There were tremendous conflicts waged between these learned men. They were

all musicians: but as they all affected different styles, each of them

claimed that his was the only true style, and cried "Raca!" to that of

their colleagues. They accused each other of sham writing and sham culture,

and hurled at each other's heads the words "idealism" and "materialism,"

"symbolism" and "verism," "subjectivism" and "objectivism." Christophe

thought it was hardly worth while leaving Germany to find the squabbles

of the Germans in Paris. Instead of being grateful for having good music

presented in so many different fashions, they would only tolerate their own

particular fashion: and a new _Lutrin_, a fierce war, divided musicians

into two hostile camps, the camp of counterpoint and the camp of harmony.

Like the _Gros-boutiens_ and the _Petits-boutiens_, one side maintained

with acrimony that music should be read horizontally, and the other that

it should be read vertically. One party would only hear of full-sounding

chords, melting concatenations, succulent harmonies: they spoke of music as

though it were a confectioner's shop. The other party would not hear of the

ear, that trumpery organ, being considered: music was for them a lecture,

a Parliamentary assembly, in which all the orators spoke at once without

bothering about their neighbors, and went on talking until they had done:

if people could not hear, so much the worse for them! They could read their

speeches next day in the _Official Journal_: music was made to be read, and

not to be heard. When Christophe first heard of this quarrel between the

_Horizontalists_ and the _Verticalists_, he thought they were all mad. When

he was summoned to join in the fight between the army of _Succession_ and

the army of _Superposition_, he replied, with his usual formula, which was

very different from that of Sosia:

"Gentlemen, I am everybody's enemy."

And when they insisted, saying:

"Which matters most in music, harmony or counterpoint?"

He replied:

"Music. Show me what you have done."

They were all agreed about their own music. These intrepid warriors who,

when they were not pummeling each other, were whacking away at some dead

Master whose fame had endured too long, were reconciled by the one passion

which was common to them all: an ardent musical patriotism. France was to

them _the_ great musical nation. They were perpetually proclaiming the

decay of Germany. That did not hurt Christophe. He had declared so himself,

and therefore was not in a position to contradict them. But he was a little

surprised to hear of the supremacy of French music: there was, in fact,

very little trace of it in the past. And yet French musicians maintained

that their art had been admirable from the earliest period. By way of

glorifying French music, they set to work to throw ridicule on the famous

men of the last century, with the exception of one Master, who was very

good and very pure--and a Belgian. Having done that amount of slaughter,

they were free to admire the archaic Masters, who had been forgotten, while

a certain number of them were absolutely unknown. Unlike the lay schools

of France which date the world from the French Revolution, the musicians

regarded it as a chain of mighty mountains, to be scaled before it could

be possible to look back on the Golden Age of music, the Eldorado of art.

After a long eclipse the Golden Age was to emerge again: the hard wall

was to crumble away: a magician of sound was to call forth in full flower

a marvelous spring: the old tree of music was to put forth young green

leaves: in the bed of harmony thousands of flowers were to open their

smiling eyes upon the new dawn: and silvery trickling springs were to

bubble forth with the vernal sweet song of streams--a very idyl.

Christophe was delighted. But when he looked at the bills of the Parisian

theaters, he saw the names of Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet, and Mascagni and

Leoncavallo--names with which he was only too familiar: and he asked his

friends if all this brazen music, with its girlish rapture, its artificial

flowers, like nothing so much as a perfumery shop, was the garden of Armide

that they had promised him. They were hurt and protested: if they were to

be believed, these things were the last vestiges of a moribund age: no

one attached any value to them. But the fact remained that _Cavalleria

Rusticana_ flourished at the Opéra Comique, and _Pagliacci_ at the Opéra:

Massenet and Gounod were more frequently performed than anybody else, and

the musical trinity--_Mignon_, _Les Huguenots_, and _Faust_--had safely

crossed the bar of the thousandth performance. But these were only trivial

accidents: there was no need to go and see them. When some untoward fact

upsets a theory, nothing is more simple than to ignore it. The French

critics shut their eyes to these blatant works and to the public which

applauded them: and only a very little more was needed to make them ignore

the whole music-theater in France. The music-theater was to them a literary

form, and therefore impure. (Being all literary men, they set a ban on

literature.) Any music that was expressive, descriptive, suggestive--in

short, any music with any meaning--was condemned as impure. In every

Frenchman there is a Robespierre. He must be for ever chopping the head

off something or somebody to purify it. The great French critics only

recognized pure music: the rest they left to the rabble.

Christophe was rather mortified when he thought how vulgar his taste must

be. But he found some comfort in the discovery that all these musicians who

despised the theater spent their time in writing for it: there was not one

of them who did not compose operas. But no doubt that was also a trivial

accident. They were to be judged, as they desired, by their pure music.

Christophe looked about for their pure music.

* * * * *

Théophile Goujart took him to the concerts of a Society dedicated to

the national art. There the new glories of French music were elaborated

and carefully hatched. It was a club, a little church, with several

side-chapels. Each chapel had its saint, each saint his devotees, who

blackguarded the saint in the next chapel. It was some time before

Christophe could differentiate between the various saints. Naturally

enough, being accustomed to a very different sort of art, he was at first

baffled by the new music, and the more he thought he understood it, the

farther was he from a real understanding.

It all seemed to him to be bathed in a perpetual twilight. It was a dull

gray ground on which were drawn lines, shading off and blurring into

each other, sometimes starting from the mist, and then sinking back into

it again. Among all these lines there were stiff, crabbed, and cramped

designs, as though they were drawn with a set-square--patterns with sharp

corners, like the elbow of a skinny woman. There were patterns in curves

floating and curling like the smoke of a cigar. But they were all enveloped

in the gray light. Did the sun never shine in France? Christophe had only

had rain and fog since his arrival, and was inclined to believe so; but

it is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails. These

men lit up their little lanterns, it is true: but they were like the

glow-worm's lamp, giving no warmth and very little light. The titles of

their works were changed: they dealt with Spring, the South, Love, the Joy

of Living, Country Walks; but the music never changed: it was uniformly

soft, pale, enervated, anemic, wasting away. It was then the mode in

France, among the fastidious, to whisper in music. And they were quite

right: for as soon as they tried to talk aloud they shouted: there was no

mean. There was no alternative but distinguished somnolence and

melodramatic declamation.

Christophe shook off the drowsiness that was creeping over him, and looked

at his program; and he was surprised to read that the little puffs of cloud

floating across the gray sky claimed to represent certain definite things.

For, in spite of theory, all their pure music was almost always program

music, or at least music descriptive of a certain subject. It was in vain

that they denounced literature: they needed the support of a literary

crutch. Strange crutches they were, too, as a rule! Christophe observed

the odd puerility of the subjects which they labored to depict--orchards,

kitchen-gardens, farmyards, musical menageries, a whole Zoo. Some musicians

transposed for orchestra or piano the pictures in the Louvre, or the

frescoes of the Opéra: they turned into music Cuyp, Baudry, and Paul

Potter: explanatory notes helped the hearer to recognize the apple of

Paris, a Dutch inn, or the crupper of a white horse. To Christophe it was

like the production of children obsessed by images, who, not knowing how to

draw, scribble down in their exercise-books anything that comes into their

heads, and naïvely write down under it in large letters an inscription to

the effect that it is a house or a tree.

But besides these blind image-fanciers who saw with their ears, there were

the philosophers: they discussed metaphysical problems in music: their

symphonies were composed of the struggle between abstract principles and

stated symbols or religions. And in their operas they affected to study the

judicial and social questions of the day: the Declaration of the Rights of

Woman and the Citizen, elaborated by the metaphysicians of the Butte and

the Palais-Bourbon. They did not shrink from bringing the question of

divorce on to the platform together with the inquiry into the birth-rate

and the separation of the Church and State. Among them were to be found

lay symbolists and clerical symbolists. They introduced philosophic

rag-pickers, sociological grisettes, prophetic bakers, and apostolic

fishermen to the stage. Goethe spoke of the artists of his day, "who

reproduced the ideas of Kant in allegorical pictures." The artists of

Christophe's day wrote sociology in semi-quavers. Zola, Nietzsche,

Maeterlinck, Barrès, Jaurès, Mendès, the Gospel, and the Moulin Rouge, all

fed the cistern whence the writers of operas and symphonies drew their

ideas. Many of them, intoxicated by the example of Wagner, cried: "And I,

too, am a poet!" And with perfect assurance they tacked on to their music

verses in rhyme, or unrhymed, written in the style of an elementary school

or a decadent feuilleton.

All these thinkers and poets were partisans of pure music. But they

preferred talking about it to writing it. And yet they did sometimes manage

to write it. Then they wrote music that was not intended to say anything.

Unfortunately, they often succeeded: their music was meaningless--at least,

to Christophe. It is only fair to say that he had not the key to it.

In order to understand the music of a foreign nation a man must take the

trouble to learn the language, and not make up his mind beforehand that he

knows it. Christophe, like every good German, thought he knew it. That was

excusable. Many Frenchmen did not understand it any more than he. Like the

Germans of the time of Louis XIV, who tried so hard to speak French that

in the end they forgot their own language, the French musicians of the

nineteenth century had taken so much pains to unlearn their language that

their music had become a foreign lingo. It was only of recent years that a

movement had sprung up to speak French in France. They did not all succeed:

the force of habit was very strong: and with a few exceptions their French

was Belgian, or still smacked faintly of Germany. It was quite natural,

therefore, that a German should be mistaken, and declare, with his usual

assurance, that it was very bad German, and meant nothing, since he could

make nothing of it.

Christophe was in exactly that case. The symphonies of the French seemed

to him to be abstract, dialectic, and musical themes were opposed and

superposed arithmetically in them: their combinations and permutations

might just as well have been expressed in figures or the letters of the

alphabet. One man would construct a symphony on the progressive development

of a sonorous formula which did not seem to be complete until the last page

of the last movement, so that for nine-tenths of the work it never advanced

beyond the grub stage of its existence. Another would erect variations on a

theme which was not stated until the end, so that the symphony gradually

descended from the complex to the simple. They were very clever toys. But a

man would need to be both very old and very young to be able to enjoy them.

They had cost their inventors untold effort. They took years to write a

fantasy. They worried their hair white in the search for new combinations

of chords--to express ...? No matter! New expressions. As the organ creates

the need, they say, so the expression must in the end create the idea: the

chief thing is that the expression should be novel. Novelty at all costs!

They had a morbid horror of anything that "had been said." The best of them

were paralyzed by it all. They seemed always to be keeping a fearful guard

on themselves, and crossing out what they had written, wondering: "Good

Lord! Where did I read that?" ... There are some musicians--especially in

Germany--who spend their time in piecing together other people's music. The

musicians of France were always looking out at every bar to see that they

had not included in their catalogues melodies that had already been used by

others, and erasing, erasing, changing the shape of the note until it was

like no known note, and even ceased to be like a note at all.

But they did not take Christophe in: in vain did they muffle themselves

up in a complicated language, and make superhuman and prodigious efforts,

go into orchestral fits, or cultivate inorganic harmonies, an obsessing

monotony, declamations à la Sarah Bernhardt, beginning in a minor key, and

going on for hours plodding along like mules, half asleep, along the edge

of the slippery slope--always under the mask Christophe found the souls of

these men, cold, weary, horribly scented, like Gounod and Massenet, but

even less natural. And he repeated the unjust comment on the French of

Gluck:

"Let them be: they always go back to their giddy-go-round."

Only they did try so hard to be learned. They took popular songs as themes

for learned symphonies, like dissertations for the Sorbonne. That was the

great game at the time. All sorts and kinds of popular songs, songs of all

nations, were pressed into the service. And they worked them up into things

like the _Ninth Symphony_ and the _Quartet_ of César Franck, only much more

difficult. A musician would conceive quite a simple air. At once he would

mix it up with another, which meant nothing at all, though it jarred

hideously with the first. And all these people were obviously so calm, so

perfectly balanced!...

And there was a young conductor, properly haggard and dressed for the part,

who produced these works: he flung himself about, darted lightnings, made

Michael Angelesque gestures as though he were summoning up the armies of

Beethoven or Wagner. The audience, which was composed of society people,

was bored to tears, though nothing would have induced them to renounce the

honor of paying a high price for such glorious boredom: and there were

young tyros who were only too glad to bring their school knowledge into

play as they picked up the threads of the music, and they applauded with

an enthusiasm as frantic as the gestures of the conductor, and the fearful

noise of the music....

"What rot!" said Christopher. (For he was well up in Parisian slang by

now.)

* * * * *

But it is easier to penetrate the mystery of Parisian slang than the

mystery of Parisian music. Christophe judged it with the passion which he

brought to bear on everything, and the native incapacity of the Germans to

understand French art. At least, he was sincere, and only asked to be put

right if he was mistaken. And he did not regard himself as bound by his

judgment, but left it open to any new impression that might alter it.

As matters stood, he readily admitted that there was much talent in the

music he heard, interesting stuff, certain odd happy rhythms and harmonies,

an assortment of fine materials, mellow and brilliant, glittering colors,

a perpetual outpouring of invention and cleverness. Christophe was

entertained by it, and learned a thing or two. All these small masters had

infinitely more freedom of thought than the musicians of Germany: they

bravely left the highroad and plunged through the woods. They did their

best to lose themselves. But they were so clever that they could not manage

it. Some of them found themselves on the road again in twenty yards. Others

tired at once, and stopped wherever they might be. There were a few who

almost discovered new paths, but instead of following them up they sat down

at the edge of the wood and fell to musing under a tree. What they most

lacked was will-power, force: they had all the gifts save one--vigor and

life. And all their multifarious efforts were confusedly directed, and were

lost on the road. It was only rarely that these artists became conscious of

the nature of their efforts, and could join forces to a common and a given

end. It was the usual result of French anarchy, which wastes the enormous

wealth of talent and good intentions through the paralyzing influence of

its uncertainty and contradictions. With hardly an exception, all the great

French musicians, like Berlioz and Saint-Saens--to mention only the most

recent--have been hopelessly muddled, self-destructive, and forsworn, for

want of energy, want of faith, and, above all, for want of an inward guide.

Christophe, with the insolence and disdain of the latter-day German,

thought:

"The French do no more than fritter away their energy in inventing things

which they are incapable of using. They need a master of another race, a

Gluck or a Napoleon, to turn their Revolutions to any account."

And he smiled at the notion of an Eighteenth of Brumaire.

* * * * *

And yet, in the midst of all this anarchy, there was a group striving to

restore order and discipline to the minds of artists and public. By way

of a beginning, they had taken a Latin name reminiscent of a clerical

institution which had flourished thirteen or fourteen centuries ago at the

time of the great Invasion of the Goths and Vandals. Christophe was rather

surprised at their going back so far. It was a good thing, certainly, to

dominate one's generation. But it looked as though a watch-tower fourteen

centuries high might be, a little inconvenient, and more suitable perhaps

for observing the movements of the stars than those of the men of the

present day. But Christophe was soon reassured when he saw that the sons of

St. Gregory spent very little time on their tower: they only went up it to

ring the bells, and spent the rest of their time in the church below. It

was some time before Christophe, who attended some of their services, saw

that it was a Catholic cult: he had been sure at the outset that their

rites were those of some little Protestant sect. The audience groveled: the

disciples were pious, intolerant, aggressive on the smallest provocation:

at their head was a man of a cold sort of purity, rather childish and

wilful, maintaining the integrity of his doctrine, religious, moral, and

artistic, explaining in abstract terms the Gospel of music to the small

number of the Elect, and calmly damning Pride and Heresy. To these two

states of mind he attributed every defect in art and every vice of

humanity: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and present-day Judaism, which

he lumped together in one category. The Jews of music were burned in

effigy after being ignominiously dressed. The colossal Handel was soundly

trounced. Only Johann Sebastian Bach attained salvation by the grace of the

Lord, who recognized that he had been a Protestant by mistake.

The temple of the _Rue Saint-Jacques_ fulfilled an apostolic function:

souls and music found salvation there. The rules of genius were taught

there most methodically. Laborious pupils applied the formulas with

infinite pains and absolute certainty. It looked as though by their pious

labors they were trying to regain the criminal levity of their ancestors:

the Aubers, the Adams, and the trebly damned, the diabolical Berlioz, the

devil himself, _diabolus in musica_. With laudable ardor and a sincere

piety they spread the cult of the acknowledged masters. In ten years the

work they had to show was considerable: French music was transformed. Not

only the French critics, but the musicians themselves had learned something

about music. There were now composers, and even virtuosi, who were

acquainted with the works of Bach. And that was not so common even in

Germany! But, above all, a great effort had been made to combat the

stay-at-home spirit of the French, who will shut themselves up in their

homes, and cannot be induced to go out. So their music lacks air: it is

sealed-chamber music, sofa music, music with no sort of vigor. Think

of Beethoven composing as he strode across country, rushing down the

hillsides, swinging along through sun and rain, terrifying the cattle with

his wild shouts and gestures! There was no danger of the musicians of Paris

upsetting their neighbors with the noise of their inspiration, like the

bear of Bonn. When they composed they muted the strings of their thought:

and the heavy hangings of their rooms prevented any sound from outside

breaking in upon them.

