情色书屋

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP005
书名： 约翰克里斯朵夫第三卷终结卷 作者： （法）罗曼·罗兰 本章字数： 39950 更新时间： 2024-06-13 16:24:00

“That’s no great thing.”

“It’s a fine thing,” he said, “and it may be a good thing, too!”

She laughed:

“To be a woman!” she said. “But what does the world make of women?”

“You have to defend yourself.”

“But goodness never lasts long.”

“Then you can’t have much of it.”

“Possibly. And then, I don’t think one ought to suffer too much. There is a point beyond which suffering withers you up.”

He was just about to tell her how he pitied her, but he remembered how she had received it a short while before….

“You’ll only talk about the advantages of the part of comforter….”

“No,” she said, “I won’t say it again. I feel that you are kind and sincere. Thank you. Only, don’t say anything. You cannot know…. Thank you.”

They had reached Paris. They parted without exchanging addresses or inviting each other to call.

*　*　*　*　*

A few months later she came of her own accord and knocked at

Christophe’s door.

“I came to see you. I want to talk to you. I have been thinking of you sometimes since our meeting.”

She took a seat.

“Only for a moment. I shan’t disturb you for long.”

He began to talk to her. She said:

“Wait a moment, please.”

They sat in silence. Then she said with a smile:

“I couldn’t bear it any longer. I feel better now.”

He tried to question her.

“No,” she said. “Not that!”

She looked round the room, examined and appraised the things in it, and saw the photograph of Louisa:

“Your mother?” she said.

“Yes.”

She took it and looked at it sympathetically.

“What a good old woman!” she said. “You are lucky!”

“Alas! she is dead.”

“That is nothing. You have had the luck to have her for your mother.”

“Yes. And you?”

But she turned the subject with a frown. She would not let him question her about herself.

“No; tell me about yourself. Tell me…. Something about your life….”

“How can it be of any interest to you?”

“Tell me, all the same….”

He would not tell her: but he could not avoid answering her questions, for she cross-examined him very skilfully: so much so, that he told her something of what he was suffering, the story of his friendship, and how Olivier had left him. She listened with a pitying ironical smile…. Suddenly she asked:

“What time is it? Oh! good Heavens! I’ve been here two whole hours!…

Please forgive me…. Ah! what a rest it has been!…”

She added:

“Will you let me come again?… Not often…. Sometimes…. It would do me good. But I wouldn’t like to bore you or waste your time…. Only a minute or two every now and then….”

“I’ll come and see you,” said Christophe.

“No, don’t do that. I would much rather come to see you….”

But she did not come again for a long time. One evening he heard by accident that she was seriously ill, and had not been acting for some weeks. He went to see her, although she had forbidden it. She was not at home: but when she heard who it was, she sent and had him brought back as he was going down the stairs. She was in bed, but much better: she had had pneumonia, and looked altered: but she still had her ironical manner and her watchful expression, which there was no disarming. However, she seemed to be really pleased to see Christophe. She made him sit by her bedside, and talked about herself in a mocking, detached way, and said that she had almost died. He was much moved, and showed it. Then she teased him. He reproached her for not having let him know.

“Let you know? And have you coming to see me? Never!”

“I bet you never even thought of me.”

“You’ve won,” she said, with her sad little mocking smile. “I didn’t think of you for a moment while I was ill. To be precise, I never thought of you until to-day. There’s nothing to be glum about, come. When I am ill I don’t think of anybody. I only ask one thing of people; to be left alone in peace. I turn my face to the wall and wait: I want to be alone. I want to die alone, like a rat in a hole.”

“And yet it is hard to suffer alone.”

“I’m used to it. I have been unhappy for years. No one ever came to my assistance. Now it has become a habit…. Besides, it is better so. No one can do anything for you. A noise in the room, worrying attentions, hypocritical jeremiads…. No; I would rather die alone.”

“You are very resigned!”

“Resigned? I don’t even know what the word means. No: I set my teeth and

I hate the illness which makes me suffer.”

