27
RÉSUMÉ
The end of Varsieff is satisfying to us, and yet I wonder if I can make this sort of romance clear. Martyrdom—they call it a short cut. There is a saying that the soul of a man who dies for something, goes marching on. The Irish become hopeless of their cause, if some one dies for the opposition. All revolutionists have reckoned with this subtlety—no propaganda like martyrdom; all the sacred writings refer to it, our Bible several times, once in the sentence, "Greater love hath no man——"
A deluge of phenomena from "the other side" has come in during the present war, all the old martyrs of nationalism said to be called to the cause of their empires....
What is the romantic haunt that lifts a man to such a pitch of exaltation that he transcends pain, and goes singing down to die?
These are matters much better known among the young dreamers and workers of Russia and the Orient than of America.... Varsieff reveals the child under the man of action; the lover above the intellectualist. His love story unfolds certain passages which we are making a point of in these chapters. The woman, Paula Mantone, represents a loved type in our sort of story-making. She brings, vaguely, at least, into terms the romantic ideal so calling to us in these days. She means more than three-score and ten. Her love goes on and on. She becomes a priestess, in a sense, and conducts her lover through the critical passage of finding his own Soul. External battles then take his body, but she is not altogether bereft. An intuitional woman does not always know what she is doing in her heart story, even when she does greatly. If the physical action had broken different, if the body of Varsieff had not been required in martyrdom, for instance, he might have emerged from the final stress of action in a state of spiritual exaltation, from which, I can imagine Paula Mantone calling him back to the gardens of the senses.... Martyr, priestess, revoltee, but always a woman. Every year of devotion to the feminine in fiction, compels a more fluid, yet more mystic handling.
We have been very close to the young students and poets and players of Russia. In the Fall of 1914 we published the following paragraph:
There[19] are men in Russia who have heard the mighty music of humanity. They will sing their dream and grave their message upon the peasant soul.... Not the Russia of Nicholas Romanoff. His passing and all the princes of his tainted blood will prove but an incident of the Great War. Very low in the west among the red blinking points of the falling constellation, is Nicholas and that Russia. In the east is the Russian novi before the dawn, commanding the dark before the sun.