Jean-Christophe, vol 1 - Romain Rolland (best books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📗

made a movement to come near him and hold his hand. He

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