Jean-Christophe Journey's End

by Romain Rolland

They used to sit together after dinner in the evening. Braun and Christophe would talk. Anna would sit working. On Braun's entreaty, Christophe had consented to play the piano sometimes: and he would occasionally play on to a very late hour in the big gloomy room looking out on to the garden. Braun would go into ecstasies…. Who is there that does not know the type that has a passionate love for things they do not understand, or understand all wrong!—(which is why they love them!)—Christophe did not mind: he had met so many idiots in the course of his life! But when Braun gave vent to certain mawkish expressions of enthusiasm, he would stop playing, and go up to his room without a word. Braun grasped the truth at last, and put a stopper on his reflections. Besides, his love for music was quickly sated: he could never listen with any attention for more than a quarter of an hour on end: he would pick up his paper, or doze off, and leave Christophe in peace. Anna would sit back in her chair and say nothing: she would have her work in her lap and seem to be working: but her eyes were always staring and her hands never moved. Sometimes she would go out without a sound in the middle of a piece, and be seen no more.

* * * * *

So the days passed. Christophe regained his strength. Braun's heavy but kindly attentions, the tranquillity of the household, the restful regularity of such a domestic life, the extremely nourishing German food, restored him to his old robustness. His physical health was repaired: but his moral machinery was still out of gear. His new vigor only served to accentuate the disorder of his mind, which could not recover its balance, like a badly ballasted ship which will turn turtle on the smallest shock.

He was profoundly lonely. He could have no intellectual intimacy with Braun. His relations with Anna were reduced, with a few exceptions, to saying good-morning and good-night. His dealings with his pupils were rather hostile than otherwise: for he hardly hid from them his opinion that the best thing for them to do was to give up music altogether. He knew nobody. It was not only his fault, though he had hidden himself away since his loss. People held aloof from him.

He was living in an old town, full of intelligence and vitality, but also full of patrician pride, self-contained, and self-satisfied. There was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to live in family isolation. There were enormous families with vast ramifications. Each family had its day for a general gathering of the clan. They were hardly at all open to the outside world. All these great houses, with fortunes generations old, felt no need of showing their wealth. They knew each other, and that was enough: the opinion of others was a thing of no consequence. There were millionaires dressed like humble shopkeepers, talking their raucous dialect with its pungent expressions, going conscientiously to their offices, every day of their lives, even at an age when the most industrious of men will grant themselves the right to rest. Their wives prided themselves on their domestic skill. No dowry was given to the daughters. Rich men let their sons in their turn go through the same hard apprenticeship that they themselves had served. They practised strict economy in their daily lives. But they made a noble use of their fortune in collecting works of art, picture galleries, and in social work: they were forever giving enormous sums, nearly always anonymously, to found charities and to enrich the museums. They were a mixture of greatness and absurdity, both of another age. This little world, for which the rest of the world seemed not to exist—(although its members knew it thoroughly through their business, and their distant relationships, and the long and extended voyages which they forced their sons to take,)—this little world, for which fame and celebrity in another land only were esteemed from the moment when they were welcomed and recognized by itself,—practised the severest discipline upon itself. Every member of it kept a watch upon himself and upon the rest. The result of all this was a collective conscience which masked all individual differences (more marked than elsewhere among the robust personalities of the place) under the veil of religious and moral uniformity. Everybody practised it, everybody believed in it. Not a single soul doubted it or would admit of doubt. It were impossible to know what took place in the depths of souls which were the more hermetically sealed against prying eyes inasmuch as they knew that they were surrounded by a narrow scrutiny, and that every man took upon himself the right to examine into the conscience of other men. It was said that even those who had left the country and thought themselves emancipated—as soon as they set foot in it again were dominated by the traditions, the habits, the atmosphere of the town: even the most skeptical were at once forced to practise and to believe. Not to believe would have seemed to them an offense against Nature. Not to believe was the mark of an inferior caste, a sign of bad breeding. It was never admitted that a man of their world could possibly be absolved of his religious duties. If a man did not practise their religion, he was at once unclassed, and all doors were closed to him.

Even the weight of such discipline was apparently not enough for them. The men of this little world were not closely bound enough within their caste. Within the great Verein they had formed a number of smaller Verein by way of binding their fetters fast. There were several hundred of them: and they were increasing every year. There were Verein for everything: for philanthropy, charitable work, commercial work, work that was both charitable and commercial, for the arts, for the sciences, for singing, music, spiritual exercises, physical exercises, merely to provide excuses for meeting and taking their amusement collectively: there were Verein for the various districts and the various corporations: there were Verein for men of the same position in the world, the same degree of wealth, men of the same social weight, who wore the same handle to their names. It was even said that an attempt had been made to form a Verein for the Vereinlosen (those who did not belong to any Verein): though not twelve such people had been forthcoming.

Within this triple bandage of town, caste, and union, the soul was cramped and bound. Character was suppressed by a secret constraint. The majority were brought up to it from childhood—had been for centuries: and they found it good: they would have thought it improper and unhealthy to go without these bandages. Their satisfied smiles gave no indication of the discomfort they might be feeling. But Nature always took her revenge. Every now and then there would arise some individual in revolt, some vigorous artist or unbridled thinker who would brutally break his bonds and set the city fathers by the ears. They were so clever that, if the rebel had not been stifled in the embryo, and became the stronger, they never troubled to fight him—(a fight might have produced all sorts of scandalous outbreaks):—they bought him up. If he were a painter, they sent him to the museum: if he were a thinker, to the libraries. It was quite useless for him to roar out all sorts of outrageous things: they pretended not to hear him. It was in vain for him to protest his independence: they incorporated him as one of themselves. So the effect of the poison was neutralized: it was the homeopathic treatment.—But such cases were rare, most of the rebellions never reached the light of day. Their peaceful houses concealed unsuspected tragedies. The master of a great house would go quietly and throw himself into the river, and leave no explanation. Sometimes a man would go into retirement for six months, sometimes he would send his wife to an asylum to restore her mind. Such things were spoken of quite openly, as though they were quite natural, with that placidity which is one of the great features of the town, the inhabitants of which are able to maintain it in the face of suffering and death.

These solid burgesses, who were hard upon themselves because they knew their own worth, were much less hard on others because they esteemed them less. They were quite liberal towards the foreigners dwelling in the town like Christophe, German professors, and political refugees, because they had no sort of feeling about them. And, besides, they loved intelligence. Advanced ideas had no terrors for them: they knew that their sons were impervious to their influence. They were coldly cordial to their guests, and kept them at a distance.

Christophe did not need to have these things underlined. He was in a state of raw sensitiveness which left his feelings absolutely unprotected: he was only too ready to see egoism and indifference everywhere, and to withdraw into himself.

To make matters worse, Braun's patients, and the very limited circle to which his wife belonged, all moved in a little Protestant society which was particularly strict. Christophe was ill-regarded by them both as a Papist by origin and a heretic in fact. For his part, he found many things which shocked him. Although he no longer believed, yet he bore the marks of his inherited Catholicism, which was more poetic than a matter of reason, more indulgent towards Nature, and never suffered the self-torment of trying to explain and understand what to love and what not to love: and also he had the habits of intellectual and moral freedom which he had unwittingly come by in Paris. It was inevitable that he should come into collision with the little pious groups of people in whom all the defects of the Calvinistic spirit were marked and exaggerated: a rationalistic religion, which clipped the wings of faith and left it dangling over the abyss: for it started with an a priori reason which was open to discussion like all mysticism: it was no longer poetry, nor was it prose, it was poetry translated into prose. They had pride of intellect, an absolute, dangerous faith in reason—in their reason. They could not believe in God or in immortality: but they believed in reason as a Catholic believes in the Pope, or as a fetish-worshiper believes in his idol. They never even dreamed of discussing the matter. In vain did life contradict it; they would rather have denied life. They had no psychology, no understanding of Nature, or of the hidden forces, the roots of humanity, the "Spirit of the Earth." They fashioned a scheme of life and nature that were childish, silly, arbitrary figments. Some of them were cultured and practical people who had seen and read much. But they never saw or read anything as it actually was: they always reduced it to an abstraction. They were poor-blooded: they had high moral qualities: but they were not human enough: and that is the cardinal sin. Their purity of heart, which was often very real, noble, and naive, sometimes comic, unfortunately, in certain cases, became tragic: it made them hard in their dealings with others, and produced in them a tranquil inhumanity, self-confident and free from anger, which was quite appalling. How should they hesitate? Had they not truth, right, virtue, on their side? Did they not receive revelation direct from their hallowed reason? Reason is a hard sun: it gives light, but it blinds. In that withering light, without shade or mist, human beings grow pallid, the blood is sucked up from their hearts.