to the _Merry Wives_ of Nicolai, the religious march of _Athalie_, and a fantasy on the _North Star_. The orchestra played the Beethoven overture correctly, and the valse deliciously. During the _Pilgrimage of Tannhauser_, the uncorking of bottles was heard. A big man sitting at the table next to Christophe beat time to the _Merry Wives_ by imitating Falstaff. A stout old lady, in a pale blue dress, with a white belt, golden pince-nez on her flat nose, red arms, and an enormous waist, sang in a loud voice _Lieder_ of Schumann and Brahms. She raised her eyebrows, made eyes at the wings, smiled with a smile that seemed to curdle on her moon-face, made exaggerated gestures which must certainly have called to mind the _cafe-concert_ but for the majestic honesty which shone in her: this mother of a family played the part of the giddy girl, youth, pa.s.sion: and Schumann's poetry had a faint smack of the nursery. The audience was in ecstasies.--But they grew solemn and attentive when there appeared the Choral Society of the Germans of the South (_Suddeutschen Manner Liedertafel_), who alternately cooed and roared part songs full of feeling. There were forty and they sang four parts: it seemed as though they had set themselves to free their execution of every trace of style that could properly be called choral: a hotch-potch of little melodious effects, little timid puling shades of sound, dying _pianissimos_, with sudden swelling, roaring _crescendos_, like some one heating on an empty box: no breadth or balance, a mawkish style: it was like Bottom:

"Let me play the lion. I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I will roar you as it were a nightingale."

Christophe listened: foam the beginning with growing amazement. There was nothing new in it all to him. He knew these concerts, the orchestra, the audience. But suddenly it all seemed to him false. All of it: even to what he most loved, the _Egmont_ overture, in which the pompous disorder and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose cra.s.s stupidity was spread about their works like a heavy mist.--No matter, there was in the works, even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had never before felt.--What was it? He dared not a.n.a.lyze it, deeming it a sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But in vain did he shut his eyes to it: he had seen it. And, in spite of himself, he went on seeing it: like the _Vergognosa_ at Pisa he looked: between his fingers.

He saw German art stripped. All of them--the great and the idiots--laid bare their souls with a complacent tenderness. Emotion overflowed, moral n.o.bility trickled down, their hearts melted in distracted effusions: the sluice gates were opened to the fearful German tender-heartedness: it weakened the energy of the stronger, it drowned the weaker under its grayish waters: it was a flood: in the depths of it slept German thought.

And, what thoughts were those of a Mendelssohn, a Brahms, a Schumann, and, following them, the whole legion of little writers of affected and tearful _Lieder_! Built on sand. Never rock. Wet and shapeless clay.--It was all so foolish, so childish often, that Christophe could not believe that it never occurred to the audience. He looked about him: but he saw only gaping faces, convinced in advance of the beauties they were hearing and the pleasure that they ought to find in it. How could they admit their own right to judge for themselves? They were filled with respect for these hallowed names. What did they not respect? They were respectful before their programmes, before their gla.s.ses, before themselves. It was clear that mentally they dubbed everything excellent that remotely or nearly concerned them.

Christophe pa.s.sed in review the audience and the music alternately: the music reflected the audience, the audience reflected the music. Christophe felt laughter overcoming him and he made faces. However, he controlled himself. But when the Germans of the South came and solemnly sang the _Confession_ that reminded him of the blushes of a girl in love, Christophe could not contain himself. He shouted with laughter. Indignant cries of "Ss.h.!.+" were raised. His neighbors looked at him, scared: their honest, scandalized faces filled him with joy: he laughed louder than ever, he laughed, he laughed until he cried. Suddenly the audience grew angry. They cried: "Put him out!" He got up, and went, shrugging his shoulders, shaking with suppressed laughter. His departure caused a scandal. It was the beginning of hostilities between Christophe and his birthplace.

After that experience Christophe shut himself up and set himself to read once more the works of the "hallowed" musicians. He was appalled to find that certain of the masters whom he loved most had _lied_. He tried hard to doubt it at first, to believe that he was mistaken.--But no, there was no way out of it. He was staggered by the conglomeration of mediocrity and untruth which const.i.tutes the artistic treasure of a great people. How many pages could bear examination!

