YOUNG Headstrong, looking upon his fellow men with passion and prejudice, fails to understand their natures; at first he contemplates the families of mankind, the nations, with like passion and prejudice. It is a part of our inevitable destiny that to begin with, and for many of us throughout life, we know our own land from within only, foreign lands only from without. Not until we have learned to see our own country from without, and to understand foreign countries from within as the natives of these countries understand them, can we acquire a European outlook, can we realize that these various countries are complementary parts of a single whole. Jean Christophe fights for life in its entirety. For this reason he must pursue the path by which the nationalist becomes a citizen of the world and acquires a "European soul."
As must happen, Jean Christophe begins with prejudice. At first he overvalues France. Ideas have been impressed upon his mind concerning the artistic, cheerful, liberal-spirited French, and he regards his own Germany as a land full of restriction. His first sight of Paris brings disillusionment; he can see nothing but lies, clamor, and cheating. By degrees, however, he discovers that the soul of a nation is not an obvious and superficial thing, like a paving-stone in the street, but that the observer of a foreign people must dig his way to that soul through a thick stratum of illusion and falsehood. Ere long he weans himself of the habit which leads people to talk of the French, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, as if members of these respective nations or races were all of a piece, to be classified and docketed in so simple a fashion. Each people has its own measure, its own form, customs, failings, and lies; just as each has its own climate, history, skies, and race; and these things cannot be easily summarized in a phrase or two. As with all experience, our experiences of a country must be built up from within. With words alone we can build nothing but a house of cards. "Truth is the same to all nations, but each nation has its own lies which it speaks of as its idealism. Every member of each nation inhales the appropriate atmosphere of lying idealism from the cradle to the grave, until it becomes the very breath of his life. None but isolated geniuses can free themselves by heroic struggle, during which they stand alone in the free universe of their own thought." We must free ourselves from prejudice if we are to judge freely. There is no other formula; there are no other psychological prescriptions. As with all creative work, we must permeate the material with which we have to deal, must yield ourselves without reserve. In the case of nations as in the case of individual men, he who would know them will find that there is but one science, that of the heart and not of books.
Nothing but such mutual understanding passing from soul to soul can weld the nations together. What keeps them asunder is misunderstanding, the way those of each nation hold their own beliefs to be the only right ones, look upon their own natures as the only good ones. The mischief lies in the arrogance of persons who believe that all others are wrong. Nation is estranged from nation by the collective conceit of the members of each nation, by the "great European plague of national pride" which Nietzsche termed "the malady of the century." They stand like trees in a forest, each stem priding itself on its isolation, though the roots interlace underground and the summits touch overhead. The common people, the proletariat, living in the depths, universally human in its feelings, know naught of national contrasts. Jean Christophe, making the acquaintance of Sidonie, the Breton maidservant, recognizes with astonishment "how closely she resembles respectable folk in Germany." Look again at the summits, at the elite. Olivier and Grazia have long been living in that lofty sphere known to Goethe "in which we feel the fate of foreign nations just as we feel our own." Fellowship is a truth; mutual hatred is a falsehood; justice is the only real tie linking men and linking nations. "All of us, all nations, are debtors one to another. Let us, then, pay our debts and do our duty together." Jean Christophe has suffered at the hands of every nation, and has received gifts from every nation; disillusioned by all, he has also been benefited by all. To the citizen of the world, at the end of his pilgrimage, all nations are alike. In each his soul can make itself at home. The musician in him dreams of a sublime work, of the great European symphony, wherein the voices of the peoples, resolving discords, will rise in the last and highest harmony, the harmony of mankind.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PICTURE OF FRANCE
THE picture of France in the great romance is notable because we are here shown a country from a twofold outlook, from without and from within, from the perspective of a German and with the eyes of a Frenchman. It is likewise notable because Christophe's judgment is not merely that of one who sees, but that of one who learns in seeing.
In every respect, the German's thought process is intentionally presented in a typical form. In his little native town he had never known a Frenchman. His feelings towards the French, of whom he had no concrete experience whatever, took the form of a genial, but somewhat contemptuous, sympathy. "The French are good fellows, but rather a slack lot," would seem to sum up his German prejudice. They are a nation of spineless artists, bad soldiers, corrupt politicians, women of easy virtue; but they are clever, amusing, and liberal-minded. Amid the order and sobriety of German life, he feels a certain yearning towards the democratic freedom of France. His first encounter with a French actress, Corinne, akin to Goethe's Philine, seems to confirm this facile judgment; but soon, when he meets Antoinette, he comes to realize the existence of another France. "You are so serious," he says with astonishment to the demure, tongue-tied girl, who in this foreign land is hard at work as a teacher in a pretentious, parvenu household. Her characteristics are not in keeping with his traditional prejudices. A Frenchwoman ought to be trivial, saucy, and wanton. For the first time France presents to him "the riddle of its twofold nature." This initial appeal from the distance exercises a mysterious lure. He begins to realize the infinite multiplicity of these foreign worlds. Like Gluck, Wagner, Meyerbeer, and Offenbach, he takes refuge from the narrowness of German provincial life, and flees to Paris, the fabled home of universal art.
