Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/791

 Jean-Christophe

(French novelist and critic, born 1866; lecturer at the University of Paris. This epoch-making ten-volume novel, probably the greatest published in France since "Les Miserables," tells the life story of a German-born musician. The following passage describes his attitude towards the revolutionary movement in Paris)

Christophe was dragged into the wake of force in the track of the army of the working-classes in revolt. But he was hardly aware that it was so; and he would tell his companions in the restaurant that he was not with them.

"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would say, "you don't interest me. The day when you march out for a belief, then I shall be with you. Otherwise, what have I to do with the conflict between one man's belly and another's? I am an artist; it is my duty to defend art; I have no right to enroll myself in the service of a party. I am perfectly aware that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems to me that they have not rendered any great service to the cause which they defended in that way; but they have certainly betrayed art. It is our business—the artists'—to save the light of the intellect. We have no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. Who shall hold the light aloft if we let it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north."