He asked her if she had no one to see her, no one to look after her. She said that her comrades at the theater were kind enough,—idiots,—but obliging and compassionate (in a superficial sort of way).

“But I tell you, I don’t want to see them. I’m a surly sort of customer.”

“I would put up with it,” he said.

She looked at him pityingly:

“You, too! You’re going to talk like the rest?”

He said:

“Pardon, pardon…. Good Heavens! I’m becoming a Parisian! I am ashamed…. I swear that I didn’t even think what I was saying….”

He buried his face in the bedclothes. She laughed frankly, and gave him a tap on the head!

“Ah! that’s not Parisian! That’s something like! I know you again. Come, show your face. Don’t weep all over my bed.”

“Do you forgive me?”

“I forgive you. But don’t do it again.”

She talked to him a little more, asked him what he was doing, and was then tired, bored, and dismissed him.

He had arranged to go and see her again the following week. But just as he was setting out he received a telegram from her telling him not to come: she was having a bad day.—Then, the next day but one, she sent for him. He went, and found her convalescent, sitting by the window, with her feet up. It was early spring, with a sunny sky and the young buds on the trees. She was more gentle and affectionate than he had yet seen her. She told him that she could not see anybody the other day, and would have detested him as much as anybody else.

“And to-day?”

“To-day I feel young and fresh, and I feel fond of everything else about me that feels young and fresh—as you do.”

“And yet I am neither very young nor very fresh.”

“You will be both until the day of your death.”

They talked about what he had been doing since their last meeting, and about the theater in which she was going to resume her work soon: and on that she told him what she thought of the theater, which disgusted her, while it held her in its grip.

She did not want him to come again, and promised to resume her visits to his flat. He told her the times when she would be least likely to disturb his work. They arranged a countersign. She was to knock at the door in a certain way, and he was to open or not as he felt inclined….

She did not go beyond bounds at first. But once, when she was going to a society At Home, where she was to recite, the idea of it bored her at the last moment: she stopped on the way and telephoned to say that she could not come, and she told her man to drive to Christophe’s. She only meant to say goodnight to him as she passed. But, as it turned out, she began to confide in him that night, and told him all her life from her childhood on.

A sad childhood! An accidental father whom she had never known. A mother who kept an ill-famed inn in a suburb of a town in the north of France: the carters used to go and drink there, use the proprietress, and bully her. One of them married her because she had some small savings: he used to beat her and get drunk. Fran?oise had an elder sister who was a servant in the inn: she was worked to death; the proprietor made her his mistress in the sight and knowledge of her mother; she was consumptive, and had died. Fran?oise had grown up amid scenes of violence and shameful things. She saw her mother and sister weep, suffer, accept, degrade themselves, and die. And desperately she made up her mind not to submit to it, and to escape from her infamous surroundings: she was a rebel by instinct: certain acts of injustice would set her beside herself: she used to scratch and bite when she was thrashed. Once she tried to hang herself. She did not succeed: she had hardly set about it than she was afraid lest she might succeed only too well; and, even while she was beginning to choke and desperately clutching at the rope and trying to loosen it with stiff fumbling fingers, there was writhing in her a furious desire to live. And since she could not escape by death,—(Christophe smiled sadly, remembering his own experiences,)—she swore that she would win, and be free, rich, and trample under foot all those who oppressed her. She had made it a vow in her lair one evening, when in the next room she could hear the oaths of the man, and the cries of her mother as he beat her, and her sister’s sobs. How utterly wretched she felt! And yet her vow had been some solace. She clenched her teeth and thought:

“I will crush the lot of you.”

In that dark childhood there had been one ray of light:

One day, one of the little grubby boys with whom she used to lark in the gutter, the son of the stagedoor keeper of the theater, got her in to the rehearsal, although it was strictly forbidden. They stole to the very back of the building in the darkness. She was gripped by the mystery of the stage, gleaming in the darkness, and by the magnificent and incomprehensible things that the actors were saying, and by the queenly bearing of the actress,—who was, in fact, playing a queen in a romantic melodrama. She was chilled by emotion: and at the same time her heart thumped…. “That—that is what I must be some day!” … Oh! if she could ever be like that!…—When it was over she wanted at all costs to see the evening performance. She let her companion go out, and pretended to follow him: and then she turned back and hid herself in the theater: she cowered away under a seat, and stayed there for three hours without stirring, choked by the dust: and when the performance was about to begin and the audience was arriving, just as she was creeping out of her hiding-place, she had the mortification of being pounced on, ignominiously expelled amid jeers and laughter, and taken home, where she was whipped. She would have died that night had she not known now what she must do later on to master these people and avenge herself on them.

