The artists of that time were far removed from that love. They wrote only for a more or less anarchical and vain group, uprooted from the life of the country, who preened themselves on not sharing the prejudices and passions of the rest of humanity, or else made a mock of them. It is a fine sort of fame that is won by self-amputation from life, so as to be unlike other men! Let all such artists perish! We will go with the living, be suckled at the breasts of the earth, and drink in all that is most profound and sacred in our people, and all its love from the family and the soil. In the greatest age of liberty, among the people with the most ardent worship of beauty, the young Prince of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael, glorified maternity in his transteverine Madonnas. Who is there now to give us in music a Madonna à la Chaise? Who is there to give us music meet for every hour of life? You have nothing, you have nothing in France. When you want to give your people songs, you are reduced to bringing up to date the German masters of the past. In your art, from top to bottom, everything remains to be done, or to be done again….
Christophe corresponded with Olivier, who was now settled in a provincial town. He tried to maintain in correspondence that collaboration which had been so fruitful during the time when they had lived together. He wanted him to write him fine poetic words closely allied with the thoughts and deeds of everyday life, like the poems which are the substance of the old German lieder. Short fragments from the Scriptures and the Hindoo poems, and the old Greek philosophers, short religious and moral poems, little pictures of Nature, the emotions of love or family life, the whole poetry of morning, evening, and night, that is in simple, healthy people. Four lines or six are enough for a lied: only the simplest expressions, and no elaborate development or subtlety of harmony. What have I to do with your esthetic tricks? Love my life, help me to love it and to live it. Write me the Hours of France, my Great and Small Hours. And let us together find the clearest melody. Let us avoid like the plague any artistic language that belongs to a caste like that of so many writers, and especially of so many French musicians of to-day. We must have the courage to speak like men, and not like "artists." We must draw upon the common fund of all men, and unashamedly make use of old formulae, upon which the ages have set their seal, formulas which the ages have filled with their spirit. Look at what our forefathers have done. It was by returning to the musical language of all men that the art of the German classics of the eighteenth century came into being. The melodies of Gluck and the creators of the symphony are sometimes trivial and commonplace compared with the subtle and erudite phrases of Johann Sebastian Bach and Rameau. It is their raciness of the soil that gives such zest to, and has procured such immense popularity for the German classics. They began with the simplest musical forms, the lied and the Singspiel, the little flowers of everyday life which impregnated the childhood of men like Mozart and Weber.—Do you do the same. Write songs for all and sundry. Upon that basis you will soon build quartettes and symphonies. What is the good of rushing ahead? The pyramids were not begun at the top. Your symphonies at present are trunkless heads, ideas without any stuffing. Oh, you fair spirits, become incarnate! There must be generations of musicians patiently and joyously and piously living in brotherhood with these people. No musical art was ever built in a day.
Christophe was not content to apply these principles in music: he urged
Olivier to set himself at the head of a similar movement in literature:
"The writers of to-day," he said, "waste their energy in describing human rarities, or cases that are common enough in the abnormal groups of men and women living on the fringe of the great society of active, healthy human beings. Since they themselves have shut themselves off from life, leave them and go where there are men. Show the life of every day to the men and women of every day: that life is deeper and more vast than the sea. The smallest among you bears the infinite in his soul. The infinite is in every man who is simple enough to be a man, in the lover, in the friend, in the woman who pays with her pangs for the radiant glory of the day of childbirth, in every man and every woman who lives in obscure self-sacrifice which will never be known to another soul: it is the very river of life, flowing from one to another, from one to another, and back again and round…. Write the simple life of one of these simple men, write the peaceful epic of the days and nights following, following one like to another, and yet all different, all sons of the same mother, from the dawning of the first day in the life of the world. Write it simply, as simple as its own unfolding. Waste no thought upon the word, and the letter, and the subtle vain researches in which the force of the artists of to-day is turned to nought. You are addressing all men: use the language of all men. There are no words noble or vulgar; there is no style chaste or impure: there are only words and styles which say or do not say exactly what they have to say. Be sound and thorough in all you do: think just what you think,—and feel just what you feel. Let the rhythm of your heart prevail in your writings! The style is the soul."
Olivier agreed with Christophe, but he replied rather ironically:
"Such a book would be fine: but it would never reach the people who would care to read it. The critics would strangle it on the way."
"There speaks my little French bourgeois!" replied Christophe. "Worrying his mind about what the critics will or will not think of his work!… The critics, my boy, are only there to register victory or defeat. The great thing is to be victor…. I have managed to get along without them! You must learn how to disregard them, too…."
* * * * *
But Olivier had learned how to disregard something entirely different! He had turned aside from art, and Christophe, and everybody. At that time he was thinking of nothing but Jacqueline, and Jacqueline was thinking of nothing but him.
The selfishness of their love had cut them off from everything and everybody: they were recklessly destroying all their future resources.