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 naïve 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
passion 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 passion 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 noblest 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
noble priest, the circus rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in
equal doses of real and false nobility, 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-gods, 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 fashionable folly, of
school-chattering. The man who had seen God, the man who lived in God,
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 Händel. What hurt him in all of them, especially
in the classics, 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 fashion. These symmetrical and
twaddling constructions--classical, and neo-classical 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 naïve 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 massive
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 Brünnhilde, like
respectable German married people, in the _Götterdämmerung_ laid bare
before each other, especially for the benefit of the audience, their
pompous and voluble conjugal passion. Every sort of lie had arranged to
meet in that work: false idealism, false Christianity, false Gothicism,
false legend, false gods, 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 rushing
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, shifting 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 ingratitude 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 passionately--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 passing through that crisis of healthy disgust. His instinct
was impelling him to eliminate from his life all the undigested elements
which encumbered 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 _Gemüt_ 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 Frühling_ (To Spring), _an den Sonnenschein_ (To
Sunshine): like _Frühlingslied_ (Spring Song), _Frühlingslust_ (Delights of
Spring), _Frühlingsgruss_ (Hail to the Spring), _Frülingsfahrt_ (A Spring
Journey), _Frülingsnacht_ (A Spring Night), _Frühlingsbotschaft_ (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), _Fülle 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
betrübt_ (My Heart is Troubled), _Mein Aug' ist trüb_ (My Eye is Heavy):
like the candid and silly dialogues with the _Röselein_ (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, noble
glass ..."). 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 passion. He was frozen by the mist, the anæmic 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 crushing 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 naïve
and turgid soul.
But besides these monsters who were not really begotten, he wrote a
quantity of small pieces, which were the immediate expression of passing
emotions--the most eternal of all: musical thoughts, _Lieder_. In this as
in other things he was in passionate 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 passions 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_.
But generally he would find the poets, even the greatest of them, too
literary: and he would select the simplest texts for preference: texts of
old _Lieder_, jolly old songs, which he had read perhaps in some improving
work: he would take care not to preserve their choral character: he would
treat them with a fine, lively, and altogether lay audacity. Or he would
take words from the Gospel, or proverbs, sometimes even words heard by
chance, scraps of dialogues of the people, children's thoughts: words often
awkward and prosaic in which there was only pure feeling. With them he was
at his ease, and he would reach a depth with them which was not in his
other compositions, a depth which he himself never suspected.
Good or bad, more often bad than good, his works as a whole had abounding
vitality. They were not altogether new: far from it. Christophe was often
banal, through his very sincerity: he repeated sometimes forms already used
because they exactly rendered his thought, because he also felt in that way
and not otherwise. Nothing would have induced him to try to be original: it
seemed to him that a man must be very commonplace to burden himself with
such an idea. He tried to be himself, to say what he felt, without worrying
as to whether what he said had been said before him or not. He took a pride
in believing that it was the best way of being original and that Christophe
had only been and only would be alive once. With the magnificent impudence
of youth, nothing seemed to him to have been done before: and everything
seemed to him to be left for doing--or for doing again. And the feeling
of this inward fullness of life, of a life stretching endless before him,
brought him to a state of exuberant and rather indiscreet happiness. He
was perpetually in a state of jubilation, which had no need of joy: it
could adapt itself to sorrow: its source overflowed with life, was, in its
strength, mother of all happiness and virtue. To live, to live too much!...
A man who does not feel within himself this intoxication of strength, this
jubilation in living--even in the depths of misery,--is not an artist.
That is the touchstone. True greatness is shown in this power of rejoicing
through joy and sorrow. A Mendelssohn or a Brahms, gods of the mists of
October, and of fine rain, have never known the divine power.
Christophe was conscious of it: and he showed his joy simply, impudently.
He saw no harm in it, he only asked to share it with others. He did not
see how such joy hurts the majority of men, who never can possess it and
are always envious of it. For the rest he never bothered about pleasing
or displeasing: he was sure of himself, and nothing seemed to him simpler
than to communicate his conviction to others,--to conquer. Instinctively he
compared his riches with the general poverty of the makers of music: and he
thought that it would be very easy to make his superiority recognized. Too
easy, even. He had only to show himself.
He showed himself.
* * * * *
They were waiting for him.
Christophe had made no secret of his feelings. Since he had become aware
of German Pharisaism, which refuses to see things as they are, he had
made it a law for himself that he should be absolutely, continually,
uncompromisingly sincere in everything without regard for anything or
anybody or himself. And as he could do nothing without going to extremes,
he was extravagant in his sincerity: he would say outrageous things and
scandalize people a thousand times less naïve than himself. He never
dreamed that it might annoy them. When he realized the idiocy of some
hallowed composition he would make haste to impart his discovery to
everybody he encountered: musicians of the orchestra, or amateurs of his
acquaintance. He would pronounce the most absurd judgments with a beaming
face. At first no one took him seriously: they laughed at his freaks. But
it was not long before they found that he was always reverting to them,
insisting on them in a way that was really bad taste. It became evident
that Christophe believed in his paradoxes: and they became less amusing. He
was a nuisance: at concerts he would make ironic remarks in a loud voice,
or would express his scorn for the glorious masters in no veiled fashion
wherever he might be.
Everything passed from mouth to mouth in the little town: not a word was
lost. People were already affronted by his conduct during the past year.
They had not forgotten the scandalous fashion in which he had shown himself
abroad with Ada and the troublous times of the sequel. He had forgotten,
it himself: one day wiped out another, and he was very different from what
he had been two months before. But others had not forgotten: those who, in
all small towns, take upon themselves scrupulously to note down all the
faults, all the imperfections, all the sad, ugly, and unpleasant happenings
concerning their neighbors, so that nothing is ever forgotten. Christophe's
new extravagances were naturally set, side by side with his former
indiscretions, in the scroll. The former explained the latter. The outraged
feelings of offended morality were now bolstered up by those of scandalized
good taste. The kindliest of them said:
"He is trying to be particular."
But most alleged:
_"Total verrückt!"_ (Absolutely mad.)
An opinion no less severe and even more dangerous was beginning to find
currency--an opinion assured of success by reason of its illustrious
origin: it was said that, at the Palace, whither Christophe still went upon
his official duties, he had had the bad taste in conversation with the
Grand Duke himself, with revolting lack of decency, to give vent to his
ideas concerning the illustrious masters: it was said that he had called
Mendelssohn's _Elijah_ "a clerical humbug's paternoster," and he had called
certain _Lieder_ of Schumann "_Backfisch Musik_": and that in the face of
the declared preference of the august Princess for those works! The Grand
Duke had cut short his impertinences by saying dryly: