difficult for a musician to live: the air was circumscribed. The musical
life of the country was suppressed and deformed. The factory of the
theater scattered its heavy ashes and its burning smoke upon the soil,
whose flowers in old days had perfumed all Europe. If a man refused to
enroll himself in the train of the brawlers, and could not, or would
not, enter the factory, he was condemned to exile or a stifled
existence. Genius was by no means dried up. But it was left to stagnate
unprofitably and to go to ruin. Christophe had met more than one young
musician in whom there lived again the soul of the melodious masters of
the race and the instinct of beauty which filled the wise and simple art
of the past. But who gave a thought to them? They could neither get
their work played nor published. No interest was taken in the symphony.
There were no ears for music except it were presented with a painted
face!... So discouraged, they sang for themselves, and soon sang no
more. What was the good of it? Sleep....--Christophe would have asked
nothing better than to help them. While they admitted that he could do
so, their umbrageous pride would not consent to it. Whatever he did, he
was a foreigner to them; and for Italians of long descent, in spite of
the warm welcome they will give him, every foreigner is really a
barbarian. They thought that the wretched condition of their art was a
question to be threshed out among themselves, and while, they extended
all kind of friendly tributes to Christophe, they could not admit him as
one of themselves.--What could he do? He could not compete with them and
dispute with them their meager place in the sun, where they were by no
means secure!...
Besides, genius cannot do without its food. The musician must have
music--music to hear, music to make heard. A temporary withdrawal is
valuable to the mind by forcing it to recuperate. But this can only be
on condition that it will return. Solitude is noble, but fatal to an
artist who has not the strength to break out of it. An artist must live
the life of his own time, even if it be clamorous and impure: he must
forever be giving and receiving, and giving, and giving, and again
receiving.--Italy, at the time of Christophe's sojourn, was no longer
the great market of the arts that once it was, and perhaps will be
again. Nowadays the meeting-place of ideas, the exchange of the thought
and spirit of the nations, are in the North. He who has the will to live
must live in the North.
Left to himself, Christophe would have shuddered away from the rout. But
Grazia felt his duty more clearly than he could see it. And she demanded
more of him than of herself: no doubt because she valued him more
highly, but also because it suited her. She delegated her energy upon
him, and so maintained her tranquillity.--He had not the heart to be
angry with her for it. Like Mary, hers was the better part. Each of us
has his part to play in life. Christophe's was action. For her it was
enough to be. He asked no more of her.
He asked nothing but to love her, if it were possible, a little less for
himself, and a little more for her. For he did not altogether like her
having so little egoism in her friendship as to think only of the
interests of her friend--who asked only to be allowed to give no thought
to them.
* * * * *
He went away from her. And yet he did not leave her. As an old trouvère
says: "_The lover does not leave his beloved but with the sanction of
his soul._"
II
He was sick at heart as he reached Paris. It was the first time he had
been there since the death of Olivier. He had wished never to see the
city again. In the cab which took him from the station to his hotel he
hardly dared look out of the window; for the first few days he stayed in
his room and could not bring himself to go out. He was fearful of the
memories lying in wait for him outside. But what exactly did he dread?
Did he really know? Was it, as he tried to believe, the terror of seeing
the dead spring to life again exactly as they had been? Or was it--the
greater sorrow of being forced to know that they were dead?... Against
this renewal of grief all the half-unconscious ruses of instinct had
taken up arms. It was for this reason--(though perhaps he knew it
not)--that he had chosen a hotel in a district far removed from that in
which he had lived. And when for the first time he went out into the
streets, having to conduct rehearsals at the concert-hall, when once
more he came in contact with the life of Paris, he walked for a long
time with his eyes closed, refusing to see what he did see, insisting on
seeing only what he had seen in old days. He kept on saying to himself:
"I know that. I know that...."
