supple climbing plant needed a prop: it could not do without literature,
but did not find in it enough of the breath of life. French music was
breathless, bloodless, will-less. It was like a woman languishing for her
lover. But, like a Byzantine Empress, slender and feeble in body, laden
with precious stones, it was surrounded with eunuchs: snobs, esthetes,
and critics. The nation was not musical: and the craze, so much talked of
during the last twenty years, for Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, or Debussy,
never reached farther than a certain class. The enormous increase in the
number of concerts, the flowing tide of music at all costs, found no real
response in the development of public taste. It was just a fashionable
craze confined to the few, and leading them astray. There was only a
handful of people who really loved music, and these were not the people
who were most occupied with it, composers and critics. There are so few
musicians in France who really love music!

So thought Christophe: but it did not occur to him that it is the same
everywhere, that even in Germany there are not many more real musicians,
and that the people who matter in art are not the thousands who understand
nothing about it, but the few who love it and serve it in proud humility.
Had he ever set eyes on them in France? Creators and critics--the best of
them were working in silence, far from the racket, as Cesar Franck had
done, and the most gifted composers of the day were doing, and a number of
artists who would live out their lives in obscurity, so that some day in
the future some journalist might have the glory of discovering them and
posing as their friend--and the little army of industrious and obscure men
of learning who, without ambition and careless of their fame, were building
stone by stone the greatness of the past history of France, or, being vowed
to the musical education of the country, were preparing the greatness of
the France of the future. There were minds there whose wealth and liberty
and world-wide curiosity would have attracted Christophe if he had been