The _Schola_ had tried to let in fresh air, and had opened the windows upon

the past. But only on the past. The windows were opened upon a courtyard,

not into the street. And it was not much use. Hardly had they opened the

windows than they closed the shutters, like old women afraid of catching

cold. And there came up a gust or two of the Middle Ages, Bach, Palestrina,

popular songs. But what was the good of that? The room still smelt of stale

air. But really that suited them very well: they were afraid of the great

modern draughts of air. And if they knew more than other people, they also

denied more in art. Their music took on a doctrinal character: there was no

relaxation: their concerts were history lectures, or a string of edifying

examples. Advanced ideas became academic. The great Bach, he whose music is

like a torrent, was received into the bosom of the Church and then tamed.

His music was submitted to a transformation in the minds of the _Schola_

very like the transformation to which the savagely sensual Bible has been

submitted in the minds of the English. As for modern music, the doctrine

promulgated was aristocratic and eclectic, an attempt to compound the

distinctive characteristics of the three or four great periods of music

from the sixth to the twentieth century. If it had been possible to carry

it out, the resulting music would have been like those hybrid structures

raised by a Viceroy of India on his return from his travels, with rare

materials collected in every corner of the earth. But the good sense of

the French saved them from any such barbarically erudite excesses: they

carefully avoided any application of their theories: they treated them as

Molière treated his doctors: they took their prescriptions, but did not

carry them out. The best of them went their own way. The rest of them

contented themselves in practice with very intricate and difficult

exercises in counterpoint: they called them sonatas, quartets, and

symphonies.... "Sonata, what do you desire of me?" The poor thing desired

nothing at all except to be a sonata. The idea behind it was abstract

and anonymous, heavy and joyless. So might a lawyer conceive an art.

Christophe, who had at first been by way of being pleased with the French

for not liking Brahms, now thought that there were many, many little

Brahms in France. These laborious, conscientious, honest journeymen had

many qualities and virtues. Christophe left them edified, but bored to

distraction. It was all very good, very good....

How fine it was outside!

* * * * *

And yet there were a few independent musicians in Paris, men belonging to

no school; They alone were interesting to Christophe. It was only through

them that he could gauge the vitality of the art. Schools and coteries only

express some superficial fashion or manufactured theory. But the

independent men who stand apart have more chance of really discovering the

ideas of their race and time. It is true that that makes them all the more

difficult for a foreigner to understand.

That was, in fact, what happened when Christophe first heard the famous

work which the French had so extravagantly praised, while some of them were

announcing the coming of the greatest musical revolution of the last ten

centuries. (It was easy for them to talk about centuries: they knew hardly

anything of any except their own.)

Théophile Goujart and Sylvain Kohn took Christophe to the Opéra Comique

to hear _Pelleas and Melisande_. They were proud to display the opera

to him--as proud as though they had written it themselves. They gave

Christophe to understand that it would be the road to Damascus for him. And

they went on eulogizing it even after the piece had begun. Christophe shut

them up and listened intently. After the first act he turned to Sylvain

Kohn, who asked him, with glittering eyes:

"Well, old man, what do you think of it?"

And he said:

"Is it like that all through?"

"Yes."

"But it's nothing."

Kohn protested loudly, and called him a Philistine.

"Nothing at all," said Christophe. "No music. No development. No sequence.

No cohesion. Very nice harmony. Quite good orchestral effects, quite good.

But it's nothing--nothing at all...."

He listened through the second act. Little by little the lantern gathered

light and glowed: and he began to perceive something through the twilight.

Yes: he could understand the sober-minded rebellion against the Wagnerian

ideal which swamped the drama with floods of music; but he wondered a

little ironically if the ideal of sacrifice did not mean the sacrifice of

something which one does not happen to possess. He felt the easy fluency

of the opera, the production of an effect with the minimum of trouble, the

indolent renunciation of the sturdy effort shown in the vigorous Wagnerian

structures. And he was quite struck by the unity of it, the simple, modest,

rather dragging declamation, although it seemed monotonous to him, and, to

his German ears, it sounded false:--(and it even seemed to him that the

more it aimed at truth the more it showed how little the French language

was suited to music: it is too logical, too precise, too definite,--a world

perfect in itself, but hermetically sealed).--However, the attempt was

interesting, and Christophe gladly sympathized with the spirit of revolt

and reaction against the over-emphasis and violence of Wagnerian art.

The French composer seemed to have devoted his attention discreetly and

ironically to all the things that sentiment and passion only whisper. He

showed love and death inarticulate. It was only by the imperceptible

throbbing of a melody, a little thrill from the orchestra that was no more

than a quivering of the corners of the lips, that the drama passing through

the souls of the characters was brought home to the audience. It was as

though the artist were fearful of letting himself go. He had the genius of

taste--except at certain moments when the Massenet slumbering in the heart

of every Frenchman awoke and waxed lyrical. Then there showed hair that was

too golden, lips that were too red--the Lot's wife of the Third Republic

playing the lover. But such moments were the exception: they were a

relaxation of the writer's self-imposed restraint: throughout the rest of

the opera there reigned a delicate simplicity, a simplicity which was not

so very simple, a deliberate simplicity, the subtle flower of an ancient

society. That young Barbarian, Christophe, only half liked it. The whole

scheme of the play, the poem, worried him. He saw a middle-aged Parisienne

posing childishly and having fairy-tales told to her. It was not the

Wagnerian sickliness, sentimental and clumsy, like a girl from the Rhine

provinces. But the Franco-Belgian sickliness was not much better, with

its simpering parlor-tricks:--"the hair," "the little father," "the

doves,"--and the whole trick of mystery for the delectation of society

women. The soul of the Parisienne was mirrored in the little piece, which,

like a flattering picture, showed the languid fatalism, the boudoir

Nirvana, the soft, sweet melancholy. Nowhere a trace of will-power. No one

knew what he wanted. No one knew what he was doing.

"It is not my fault! It is not my fault!" these grown-up children groaned.

All through the five acts, which took place in a perpetual

half-light--forests, caves, cellars, death-chambers--little sea-birds

struggled: hardly even that. Poor little birds! Pretty birds, soft, pretty

birds.... They were so afraid of too much light, of the brutality of deeds,

words, passions--life! Life is not soft and pretty. Life is no kid-glove

matter....

Christophe could hear in the distance the rumbling of cannon, coming to

batter down that worn-out civilization, that perishing little Greece.

Was it that proud feeling of melancholy and pity that made him in spite of

all sympathize with the opera? It interested him more than he would admit.

Although he went on telling Sylvain Kohn, as they left the theater, that it

was "very fine, very fine, but lacking in _Schwung_ (impulse), and did not

contain enough music for him," he was careful not to confound _Pelleas_

with the other music of the French. He was attracted by the lamp shining

through the fog. And then he saw other lights, vivid and fantastic,

flickering round it. His attention was caught by these will-o'-the-wisps:

he would have liked to go near them to find out how it was that they

shone: but they were not easy to catch. These independent musicians, whom

Christophe did not understand, were not very approachable. They seemed to

lack that great need of sympathy which possessed Christophe. With a few

exceptions they seemed to read very little, know very little, desire very

little. They almost all lived in retirement, some outside Paris, others in

Paris, but isolated, by circumstances or purposely, shut up in a narrow

circle--from pride, shyness, disgust, or apathy. There were very few of

them, but they were split up into rival groups, and could not tolerate

each other. They were extremely susceptible, and could not bear with their

enemies, or their rivals, or even their friends, when they dared to admire

any other musician than themselves, or when they admired too coldly,

or too fervently, or in too commonplace or too eccentric a manner. It

was extremely difficult to please them. Every one of them had actually

sanctioned a critic, armed with letters patent, who kept a jealous watch

at the foot of the statue. Visitors were requested not to touch. They did

not gain any greater understanding from being understood only by their own

little groups. They were deformed by the adulation and the opinion that

their partisans and they themselves held of their work, and they lost

grip of their art and their genius. Men with a pleasing fantasy thought

themselves reformers, and Alexandrine artists posed as rivals of Wagner.

They were almost all the victims of competition. Every day they had to leap

a little higher than the day before, and, especially, higher than their

rivals, These exercises in high jumping were not always successful, and

were certainly not attractive except to professionals. They took no account

of the public, and the public never bothered about them. Their art was

out of touch with the people, music which was only fed from music. Now,

Christophe was under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that there was no

music that had a greater need of outside support than French music. That

supple climbing plant needed a prop: it could not do without literature,

but did not find in it enough of the breath of life. French music was

breathless, bloodless, will-less. It was like a woman languishing for her

lover. But, like a Byzantine Empress, slender and feeble in body, laden

with precious stones, it was surrounded with eunuchs: snobs, esthetes,

and critics. The nation was not musical: and the craze, so much talked of

during the last twenty years, for Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, or Debussy,

never reached farther than a certain class. The enormous increase in the

number of concerts, the flowing tide of music at all costs, found no real

response in the development of public taste. It was just a fashionable

craze confined to the few, and leading them astray. There was only a

handful of people who really loved music, and these were not the people

who were most occupied with it, composers and critics. There are so few

musicians in France who really love music!

