Jean-Christophe, vol 1 by Romain Rolland (fb2 epub reader .txt) 📕
He waited for contradiction, and spat on the fire. Then, as neither mother nor child raised any objection, he was for going on, but relapsed into silence.
* * * * *
They said no more. Both Jean Michel, sitting by the fireside, and Louisa, in her bed, dreamed sadly. The old man, in spite of what he had said, had bitter thoughts about his son's marriage, and Louisa was thinking of it also, and blaming herself, although she had nothing wherewith to reproach herself.
She had been a servant when, to everybody's surprise, and her own especially, she married Melchior Krafft, Jean Michel's son. The Kraffts were without fortune, but were considerable people in the little Rhine town in which the old man had settled down more than fifty years before. Both father and son were musicians, and known to all the musicians of the country from Cologne to Mannheim. Melchior played the violin at the Hof-Theater, and Jean Michel had formerly been director of the grand-ducal concerts. The o
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moved, too—but already she had relapsed into her impassiveness, and when
he had finished, she only replied with a few banal words. Behind her broad
forehead, on which there was not a line, there was the obstinacy of a
peasant, hard as a stone. She said that she must go home to look after her
brothers children. She talked of them with a calm smile.
He asked her:
“You are happy?”
She seemed to be more happy to hear him say the word. She said she was
happy and insisted on the reasons she had for being so: she was trying to
persuade herself and him that it was so. She spoke of the children, and the
house, and all that she had to do….
“Oh! yes,” she said, “I am very happy!” Christophe did not reply. She rose
to go. He rose too. They said good-bye gaily and carelessly. Modesta’s hand
trembled a little in Christophe’s. She said:
“You will have fine weather for your walk to-day.” And she told him of
a crossroads where he must not go wrong. It was as though, of the two,
Christophe were the blind one.
They parted. He went down the hill. When he reached the bottom he
turned. She was standing at the summit in the same place. She waved her
handkerchief and made signs to him as though she saw him.
There was something heroic and absurd in her obstinacy in denying her
misfortune, something which touched Christophe and hurt him. He felt how
worthy Modesta was of pity and even of admiration,—and he could not have
lived two days with her. As he went his way between flowering hedges he
thought of dear old Schulz, and his old eyes, bright and tender, before
which so many sorrows had passed which they refused to see, for they would
not see hurtful realities.
“How does he see me, I wonder?” thought Christophe. “I am so different from
his idea of me! To him I am what he wants me to be. Everything is in his
own image, pure and noble like himself. He could not bear life if he saw it
as it is.”
And he thought of the girl living in darkness who denied the darkness, and
tried to pretend that what was was not, and that what was not was.
Then he saw the greatness of German idealism, which he had so often loathed
because in vulgar souls it is a source of hypocrisy and stupidity. He saw
the beauty of the faith which Begets a world within the world, different
from the world, like a little island in the ocean.—But he could not bear
such a faith for himself, and refused to take refuge upon such an Island
of the Dead. Life! Truth! He would not be a lying hero. Perhaps that
optimistic lie which a German Emperor tried to make law for all his
people was indeed necessary for weak creatures if they were to live. And
Christophe would have thought it a crime to snatch from such poor wretches
the illusion which upheld them. But for himself he never could have
recourse to such subterfuges. He would rather die than live by illusion.
Was not Art also an illusion? No. It must not be. Truth! Truth! Byes wide
open, let him draw in through every pore the all-puissant breath of life,
see things as they are, squarely face his misfortunes,—and laugh.
*
Several months passed. Christophe had lost all hope of escaping from the
town. Hassler, the only man who could have saved him, had refused to help
him. And old Schulz’s friendship had been taken from him almost as soon as
it had been given.
He had written once on his return, and he had received two affectionate
letters, but from sheer laziness, and especially because of the difficulty
he had expressing himself in a letter, he delayed thanking him for his kind
words. He put off writing from day to day. And when at last he made up
his mind to write he had a word from Kunz announcing the death of his old
friend. Schulz had had a relapse of his bronchitis which had developed
into pneumonia. He had forbidden them to bother Christophe, of whom he was
always talking. In spite of his extreme weakness and many years of illness,
he was not spared a long and painful end. He had charged Kunz to convey
the tidings to Christophe and to tell him that he had thought of him up to
the last hour; that he thanked him for all the happiness he owed him, and
that his blessing would be on Christophe as long as he lived. Kunz did not
tell him that the day with Christophe had probably been the reason of his
relapse and the cause of his death.
Christophe wept in silence, and he felt them all the worth of the friend
he had lost, and how much he loved him, and he was grieved not to have
told him more of how he loved him. It was too late now. And what was left
to him? The good Schulz had only appeared enough to make the void seem
more empty, the night more black after he ceased to be. As for Kunz and
Pottpetschmidt, they had no value outside the friendship they had for
Schulz and Schulz for them. Christophe valued them at their proper worth.
