“Patience, my friend, patience!” replied Olivier. “Be silent, say nothing, listen. …”
Slowly the creaking of the axletree of the world died away and the rumbling over the stones of the heavy car of action was lost in the distance. And there arose the divine song of silence. …
The hum of bees, and the perfume of the limes. …
The wind,
With his golden lips kissing the earth of the plains …
The soft sound of the rain and the scent of the roses.
There rang out the hammer and chisel of the poets carving the sides of a vase with
The fine majesty of simple things,
solemn, joyous life,
With its flutes of gold and flutes of ebony,
religious joy, faith welling up like a fountain of souls
For whom the very darkness is clear, …
and great sweet sorrow, giving comfort and smiling,
With her austere face from which there shines
A clearness beyond nature, …
and
Death serene with her great, soft eyes.
A symphony of harmonious and pure voices. Not one of them had the full sonorousness of such national trumpets as were Corneille and Hugo: but how much deeper and more subtle in expression was their music! The richest music in Europe of today.
Olivier said to Christophe, who was silent:
“Do you understand now?”
Christophe in his turn bade him be silent. In spite of himself, and although he preferred more manly music, yet he drank in the murmuring of the woods and fountains of the soul which came whispering to his ears. Amid the passing struggles of the nations they sang the eternal youth of the world, the
Sweet goodness of Beauty.
While humanity,
Screaming with terror and yelping its complaint
Marched round and round a barren gloomy field,
while millions of men and women wore themselves out in wrangling for the bloody rags of liberty, the fountains and the woods sang on:
“Free! … Free! … Sanctus, Sanctus. …”
And yet they slept not in any dream selfishly serene. In the choir of the poets there were not wanting tragic voices: voices of pride, voices of love, voices of agony.
A blind hurricane, mad, intoxicated
With its own rough force or gentleness profound,
tumultuous forces, the epic of the illusions of those who sing the wild fever of the crowd, the conflicts of human gods, the breathless toilers,
Faces inky black and golden peering through darkness and mist,
Muscular backs stretching, or suddenly crouching
Round mighty furnaces and gigantic anvils …
forging the City of the Future.
In the flickering light and shadow falling on the glaciers of the mind there was the heroic bitterness of those solitary souls which devour themselves with desperate joy.
Many of the characteristics of these idealists seemed to the German more German than French. But all of them had the love for the “fine speech of France” and the sap of the myths of Greece ran through their poetry. Scenes of France and daily life were by some hidden magic transformed in their eyes into visions of Attica. It was as though antique souls had come to life again in these twentieth-century Frenchmen, and longed to fling off their modern garments to appear again in their lovely nakedness.
Their poetry as a whole gave out the perfume of a rich civilization that has ripened through the ages, a perfume such as could not be found anywhere else in Europe. It were impossible to forget it once it had been breathed. It attracted foreign artists from every country in the world. They became French poets, almost bigotedly French: and French classical art had no more fervent disciples than these Anglo-Saxons and Flemings and Greeks.
Christophe, under Olivier’s guidance, was impregnated with the pensive beauty of the Muse of France, while in his heart he found the aristocratic lady a little too intellectual for his liking, and preferred a pretty girl of the people, simple, healthy, robust, who thinks and argues less, but is more concerned with love.
The same odor di bellezza arose from all French art, as the scent of ripe strawberries and raspberries ascends from autumn woods warmed by the sun. French music was like one of those little strawberry plants, hidden in the grass, the scent of which sweetens all the air of the woods. At first Christophe had passed it by without seeing it, for in his own country he had been used to whole thickets of music, much fuller and bearing more brilliant fruits. But now the delicate perfume made him turn: with Olivier’s help among the stones and brambles and dead leaves which usurped the name of music, he discovered the subtle and ingenuous art of a handful of musicians. Amid the marshy fields and the factory chimneys of democracy, in the heart of the Plaine-Saint-Denis, in a little magic wood fauns were dancing blithely. Christophe was amazed to hear the ironic and serene notes of their flutes which were like nothing he had ever heard:
“A little reed sufficed for me
To make the tall grass quiver,
And all the meadow,
The willows sweet.
And the singing stream also:
A little reed sufficed, for me
To make the forest sing.”
Beneath the careless grace