So thought Christophe: but it did not occur to him that it is the same

everywhere, that even in Germany there are not many more real musicians,

and that the people who matter in art are not the thousands who understand

nothing about it, but the few who love it and serve it in proud humility.

Had he ever set eyes on them in France? Creators and critics--the best of

them were working in silence, far from the racket, as César Franck had

done, and the most gifted composers of the day were doing, and a number of

artists who would live out their lives in obscurity, so that some day in

the future some journalist might have the glory of discovering them and

posing as their friend--and the little army of industrious and obscure men

of learning who, without ambition and careless of their fame, were building

stone by stone the greatness of the past history of France, or, being vowed

to the musical education of the country, were preparing the greatness of

the France of the future. There were minds there whose wealth and liberty

and world-wide curiosity would have attracted Christophe if he had been

able to discover them! But at most he only caught a cursory glimpse of

two or three of them: he only made their acquaintance in the villainous

caricatures of their ideas. He saw only their defects copied and

exaggerated by the apish mimics of art and the bagmen of the Press.

But what most disgusted him with these vulgarians of music was their

formalism. They never seemed to consider anything but form. Feeling,

character, life--never a word of these! It never seemed to occur to them

that every real musician lives in a world of sound, as other men live in a

visible world, and that his days are lived in and borne onward by a flood

of music. Music is the air he breathes, the sky above him. Nature wakes

answering music in his soul. His soul itself is music: music is in all that

it loves, hates, suffers, fears, hopes. And when the soul of a musician

loves a beautiful body, it sees music in that, too. The beloved eyes are

not blue, or brown, or gray: they are music: their tenderness is like

caressing, notes, like a delicious chord. That inward music is a thousand

times more rich than the music that finds expression, and the instrument

is inferior to the player. Genius is measured by the power of life, by the

power of evoking life through the imperfect instrument of art. But to how

many men in France does that ever occur? To these chemists music seems to

be no more than the art of resolving sounds. They mistake the alphabet

for a book. Christophe shrugged his shoulders when he heard them say

complacently that to understand art it must be abstracted from the man.

They were extraordinarily pleased with this paradox: for by it they fancied

they were proving their own musical quality. And even Goujart subscribed

to it--Goujart, the idiot who had never been able to understand how people

managed to learn by heart a piece of music--(he had tried to get Christophe

to explain the mystery to him)--and had tried to prove to him that

Beethoven's greatness of soul and Wagner's sensuality had no more to do

with their music than a painter's model has to do with his portraits.

Christophe lost patience with him, and said:

"That only proves that a beautiful body is of no more artistic value to

you than a great passion. Poor fellow!... You have no notion of the beauty

given to a portrait by the beauty of a perfect face, or of the glow of

beauty given to music by the beauty of the great soul which is mirrored in

it?... Poor fellow!... You are interested only in the handiwork? So long

as it is well done you are not concerned with the meaning of a piece of

work.... Poor fellow!... You are like those people who do not listen to

what an orator says, but only to the sound of his voice, and watch his

gestures without understanding them, and then say he speaks devilish

well.... Poor fellow! Poor wretch!... Oh, you rotten swine!"

But it was not only a particular theory that irritated Christophe; it was

all their theories. He was appalled by their unending arguments, their

Byzantine discussions, the everlasting talk, talk, talk, of musicians

about music, and nothing else. It was enough to make the best of musicians

heartily sick of music. Like Moussorgski, Christophe thought that it would

be as well for musicians every now and then to leave their counterpoint and

harmony in favor of books or experience of life. Music is not enough for a

present-day musician; not thus will he dominate his age and raise his head

above the stream of time.... Life! All life! To see everything, to know

everything, to feel everything. To love, to seek, to grasp Truth--the

lovely Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, whose teeth bite in answer to a

kiss!

Away with your musical discussion-societies, away with your

chord-factories! Not all the twaddle of the harmonic kitchens would ever

help him to find a new harmony that was alive, alive, and not a monstrous

birth.

He turned his back on these Doctor Wagners, brooding on their alembics to

hatch out some homunculus in bottle: and, running away from French music,

he sought to enter literary circles and Parisian society. Like many

millions of people in France, Christophe made his first acquaintance

with modern French literature through the newspapers. He wanted to get

the measure of Parisian thought as quickly as possible, and at the same

time to perfect his knowledge of the language. And so he set himself

conscientiously to read the papers which he was told were most Parisian. On

the first day after a horrific chronicle of events, which filled several

pages with paragraphs and snapshots, he read a story about a father and a

daughter, a girl of fifteen: it was narrated as though it were a matter

of course, and even rather moving. Next day, in the same paper, he read a

story about a father and a son, a boy of twelve, and the girl was mixed up

in it again. On the following day he read a story about a brother and a

sister. Next day, the story was about two sisters. On the fifth day.... On

the fifth day he hurled the paper away with a shudder, and said to Sylvain

Kohn:

"But what's the matter with you all? Are you ill?"

Sylvain Kohn began to laugh, and said:

"That is art."

Christophe shrugged his shoulders:

"You're pulling my leg."

Kohn laughed once more:

"Not at all. Read a little more."

And he pointed to the report of a recent inquiry into Art and Morality,

which set out that "Love sanctified everything," that "Sensuality was

the leaven of Art," that "Art could not be Immoral," that "Morality was

a convention of Jesuit education," and that nothing mattered except "the

greatness of Desire." A number of letters from literary men witnessed

the artistic purity of a novel depicting the life of bawds. Some of the

signatories were among the greatest names in contemporary literature, or

the most austere of critics. A domestic poet, _bourgeois_ and a Catholic,

gave his blessing as an artist to a detailed description of the decadence

of the Greeks. There were enthusiastic praises of novels in which the

course of Lewdness was followed through the ages: Rome, Alexandria,

Byzantium, the Italian and French Renaissance, the Age of Greatness ...

Nothing was omitted. Another cycle of studies was devoted to the various

countries of the world: conscientious writers had devoted their energies,

with a monkish patience, to the study of the low quarters of the five

continents. And it was no matter for surprise to discover among these

geographers and historians of Pleasure distinguished poets and very

excellent writers. They were only marked out from the rest by their

erudition. In their most impeccable style they told archaic stories, highly

spiced.

But what was most alarming was to see honest men and real artists, men who

rightly enjoyed a high place in French literature, struggling in such a

traffic, for which they were not at all suited. Some of them with great

travail wrote, like the rest, the sort of trash that the newspapers

serialize. They had to produce it by a fixed time, once or twice a week:

and it had been going on for years. They went on producing and producing,

long after they had ceased to have anything to say, racking their brains to

find something new, something more sensational, more bizarre: for the

public was surfeited and sick of everything, and soon wearied of even the

most wanton imaginary pleasures: they had always to go one better--better

than the rest, better than their own best--and they squeezed out their very

life-blood, they squeezed out their guts: it was a pitiable sight, a

grotesque spectacle.

Christophe, who did not know the ins and outs of that melancholy traffic,

and if he had known them would not have been more indulgent; for in his

eyes nothing in the world could excuse an artist for selling his art for

thirty pieces of silver....

(Not even to assure the well-being of those whom he loves?

Not even then.

That is not human.

It is not a question of being human; it is a question of being a man....

Human!... May God have mercy on your white-livered humanitarianism, it is

so bloodless!... No man loves twenty things at once, no man can serve many

gods!...)

... Christophe, who, in his hard-working life, had hardly yet seen beyond

the limits of his little German town, could have no idea that this artistic

degradation, which showed so rawly in Paris, was common to nearly all the

great towns: and the hereditary prejudices of chaste Germany against Latin

immorality awoke in him once more. And yet Sylvain Kohn might easily have

pointed to what was going on by the banks of the Spree, and the impurity

of Imperial Germany, where brutality made shame and degradation even more

repulsive. But Sylvain Kohn never thought of it: he was no more shocked by

that than by the life of Paris. He thought ironically: "Every nation has

its little ways," and the ways of the world in which he lived seemed so

natural to him that Christophe could be excused for thinking it was in the

nature of the people. And so, like so many of his compatriots, he saw in

the secret sore which is eating away the intellectual aristocracies of

Europe the vice proper to French art, and the bankruptcy of the Latin

races.