In art as in politics there was the same intolerant anarchy. The same
Fair in the market-place. Only the actors had changed their parts. The
revolutionaries of his day had become bourgeois, and the supermen had
become men of fashion. The old independents were trying to stifle the
new independents. The young men of twenty years ago were now more
conservative than the old conservatives whom they had fought, and their
critics refused the newcomers the right to live. Apparently nothing was
different.
But everything had changed....
* * * * *
"My dear, forgive me. It is good of you not to be angry with me for my
silence. Your letter has helped me greatly. I have been through several
weeks of terrible distress. I had nothing. I had lost you. Here I was
feeling terribly the absence of those whom I have lost. All my old
friends of whom I used to tell you have disappeared--Philomela--(you
remember the singing voice that dear, sad night when, as I wandered
through a gay crowd, I saw your eyes in a mirror gazing at
me)--Philomela has realized her very reasonable dream: she inherited a
little money, and has a farm in Normandy. M. Arnaud has retired and gone
back to the provinces with his wife, to a little town near Angers. Of
the famous men of my day many are dead or gone under; none are left save
the same old puppets who twenty years ago were playing the juvenile lead
in art and politics, and with the same false faces are still playing it.
Outside these masks there are none whom I recognize. They seem to me to
be grimacing over a grave. It is a terrible feeling.--More than this:
during the first few days after my arrival I suffered physically from
the ugliness of things, from the gray light of the North after your
golden sun: the masses of dull houses, the vulgar lines of certain domes
and monuments, which had never struck me before, hurt me cruelly. Nor
was the moral atmosphere any more to my taste.
"And yet I have no complaint to make of the Parisians. They have given
me a welcome altogether different from that which I received before. In
my absence I seem to have become a kind of celebrity. I will say nothing
of that, for I know what it is worth. I am touched by all the pleasant
things which these people say and write of me, and am obliged to them.
But what shall I say to you? I felt much nearer the people who attacked
me in old days than I do to the people who laud me now.... It is my own
fault, I know. Don't scold me. I had a moment of uneasiness. It was to
be expected. It is done now. I understand. Yes. You are right to have
sent me back among men. I was in a fair way to be buried in my solitude.
It is unhealthy to play at Zarathustra. The flood of life moves on,
moves on away from us. There comes a time when one is as a desert. Many
weary days in the burning sun are needed to dig a new channel in the
sand, to dig down to the river.--It has been done. I am no longer dizzy.
I am in the current again. I look and see.
"My dear, what a strange people are the French! Twenty years ago I
thought they were finished.... They are just beginning again. My dear
comrade, Jeannin, foretold it. But I thought he was deceiving himself.
How could one believe it then! France was, like their Paris, full of
broken houses, plaster, and holes. I said: 'They have destroyed
everything.... What a race of rodents!'--a race of beavers. Just when
you think them prostrate on their ruins, lo, they are using the ruins to
lay the foundations of a new city. I can see it now in the scaffoldings
which are springing up on all sides....
_"Wenn ein Ding geschehen Selbst die Narren es verstehen,..."_
[Footnote: "When a thing has happened, even the fools can see it."]
"In truth there is just the same French disorder. One needs to be used
to it to see in the rout seething up from all directions, the bands of
workmen, each going about his appointed task. There are also people who
can do nothing without vilifying what their neighbors are doing. All
this is calculated to upset the stoutest head. But when you have lived,
as I have, nearly ten years with them, you cannot be deceived by their
uproar. You see then that it is their way of spurring themselves on to
work. They talk, but they work, and as each builder's yard sets about
building a house, in the end you find that the city has been re-builded.
What is most remarkable is that, taken together, all these buildings are
not discordant. They may maintain opposing theses, but all their minds
are cast in the same mold. So that, beneath their anarchy, there are
common instincts, a racial logic which takes the place of discipline,
and this discipline is, when all is told, probably more solid than that
of a Prussian regiment.
