All these people went on living side by side in that house with its walled-in garden sheltered from all the buffets of the world, hermetically sealed even against each other. Only Christophe, with his need of expansion and his great fullness of life, unknown to them, wrapped them about with his vast sympathy, blind, yet all-seeing. He could not understand them. He had no means of understanding them. He lacked Olivier’s psychological insight and quickness. But he loved them. Instinctively he put himself in their place. Slowly, mysteriously, there crept through him a dim consciousness of these lives so near him and yet so far removed, the stupefying sorrow of the mourning woman, the stoic silence of all their proud thoughts, the priest, the Jew, the engineer, the revolutionary: the pale and gentle flame of tenderness and faith which burned in silence in the hearts of the two Arnauds: the naive aspirations towards the light of the man of the people: the suppressed revolt and fertile activity which were stifled in the bosom of the old soldier: and the calm resignation of the girl dreaming in the shade of the lilac. But only Christophe could perceive and hear the silent music of their souls: they heard it not: they were all absorbed in their sorrow and their dreams.
They all worked hard, the skeptical old scientist, the pessimistic engineer, the priest, the anarchist, and all these proud or dispirited creatures. And on the roof the mason sang.
In the district round the house among the best of the people Christophe found the same moral solitude—even when the people were banded together.
Olivier had brought him in touch with a little review for which he wrote. It was called Ésope, and had taken for its motto this quotation from Montaigne:
“Aesop was put up for sale with two other slaves. The purchaser inquired of the first what he could do; and he, to put a price upon himself, described all sorts of marvels; the second said as much for himself, or more. When it came to Aesop’s turn, and he was asked what he could do:—Nothing, he said, for these two have taken everything: they can do everything.”
Their attitude was that of pure reaction against “the impudence,” as Montaigne says, “of those who profess knowledge and their overweening presumption!” The self-styled skeptics of the Ésope review were at heart men of the firmest faith. But their mask of irony and haughty ignorance, naturally enough, had small attraction for the public: rather it repelled. The people are only with a writer when he brings them words of simple, clear, vigorous, and assured life. They prefer a sturdy lie to an anemic truth. Skepticism is only to their liking when it is the covering of lusty naturalism or Christian idolatry. The scornful Pyrrhonism in which the Ésope clothed itself could only be acceptable to a few minds—“aeme sdegnose,”—who knew the solid worth beneath it. It was force absolutely lost upon action and life.
There was no help for it. The more democratic France became, the more aristocratic did her ideas, her art, her science seem to grow. Science securely lodged behind its special languages, in the depths of its sanctuary, wrapped about with a triple veil, which only the initiate had the power to draw, was less accessible than at the time of Buffon and the Encyclopedists. Art—that art at least which had some respect for itself and the worship of beauty—was no less hermetically sealed: it despised the people. Even among writers who cared less for beauty than for action, among those who gave moral ideas precedence over esthetic ideas, there was often a strange dominance of the aristocratic spirit. They seemed to be more intent upon preserving the purity of their inward flame than to communicate its warmth to others. It was as though they desired not to make their ideas prevail but only to affirm them.
And yet among these writers there were some who applied themselves to popular art. Among the most sincere some hurled into their writings destructive anarchical ideas, truths of the distant future, which might be beneficent in a century or so, but, for the time being, corroded and scorched the soul: others wrote bitter or ironical plays, robbed of all illusion, sad to the last degree. Christophe was left in a state of collapse, hamstrung, for a day or two after he read them.
“And you give that sort of thing to the people?” he would ask, feeling sorry for the poor audiences who had come to forget their troubles for a few hours, only to be presented with these lugubrious entertainments. “It’s enough to make them all go and drown themselves!”
“You may be quite easy on that score,” said Olivier, laughing. “The people don’t go.”
“And a jolly good thing too! You’re mad. Are you trying to rob them of every scrap