From that time on he could begin to read other works, other masters, who were dear to him, only with a fluttering heart.... Alas! There was some spell cast upon him: always there was the same discomfiture. With some of them his heart was rent: it was as though he had lost a dear friend, as if he had suddenly seen that a friend in whom he had reposed entire confidence had been deceiving him for years. He wept for it. He did not sleep at night: he could not escape his torment. He blamed himself: perhaps he had lost his judgment? Perhaps he had become altogether an idiot?--No, no. More than ever he saw the radiant beauty of the day and with more freshness and love than ever he felt the generous abundance of life: his heart was not deceiving him....

But for a long time he dared not approach those who were the best for him, the purest, the Holy of Holies. He trembled at the thought of bringing his faith in them to the test. But how resist the pitiless instinct of a brave and truthful soul, which will go on to the end, and see things as they are, whatever suffering may be got in doing so?--So he opened the sacred works, he called upon the last reserve, the imperial guard.... At the first glance he saw that they were no more immaculate than the others. He had not the courage to go on. Every now and then he stopped and closed the book: like the son of Noah, he threw his cloak about his father's nakedness....

Then he was prostrate in the midst of all these ruins. He would rather have lost an arm, than have tampered with his blessed illusions. In his heart he mourned. But there was so much sap in him, so much reserve of life, that his confidence in art was not shaken. With a young man's nave presumption he began life again as though no one had ever lived it before him.

Intoxicated by his new strength, he felt--not without reason, perhaps--that with a very few exceptions there is almost no relation between living pa.s.sion and the expression which art has striven to give to it. But he was mistaken in thinking himself more happy or more true when he expressed it.

As he was filled with pa.s.sion it was easy for him to discover it at the back of what he had written: but no one else would have recognized it through the imperfect vocabulary with which he designated its variations.

Many artists whom he condemned were in the same case. They had had, and had translated profound emotions: but the secret of their language had died with them.

Christophe was no psychologist: he was not bothered with all these arguments: what was dead for him had always been so. He revised his judgment of the past with all the confident and fierce injustice of youth.

He stripped the n.o.blest souls, and had no pity for their foibles. There were the rich melancholy, the distinguished fantasy, the kindly thinking emptiness of Mendelssohn. There were the bead-stringing and the affectation of Weber, his dryness of heart, his cerebral emotion. There was Liszt, the n.o.ble priest, the circus rider, neo-cla.s.sical and vagabond, a mixture in equal doses of real and false n.o.bility, of serene idealism and disgusting virtuosity. Schubert, swallowed up by his sentimentality, drowned at the bottom of leagues of stale, transparent water. The men of the heroic ages, the demi-G.o.ds, the Prophets, the Fathers of the Church, were not spared.

Even the great Sebastian, the man of ages, who bore in himself the past and the future,--Bach,--was not free of untruth, of fas.h.i.+onable folly, of school-chattering. The man who had seen G.o.d, the man who lived in G.o.d, seemed sometimes to Christophe to have had an insipid and sugared religion, a Jesuitical style, rococo. In his cantatas there were languorous and devout airs--(dialogues of the Soul coquetting with Jesus)--which sickened Christophe: then he seemed to see chubby cherubim with round limbs, and flying draperies. And also he had a feeling that the genial _Cantor_ always wrote in a closed room: his work smacked of stuffiness: there was not in his music that brave outdoor air that was breathed in others, not such great musicians, perhaps, but greater men--more human--than he. Like Beethoven or Handel. What hurt him in all of them, especially in the cla.s.sics, was their lack of freedom: almost all their works were "constructed." Sometimes an emotion was filled out with all the commonplaces of musical rhetoric, sometimes with a simple rhythm, an ornamental design, repeated, turned upside down, combined in every conceivable way in a mechanical fas.h.i.+on. These symmetrical and twaddling constructions--cla.s.sical, and neo-cla.s.sical sonatas and symphonies--exasperated Christophe, who, at that time, was not very sensible of the beauty of order, and vast and well-conceived plans. That seemed to him to be rather masons' work than musicians'.