His feeling on arrival is one of disorder, and this impression never leaves him. The first and last impression, the strongest impression, to which the German in him continually returns, is that powerful energies are being squandered through lack of discipline. His first guide in the fair is one of those spurious "real Parisians," one of the immigrants who are more Parisian in their manners than those who are Parisian by birth, a Jew of German extraction named Sylvain Kohn, who here passes by the name of Hamilton, and in whose hands all the threads of the trade in art are centered. He shows Jean Christophe the painters, the musicians, the politicians, the journalists; and Jean Christophe turns away disheartened. It seems to him that all their works exhale an unpleasant "odor femininus," an oppressive atmosphere laden with scent. He sees praises showered upon second-rate persons, hears a clamor of appreciation, without discovering a single genuine work of art. There is indeed art of a kind amid the medley, but it is over-refined and decadent; the work of taste and not of power; lacking integration through excess of irony; an Alexandrian-Greek literature and music; the breath of a moribund nation; the hothouse blossom of a perishing civilization. He sees an end, but no beginning. The German in him already hears "the rumbling of the cannon" which will destroy this enfeebled Greece.
He learns to know good men and bad; many of them are vain and stupid, dull and soulless; not one does he meet, in his experience of social life in Paris, who gives him confidence in France. The first messenger comes from a distance; this is Sidonie, the peasant girl who tends him during his illness. He learns, all at once, how calm and inviolable, how fertile and strong, is the earth, the humus, out of which the Parisian exotics suck their energies. He becomes acquainted with the people, the robust and serious-minded French people, which tills the land, caring naught for the noise of the great fair, the people which has made revolutions with the might of its wrath and has waged the Napoleonic wars with its enthusiasm. From this moment he feels there must be a real France still unknown to him. In conversation with Sylvain Kohn, he asks, "Where can I find France?" Kohn answers grandiloquently, "We are France!" Jean Christophe smiles bitterly, knowing well that he will have a long search. Those among whom he is now moving have hidden France.
At length comes the rencounter which is a turning-point in his fate; he meets Olivier, Antoinette's brother, the true Frenchman. Just as Dante, guided by Virgil, wanders through new and ever new circles of knowledge, so Jean Christophe, led by Olivier, learns with astonishment that behind this veil of noise, behind this clamorous façade, an elite is quietly laboring. He sees the work of persons whose names are never printed in the newspapers; sees the people, those who, remote from the hurly-burly, tranquilly pursue their daily round. He learns to know the new idealism of the France whose soul has been strengthened by defeat. At first this discovery fills him with rage. "I cannot understand you all," he cries to the gentle Olivier. "You live in the most beautiful of countries, are marvelously gifted, are endowed with the highest human sensibilities, and yet you fail to turn these advantages to account. You allow yourselves to be dominated and to be trampled upon by a handful of rascals. Rouse yourselves; get together; sweep your house clean!" The first and most natural thought of the German is for organization, for the drawing together of the good elements; the first thought of the strong man is to fight. Yet the best in France insist on holding aloof, some of them content with a mysterious clarity of vision, and others giving themselves up to a facile resignation. With that tincture of pessimism in their sagacity to which Renan has given such lucid expression, they shrink from the struggle. Action is uncongenial to them, and the hardest thing of all is to combine them for joint action. "They are over cautious, and visualize defeat before the battle begins." Lacking the optimism of the Germans, they remain isolated individuals, some from prudence, others from pride. They seem to be affected with a spirit of exclusiveness, the operation of which Jean Christophe is able to study in his own dwelling. On each story there live excellent persons who could combine well, but they will have nothing to do with one another. For twenty years they pass on the staircase without becoming acquainted, without the least concern about one another's lives. Thus the best among the artists remain strangers.
Jean Christophe suddenly comes to realize with all its merits and defects the essential characteristic of the French people, the desire for liberty. Each one wishes to be free for himself, free from ties. They waste enormous quantities of energy because each tries to wage the time struggle unaided, because they will not permit themselves to be organized, because they refuse to pull together in harness. Although their activities are thus paralyzed by their reason, their minds nevertheless remain free. Consequently they are enabled to permeate every revolutionary movement with the religious fervor of the solitary, and they can perpetually renew their own revolutionary faith. These things are their salvation, preserving them from an order which would be unduly rigid, from a mechanical system which would impose excessive uniformity. Jean Christophe at length understands that the noisy fair exists only to attract the unthinking, and to preserve a creative solitude for the really active spirits. He sees that for the French temperament this clamor is indispensable, is a means by which the French fire one another to labor; he sees that the apparent inconsequence of their thoughts is a rhythmical form of continuous renewal. His first impression, like that of so many Germans, had been that the French are effete. But after twenty years he realizes that in truth they are always ready for new beginnings, that amid the apparent contradictions of their spirit a hidden order reigns, a different order from that known to the Germans, just as their freedom is a different freedom. The citizen of the world, who no longer desires to impose upon any other nation the characteristics of his own, now contemplates with delight the eternal diversity of the races. As the light of the world is composed of the seven colors of the spectrum, so from this racial diversity arises that wonderful multiplicity in unity, the fellowship of all mankind.