Christophe was hurt by his first encounter with French literature, and it

took him some time to get over it. And yet there were plenty of books which

were not solely occupied with what one of these writers has nobly called

"the taste for fundamental entertainments." But he never laid hands on

the best and finest of them. Such books were not written, for the like of

Sylvain Kohn and his friends: they did not bother about them, and certainly

Kohn and the rest never bothered about the better class of books: they

ignored each other. Sylvain Kohn would never have thought of mentioning

them to Christophe. He was quite sincerely convinced that his friends

and himself were the incarnation of French Art, and thought there was no

talent, no art, no France outside the men who had been consecrated as great

by their opinion and the press of the boulevards. Christophe knew nothing

about the poets who were the glory of French literature, the very crown of

France. Very few of the novelists reached him, or emerged from the ocean of

mediocre writers: a few books of Barrès and Anatole France. But he was not

sufficiently familiar with the language to be able to enjoy the universal

dilettantism, and erudition, and irony of the one, or the unequal but

superior art of the other. He spent some time in watching the little

orange-trees in tubs growing in the hothouse of Anatole France, and the

delicate, perfect flowers clambering over the gravelike soul of Barrès. He

stayed for a moment or two before the genius, part sublime, part silly, of

Maeterlinck: from that there issued a polite mysticism, monotonous, numbing

like some vague sorrow. He shook himself, and plunged into the heavy,

sluggish stream, the muddy romanticism of Zola, with whom he was already

acquainted, and when he emerged from that it was to sink back and drown in

a deluge of literature.

The submerged lands exhaled an _odor di femina_. The literature of the day

teemed with effeminate men and women. It is well that women should write if

they are sincere enough to describe what no man has yet seen: the depths

of the soul of a woman. But only very few dared do that: most of them only

wrote to attract the men: they were as untruthful in their books as in

their drawing-rooms: they jockeyed their facts and flirted with the reader.

Since they were no longer religious, and had no confessor to whom to tell

their little lapses, they told them to the public. There was a perfect

shower of novels, almost all scabrous, all affected, written in a sort of

lisping style, a style scented with flowers and fine perfumes--sometimes

too fine--sometimes not fine at all--and the eternal stale, warm, sweetish

smell. Their books reeked of it. Christophe thought, like Goethe: "Let

women do what they like with poetry and writing: but men must not write

like women! That I cannot stand." He could not help being disgusted by

their tricks, their sly coquetry, their sentimentality, which seemed to

expend itself by preference upon creatures hardly worthy of interest,

their style crammed with metaphor, their love-making and sensuality, their

hotch-potch of subtlety and brutality.

But Christophe was ready to admit that he was not in a position to judge.

He was deafened by the row of this babel of words. It was impossible to

hear the little fluting sounds that were drowned in it all. For even among

such books as these there were some, from the pages of which, behind all

the nonsense, there shone the limpid sky and the harmonious outline of the

hills of Attica--so much talent, so much grace, a sweet breath of life, and

charm of style, a thought like the voluptuous women or the languid boys of

Perugino and the young Raphael, smiling, with half-closed eyes, at their

dream of love. But Christophe was blind to that. Nothing could reveal

to him the dominant tendencies, the currents of public opinion. Even a

Frenchman would have been hard put to it to see them. And the only definite

impression that he had at this time was that of a flood of writing which

looked like a national disaster. It seemed as though everybody wrote: men,

women, children, officers, actors, society people, blackguards. It was an

epidemic.

For the time being Christophe gave it up. He felt that such a guide as

Sylvain Kohn must lead him hopelessly astray. His experience of a literary

coterie in Germany gave him very properly a profound distrust of the people

whom he met: it was impossible to know whether or no they only represented

the opinion of a few hundred idle people, or even, in certain cases,

whether or no the author was his own public. The theater gave a more exact

idea of the society of Paris. It played an enormous part in the daily life

of the city. It was an enormous kitchen, a Pantagruelesque restaurant,

which could not cope with the appetite of the two million inhabitants.

There were thirty leading theaters, without counting the local houses, café

concerts, all sorts of shows--a hundred halls, all giving performances

every evening, and, every evening, almost all full. A whole nation of

actors and officials. Vast sums were swallowed up in the gulf. The four

State-aided theaters gave work to three thousand people, and cost the

country ten million francs. The whole of Paris re-echoed with the glory

of the play-actors. It was impossible to go anywhere without seeing

innumerable photographs, drawings, caricatures, reproducing their features

and mannerisms, gramophones reproducing their voices, and the newspapers

their opinions on art and politics. They had special newspapers devoted

to them. They published their heroic and domestic Memoirs. These big

self-conscious children, who spent their time in aping each other, these

wonderful apes reigned and held sway over the Parisians: and the dramatic

authors were their chief ministers. Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to

conduct him into the kingdom of shadows and reflections.

* * * * *

But Sylvain Kohn was no safer as a guide in that world than in the world

of books, and, thanks to him, Christophe's first impression was almost as

repulsive as that of his first essay in literature. It seemed that there

was everywhere the same spirit of mental prostitution.

The pleasure-mongers were divided into two schools. On the one hand there

was the good old way, the national way, of providing a coarse and unclean

pleasure, quite frankly; a delight in ugliness, strong meat, physical

deformities, a show of drawers, barrack-room jests, risky stories, red

pepper, high game, private rooms--"a manly frankness," as those people

say who try to reconcile looseness and morality by pointing out that,

after four acts of dubious fun, order is restored and the Code triumphs

by the fact that the wife is really with the husband whom she thinks

she is deceiving--(so long as the law is observed, then virtue is all

right):--that vicious sort of virtue which defends marriage by endowing it

with all the charm of lewdness:--the Gallic way.

The other school was in the modern style. It was much more subtle and much

more disgusting. The Parisianized Jews and the Judaicized Christians who

frequented the theater had introduced into it the usual hash of sentiment

which is the distinctive feature of a degenerate cosmopolitanism. Those

sons who blushed for their fathers set themselves to abnegate their racial

conscience: and they succeeded only too well. Having plucked out the soul

that was their birthright, all that was left them was a mixture of the

moral and intellectual values of other races: they made a _macédoine_ of

them, an _olla podrida_: it was their way of taking possession of them.

The men who who were at that time in control of the theaters in Paris were

extraordinarily skilful at beating up filth and sentiment, and giving

virtue a flavoring of vice, vice a flavoring of virtue, and turning upside

down every human relation of age, sex, the family, and the affections.

Their art, therefore, had an odor _sui generis_, which smelt both good and

bad at once--that is to say, it smelled very bad indeed: they called it

"amoralism."

One of their favorite heroes at that time was the amorous old man. Their

theaters presented a rich gallery of portraits of the type: and in painting

it they introduced a thousand pretty touches. Sometimes the sexagenarian

hero would take his daughter into his confidence, and talk to her about

his mistress: and she would talk about her lovers: and they would give

each other friendly advice: the kindly father would aid his daughter in

her indiscretions: and the precious daughter would intervene with the

unfaithful mistress, beg her to return, and bring her back to the fold.

Sometimes the good old man would listen to the confidences of his

mistress: he would talk to her about her lovers, or, if nothing better

was forthcoming, he would listen to the tale of her gallantries, and even

take a delight in them. And there were portraits of lovers, distinguished

gentlemen, who presided in the houses of their former mistresses, and

helped them in their nefarious business. Society women were thieves. The

men were bawds, the girls were Lesbian. And all these things happened in

the highest society: the society of rich people--the only society that

mattered. For that made it possible to offer the patrons of the theater

damaged goods under cover of the delights of luxury. So tricked out, it was

displayed in the market, to the joy of old gentlemen and young women. And

it all reeked of death and the seraglio.

Their style was not less mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a

composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every

country under the sun--pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious,

prurient, and low--a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and

wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted

with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: but they were

clever enough, and they manufactured their goods in imitation of Paris. If

the stone was not always of the first water, and if the setting was always

strange and overdone, at least it shone in artificial light, and that was

all it was meant to do. They were intelligent, keen, though short-sighted

observers--their eyes had been dulled by centuries of the life of the

counting-house--turning the magnifying-glass on human sentiments, enlarging

small things, not seeing big things. With a marked predilection for finery,

they were incapable of depicting anything but what seemed to their upstart

snobbishness the ideal of polite society: a little group of worn-out rakes

and adventurers, who quarreled among themselves for the possession of

certain stolen moneys and a few virtueless females.

And yet upon occasion the real nature of these Jewish writers would

suddenly awake, come to the surface from the depths of their being, in

response to some mysterious echo called forth by some vivid word or

sensation. Then there appeared a strange hotch-potch of ages and races, a

breath of wind from the Desert, bringing over the seas to their Parisian

rooms the musty smell of a Turkish bazaar, the dazzling shimmer of the

sands, the mirage, blind sensuality, savage invective, nervous disorder

only a hair's-breadth away from epilepsy, a destructive frenzy--Samson,

suddenly rising like a lion--after ages of squatting in the shade--and

savagely tearing down the columns of the Temple, which comes crashing down

on himself and on his enemies.