"Everywhere the same enthusiasm, the same constructive fever: in
politics, where Socialists and Nationalists vie with one another in
tightening up the wheels of slackened power; in art, which some wish to
make into an old aristocratic mansion for the privileged few, and others
a vast hall open to the people, a hall where the collective soul can
sing; they are reconstructors of the past, or constructors of the
future. But whatever they do, these ingenious creatures are forever
building the same cells. They have the instincts of beavers or bees, and
through the ages are forever doing the same things, returning to the
same forms. The most revolutionary among them are perhaps those who most
closely cling, though they may not know it, to the most ancient
traditions. Among the syndicates and the most striking of the young
writers I have found purely medieval souls.
"Now that I have grown used to their tumultuous ways, I can watch them
working with pleasure. Let us be frank: I am too old a bear ever to feel
at ease in any of their houses: I need the open air. But what good
workers they are! That is their highest virtue. It laves the most
mediocre and the most corrupt: and then, in their artists, what a sense
of beauty! I remarked that much less in the old days. You taught me to
see. My eyes were opened in the light of Rome. Your Renaissance men have
helped me to understand these. A page of Debussy, a torso of Rodin, a
phrase of Suarès, these are all in the direct line from your
_cinquecestenti_.
"Not that there is not much that is distasteful to me here. I have found
my old friends of the market-place, who used to drive me to fury. They
have not changed. But, alas! I have changed. I cannot be severe. When I
feel myself wanting to judge one of them harshly I say to myself: 'You
have no right. You have done worse than these men, though you thought
yourself so strong.' Also, I have learned that nothing exists in vain,
and that even the vilest have their place in the scheme of the tragedy.
The depraved dilettantists, the foetid amoralists, have accomplished
their termitic task; the tottering ruins must be brought down before
they can be built up again. The Jews have been true to their sacred
mission, which is, in the midst of other races, to be a foreign race,
the race which, from end to end of the world, is to link up the network
of human unity. They break down the intellectual barriers between the
nations, to give Divine Reason an open field. The worst agents of
corruption, the ironic destroyers who ruin our old beliefs and kill our
well-beloved dead, toil, unwittingly, in the holy work of new life. So
the ferocious self-interest of the cosmopolitan bankers, whose labors
are attended with such and so many disasters, build, whether they will
or no, the future peace of the world, side by side with the
revolutionaries who combat them, far more surely than the idiotic
pacifists.
"You see, I am getting old. I have lost my bite. My teeth have lost
their sharpness. When I go to the theater I am now only one of those
simple spectators who apostrophize the actors and cry shame on the
traitor.
"My tranquil Grace, I am only talking about myself: and yet I think only
of you. If you knew how importunate is my ego! It is oppressive and
absorbing. It is like a millstone that God has tied round my neck. How I
should have loved to lay it at your feet! But what would you have done
with it? It is a poor kind of present.... Your feet were made to tread
the soft earth and the sand sinking beneath the tread. I see your feet
carelessly passing over the lawns dappled with anemones.... (Have you
been again to the Villa Doria?)... And you are tired! I see you now
half-reclining in your favorite retreat, in your drawing-room, propped
up on your elbow, holding a book which you do not read. You listen to me
kindly, without paying much attention to what I say; for I am tiresome,
and, for patience, you turn every now and then to your own thoughts; but
you are courteous, and, taking care not to upset me, when a chance word
brings you back from your distant journeying, your eyes, so absent
before, quickly take on an expression of interest. And I am as far from
what I am saying as you: I, too, hardly hear the sound of my words: and
while I follow their reflection in your lovely face, in my heart I
listen to other words which I do not speak to you. Those words, my
tranquil Grace, unlike the others, you hear quite clearly, but you
pretend not to hear them.
"Adieu. I think you will see me again in a little while, I shall not
languish here. What should I do now that my concerts are over?--I kiss
your children on their little cheeks. They are yours and you. I must be
content!...
"CHRISTOPHE."