He wrote to them once and their relation ended there. He tried also to
write to Modesta, but she answered with a commonplace letter in which she
spoke only of trivialities. He gave up the correspondence. He wrote to
nobody and nobody wrote to him.
Silence. Silence. From day to day the heavy cloak of silence descended upon
Christophe. It was like a rain of ashes falling on him. It seemed already
to be evening, and Christophe was losing his hold on life. He would not
resign himself to that. The hour of sleep was not yet come. He must live.
And he could not live in Germany. The sufferings of his genius cramped by
the narrowness of the little town lashed him into injustice. His nerves
were raw: everything drew blood. He was like one of those wretched wild
animals who perished of boredom in the holes and cages in which they were
imprisoned in the Stadtgarten (town gardens). Christophe used often to go
and look at them in sympathy. He used to look at their wonderful eyes, in
which there burned—or every day grew fainter—a fierce and desperate fire.
Ah! How they would have loved the brutal bullet which sets free, or the
knife that strikes into their bleeding hearts! Anything rather than the
savage indifference of those men who prevented them from either living or
dying!
Not the hostility of the people was the hardest for Christophe to bear, but
their inconsistency, their formless, shallow natures. There was no knowing
how to take them. The pig-headed opposition of one of those stiff-necked,
bard races who refuse to understand any new thought were much better.
Against force it is possible to oppose force—the pick and the mine
which hew away and blow up the hard rock. But what can be done against
an amorphous mass which gives like a jelly, collapses under the least
pressure, and retains no imprint of it? All thought and energy and
everything disappeared in the slough. When a stone fell there were hardly
more than a few ripples quivering on the surface of the gulf: the monster
opened and shut its maw, and there was left no trace of what had been.
They were not enemies. Dear God! if they only had been enemies! They
were people who had not the strength to love or hate, or believe or
disbelieve,—in religion, in art, in politics, in daily life; and all
their energies were expended in trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.
Especially since the German victories they had been striving to make a
compromise, a revolting intrigue between their new power and their old
principles. The old idealism had not been renounced. There should have been
a new effort of freedom of which they were incapable. They were content
with a forgery, with making it subservient to German interests. Like the
serene and subtle Schwabian, Hegel, who had waited until after Leipzig
and Waterloo to assimilate the cause of his philosophy with the Prussian
State—their interests having changed, their principles had changed too.
When they were defeated they said that Germany’s ideal was humanity. Now
that they had defeated others, they said that Germany was the ideal of
humanity. When other countries were more powerful, they said, with Lessing,
that “patriotism is a heroic weakness which it is well to be without” and
they called themselves “citizens of the world.” Now that they were in the
ascendant, they could not enough despise the Utopias “à la Française.”
Universal peace, fraternity, pacific progress, the rights of man, natural
equality: they said that the strongest people had absolute rights against
the others, and that the others, being weaker, had no rights against
themselves. It was the living God and the Incarnate Idea, the progress of
which is accomplished by war, violence, and oppression. Force had become
holy now that it was on their side. Force had become the only idealism and
the only intelligence.
In truth, Germany had suffered so much for centuries from having idealism
and no fame that she had every excuse after so many trials for making
the sorrowful confession that at all costs Force must be hers. But what
bitterness was hidden in such a confession from the people of Herder and
Goethe! And what an abdication was the German victory, what a degradation
of the German ideal! Alas! There were only too many facilities for such an
abdication in the deplorable tendency even of the best Germans to submit.
“The chief characteristic of Germany,” said Moser, more than a century
ago, “is obedience.” And Madame de Staël:
“_They have submitted doughtily. They find philosophic reasons for
explaining the least philosophic theory in the world: respect for power
and the chastening emotion of fear which changes that respect into
admiration._”
Christophe found that feeling everywhere in Germany, from the highest
to the lowest—from the William Tell of Schiller, that limited little
bourgeois with muscles like a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, “_to
reconcile honor and fear passes before the pillar of dear Herr Gessler,
with his eyes down so as to be able to say that he did not see the hat;
did not disobey_,”—to the aged and respectable Professor Weisse, a man of
seventy, and one of the most honored mea of learning in the town, who, when
he saw a Herr Lieutenant coming, would make haste to give him the path
and would step down into the road. Christophe’s blood boiled whenever he
saw one of these small acts of daily servility. They hurt him as much as
though he had demeaned himself. The arrogant manners of the officers whom
he met in the street, their haughty insolence, made him speechless with
anger. He never would make way for them. Whenever he passed them he
returned their arrogant stare. More than once he was very near causing a
scene. He seemed to be looking for trouble. However, he was the first to
understand the futility of such bravado; but he had moments of aberration,
the perpetual constraint which he imposed on himself and the accumulation
of force in him that had no outlet made him furious. Then he was ready to
go any length, and he had a feeling that if
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