Christophe blew his nose and said to Sylvain Kohn:

"There's power in it: but it stinks. That's enough! Let's go and see

something else."

"What?" asked Sylvain Kohn.

"France."

"That's it!" said Kohn.

"Can't be," replied Christophe. "France isn't like that."

"It's France, and Germany, too."

"I don't believe it. A nation that was anything like that wouldn't last for

twenty years: why, it's decomposing already. There must be something else."

"There's nothing better."

"There must be something else," insisted Christophe.

"Oh, yes," said Sylvain Kohn. "We have fine people, of course, and theaters

for them, too. Is that what you want? We can give you that."

He took Christophe to the Théâtre Français.

* * * * *

That evening they happened to be playing a modern comedy, in prose, dealing

with some legal problem.

From the very beginning Christophe was baffled to make out in what sort of

world the action was taking place. The voices of the actors were out of all

reason, full, solemn, slow, formal: they rounded every syllable as though

they were giving a lesson in elocution, and they seemed always to be

scanning Alexandrines with tragic pauses. Their gestures were solemn and

almost hieratic. The heroine, who wore her gown as though it were a Greek

peplus, with arm uplifted, and head lowered, was nothing else but Antigone,

and she smiled with a smile of eternal sacrifice, carefully modulating

the lower notes of her beautiful contralto voice. The heavy father

walked about like a fencing-master, with automatic gestures, a funereal

dignity,--romanticism in a frock-coat. The juvenile lead gulped and gasped

and squeezed out a sob or two. The piece was written in the style of a

tragic serial story: abstract phrases, bureaucratic epithets, academic

periphrases. No movement, not a sound unrehearsed. From beginning to end it

was clockwork, a set problem, a scenario, the skeleton of a play, with not

a scrap of flesh, only literary phrases. Timid ideas lay behind discussions

that were meant to be bold: the whole spirit of the thing was hopelessly

middle-class and respectable.

The heroine had divorced an unworthy husband, by whom she had had a child,

and she had married a good man whom she loved. The point was, that even in

such a case as this divorce was condemned by Nature, as it is by prejudice.

Nothing could be easier than to prove it: the author contrived that the

woman should be surprised, for one occasion only, into yielding to the

first husband. After that, instead of a perfectly natural remorse, perhaps

a profound sense of shame, together with a greater desire to love and

honor the second and good husband, the author trotted out an heroic case

of conscience, altogether beyond Nature. French writers never seem to be

on good terms with virtue: they always force the note when they talk of

it: they make it quite incredible. They always seem to be dealing with

the heroes of Corneille, and tragedy Kings. And are they not Kings and

Queens, these millionaire heroes, and these heroines who would not be

interesting unless they had at least a mansion in Paris and two or three

country-houses? For such writers and such a public wealth itself is a

beauty, and almost a virtue.

The audience was even more amazing than the play. They were never bored

by all the tiresomely repeated improbabilities. They laughed at the good

points, when the actors said things that were _meant_ to be laughed at: it

was made obvious that they were coming, so that the audience could be ready

to laugh. They mopped their eyes and coughed, and were deeply moved when

the puppets gasped, and gulped, and roared, and fainted away in accordance

with the hallowed tragic ritual.

"And people say the French are gay!" exclaimed Christophe as they left the

theater.

"There's a time for everything," said Sylvain Kohn chaffingly. "You wanted

virtue. You see, there's still virtue in France."

"But that's not virtue!" cried Christophe. "That's rhetoric!"

"In France," said Sylvain Kohn. "Virtue in the theater is always

rhetorical."

"A pretorium virtue," said Christophe, "and the prize goes to the best

talker. I hate lawyers. Have you no poets in France?"

Sylvain Kohn took him to the poetic drama.

* * * * *

There were poets in France. There were even great poets. But the theater

was not for them. It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what

the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: _Sicut amori lupanar._

Christophe saw Princesses who were virtuously promiscuous, who prostituted

themselves for their honor, who were compared with Christ ascending

Calvary:--friends who deceived their friends out of devotion to

them:--glorified triangular relations:--heroic cuckoldry: (the cuckold,

like the blessed prostitute, had become a European commodity: the example

of King Mark had turned the heads of the poets: like the stag of Saint

Hubert, the cuckold never appeared without a halo.) And Christophe saw

also lovely damsels torn between passion and duty: their passion bade them

follow a new lover: duty bade them stay with the old one, an old man who

gave them money and was deceived by them. And in the end they plumped

heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid

interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them:

they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word

for it.

The summit of art was reached and the greatest pleasure was given when,

most paradoxically, sexual immorality and Corneillian heroics could be

combined. In that way every need of the Parisian public was satisfied:

mind, senses, rhetoric. But it is only just to say that the public was

fonder even of words than of lewdness. Eloquence could send it into

ecstasies. It would have suffered anything for a fine tirade. Virtue or

vice, heroics hobnobbing with the basest prurience, there was no pill that

it would not swallow if it were gilded with sonorous rhymes and redundant

words. Anything that came to hand was ground into couplets, antitheses,

arguments: love, suffering, death. And when that was done, they thought

they had felt love, suffering, and death. Nothing but phrases. It was all

a game. When Hugo brought thunder on to the stage, at once (as one of

his disciples said) he muted it so as not to frighten even a child. (The

disciple fancied he was paying him a compliment.) It was never possible to

feel any of the forces of Nature in their art. They made everything polite.

Just as in music--and even more than in music, which was a younger art

in France, and therefore relatively more simple--they were terrified of

anything that had been "already said." The most gifted of them coldly

devoted themselves to working contrariwise. The process was childishly

simple: they pitched on some beautiful legend or fairy-story, and turned

it upside down. Thus, Bluebeard was beaten by his wives, or Polyphemus

was kind enough to pluck out his eye by way of sacrificing himself to the

happiness of Acis and Galatea. And they thought of nothing but form. And

once more it seemed to Christophe (though he was not a good judge) that

these masters of form were rather coxcombs and imitators than great writers

creating their own style and giving breadth and depth to their work.

They played at being artists. They played at being poets. Nowhere was the

poetic lie more insolently reared than in the heroic drama. They put up a

burlesque conception of a hero:

"_The great thing is to have a soul magnificent.

An eagel's eye; broad brow like portico; present

An air of strength, grave mien, most touchingly to show

A heart that throbs, eyes full of dreams of worlds they know._"

Verses like that were taken seriously. Behind the hocus-pocus of such

fine-sounding words, the bombast, the theatrical clash and clang of the

swords and pasteboard helmets, there was always the incurable futility of a

Sardou, the intrepid vaudevillist, playing Punch and Judy with history.

When in the world was the like of the heroism of Cyrano ever to be found?

These writers moved heaven and earth; they summoned from their tombs the

Emperor and his legions, the bandits of the Ligue, the _condottieri_ of

the Renaissance, called up the human cyclones that once devastated the

universe:--just to display a puppet, standing unmoved through frightful

massacres, surrounded by armies, soldiers, and whole hosts of captive

women, dying of a silly calfish love for a woman whom he had seen ten or

fifteen years before--or King Henri IV submitting to assassination because

his mistress no longer loved him.

So, and no otherwise, did these good people present their parlor Kings,

and _condottieri_, and heroic passion. They were worthy scions of the

illustrious nincompoops of the days of _Grand Cyrus_, those Gascons of the

ideal--Scudéry, La Calprenède--an everlasting brood, the songsters of sham

heroism, impossible heroism, which is the enemy of truth. Christophe

observed to his amazement that the French, who are said to be so clever,

had no sense of the ridiculous.

He was lucky when religion was not dragged in to fit the fashion! Then,

during Lent, certain actors read the sermons of Bossuet at the Gaîté

to the accompaniment of an organ. Jewish authors wrote tragedies about

Saint Theresa for Jewish actresses. The _Way of the Cross_ was acted at

the Bodinière, the _Child Jesus_ at the Ambigu, the _Passion_ at the

Porte-Saint-Martin, _Jesus_ at the Odéon, orchestral suites on the subject

of _Christ_ at the Botanical Gardens. And a certain brilliant talker--a

poet who wrote passionate love-songs--gave a lecture on the _Redemption_

at the Châtelet. And, of course, the passages of the Gospel that were most

carefully preserved by these people were those relating to Pilate and

Mary Magdalene:--"_What is truth_?" and the story of the blessed foolish

virgin.--And their boulevard Christs were horribly loquacious and well up

in all the latest tricks of worldly casuistry.

Christophe said:

"That is the worst yet. It is untruth incarnate. I'm stifling. Let's get

out."

