the Palais-Bourbon. They did not shrink from bringing the question of
divorce on to the platform together with the inquiry into the birth-rate
and the separation of the Church and State. Among them were to be found
lay symbolists and clerical symbolists. They introduced philosophic
rag-pickers, sociological grisettes, prophetic bakers, and apostolic
fishermen to the stage. Goethe spoke of the artists of his day, "who
reproduced the ideas of Kant in allegorical pictures." The artists of
Christophe's day wrote sociology in semi-quavers. Zola, Nietzsche,
Maeterlinck, Barres, Jaures, Mendes, the Gospel, and the Moulin Rouge, all
fed the cistern whence the writers of operas and symphonies drew their
ideas. Many of them, intoxicated by the example of Wagner, cried: "And I,
too, am a poet!" And with perfect assurance they tacked on to their music
verses in rhyme, or unrhymed, written in the style of an elementary school
or a decadent feuilleton.

All these thinkers and poets were partisans of pure music. But they
preferred talking about it to writing it. And yet they did sometimes manage
to write it. Then they wrote music that was not intended to say anything.
Unfortunately, they often succeeded: their music was meaningless--at least,
to Christophe. It is only fair to say that he had not the key to it.

In order to understand the music of a foreign nation a man must take the
trouble to learn the language, and not make up his mind beforehand that he
knows it. Christophe, like every good German, thought he knew it. That was
excusable. Many Frenchmen did not understand it any more than he. Like the
Germans of the time of Louis XIV, who tried so hard to speak French that
in the end they forgot their own language, the French musicians of the
nineteenth century had taken so much pains to unlearn their language that
their music had become a foreign lingo. It was only of recent years that a
movement had sprung up to speak French in France. They did not all succeed: