“My dear Old Fellow,
“Don’t lie angry with me for having gone away like a madman. I am mad, you know. But what can I do? I am what I am. Thanks for your dear hospitality. I enjoyed it much. But, you know, I am not fit to live with other people. I’m not so sure either that I am fit to live. I am only fit to stay in my corner and love people—at a distance: it is wiser so. When I see them at too close quarters, I become misanthropic. And I don’t want to be that. I want to love men and women, I want to love you all. Oh! How I long to help you all! If I could only help you to be—to be happy! How gladly would I give all the happiness I may have in exchange! … But that is forbidden. One can only show others the way. One cannot go their way in their stead. Each of us must save himself. Save yourself! Save yourselves! I love you.
“Madame Jeannin” read the letter with a smile of contempt and her lips tightly pressed together, and said dryly:
“Well. Follow his advice. Save yourself.”
But when Olivier held out his hand for the letter, Jacqueline crumpled it up and flung it down, and two great tears welled up into her eyes. Olivier took her hands.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, with some emotion.
“Let me be!” she cried angrily.
She went out. As she reached the door she cried:
“Egoists!”
Christophe had contrived to make enemies of his patrons of the Grand Journal, as was only likely. Christophe had been endowed by Heaven with the virtue extolled by Goethe: non-gratitude.
“The horror of showing gratitude,” wrote Goethe ironically, “is rare, and only appears in remarkable men who have risen from the poorest class, and at every turn have been forced to accept assistance, which is almost invariably poisoned by the churlishness of the benefactor. …”
Christophe was never disposed to think himself obliged to abase himself in return for service rendered, nor—what amounted to the same thing—to surrender his liberty. He did not lend his own benefactions at so much percent, he gave them. His benefactors, however, were of a very different way of thinking. Their lofty moral feeling of the duties of their debtors was shocked by Christophe’s refusal to write the music for a stupid hymn for an advertising festivity organized by the paper. They made him feel the impropriety of his conduct. Christophe sent them packing. And finally he exasperated them by the flat denial which he gave shortly afterwards to certain statements attributed to him by the paper.
Then they began a campaign against him. They used every possible weapon. They dragged out once more the old pettifogging engine of war which has always served the impotent against creative men, and, though it has never killed anybody, yet it never fails to have an effect upon the simple-minded and the fools: they accused him of plagiarism. They went and picked out artfully selected and distorted passages from his compositions and from those of various obscure musicians, and they proved that he had stolen his inspiration from others. He was accused of having tried to stifle various young artists. It would have been well enough if he had only had to deal with those whose business it is to bark, with those critics, those mannikins, who climb on the shoulders of a great man and cry:
“I am greater than you!”
But no: men of talent must be wrangling among themselves: each man does his best to make himself intolerable to his colleagues: and yet, as Christophe said, the world was large enough for all of them to be able to work in peace: and each of them in his own talent had quite enough to struggle against.
In Germany he found artists so jealous of him that they were ready to furnish his enemies with weapons against him, and even, if need be, to invent them. He found the same thing in France. The nationalists of the musical press—several of whom were foreigners—flung his nationality in his teeth as an insult. Christophe’s success had grown widely; and as he had a certain vogue, they pretended that his exaggeration must irritate even those who had no definite views—much more those who had. Among the concert-going public, and among people in society and the writers on the young reviews, Christophe by this time had enthusiastic partisans, who went into ecstasies over everything he did, and were wont to declare that music did not exist before his advent. Some of them explained his music and found philosophic meanings in it which simply astounded him. Others would see in it a musical revolution, an assault on the traditions which Christophe respected more than anybody. It was useless for him to protest. They would have proved to him that he did not know what he had written. They admired themselves by admiring him. And so the campaign against Christophe met with great sympathy among his colleagues, who were exasperated by the “logrolling”