* * * * *
"Tranquil Grace" replied:
"My dear,
"I received your letter in the little corner of the drawing-room that
you remember so well, and I read it, as I am clever at reading, by
letting your letter fall every now and then and resting. Don't laugh at
me. I did that to make it last a long time. In that way we spent a whole
afternoon together. The children asked me what it was I kept on reading.
I told them it was a letter from you. Aurora looked at the paper
pityingly and said: 'How tiresome it must be to write such a long
letter!' I tried to make her understand that it was not an imposition I
had set you, but a conversation we were having together. She listened
without a word, then ran away with her brother to play in the next room,
and a little later, when Lionello began to shout, I heard Aurora say:
'You mustn't make such a noise: mamma is talking to M. Christophe.'
"What you tell me about the French interests me, but it does not
surprise me. You remember that I often used to reproach you with being
unjust towards them. It is impossible to like them. But what an
intelligent people they are! There are mediocre nations who are
preserved by their goodness of heart or their physical vigor. The French
are saved by their intelligence. It laves all their weaknesses, and
regenerates them. When you think they are down, beaten, perverted, they
find new youth in the ever-bubbling spring of their minds.
"But I must scold you. You ask my pardon for speaking only of yourself.
You are an _ingannatore_. You tell me nothing about yourself.
Nothing of what you have been doing. Nothing of what you have been
seeing. My cousin Colette--(why did not you go and see her?)--had to
send me press-cuttings about your concerts, or I should have known
nothing of your success. You only mentioned it by the way. Are you so
detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased
you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like
you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic.
That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But
that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying
that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would
applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. I am not a good Christian. I
am a good Italian, and I don't like you tormenting yourself with the
past. The present is quite enough. I don't know exactly what it was that
you did. You told me the story in a very few words, and I think I
guessed the rest. It was not a nice story, but you are none the less
dear to me for it. My poor, dear Christophe, a woman does not reach my
age without knowing that an honest man is often very weak. If one did
not know his weakness one would not love him so much. Don't think any
more about what you have done. Think of what you are going to do.
Repentance is quite useless. Repentance means going back. And in good as
in evil, we must always go forward. _Sempre avanti, Savoia!_... So
you think I am going to let you come back to Rome! You have nothing to
do here. Stay in Paris, work, do: play your part in its artistic life. I
will not have you throw it all up. I want you to make beautiful things,
I want them to succeed, I want you to be strong and to help the new
young Christophes who are setting out on the same struggles, and passing
through the same trials. Look for them, help them, be kinder to your
juniors than your seniors were to you.--In fine, I want you to be strong
because I know that you are strong: you have no idea of the strength
that gives me.
"Almost every day I go with the children to the Villa Borghese.
Yesterday we drove to Ponte Molle, and walked round the tower of Monte
Mario. You slander my powers of walking and my legs cry out against you:
'What did the fellow mean by saying at the Villa Doria that we get tired
in ten paces? He knows nothing about it. If we are not prone to give
ourselves trouble, it is because we are lazy, and not because we
cannot....' You forget, my dear, that I am a little peasant....
"Go and see my cousin Colette. Are you still angry with her? She is a
good creature at heart, and she swears by you! Apparently the Parisian
women are crazy about your music. (Perhaps they were in the old days.)
My Berne bear may, and he will, be the lion of Paris. Have you had
letters? And declarations? You don't mention any woman. Can you be in
love? Tell me. I am not jealous. Your friend,
"G."
* * * * *
"... So you think I am likely to be pleased with your last sentence! I
would to God you were jealous! But don't look to me to make you so. I
have no taste for these mad Parisiennes, as you call them. Mad? They
would like to be so. But they are nothing like it. You need not hope
that they will turn my head. There would be more chance of it perhaps if
they were indifferent to my music. But it is only too true that they
love it; and how am I to keep my illusions? When any one tells you that
he understands you, you may be very sure that he will never do so....