But he was no less severe with the romantics. It was a strange thing, and he was more surprised by it than anybody,--but no musicians irritated him more than those who had pretended to be--and had actually been--the most free, the most spontaneous, the least constructive,--those, who, like Schumann, had poured drop by drop, minute by minute, into their innumerable little works, their whole life. He was the more indignantly in revolt against them as he recognized in them his adolescent soul and all the follies that he had vowed to pluck out of it. In truth, the candid Schumann could not be taxed with falsity: he hardly ever said anything that he had not felt. But that was just it: his example made Christophe understand that the worst falsity in German art came into it not when the artists tried to express something which they had not felt, but rather when they tried to express the feelings which they did in fact feel--_feelings which were false_. Music is an implacable mirror of the soul. The more a German musician is nave and in good faith, the more he displays the weaknesses of the German soul, its uncertain depths, its soft tenderness, its want of frankness, its rather sly idealism, its incapacity for seeing itself, for daring to come face to face with itself. That false idealism is the secret sore even of the greatest--of Wagner. As he read his works Christophe ground his teeth. _Lohengrin_ seemed to him a blatant lie. He loathed the huxtering chivalry, the hypocritical mummery, the hero without fear and without a heart, the incarnation of cold and selfish virtue admiring itself and most patently self-satisfied. He knew it too well, he had seen it in reality, the type of German Pharisee, foppish, impeccable, and hard, bowing down before its own image, the divinity to which it has no scruple about sacrificing others. The _Flying Dutchman_ overwhelmed him with its ma.s.sive sentimentality and its gloomy boredom. The loves of the barbarous decadents of the _Tetralogy_ were of a sickening staleness. Siegmund carrying off his sister sang a tenor drawing-room song. Siegfried and Brunnhilde, like respectable German married people, in the _Gotterdammerung_ laid bare before each other, especially for the benefit of the audience, their pompous and voluble conjugal pa.s.sion. Every sort of lie had arranged to meet in that work: false idealism, false Christianity, false Gothicism, false legend, false G.o.ds, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 ingrat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionately--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 pa.s.sing through that crisis of healthy disgust. His instinct was impelling him to eliminate from his life all the undigested elements which enc.u.mbered 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 _Gemut_ 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 Fruhling_ (To Spring), _an den Sonnenschein_ (To Suns.h.i.+ne): like _Fruhlingslied_ (Spring Song), _Fruhlingsl.u.s.t_ (Delights of Spring), _Fruhlingsgruss_ (Hail to the Spring), _Frulingsfahrt_ (A Spring Journey), _Frulingsnacht_ (A Spring Night), _Fruhlingsbotschaft_ (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), _Fulle 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 betrubt_ (My Heart is Troubled), _Mein Aug' ist trub_ (My Eye is Heavy): like the candid and silly dialogues with the _Roselein_ (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, n.o.ble gla.s.s ..."). 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 pa.s.sion. He was frozen by the mist, the anaemic 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 nave and turgid soul.

But besides these monsters who were not really begotten, he wrote a quant.i.ty of small pieces, which were the immediate expression of pa.s.sing emotions--the most eternal of all: musical thoughts, _Lieder_. In this as in other things he was in pa.s.sionate reaction against current practices.

He would take up the most famous poems, already set to music, and was impertinent enough to try to treat them differently and with greater truth than Schumann and Schubert. Sometimes he would try to give to the poetic figures of Goethe--to Mignon, the Harpist in _Wilhelm Meister_, their individual character, exact and changing. Sometimes he would tackle certain love songs which the weakness of the artists and the dullness of the audience in tacit agreement had clothed about with sickly sentimentality: and he would unclothe them: he would restore to them their rough, crude sensuality. In a word, he set out to make pa.s.sions and people live for themselves and not to serve as toys for German families seeking an easy emotionalism on Sundays when they sat about in some _Biergarten_.