“Go on, on and on, never stopping to rest.”
“But where shall I go, Lord? Whatever I do, wherever I go, is not the result always the same, is not the end always there?”
“Go die, you who are doomed to die! Go suffer, you who are doomed to suffer! You do not live to be happy. You live to accomplish my Law. Suffer! Die! But be what you should be—a Man!”
Romain Rolland, at forty-seven, has proved himself a man of great heart and of pure conscience, one of the heroic beings “forged upon the anvil of physical and moral suffering,” who dares “to look anguish in the face and venerate it”; one of the choice spirits who, seeing the world as it is, still loves it. Intoxicated with proselyting zeal, he has not thus far deigned—more’s the pity!—to become the supreme literary artist such a well-nigh flawless gem as his “Beethoven,” the best pages of “Jean-Christophe,” and his less known works, show that he can be if he will. But signs are not wanting of a growing sympathy with the sanity, the symmetry, and the harmony of classic art. His latest volume, “La nouvelle journée,” is instinct with a yearning for serenity that may lift him ultimately to a place beside the undisputed masters. It does not yet appear what he will be. He himself affirms that his work has only just begun. The time may not be far distant when, like Christophe toward the end of his career, he will blush at his former lack of orderliness and measure; when, imposing upon himself a rigid discipline, he will resolve “to be the king” of his tumultuous temperament; when his literary creations will take on, as did the mature musical creations of his hero, calmer, cooler, purer, serener forms. The torrent gradually loses its boisterousness as it approaches the sea.
In any event, Rolland’s splendid sincerity guarantees that he will not be the slave of his record. “As for me,” he declares in the farewell to Christophe with which he prefaces “La nouvelle journée,” “I bid adieu to my past soul; I cast it away like an empty husk. Life is a succession of deaths and resurrections. Let us die, Christophe, to be born again!”
SKIRTING THE BALKAN PENINSULA
FROM TRIEST TO CONSTANTINOPLE
SIXTH PAPER: STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES
BY ROBERT HICHENS