Her plan was made. She took a situation as a servant in the H?tel et Café du Théatre, where the actors put up. She could hardly read or write: and she had read nothing, for she had nothing to read. She wanted to learn, and applied herself to it with frantic energy. She used to steal books from the guests’ rooms, and read them at night by moonlight or at dawn, so as not to use her candle. Thanks to the untidiness of the actors, her larcenies passed unnoticed or else the owners put up with cursing and swearing. She used to restore their books when she had read them,—except one or two which had moved her too much for her to be able to part with them;—but she did not return them intact. She used to tear out the pages which had pleased her. When she took the books back, she used carefully to slip them under the bed or the furniture, so as to make the owners of them believe that they had never left the room. She used to glue her ears to the door to listen to the actors going over their parts. And when she was alone, sweeping the corridor, she would mimic their intonations in a whisper and gesticulate. When she was caught doing so she was laughed at and jeered at. She would say nothing, and boil with rage.—That sort of education might have gone on for a long time had she not on one occasion been imprudent enough to steal the script of a part from the room of an actor. The actor stamped and swore. No one had been to his room except the servant: he accused her. She denied it boldly: he threatened to have her searched: she threw herself at his feet and confessed everything, even to her other pilferings and the pages she had torn out of the books: the whole boiling. He cursed and swore frightfully: but he was not so angry as he seemed. He asked why she had done it. When she told him that she wanted to become an actress he roared with laughter. He questioned her, and she recited whole pages which she had learned by heart: he was struck by it, and said:

“Look here, would you like me to give you lessons?”

She was in the highest heaven of delight, and kissed his hands.

“Ah!” she said to Christophe, “how I should have loved him!”

But at once he added:

“Only, my dear, you know you can’t have anything for nothing….”

She was chaste, and had always been scared and modest with those who had pursued her with their overtures. Her absolute chastity, her ardent need of purity, her disgust with things unclean and ignoble loveless sensuality, had been with her always from her childhood on, as a result of the despair and nausea of the sad sights which she saw about her on all sides at home:—and they were with her still…. Ah! unhappy creature! She had borne much punishment!… What a mockery of Fate!…

“Then,” asked Christophe, “you consented?”

“Ah!” she said, “I would have gone through fire to get out of it. He threatened to have me arrested as a thief. I had no choice.—That was how I was initiated into art—and life.”

“The blackguard!” said Christophe.

“Yes, I hated him. But I have met so many men since that he does not seem to me to be one of the worst. He did at least keep his word. He taught me what he knew—(not much!)—of the actor’s trade. He got me into his company. At first I was everybody’s servant, I played little scraps of parts. Then one night, when the soubrette was ill, they risked giving me her part. I went on from that. They thought me impossible, grotesque, uncouth. I was ugly then. I remained ugly until I was decreed,—if not ‘divine’ like the other Woman,—the highest, the ideal type of woman, … ‘Woman.’ … Idiots! As for my acting, it was thought extravagant and incorrect. The public did not like me. The other players used to make fun of me. I was kept on because I was useful in spite of everything, and was not expensive. Not only was I not expensive, but I paid! Ah! I paid for every step, every advance, rung by rung, with my suffering, with my body. Fellowactors, the manager, the impresario, the impresario’s friends….”

She stopped: her face was very pale, her lips were pressed together, there was a hard stare in her eyes: no tears came, but it was plain to see that her soul was shedding tears of blood. In a flash she was living through the shameful past, and the consuming desire to conquer which had upheld her—a desire that burned the more with every fresh stain and degradation that she had had to endure. She would sometimes have been glad to die: but it would have been too abominable to succumb in the midst of humiliation and to go no farther. Better to take her life before—if so it must be—or after victory. But not when she had degraded herself and not enjoyed the price of it….

She said no more. Christophe was pacing up and down the room in anger: he was in a mood to slay these men who had made this woman suffer and besmirched her. Then he looked at her with the eyes of pity: and he stood near her and took her face in his hands and pressed it fondly, and said:

“Poor little woman!”

She made to thrust him away. He said:

“You must not be afraid of me. I love you.”

Then the tears trickled down her pale cheeks. He knelt down by her and kissed—

“La lunga man d’ogni bellezza piena….”

—the long delicate hands on which two tears had fallen.

He sat down again, and she recovered herself and calmly went on with her story:

An author had at last launched her. He had discovered in the strange little creature a daimon, a genius,—and, even better for his purpose, “a dramatic type, a new woman, representative of an epoch.” Of course, he made her his mistress after so many others had done the same. And she let him take her, as she had suffered the others, without love, and even with the opposite of love. But he had made her famous: and she had done the same for him.

“And now,” said Christophe, “the others cannot do anything to you: you can do what you like with them.”

“You think so?” she said bitterly.

Then she told him of Fate’s other mockery,—her passion for a knave whom she despised: a literary man who had exploited her, had plucked out the most sorrowful secrets of her soul, and turned them into literature, and then had left her.

“I despise him,” she said, “as I despise the dirt on my boots: and I tremble with rage when I think that I love him, that he has but to hold up his finger, and I should go running to him, and humble myself before such a cur. But what can I do? I have a heart that will never love what my mind desires. And I am compelled alternately to sacrifice and humiliate one or the other. I have a heart: I have a body. And they cry out and cry out and demand their share of happiness. And I have nothing to curb them with, for I believe in nothing. I am free…. Free? I am the slave of my heart and my body, which often, almost always, in spite of myself, desire and have their will. They carry me away, and I am ashamed. But what can I do?…”

She stopped for a moment, and mechanically moved the cinders in the fire with the tongs.

“I have read in books,” she said, “that actors feel nothing. And, indeed, those whom I meet are nearly all conceited, grown-up children who are never troubled by anything but petty questions of vanity. I do not know if it is they who are not true comedians, or myself. I fancy it must be I. In any case, I pay for the others.”

She stopped speaking. It was three in the morning. She got up to go. Christophe told her to wait until the morning before she went home, and proposed that she should go and lie down on his bed. She preferred to stay in the arm-chair by the dead fire, and went on talking quietly while all the house was still.

“You will be tired to-morrow.”

“I am used to it. But what about you?… What are you doing to-morrow?”

“I am free. I have a lesson to give about eleven…. Besides, I am strong.”

“All the more reason why you should sleep soundly.”

“Yes; I sleep like a log. Not even pain can stand out against it. I am sometimes furious with myself for sleeping so well. So many hours wasted!… I am delighted to be able to take my revenge on sleep for once in a way, and to cheat it of a night.”

They went on talking in low tones, with long intervals of silence. And Christophe went to sleep. Fran?oise smiled and supported his head to keep him from falling…. She sat by the window dreaming and looking down into the darkness of the garden, which presently was lit up. About seven o’clock she woke Christophe gently, and said good-by.

In the course of the month she came at times when Christophe was out, and found the door shut. Christophe sent her a key to the flat, so that she could go there when she liked. She went more than once when Christophe was away, and she would leave a little bunch of violets on the table, or a few words scribbled on a sheet of paper, or a sketch, or a caricature—just to show that she had been.

And one evening, when she left the theater, she went to the flat to resume their pleasant talk. She found him at work, and they began to talk. But at the very outset they both felt that the friendly comfortable mood of the last occasion was gone. She tried to go: but it was too late. Not that Christophe did anything to prevent her. It was her own will that failed her and would not let her go. They stayed there with the gathering consciousness of the desire that was in them.

Following on that night she disappeared for some weeks. In him there had been roused a sensual ardor that had lain dormant for months before, and he could not live without her. She had forbidden him to go to her house: he went to see her at the theater. He sat far back, and he was aflame with love and devotion: every nerve in his body thrilled: the tragic intensity which she brought to her acting consumed him also in its fire. At last he wrote to her:

“My Dear,—Are you angry with me? Forgive me if I have hurt you.” When she received his humble little note she hastened to him and flung herself into his arms.

“It would have been better to be just friends, good friends. But since it is impossible, it is no good holding out against the inevitable. Come what may!”

They lived together. They kept on in their separate flats, and each of them was free. Fran?oise could not have submitted to living openly with Christophe. Besides, her position would not allow it. She used to go to Christophe’s flat and spend part of the day and night with him; but she used to return to her own place every day and also sleep there.

During the vacation, when the theater was closed, they took a house together outside Paris, near Gif. They had many happy days there, though there were clouds of sadness too. They were days of confidence and work. They had a beautiful light room, high up, with a wide view over the fields. At night through the window they could see the strange shadows of the clouds floating across the clear, dull darkness of the sky. Half asleep, they could hear the joyous crickets chirping and the showers falling; the breath of the autumn earth—honeysuckle, clematis, glycine, and new-mown hay—filled the house and soothed their senses. The silence of the night. In the distance dogs barked. Cocks crowed. Dawn comes. The tinkling angelus rings in the distant belfry, through the cold, gray twilight, and they shiver in the warmth of their nest, and yet more lovingly hold each other close. The voices of the birds awake in the trellis on the wall. Christophe opens his eyes, holds his breath, and his heart melts as he looks down at the dear tired face of his sleeping beloved, pale with the paleness of love….

Their love was no selfish passion. It was a profound love in comradeship, in which the body also demanded its share. They did not hinder each other. They both went on with their work. Christophe’s genius and kindness and moral fiber were dear to Fran?oise. She felt older than he in many ways, and she found a maternal pleasure in the relation. She regretted her inability to understand anything he played: music was a closed book to her, except at rare moments, when she would be overcome by a wild emotion, which came less from the music than from her own inner self, from the passion in which she was steeped at that time, she and everything about her, the country, people, color, and sound. But she was none the less conscious of Christophe’s genius, because it was expressed in a mysterious language which she did not understand. It was like watching a great actor playing in a foreign language. Her own genius was rekindled by it. Christophe, thanks to love, could project his ideas and body forth his passions in the mind of the woman and her beloved person: they seemed to him more beautiful there than they were in himself—endowed with an antique and seemingly eternal beauty. Intimacy with such a soul, so feminine, so weak and kind and cruel, and genial in flashes, was a source of boundless wealth. She taught him much about life, and men—about women, of whom he knew very little, while she judged them with swift, unerring perception. But especially he was indebted to her for a better understanding of the theater; she helped him to pierce through to the spirit of that admirable art, the most perfect of all arts, the fullest and most sober. She revealed to him the beauty of that magic instrument of the human dream,—and made him see that he must write for it and not for himself, as he had a tendency to do,—(the tendency of too many artists, who, like Beethoven, refuse to write “for a confounded violin when the Spirit speaks to them”).—A great dramatic poet is not ashamed to work for a particular theater and to adapt his ideas to the actors at his disposal: he sees no belittlement in that: but he knows that a vast auditorium calls for different methods of expression than those necessary for a smaller space, and that a man does not write trumpet-blares for the flute. The theater, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.

Fran?oise’s ideas were in accordance with Christophe’s, who, at that stage in his career, was inclined towards a collective art, in communion with other men. Fran?oise’s experience helped him to grasp the mysterious collaboration which is set up between the audience and the actor. Though Fran?oise was a realist, and had very few illusions, yet she had a great perception of the power of reciprocal suggestion, the waves of sympathy which pass between the actor and the multitude, the great silence of thousands of men and women from which arises the single voice of their interpreter. Naturally she could only feel it in intermittent flashes, very, very rare, which were hardly ever reproduced at the same passages in the same play. For the rest her work was a soulless trade, an intelligent and coldly mechanical routine. But the interest of it lay in the exception—the flash of light which pierced the darkness of the abyss, the common soul of millions of men and women whose living force was expressed in her for the space of a second of eternity.