"Don't take my joking too seriously. The feeling I have for you does not
make me unjust to other women. I have never had such true sympathy for
them as I have now since I ceased to look at them with lover's eyes. The
tremendous effort they have been making during the last thirty years to
escape from the degrading and unwholesome semi-domesticity, to which our
stupid male egoism condemned them, to their and our unhappiness, seems
to me to be one of the most splendid facts of our time. In a town like
this one learns to admire the new generation of young women, who, in
spite of so many obstacles, with so much fresh ardor rush on to the
conquest of knowledge and diplomas,--the knowledge, the diplomas which,
they think, must liberate them, open to them the arcana of the unknown
world and make them the equals of men....
"No doubt their faith is illusory and rather ridiculous. But progress is
never realized as we expect it to be: it is none the less realized
because it takes entirely different paths from those we have marked out
for it. This effort of the women will not be wasted. It will make women
completer and more human, as they were in the great ages. They will no
longer be without interest in the living questions of the world, as most
scandalously and monstrously they have been, for it is intolerable that
a woman, though she be never so careful in her domestic duties, should
think herself absolved from thinking of her civic duties in the modern
city. Their great-great-grandmothers of the time of Joan of Arc and
Catherine Sforza were not of this way of thinking. Woman has withered.
We have refused her air and sun. She is taking them from us again by
force. Ah! the brave little creatures!... Of course, many of those who
are now struggling will die and many will be led astray. It is an age of
crisis. The effort is too violent for those whose strength has too much
gone to seed. When a plant has been for a long time without water, the
first shower of rain is apt to scald it. But what would you? It is the
price of progress. Those who come after will flourish through their
sufferings. The poor little warlike virgins of our time, many of whom
will never marry, will be more fruitful for posterity than the
generations of matrons who gave birth before them; for, at the cost of
their sacrifices, there will issue from them the women of a new classic
age.
"I have not found these working bees in your cousin Colette's
drawing-room. What whim was it made you send me to her? I had to obey
you; but it is not well: you are abusing your power. I had refused three
of her invitations, left two of her letters unanswered. She came and
hunted me up at one of my rehearsals--(they were going through my sixth
symphony). I saw her, during the interval, come in with her nose in the
air, sniffing and crying: 'That smacks of love! Ah! How I love such
music!...'
"She has changed, physically; only her cat-like eyes with their bulging
pupils, and her fantastic nose, always wrinkling up and never still, are
the same. But her face is wider, big-boned, highly colored, and
coarsened. Sport has transformed her. She gives herself up to sport of
all kinds. Her husband, as you know, is one of the swells at the
Automobile Club and the Aero Club. There is not an aviation meeting, nor
a race by air, land, or water, but the Stevens-Delestrades think
themselves compelled to be present at it. They are always out on the
highways and byways. Conversation is quite impossible; they talk of
nothing but Racing, Rowing, Rugby, and the Derby. They belong to a new
race of people. The days of _Pelléas_ are forever gone for the
women. Souls are no longer in fashion. All the girls hoist a red,
swarthy complexion, tanned by driving in the open air and playing games
in the sun: they look at you with eyes like men's eyes: they laugh and
their laughter is a little coarse. In tone they have become more brutal,
more crude. Every now and then your cousin will quite calmly say the
most shocking things. She is a great eater, where she used to eat hardly
anything. She still complains about her digestion, merely out of habit,
but she never misses a mouthful for it. She reads nothing. No one reads
among these people. Only music has found favor in their sight. Music has
even profited by the neglect of literature. When these people are worn
out, music is a Turkish bath to them, a warm vapor, massage, tobacco.
They have no need to think. They pass from sport to love, and love also
is a sport. But the most popular sport among their esthetic
entertainments is dancing. Russian dancing, Greek dancing, Swiss
dancing, American dancing, everything is set to a dance in Paris:
Beethoven's symphonies, the tragedies of Æschylus, the _Clavecin bien
Tempéré_, the antiques of the Vatican, _Orpheus_, Tristan, the
Passion, and gymnastics. These people are suffering from vertigo.