it out, the resulting music would have been like those hybrid structures
raised by a Viceroy of India on his return from his travels, with rare
materials collected in every corner of the earth. But the good sense of
the French saved them from any such barbarically erudite excesses: they
carefully avoided any application of their theories: they treated them as
Moliere treated his doctors: they took their prescriptions, but did not
carry them out. The best of them went their own way. The rest of them
contented themselves in practice with very intricate and difficult
exercises in counterpoint: they called them sonatas, quartets, and
symphonies.... "Sonata, what do you desire of me?" The poor thing desired
nothing at all except to be a sonata. The idea behind it was abstract
and anonymous, heavy and joyless. So might a lawyer conceive an art.
Christophe, who had at first been by way of being pleased with the French
for not liking Brahms, now thought that there were many, many little
Brahms in France. These laborious, conscientious, honest journeymen had
many qualities and virtues. Christophe left them edified, but bored to
distraction. It was all very good, very good....

How fine it was outside!

* * * * *

And yet there were a few independent musicians in Paris, men belonging to
no school; They alone were interesting to Christophe. It was only through
them that he could gauge the vitality of the art. Schools and coteries only
express some superficial fashion or manufactured theory. But the
independent men who stand apart have more chance of really discovering the
ideas of their race and time. It is true that that makes them all the more
difficult for a foreigner to understand.