He has passed from us. But the reflection of his luminous genius, his kindness in the bitter struggle, his indestructible optimism even in the midst of disaster, shine above the carnage of Europe, over which the dusk is gathering, like the splendor of the setting sun.
There is one page which he wrote, which cannot be read without emotion—an immortal page in which he represents the noble Herakles, resting after his labors on the maternal earth:
"There are hours," he says, "when in feeling the earth beneath our feet, we experience a joy deep[{191}] and tranquil as the earth herself. How often on my journey along footpaths and across fields I have realized suddenly that it was indeed the earth on which I trod, that I belonged to her, as she belonged to me! Then without thinking I went more slowly, because it was not worth while to hasten across her surface, because I was conscious of her and possessed her at each step I took, and my soul was moving within her depths. How many times at the fall of day, as I lay by the side of a ditch, my eyes turned towards the faint blue of the eastern sky, I have suddenly realized that the earth was speeding on her journey hastening from the fatigues of the day and the limited horizons which the sun illumines, and rushing with prodigious force towards the serenity of night and unlimited horizons, and bearing me with her. I felt in my body as in my soul, and in the earth herself as in my body, the thrill of this journey, and a strange sweetness in those blue spaces which opened out before us, without a shock, without a fold, without a murmur. Oh! how much deeper and more intense is this kinship of our flesh with the earth, than the vague and wandering kinship of our eyes with the starry heavens. How much less beautiful the night with its stars would be[{192}] to us, did we not feel ourselves at the same time bound to the earth."
He has returned to the earth—that earth which belonged to him, that earth to which he belonged. They have again taken possession of each other, and his spirit is even now warming and humanizing her. Beneath the torrents of blood shed upon his tomb the new life and the peace of tomorrow are already springing. It was a favorite and often repeated thought of Jaurès, as of Heraclitus of old, that nothing can interrupt the flow of things, that "peace is only a form or aspect of war, war only a form or aspect of peace, and what is conflict today is the beginning of the reconciliation of tomorrow."
R. R.
Journal de Genève, August 2, 1915.
NOTES
To [Page 19] ("Letter To Gerhart Hauptmann")
The letter to Gerhart Hauptmann, written after the destruction of Louvain, and in the stress of the emotion aroused by the first news, was provoked by a high-sounding article of Hauptmann which appeared a few days previously. In that letter he rebutted the accusation of barbarism hurled against Germany, and returned it ... against Belgium. The article ended as follows: