Jean-Christophe in Paris: The Market-Place, Antoinette, the House. Romain Rolland
that it is not correct to affirm anything without denying it at once, or at least casting a doubt on it. He was one of those men of whom St. Paul speaks: "For whom there is always Yes, Yes, and then No, No." All the superior persons in France had wildly embraced this amphibious Credo. It exactly suited their indolence of mind and weakness of character. They no longer said of a work of art that it was good or bad, true or false, intelligent or idiotic. They said:
"It may be so. … Nothing is impossible. … I don't know. … I wash my hands of it."
If some objectionable piece were put up, they did not say:
"That is nasty rubbish!"
They said:
"Sir Sganarelle, please do not talk like that. Our philosophy bids us talk of everything open-mindedly: and therefore you ought not to say: 'That is nasty rubbish!' but: 'It seems to me that that is nasty rubbish. … But it is not certain that it is so. It may be a masterpiece. Who can say that it is not?'"
There was no danger of their being accused of tyranny over the arts. Schiller once taught them a lesson when he reminded the petty tyrants of the Press of his time of what he called bluntly:
"_The Duty of Servants.
"First, the house must be clean that the Queen is to enter. Bustle about, then! Sweep the rooms. That is what you are there for, gentlemen!
"But as soon as She appears, out you go! Let not the serving-wench sit in her lady's chair!_"
But, to be just to the critics of that time, it must be said that they never did sit in their lady's chair. It was ordered that they should be servants: and servants they were. But bad servants: they never took a broom in their hands: the room was thick with dust. Instead of cleaning and tidying, they folded their arms, and left the work to be done by the master, the divinity of the day:—Universal Suffrage.
In fact, there had been for some time a wave of reaction passing through the popular conscience. A few people had set out—feebly enough—on a campaign of public health: but Christophe could see no sign of it among the people with whom he lived. They gained no hearing, and were laughed at. When every now and then some honest man did raise a protest against unclean art, the authors replied haughtily that they were in the right, since the public was satisfied. That was enough to silence every objection. The public had spoken: that was the supreme law of art! It never occurred to anybody to impeach the evidence of a debauched public in favor of those who had debauched them, or that it was the artist's business to lead the public, not the public the artist. A numerical religion—the number of the audience, and the sum total of the receipts—dominated the artistic thought of that commercialized democracy. Following the authors, the critics docilely declared that the essential function of a work of art was to please. Success is law: and when success endures, there is nothing to be done but to bow to it. And so they devoted their energies to anticipating the fluctuations of the Exchange of pleasure, in trying to find out what the public thought of the various plays. The joke of it was that the public was always trying frantically to find out what the critics thought. And so there they were, looking at each, other: and in each other's eyes they saw nothing but their own indecision.
And yet never had there been such crying need of a fearless critic. In an anarchical Republic, fashion, which is all-powerful in art, very rarely looks backward, as it does in a conservative State: it goes onwards always: and there is a perpetual competition of libertinism which hardly anybody dare resist. The mob is incapable of forming an opinion: at heart it is shocked: but nobody dares to say what everybody secretly feels. If the critics were strong, if they dared to be strong, what a power they would have! A vigorous critic would in a few years become the Napoleon of public taste, and sweep away all the diseases of art. But there is no Napoleon in France, All the critics live in that vitiated atmosphere, and do not notice it. And they dare not speak. They all know each other. They are a more or less close company, and they have to consider each other: not one of them is independent. To be so, they would have to renounce their social life, and even their friendships. Who is there that would have the courage, in such a knock-kneed time, when even the best critics doubt whether a just notice is worth the annoyance it may cause to the writer and the object of it? Who is there so devoted to duty that he would condemn himself to such a hell on earth: dare to stand out against opinion, fight the imbecility of the public, expose the mediocrity of the successes of the day, defend the unknown artist who is alone and at the mercy of the beasts of prey, and subject the minds of those who were born to obey to the dominion of the master-mind? Christophe actually heard the critics at a first night in the vestibule of the theater say: "H'm! Pretty bad, isn't it? Utter rot!" And next day in their notices they talked of masterpieces, Shakespeare, the wings of genius beating above their heads.
"It is not so much talent that your art lacks as character," said
Christophe to Sylvain Kohn. "You need a great critic, a Lessing, a … "
"A Boileau?" said Sylvain quizzically.
"A Boileau, perhaps, more than these artists of genius."
"If we had a Boileau," said Sylvain Kohn, "no one would listen to him."
"If they did not listen to him," replied Christophe, "he would not be a Boileau. I bet you that if I set out and told you the truth about yourselves, quite bluntly, however clumsy I might be, you would have to gulp it down."
"My dear good fellow!" laughed Sylvain Kohn.
That was all the reply he made.
He was so cocksure and so satisfied with the general flabbiness of the French that suddenly it occurred to Christophe that Kohn was a thousand times more of a foreigner in France than himself: and there was a catch at his heart.
"It is impossible," he said once more, as he had said that evening when he had left the theater on the boulevards in disgust. "There must be something else."
"What more do you want?" asked Sylvain Kohn.
"France."
"We are France," said Sylvain Kohn, gurgling with laughter.
Christophe stared hard at him for a moment, then shook his head, and said once more:
"There must be something else."
"Well, old man, you'd better look for it," said Sylvain Kohn, laughing louder than ever.
Christophe had to look for it. It was well hidden.
II
The more clearly Christophe saw into the vat of ideas in which Parisian art was fermenting, the more strongly he was impressed by the supremacy of women in that cosmopolitan community. They had an absurdly disproportionate importance. It was not enough for woman to be the helpmeet of man. It was not even enough for her to be his equal. Her pleasure must be law both for herself and for man. And man truckled to it. When a nation is growing old, it renounces its will, its faith, the whole essence of its being, in favor of the giver of pleasure. Men make works of art: but women make men—(except when they tamper with the work of the men, as happened in France at that time):—and it would be more just to say that they unmake what they make. No doubt the Eternal Feminine has been an uplifting influence on the best of men: but for the ordinary men, in ages of weariness and fatigue, there is, as some one has said, another Feminine, just as eternal, who drags them down. This other Feminine was the mistress of Parisian thought, the Queen of the Republic.
* * * * *
Christophe closely observed the Parisian women at the houses at which Sylvain Kohn's introduction or his own skill at the piano had made him welcome. Like most foreigners, he generalized freely and unsparingly about French women from the two or three types he had met: young women, not very tall, and not at all fresh, with neat figures, dyed hair, large hats on their pretty heads that were a little too large for their bodies: they had trim features, but their faces were just a little too fleshy: good noses, vulgar sometimes, characterless