Jean-Christophe, vol 1 by Romain Rolland (the red fox clan .TXT) đź“–
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interest, but also to his own life. When he was a little out of patience
with her remarks and told her so in his naĂŻve arrogance, she just shrugged
her shoulders: she did not take him seriously. She thought he was using
big words such as she was accustomed to hearing from her brother when
he announced periodically his absurd and ridiculous resolutions, which
he never by any chance put into practice. And then when she saw that
Christophe really believed in what he said, she thought him mad and lost
interest in him.
After that she took no trouble to appear to advantage, and she showed
herself as she was: much more German, and average German, than she seemed
to be at first, more perhaps than she thought.—The Jews are quite
erroneously reproached with not belonging to any nation and with forming
from one end of Europe to the other a homogeneous people impervious to the
influence of the different races with which they have pitched their tents.
In reality there is no race which more easily takes on the impress of the
country through which it passes: and if there are many characteristics in
common between a French Jew and a German Jew, there are many more different
characteristics derived from their new country, of which with incredible
rapidity they assimilate the habits of mind: more the habits than the mind,
indeed. But habit, which is a second nature to all men, is in most of them
all the nature that they have, and the result is that the majority of the
autochthonous citizens of any country have very little right to reproach
the Jews with the lack of a profound and reasonable national feeling of
which they themselves possess nothing at all.
The women, always more sensible to external influences, more easily
adaptable to the conditions of life and to change with them—Jewish women
throughout Europe assume the physical and moral customs, often exaggerating
them, of the country in which they live,—without losing the shadow and the
strange fluid, solid, and haunting quality of their race.—This idea came
to Christophe. At the Mannheims’ he met Judith’s aunts, cousins, and
friends. Though there was little of the German in their eyes, ardent and
too close together, their noses going down to their lips, their strong
features, their red blood coursing under their coarse brown skins: though
almost all of them seemed hardly at all fashioned to be German—they
were all extraordinarily German: they had the same way of talking, of
dressing,—of overdressing.—Judith was much the best of them all: and
comparison with them made all that was exceptional in her intelligence, all
that she had made of herself, shine forth. But she had most of their faults
just as much as they. She was much more free than they morally—almost
absolutely free—but socially she was no more free: or at least her
practical sense usurped the place of her freedom of mind. She believed in
society, in class, in prejudice, because when all was told she found them
to her advantage. It was idle for her to laugh at the German spirit: she
followed it like any German. Her intelligence made her see the mediocrity
of some artist of reputation: but she respected him none the less because
of his reputation: and if she met him personally she would admire him: for
her vanity was flattered. She had no love for the works of Brahms and she
suspected him of being an artist of the second rank: but his fame impressed
her: and as she had received five or six letters from him the result was
that she thought him the greatest musician of the day. She had no doubt as
to Christophe’s real worth, or as to the stupidity of Lieutenant Detlev von
Fleischer: but she was more flattered by the homage the lieutenant deigned
to pay to her millions than by Christophe’s friendship: for a dull officer
is a man of another caste: it is more difficult for a German Jewess to
enter that caste than for any other woman. Although she was not deceived
by these feudal follies, and although she knew quite well that if she did
marry Lieutenant Detlev von Fleischer she would be doing him a great honor,
she set herself to the conquest: she stooped so low as to make eyes at
the fool and to flatter his vanity. The proud Jewess, who had a thousand
reasons for her pride—the clever, disdainful daughter of Mannheim the
banker lowered herself, and acted like any of the little middle-class
German women whom she despised.
*
That experience was short. Christophe lost his illusions about Judith
as quickly as he had found them. It is only just to say that Judith did
nothing to preserve them. As soon as a woman of that stamp has judged a
man she is done with him: he ceases to exist for her: she will not see
him again. And she no more hesitates to reveal her soul to him, with calm
impudence, that to appear naked before her dog, her cat, or any other
domestic animal. Christophe saw Judith’s egoism and coldness, and the
mediocrity of her character. He had not had time to be absolutely caught.
But he had been enough caught to make him suffer and to bring him to a sort
of fever. He did not so much love Judith as what she might have been—what
she ought to have been. Her fine eyes exercised a melancholy fascination
over him: he could not forget them: although he knew now the drab soul that
slumbered in their depths he went on seeing them as he wished to see them,
as he had first seen them. It was one of those loveless hallucinations
of love which take up so much of the hearts of artists when they are not
entirely absorbed by their work. A passing face is enough to create it:
they see in it all the beauty that is in it, unknown to its indifferent
possessor. And they love it the more for its indifference. They love it as
a beautiful thing that must die without any man having known its worth or
that it even had life.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, and Judith Mannheim could not have been
anything more than she was. But for a moment Christophe had believed in
her: and her charm endured: he could not judge her impartially. All her
beauty seemed to him to be hers, to be herself. All that was vulgar in her
he cast back upon her twofold race, Jew and German, and perhaps he was more
indignant with the German than with the Jew, for it had made him suffer
more. As he did not yet know any other nation, the German spirit was for
him a sort of scapegoat: he put upon it all the sins of the world. That
Judith had deceived him was a reason the more for combating it: he could
not forgive it for having crushed the life out of such a soul.
Such was his first encounter with Israel. He had hoped much from it. He
had hoped to find in that strong race living apart from the rest an ally
for his fight. He lost that hope. With the flexibility of his passionate
intuition, which made him leap from one extreme to another, he persuaded
himself that the Jewish race was much weaker than it was said to be, and
much more open—much too open—to outside influence. It had all its own
weaknesses augmented by those of the rest of the world picked up on its
way. It was not in them that he could find assistance in working the lever
of his art. Rather he was in danger of being swallowed with them in the
sands of the desert.
Having seen the danger, and not feeling sure enough of himself to brave it,
he suddenly gave up going to the Mannheims’. He was invited several times
and begged to be excused without giving any reason. As up till then he had
shown an excessive eagerness to accept, such a sudden change was remarked:
it was attributed to his “originality”: but the Mannheims had no doubt
that the fair Judith had something to do with it: Lothair and Franz joked
about it at dinner. Judith shrugged her shoulders and said it was a fine
conquest, and she asked her brother frigidly not to make such a fuss about
it. But she left no stone unturned in her effort to bring Christophe back.
She wrote to him for some musical information which no one else could
supply: and at the end of her letter she made a friendly allusion to the
rarity of his visits and the pleasure it would give them to see him.
Christophe replied, giving the desired information, said that he was
very busy, and did not go. They met sometimes at the theater. Christophe
obstinately looked away from the Mannheims’ box: and he would pretend not
to see Judith, who held herself in readiness to give him her most charming
smile. She did not persist. As she did not count on him for anything she
was annoyed that the little artist should let her do all the labor of their
friendship, and pure waste at that. If he wanted to come, he would. If
not—oh, well, they could do without him….
They did without him: and his absence left no very great gap in the
Mannheims’ evenings. But in spite of herself Judith was really annoyed
with Christophe. It seemed natural enough not to bother about him when
he was there: and she could allow him to show his displeasure at being
neglected: but that his displeasure should go so far as to break off their
relationship altogether seemed to her to show a stupid pride and a heart
more egoistic than in love.—Judith could not tolerate her own faults in
others.
She followed the more attentively everything that Christophe did and wrote.
Without seeming to do so, she would lead her brother to the subject of
Christophe: she would make him tell her of his intercourse with him: and
she would punctuate the narrative with clever ironic comment, which never
let any ridiculous feature escape, and gradually destroyed Franz’s
enthusiasm without his knowing it.
At first all went well with the Review. Christophe had not yet perceived
the mediocrity of his colleagues: and, since he was one of them, they
hailed him as a genius. Mannheim, who had discovered him, went everywhere
repeating that Christophe was an admirable critic, though he had never
read anything he had written, that he had mistaken his vocation, and that
he, Mannheim, had revealed it to him. They advertised his articles in
mysterious terms which roused curiosity: and his first effort was in fact
like a stone falling into a duck-pond in the atony of the little town. It
was called: Too much music.
“Too much music, too much drinking, too much eating,” wrote Christophe.
“Eating, drinking, hearing, without hunger, thirst, or need, from sheer
habitual gormandizing. Living like Strasburg geese. These people are sick
from a diseased appetite. It matters little what you give them: Tristram
or the Trompeter von Säkkingen, Beethoven or Mascagni, a fugue or a
two-step, Adam, Bach, Puccini, Mozart, or Marschner: they do not know what
they are eating: the great thing is to eat. They find no pleasure in it.
Look at them at a concert. Talk of German gaiety! These people do not know
what gaiety means: they are always gay! Their gaiety, like their sorrow,
drops like rain: their joy is dust: there is neither life nor force in it.
They would stay for hours smilingly and vaguely drinking in sounds,
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