And yet there was a great classic art that held its ground among all these

modern industries, like the ruins of the splendid ancient temples among all

the pretentious buildings of modern Rome. But, outside Molière, Christophe

was not yet able to appreciate it. He was not yet familiar enough with the

language, and, therefore, could not grasp the genius of the race. Nothing

baffled him so much as the tragedy of the seventeenth century--one of the

least accessible provinces of French art to foreigners, precisely because

it lies at the very heart of France. It bored him horribly; he found it

cold, dry, and revolting in its tricks and pedantry. The action was thin or

forced, the characters were rhetorical abstractions or as insipid as the

conversation of society women. They were caricatures of the ancient legends

and heroes: a display of reason, arguments, quibbling, and antiquated

psychology and archeology. Speeches, speeches, speeches; the eternal

loquacity of the French. Christophe ironically refused to say whether it

was beautiful or not: there was nothing to interest him in it: whatever the

arguments put forward in turn by the orators of _Cinna_, he did not care a

rap which of the talking-machines won in the end.

However, he had to admit that the French audience was not of his way of

thinking, and that they did applaud these plays that bored him. But that

did not help to dissipate his confusion: he saw the plays through the

audience: and he recognized in the modern French certain of the features,

distorted, of the classics. So might a critical eye see in the faded charms

of an old coquette the clear, pure features of her daughter:--(such a

discovery is not calculated to foster the illusion of love). Like the

members of a family who are used to seeing each other, the French could not

see the resemblance. But Christophe was struck by it, and exaggerated it:

he could see nothing else. Every work of art he saw seemed to him to be

full of old-fashioned caricatures of the great ancestors of the French;

and he saw these same great ancestors also in caricature. He could not see

any difference between Corneille and the long line of his followers, those

rhetorical poets whose mania it was to present nothing but sublime and

ridiculous cases of conscience. And Racine he confounded with his offspring

of pretentiously introspective Parisian psychologists.

None of these people had really broken free from the classics. The critics

were for ever discussing _Tartuffe_ and _Phèdre_. They never wearied of

hearing the same plays over and over again. They delighted in the same old

words, and when they were old men they laughed at the same jokes which had

been their joy when they were children. And so it would be while the French

nation endured. No country in the world has so firmly rooted a cult of its

great-great-grandfathers. The rest of the universe did not interest them.

There were many, many men and women, even intelligent men and women, who

had never read anything, and never wanted to read anything outside the

works that had been written in France under the Great King! Their theaters

presented neither Goethe, nor Schiller, nor Kleist, nor Grillparzer,

nor Hebbel, nor any of the great dramatists of other nations, with the

exception of the ancient Greeks, whose heirs they declared themselves to

be--(like every other nation in Europe). Every now and then they felt they

ought to include Shakespeare. That was the touchstone. There were two

schools of Shakespearean interpreters: the one played _King Lear_, with

a commonplace realism, like a comedy of Emile Augier: the other turned

_Hamlet_ into an opera, with bravura airs and vocal exercises à la Victor

Hugo. It never occurred to them that reality could be poetic or that poetry

was the spontaneous language of hearts bursting with life. Shakespeare

seemed false. They very quickly went back to Rostand.

And yet, during the last twenty years, there had been sturdy efforts made

to vitalize the theater: the narrow circle of subjects drawn from Parisian

literature had been widened: the theater laid hands on everything with a

show of audacity. Two or three times even the outer world, public life, had

torn down the curtain of convention. But the theatrists made haste to piece

it together again. They lived in blinkers, and were afraid of seeing things

as they are. A sort of clannishness, a classical tradition, a routine

of form and spirit, and a lack of real seriousness, held them back from

pushing their audacity to its logical extremity. They turned the acutest

problems into ingenious games: and they always came back to the problem of

women--women of a certain class. And what a sorry figure did the phantoms

of great men cut on their boards: the heroic Anarchy of Ibsen, the Gospel

of Tolstoy, the Superman of Nietzsche!...

The literary men of Paris took a great deal of trouble to seem to be

advanced thinkers. But at heart they were all conservative. There was no

literature in Europe in which the past, the old, the "eternal yesterday,"

held a completer and more unconscious sway: in the great reviews, in the

great newspapers, in the State-aided theaters, in the Academy, Paris

was in literature what London was in Politics: the check on the mind of

Europe. The French Academy was a House of Lords. A certain number of the

institutions of the _Ancien Régime_ forced the spirit of the old days on

the new society. Every revolutionary element was rejected or promptly

assimilated. They asked nothing better. In vain did the Government pretend

to a socialistic polity. In art it truckled under to the Academies and the

Academic Schools. Against the Academies there was no opposition save from

a few coteries, and they put up a very poor fight. For as soon as a member

of a coterie could, he fell into line with an Academy, and became more

academic than the rest. And even if a writer were in the advance guard or

in the van of the army, he was almost always trammeled by his group and the

ideas of his group. Some of them were hidebound by their academic _Credo_,

others by their revolutionary _Credo_: and, when all was done, they both

amounted to the same thing.

* * * * *

By way of rousing Christophe, on whom academic art had acted as a

soporific, Sylvain Kohn proposed to take him to certain eclectic

theaters,--the very latest thing. There they saw murder, rape, madness,

torture, eyes plucked out, bellies gutted--anything to thrill the nerves,

and satisfy the barbarism lurking beneath a too civilized section of

the people. It had a great attraction for pretty women and men of the

world--the people who would go and spend whole afternoons in the stuffy

courts of the Palais de Justice, listening to scandalous cases, laughing,

talking, and eating chocolates. But Christophe indignantly refused. The

more closely he examined that sort of art, the more acutely he became

aware of the odor that from the very first he had detected, faintly in the

beginning, then more strongly, and finally it was suffocating: the odor of

death.

Death: it was everywhere beneath all the luxury and uproar. Christophe

discovered the explanation of the feeling of repugnance with which certain

French plays had filled him. It was not their immorality that shocked him.

Morality, immorality, amorality,--all these words mean nothing. Christophe

had never invented any moral theory: he loved the great poets and great

musicians of the past, and they were no saints: when he came across a great

artist he did not inquire into his morality: he asked him rather:

"Are you healthy?"

To be healthy was the great thing. "If the poet is ill, let him first of

all cure himself," as Goethe says. "When he is cured, he will write."

The writers of Paris were unhealthy: or if one of them happened to be

healthy, the chances were that he was ashamed of it: he disguised it, and

did his best to catch some disease. Their sickness was not shown in any

particular feature of their art:--the love of pleasure, the extreme license

of mind, or the universal trick of criticism which examined and dissected

every idea that was expressed. All these things could be--and were, as the

case might be--healthy or unhealthy. If death was there, it did not come

from the material, but from the use that these people made of it; it was

in the people themselves. And Christophe himself loved pleasure. He, too,

loved liberty. He had drawn down upon himself the displeasure of his little

German town by his frankness in defending many things, which he found here,

promulgated by these Parisians, in such a way as to disgust him. And yet

they were the same things. But nothing sounded the same to the Parisians

and to himself. When Christophe impatiently shook off the yoke of the

great Masters of the past, when he waged war against the esthetics and the

morality of the Pharisees, it was not a game to him as it was to these men

of intellect: and his revolt was directed only towards life, the life of

fruitfulness, big with the centuries to come. With these people all tended

to sterile enjoyment. Sterile, Sterile, Sterile. That was the key to the

enigma. Mind and senses were fruitlessly debauched. A brilliant art, full

of wit and cleverness--a lovely form, in truth, a tradition of beauty,

impregnably seated, in spite of foreign alluvial deposits--a theater which

was a theater, a style which was a style, authors who knew their business,

writers who could write, the fine skeleton of an art, and a thought that

had been great. But a skeleton. Sonorous words, ringing phrases, the

metallic clang of ideas hurtling down the void, witticisms, minds haunted

by sensuality, and senses numbed with thought. It was all useless, save

for the sport of egoism. It led to death. It was a phenomenon analogous

to the frightful decline in the birth-rate of France, which Europe was

observing--and reckoning--in silence. So much wit, so much cleverness, so

many acute senses, all wasted and wasting in a sort of shameful onanism!

They had no notion of it, and wished to have none. They laughed. That was

the only thing that comforted Christophe a little: these people could still

laugh: all was not lost. He liked them even less when they tried to take

themselves seriously: and nothing hurt him more than to see writers, who

regarded art as no more than an instrument of pleasure, giving themselves

airs as priests of a disinterested religion:

"We are artists," said Sylvain Kohn once more complacently. "We follow art

for art's sake. Art is always pure: everything in art is chaste. We explore

life as tourists, who find everything amusing. We are amateurs of rare

sensations, lovers of beauty."

