"Are you healthy?"
To be healthy was the great thing. "If the poet is ill, let him first of all cure himself," as Goethe says. "When he is cured, he will write."
The writers of Paris were unhealthy: or if one of them happened to be healthy, the chances were that he was ashamed of it: he disguised it, and did his best to catch some disease. Their sickness was not shown in any particular feature of their art:—the love of pleasure, the extreme license of mind, or the universal trick of criticism which examined and dissected every idea that was expressed. All these things could be—and were, as the case might be—healthy or unhealthy. If death was there, it did not come from the material, but from the use that these people made of it; it was in the people themselves. And Christophe himself loved pleasure. He, too, loved liberty. He had drawn down upon himself the displeasure of his little German town by his frankness in defending many things, which he found here, promulgated by these Parisians, in such a way as to disgust him. And yet they were the same things. But nothing sounded the same to the Parisians and to himself. When Christophe impatiently shook off the yoke of the great Masters of the past, when he waged war against the esthetics and the morality of the Pharisees, it was not a game to him as it was to these men of intellect: and his revolt was directed only towards life, the life of fruitfulness, big with the centuries to come. With these people all tended to sterile enjoyment. Sterile, Sterile, Sterile. That was the key to the enigma. Mind and senses were fruitlessly debauched. A brilliant art, full of wit and cleverness—a lovely form, in truth, a tradition of beauty, impregnably seated, in spite of foreign alluvial deposits—a theater which was a theater, a style which was a style, authors who knew their business, writers who could write, the fine skeleton of an art, and a thought that had been great. But a skeleton. Sonorous words, ringing phrases, the metallic clang of ideas hurtling down the void, witticisms, minds haunted by sensuality, and senses numbed with thought. It was all useless, save for the sport of egoism. It led to death. It was a phenomenon analogous to the frightful decline in the birth-rate of France, which Europe was observing—and reckoning—in silence. So much wit, so much cleverness, so many acute senses, all wasted and wasting in a sort of shameful onanism! They had no notion of it, and wished to have none. They laughed. That was the only thing that comforted Christophe a little: these people could still laugh: all was not lost. He liked them even less when they tried to take themselves seriously: and nothing hurt him more than to see writers, who regarded art as no more than an instrument of pleasure, giving themselves airs as priests of a disinterested religion:
"We are artists," said Sylvain Kohn once more complacently. "We follow art for art's sake. Art is always pure: everything in art is chaste. We explore life as tourists, who find everything amusing. We are amateurs of rare sensations, lovers of beauty."
"You are hypocrites," replied Christophe bluntly. "Excuse my saying so. I used to think my own country had a monopoly. In Germany our hypocrisy consists in always talking about idealism while we think of nothing but our interests, and we even believe that we are idealists while we think of nothing but ourselves. But you are much worse: you cover your national lewdness with the names of Art and Beauty (with capitals)—when you do not shield your Moral Pilatism behind the names of Truth, Science, Intellectual Duty, and you wash your hands of the possible consequences of your haughty inquiry. Art for art's sake!… That's a fine faith! But it is the faith of the strong. Art! To grasp life, as the eagle claws its prey, to bear it up into the air, to rise with it into the serenity of space!… For that you need talons, great wings, and a strong heart. But you are nothing but sparrows who, when they find a piece of carrion, rend it here and there, squabbling for it, and twittering … Art for art's sake!… Oh! wretched men! Art is no common ground for the feet of all who pass it by. Why, it is a pleasure, it is the most intoxicating of all. But it is a pleasure which is only won at the cost of a strenuous fight: it is the laurel-wreath that crowns the victory of the strong. Art is life tamed. Art is the Emperor of life. To be Cæsar a man must have the soul of Cæsar. But you are only limelight Kings: you are playing a part, and do not even deceive yourselves. And, like those actors, who turn to profit their deformities, you manufacture literature out of your own deformities and those of your public. Lovingly do you cultivate the diseases of your people, their fear of effort, their love of pleasure, their sensual minds, their chimerical humanitarianism, everything in them that drugs the will, everything in them that saps their power for action. You deaden their minds with the fumes of opium. Behind it all is death: you know it: but you will not admit it. Well, I tell you: Where death is, there art is not. Art is the spring of life. But even the most honest of your writers are so cowardly that even when the bandage is removed from their eyes they pretend not to see: they have the effrontery to say:
"'It is dangerous, I admit: it is poisonous: but it is full of talent.'
"It is as if a judge, sentencing a hooligan, were to say:
"'He's a blackguard, certainly: but he has so much talent!…'"
* * * * *
Christophe wondered what was the use of French criticism. There was no lack of critics: they swarmed all over and about French art. It was impossible to see the work of the artists: they were swamped by the critics.