able to discover them! But at most he only caught a cursory glimpse of
two or three of them: he only made their acquaintance in the villainous
caricatures of their ideas. He saw only their defects copied and
exaggerated by the apish mimics of art and the bagmen of the Press.

But what most disgusted him with these vulgarians of music was their
formalism. They never seemed to consider anything but form. Feeling,
character, life--never a word of these! It never seemed to occur to them
that every real musician lives in a world of sound, as other men live in a
visible world, and that his days are lived in and borne onward by a flood
of music. Music is the air he breathes, the sky above him. Nature wakes
answering music in his soul. His soul itself is music: music is in all that
it loves, hates, suffers, fears, hopes. And when the soul of a musician
loves a beautiful body, it sees music in that, too. The beloved eyes are
not blue, or brown, or gray: they are music: their tenderness is like
caressing, notes, like a delicious chord. That inward music is a thousand
times more rich than the music that finds expression, and the instrument
is inferior to the player. Genius is measured by the power of life, by the
power of evoking life through the imperfect instrument of art. But to how
many men in France does that ever occur? To these chemists music seems to
be no more than the art of resolving sounds. They mistake the alphabet
for a book. Christophe shrugged his shoulders when he heard them say
complacently that to understand art it must be abstracted from the man.
They were extraordinarily pleased with this paradox: for by it they fancied
they were proving their own musical quality. And even Goujart subscribed
to it--Goujart, the idiot who had never been able to understand how people
managed to learn by heart a piece of music--(he had tried to get Christophe
to explain the mystery to him)--and had tried to prove to him that
Beethoven's greatness of soul and Wagner's sensuality had no more to do
with their music than a painter's model has to do with his portraits.