When he awoke (it was day), his strange happiness still endured, with the distant gleam of words falling upon his ears. He got up. He was exalted with a silent, holy enthusiasm.
“… Or vedi, figlio,
tra Beatrice e te è questo muro. …”
Between Beatrice and himself, the wall was broken down. For a long time now more than half his soul had dwelt upon the other side. The more a man lives, the more a man creates, the more a man loves and loses those whom he loves, the more does he escape from death. With every new blow that we have to bear, with every new work that we round and finish, we escape from ourselves, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us. When all is told, Rome is not in Rome: the best of a man lies outside himself. Only Grazia had withheld him on this side of the wall. And now in her turn. … Now the door was shut upon the world of sorrow.
He lived through a period of secret exaltation. He felt the weight of no fetters. He expected nothing of the things of this world. He was dependent upon nothing. He was set free. The struggle was at an end. Issuing from the zone of combat and the circle where reigned the God of heroic conflict, Dominus Deus Sabaoth, he looked down, and in the night saw the torch of the Burning Bush put out. How far away it was! When it had lit up his path he had thought himself almost at the summit. And since then, how far he had had to go! And yet the topmost pinnacle seemed no nearer. He would never reach it (he saw that now), though he were to march on to eternity. But when a man enters the circle of light and knows that he has not left those he loves behind him, eternity is not too long a space to be journeying on with them.
He closed his doors. No one knocked. Georges had expended all his compassion and sympathy in the one impulse; he was reassured by the time he reached home, and forgot all about it by the next day. Colette had gone to Rome. Emmanuel knew nothing, and hypersensitive as usual, he maintained an affronted silence because Christophe had not returned his visit. Christophe was not disturbed in his long colloquy with the woman whom he now bore in his soul, as a pregnant woman bears her precious burden. It was a moving intercourse, impossible to translate into words. Even music could hardly express it. When his heart was full, almost overflowing, Christophe would lie still with eyes closed, and listen to its song. Or, for hours together, he would sit at his piano and let his fingers speak. During this period he improvised more than he had done in the whole of his life. He did not set down his thoughts. What was the good?
When, after several weeks, he took to going out again and seeing other men, while none of his friends, except Georges, had any suspicion of what had happened, the daimon of improvisation pursued him still. It would take possession of Christophe just when he was least expecting it. One evening, at Colette’s, Christophe sat down at the piano and played for nearly an hour, absolutely surrendering himself, and forgetting that the room was full of strangers. They had no desire to laugh. His terrible improvisations enslaved and overwhelmed them. Even those who did not understand their meaning were thrilled and moved: and tears came to Colette’s eyes. … When Christophe had finished he turned away abruptly: he saw how everybody was moved, and shrugged his shoulders, and—laughed.
He had reached the point at which sorrow also becomes a force—a dominant force. His sorrow possessed him no more: he possessed his sorrow: in vain it fluttered and beat upon its bars: he kept it caged.
From that period date his most poignant and his happiest works: a scene from the Gospel which Georges recognized—
“Mulier, quid ploras?”—“Quia tulerunt Dominum meum, et nescio ubi posuerunt eum.”
Et cum hæc dixisset, conversa est retrorsum, et vidit Jesum stantem: et non sciebat quia Jesus est.
—a series of tragic lieder set to verses of popular Spanish cantares, among others a gloomy sad love-song, like a black flame—
“Quisiera ser el sepulcro
Donde á ti te han de enterrar,
Para tenerte en mis brazos
Por toda la eternidad.”
(“Would I were the grave, where thou art to be buried, that I might hold thee in my arms through all eternity.”)
—and two symphonies, called The Island of Tranquillity and The Dream of Scipio, in which, more intimately than in any other of the works of Jean-Christophe Krafft, is realized the union of the most beautiful of the forces of the music of his time: the affectionate and wise thought of Germany with all its shadowy windings, the clear passionate melody of Italy, and the quick mind of France, rich in subtle rhythms and variegated harmonies.
This “enthusiasm begotten of despair at the time of a great loss” lasted for a few months. Thereafter Christophe fell back into his place in life with a stout heart and a sure foot. The wind of death had blown away the last mists of pessimism, the gray of the Stoic soul, and the phantasmagoria of the mystic chiaroscura. The rainbow had shone upon the vanishing clouds. The gaze of heaven, purer, as though it had been laved with tears, smiled through them. There was the peace of evening on the mountains.
IV
The fire smoldering in the forest of Europe was beginning to burst into flames. In vain did they try to put it out in one place: it only broke out in another: with gusts of smoke and a shower of