It was this common soul which it was the business of the great artist to express. His ideal should be a living objectivism, in which the poet should throw himself into those for whom he sings, and denude himself of self, to clothe the collective passions which are blown over the world like a mighty wind. Fran?oise was all the more keenly conscious of the necessity, inasmuch as she was incapable of such disinterestedness, and always played herself.—For the last century and a half the disordered efflorescence of individual lyricism has been tinged with morbidity. Moral greatness consists in feeling much and controlling much, in being sober in words and chaste in thought, in not making a parade of it, in making a look speak and speak profoundly, without childish exaggeration or effeminate effusiveness, to those who can grasp the half-spoken thought, to men. Modern music, which is so loquaciously introspective, dragging in indiscreet confidences at every turn, is immodest and lacking in taste. It is like those invalids who can think of nothing but their illnesses, and never weary of discussing them with other people and going into repulsive petty details. This travesty of art has been growing more and more prevalent for the last century. Fran?oise, who was no musician, was disposed to see a sign of decadence in the development of music at the expense of poetry, like a polypus sucking it dry. Christophe protested: but, upon reflection, he began to wonder whether there might not be some truth in it. The first lieder written to poems of Goethe were sober and apt: soon Schubert came and infused his romantic sentimentality into them and gave them a twist: Schumann introduced his girlish languor: and, down to Hugo Wolf, the movement had gone on towards more stress in declamation, indecent analysis, a presumptuous endeavor to leave no smallest corner of the soul unlit. Every veil about the mysteries of the heart was rent. Things said in all earnestness by a man were now screamed aloud by shameless girls who showed themselves in their nakedness.

Christophe was rather ashamed of such art, by which he was himself conscious of being contaminated: and, without seeking to go back to the past,—(an absurd, unnatural desire),—he steeped himself in the spirit of those of the masters of the past who had been haughtily discreet in their thought and had possessed the sense of a great collective art: like Handel, who, scorning the tearful piety of his time and country, wrote his colossal Anthems and his oratorios, those heroic epics which are songs of the nations for the nations. The difficulty was to find inspiring subjects, which, like the Bible in Handel’s time, could arouse emotions common to all the nations of modern Europe. Modern Europe had no common book: no poem, no prayer, no act of faith which was the property of all. Oh! the shame that should overwhelm all the writers, artists, thinkers, of to-day! Not one of them has written, not one of them has thought, for all. Only Beethoven has left a few pages of a new Gospel of consolation and brotherhood: but only musicians can read it, and the majority of men will never hear it. Wagner, on the hill at Bayreuth, has tried to build a religious art to bind all men together. But his great soul had too little simplicity and too many of the blemishes of the decadent music and thought of his time: not the fishers of Galilee have come to the holy hill, but the Pharisees.

Christophe felt sure what he had to do: but he had no poet, and he was forced to be self-sufficing and to confine himself to music. And music, whatever people say, is not a universal language: the bow of words is necessary to send the arrow of sound into the hearts of all men.

Christophe planned to write a suite of symphonies inspired by everyday life. Among others he conceived a Domestic Symphony, in his own manner, which was very different from that of Richard Strauss. He was not concerned with materializing family life in a cinematograph picture, by making use of a conventional alphabet, in which musical themes expressed arbitrarily the various characters whom, if the auditor’s eyes and ears could stand it, were presently to be seen going through divers evolutions together. That seemed to him a pedantic and childish game for a great contrapuntist. He did not try to describe characters or actions, but only to express emotions familiar to every man and woman, in which they could find the echo of their own souls, and perhaps comfort and relief. The first movement expressed the grave and simple happiness of a loving young couple, with its tender sensuality, its confidence in the future, its joy and hopes. The second movement was an elegy on the death of a child. Christophe had avoided with horror any effort to depict death, and realistic detail in the expression of sorrow: there was only the utter misery of it,—yours, mine, everybody’s, of being face to face with a misfortune which falls or may fall to the lot of everybody. The soul, prostrate in its grief, from which Christophe had banned the usual effects of sniveling melodrama, recovered bit by bit, in a sorrowful effort, to offer its suffering as a sacrifice to God. Once more it set bravely out on the road, in the next movement, which was linked with the second,—a headstrong fugue, the bold design and insistent rhythm of which captivated, and, through struggles and tears, led on to a mighty march, full of indomitable faith. The last movement depicted the evening of life. The themes of the opening movement reappeared in it with their touching confidence and their tenderness which could not grow old, but riper, emerging from the shadow of sorrow, crowned with light, and, like a rich blossoming, raising a religious hymn of love to life and God.