"You are hypocrites," replied Christophe bluntly. "Excuse my saying so. I

used to think my own country had a monopoly. In Germany our hypocrisy

consists in always talking about idealism while we think of nothing but

our interests, and we even believe that we are idealists while we think

of nothing but ourselves. But you are much worse: you cover your national

lewdness with the names of Art and Beauty (with capitals)--when you do not

shield your Moral Pilatism behind the names of Truth, Science, Intellectual

Duty, and you wash your hands of the possible consequences of your haughty

inquiry. Art for art's sake!... That's a fine faith! But it is the faith

of the strong. Art! To grasp life, as the eagle claws its prey, to bear it

up into the air, to rise with it into the serenity of space!... For that

you need talons, great wings, and a strong heart. But you are nothing but

sparrows who, when they find a piece of carrion, rend it here and there,

squabbling for it, and twittering ... Art for art's sake!... Oh! wretched

men! Art is no common ground for the feet of all who pass it by. Why, it is

a pleasure, it is the most intoxicating of all. But it is a pleasure which

is only won at the cost of a strenuous fight: it is the laurel-wreath that

crowns the victory of the strong. Art is life tamed. Art is the Emperor

of life. To be Cæsar a man must have the soul of Cæsar. But you are

only limelight Kings: you are playing a part, and do not even deceive

yourselves. And, like those actors, who turn to profit their deformities,

you manufacture literature out of your own deformities and those of your

public. Lovingly do you cultivate the diseases of your people, their fear

of effort, their love of pleasure, their sensual minds, their chimerical

humanitarianism, everything in them that drugs the will, everything in them

that saps their power for action. You deaden their minds with the fumes

of opium. Behind it all is death: you know it: but you will not admit it.

Well, I tell you: Where death is, there art is not. Art is the spring of

life. But even the most honest of your writers are so cowardly that even

when the bandage is removed from their eyes they pretend not to see: they

have the effrontery to say:

"'It is dangerous, I admit: it is poisonous: but it is full of talent.'

"It is as if a judge, sentencing a hooligan, were to say:

"'He's a blackguard, certainly: but he has so much talent!...'"

* * * * *

Christophe wondered what was the use of French criticism. There was no lack

of critics: they swarmed all over and about French art. It was impossible

to see the work of the artists: they were swamped by the critics.

Christophe was not indulgent towards criticism in general. He found it

difficult to admit the utility of these thousands of artists who formed a

Fourth or Fifth Estate in the modern community: he read in it the signs of

a worn-out generation which relegates to others the business of regarding

life--feeling vicariously. And, to go farther, it seemed to him not a

little shameful that they could not even see with their own eyes the

reflection of life, but must have yet more intermediaries, reflections

of the reflection--the critics. At least, they ought to have seen to it

that the reflections were true. But the critics reflected nothing but the

uncertainty of the mob that moved round them. They were like those trick

mirrors which reflect again and again the faces of the sightseers who gaze

into them against a painted background.

There had been a time when the critics had enjoyed a tremendous authority

in France. The public bowed down to their decrees: and they were not

far from regarding them as superior to the artists, as artists with

intelligence:--(apparently the two words do not go together naturally).

Then they had multiplied too rapidly: there were too many oracles: that

spoiled the trade. When there are so many people, each of whom declares

that he is the sole repository of truth, it is impossible to believe them:

and in the end they cease to believe it themselves. They were discouraged:

in the passage from night to day, according to the French custom, they

passed from one extreme to the other. Where they had before professed

to know everything, they now professed to know nothing. It was a point

of honor with them, quite fatuously. Renan had taught those milksop

generations that it is not correct to affirm anything without denying it at

once, or at least casting a doubt on it. He was one of those men of whom

St. Paul speaks: "For whom there is always Yes, Yes, and then No, No." All

the superior persons in France had wildly embraced this amphibious _Credo_.

It exactly suited their indolence of mind and weakness of character. They

no longer said of a work of art that it was good or bad, true or false,

intelligent or idiotic. They said:

"It may be so.... Nothing is impossible.... I don't know.... I wash my

hands of it."

If some objectionable piece were put up, they did not say:

"That is nasty rubbish!"

They said:

"Sir Sganarelle, please do not talk like that. Our philosophy bids us talk

of everything open-mindedly: and therefore you ought not to say: 'That is

nasty rubbish!' but: 'It seems to me that that is nasty rubbish.... But it

is not certain that it is so. It may be a masterpiece. Who can say that it

is not?'"

There was no danger of their being accused of tyranny over the arts.

Schiller once taught them a lesson when he reminded the petty tyrants of

the Press of his time of what he called bluntly:

"_The Duty of Servants.

"First, the house must be clean that the Queen is to enter. Bustle about,

then! Sweep the rooms. That is what you are there for, gentlemen!

"But as soon as She appears, out you go! Let not the serving-wench sit in

her lady's chair!_"

But, to be just to the critics of that time, it must be said that they

never did sit in their lady's chair. It was ordered that they should be

servants: and servants they were. But bad servants: they never took a broom

in their hands: the room was thick with dust. Instead of cleaning and

tidying, they folded their arms, and left the work to be done by the

master, the divinity of the day:--Universal Suffrage.

In fact, there had been for some time a wave of reaction passing through

the popular conscience. A few people had set out--feebly enough--on a

campaign of public health: but Christophe could see no sign of it among the

people with whom he lived. They gained no hearing, and were laughed at.

When every now and then some honest man did raise a protest against unclean

art, the authors replied haughtily that they were in the right, since the

public was satisfied. That was enough to silence every objection. The

public had spoken: that was the supreme law of art! It never occurred to

anybody to impeach the evidence of a debauched public in favor of those

who had debauched them, or that it was the artist's business to lead the

public, not the public the artist. A numerical religion--the number of the

audience, and the sum total of the receipts--dominated the artistic thought

of that commercialized democracy. Following the authors, the critics

docilely declared that the essential function of a work of art was to

please. Success is law: and when success endures, there is nothing to be

done but to bow to it. And so they devoted their energies to anticipating

the fluctuations of the Exchange of pleasure, in trying to find out what

the public thought of the various plays. The joke of it was that the public

was always trying frantically to find out what the critics thought. And so

there they were, looking at each, other: and in each other's eyes they saw

nothing but their own indecision.

And yet never had there been such crying need of a fearless critic. In an

anarchical Republic, fashion, which is all-powerful in art, very rarely

looks backward, as it does in a conservative State: it goes onwards always:

and there is a perpetual competition of libertinism which hardly anybody

dare resist. The mob is incapable of forming an opinion: at heart it is

shocked: but nobody dares to say what everybody secretly feels. If the

critics were strong, if they dared to be strong, what a power they would

have! A vigorous critic would in a few years become the Napoleon of public

taste, and sweep away all the diseases of art. But there is no Napoleon in

France, All the critics live in that vitiated atmosphere, and do not notice

it. And they dare not speak. They all know each other. They are a more or

less close company, and they have to consider each other: not one of them

is independent. To be so, they would have to renounce their social life,

and even their friendships. Who is there that would have the courage, in

such a knock-kneed time, when even the best critics doubt whether a just

notice is worth the annoyance it may cause to the writer and the object of

it? Who is there so devoted to duty that he would condemn himself to such a

hell on earth: dare to stand out against opinion, fight the imbecility of

the public, expose the mediocrity of the successes of the day, defend the

unknown artist who is alone and at the mercy of the beasts of prey, and

subject the minds of those who were born to obey to the dominion of the

master-mind? Christophe actually heard the critics at a first night in the

vestibule of the theater say: "H'm! Pretty bad, isn't it? Utter rot!" And

next day in their notices they talked of masterpieces, Shakespeare, the

wings of genius beating above their heads.

"It is not so much talent that your art lacks as character," said

Christophe to Sylvain Kohn. "You need a great critic, a Lessing, a ..."

"A Boileau?" said Sylvain quizzically.

"A Boileau, perhaps, more than these artists of genius."

"If we had a Boileau," said Sylvain Kohn, "no one would listen to him."

"If they did not listen to him," replied Christophe, "he would not be

a Boileau. I bet you that if I set out and told you the truth about

yourselves, quite bluntly, however clumsy I might be, you would have to

gulp it down."

"My dear good fellow!" laughed Sylvain Kohn.

That was all the reply he made.

He was so cocksure and so satisfied with the general flabbiness of the

French that suddenly it occurred to Christophe that Kohn was a thousand

times more of a foreigner in France than himself: and there was a catch at

his heart.

"It is impossible," he said once more, as he had said that evening when he

had left the theater on the boulevards in disgust. "There must be something

else."

"What more do you want?" asked Sylvain Kohn.

"France."

"We are France," said Sylvain Kohn, gurgling with laughter.

Christophe stared hard at him for a moment, then shook his head, and said

once more:

"There must be something else."

"Well, old man, you'd better look for it," said Sylvain Kohn, laughing

louder than ever.

Christophe had to look for it. It was well hidden.