Christophe also rummaged in the books of the past for great, simple, human subjects speaking to the best in the hearts of all men. He chose two such stories: Joseph and Niobe. But then Christophe was brought up not only against his need of a poet, but against the vexed question, which has been argued for centuries and never solved, of the union of poetry and music. His talks with Fran?oise had brought him back to his idea, sketched out long ago with Corinne, of a form of musical drama, somewhere between recitative opera and the spoken drama,—the art of the free word united with free music,—an art of which hardly any artist of to-day has a glimmering, an art also which the routine critics, imbued with the Wagnerian tradition, deny, as they deny every really new work: for it is not a matter of following in the footsteps of Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Bizet, although they used the melodramatic form with genius: it is not a matter of yoking any sort of speaking voice to any sort of music, and producing, at all costs, with absurd tremolos, coarse effects upon coarse audiences: it is a matter of creating a new form, in which musical voices will be wedded to instruments attuned to those voices, discreetly mingling with their harmonious periods the echo of dreams and the plaintive murmur of music. It goes without saying that such a form could only be applied to a narrow range of subjects, to intimate and introspective moments of the soul, so as to conjure up its poetic perfume. In no art should there be more discretion and aristocracy of feeling. It is only natural, therefore, that it should have little chance of coming to flower in an age which, in spite of the pretensions of its artists, reeks of the deep-seated vulgarity of upstarts.

Perhaps Christophe was no more suited to such an art than the rest: his very qualities, his plebeian force, were obstacles in the way. He could only conceive it, and with the aid of Fran?oise realize a few rough sketches.

In this way he set to music passages from the Bible, almost literally transcribed,—like the immortal scene in which Joseph makes himself known to his brothers, and, after so many trials, can no longer contain his emotion and tender feeling, and whispers the words which have wrung tears from old Tolstoy, and many another:

“Then Joseph could not refrain himself…. I am Joseph; doth my father yet live? I am Joseph, your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. I am Joseph….”

Their beautiful and free relation could not last. They had moments splendid and full of life: but they were too different. They were both strong-willed, and then often clashed. But their differences were never of a vulgar character: for Christophe had won Fran?oise’s respect. And Fran?oise, who could sometimes be so cruel, was kind to those who were kind to her; no power on earth could have made her do anything to hurt them. And besides, both of them had a fund of gay humor. She was always the first to laugh at herself. She was still eating her heart out: for the old passion still had its grip on her: she still thought of the blackguard she loved: and she could not bear to be in so humiliating a position or, above all, to have Christophe suspecting what she was feeling.

Christophe would sometimes find her for days together silent and restless and given up to melancholy, and could not understand how she could be unhappy. She had achieved her end: she was a great artist, admired, flattered….

“Yes,” she would say; “that would be all very well if I were one of those famous actresses, with, no soul above shopkeeping, who run the theater just as they would run any other business. They are quite happy when they have ‘realized’ a good position, a commonplace, wealthy marriage, and—the ne plus ultra—been decorated. I wanted more than that. Unless one is a fool, success is even more empty than failure. You must know that!”

“I know,” said Christophe. “Ah! Dear God, that is not what I imagined fame to be when I was a child. How I longed for it, and what a shining thing it seemed to be! It was almost a religion to me then…. No matter! There is one divine virtue in success: the good it gives one the power to do.”

“What good? One has conquered. But what’s the good of it? Nothing is altered. Theaters, concerts, everything is just the same. A new fashion succeeds the old: that is all. They do not understand one, or only superficially: and they begin to think of something else at once…. Do you yourself understand other artists? In any case, they don’t understand you. The people you love best are so far away from you! Look at your Tolstoy….”

Christophe had written to him: he had been filled with enthusiasm for him, and had wept over his books: he wanted to set one of the peasant tales to music, and had asked for his authority, and had sent him his lieder. Tolstoy did not reply, any more than Goethe replied to Schubert or Berlioz when they sent him their masterpieces. He had had Christophe’s music played to him, and it had irritated him: he could make nothing of it. He regarded Beethoven as a decadent, and Shakespeare as a charlatan. On the other hand, he was infatuated with various little pretty-pretty masters, and the harpsichord music which used to charm the Roi-Perruque: and he regarded La Confession d’une Femme de Chambre as a Christian book….

“Great men have no need of us,” said Christophe. “We must think of the others.”

“Who? The dull public, the shadows who hide life from us? Act, write for such people? Give your life for them? That would be bitter indeed!”

“Bah!” said Christophe. “I see them as they are just as you do: but I don’t let it make me despondent. They are not as bad as you say.”

“Dear old German optimist!”

“They are men, like myself. Why should they not understand me?…—And suppose they don’t understand me, why should I despair? Among all the thousands of people there will surely be one or two who will be with me: that is enough for me, and gives me window enough to breathe the outer air…. Think of all the simple playgoers, the young people, the old honest souls, who are lifted out of their tedious everyday life by your appearance, your voice, your revelation of tragic beauty. Think of what you were yourself when you were a child! Isn’t it a fine thing to give to others—perhaps even only to one other—the happiness that others gave you, and to do to them the good that others did to you?”

“Do you really believe that there is one such in the world? I have come to doubt it…. Besides, what sort of love do we get from the best of those who love us? How do they see us? They see so badly! They admire you while they degrade you: they get just as much pleasure out of watching any old stager act: they drag you down to the level of the idiots you despise. In their eyes all successful people are exactly the same.”

“And yet, when all is told, it is the greatest of all who go down to posterity with the greatest.”

“It is only the backward movement of time. Mountains grow taller the farther you go away from them. You see their height better: but you are farther away from them…. And besides, who is to tell us who are the greatest? What do you know of the men who have disappeared?”

“Nonsense!” said Christophe. “Even if nobody were to feel what I think and what I am, I think my thoughts and I am what I am just the same. I have my music, I love it, I believe in it: it is the truest thing in my life.”

“You are free in your art,—you can do what you like. But what can I do? I am forced to act in the plays they give me, and go on acting until I am sick of it. We are not yet, in France, such beasts of burden as those American actors who play Rip or Robert Macaire ten thousand times, and for twenty-five years of their lives go on grinding out and grinding out an idiotic part. But we are on the road to it. Our theaters are so poverty-stricken! The public will only stand genius in infinitesimal doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature…. A ‘fashionable genius’! Doesn’t that make you laugh?… What waste of power! Look at what they have made of a Mounet. What has he had to play the whole of his life? Two or three parts that are worth the struggle for life: the Oedipus and Polyeucte. The rest has been rot! Isn’t that enough to disgust one? And just think of all the great and glorious things he might have had to do!… Things are no better outside France? What have they made of a Duse? What has her life been given up to? Think of the futile parts she has played?”

“Your real task,” said Christophe, “is to force great works of art on the world.”

“We should exhaust ourselves in a vain endeavor. It isn’t worth it. As soon as a great work of art is brought into the theater it loses its great poetic quality. It becomes a hollow sham. The breath of the public sullies it. The public consists of people living in stifling towns and they have lost all knowledge of the open air, and Nature, and healthy poetry: they must have their poetry theatrical, glittering, painted, reeking.—Ah! And besides … besides, even suppose one did succeed … no, that would not fill one’s life, it would not fill my life….”

“You are still thinking of him.”

“Who?”

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