Thus in her strong and vibrant girlhood, the very richness of her nature betrayed her into a feeling of wretchedness and of poverty of the will. Her resolution, once it became conscious, lashed her to such a passion of endeavour that because her years were few, her strength undiscovered, her talents latent, her life's programme not made out, it sometimes seemed to her that she was destined to fall by the roadside, in full view of her goal.
Unless she found a life-work, the world would grind her fine and grind her small, and an end would come of all her dreams.
VI. The Stage
IT came about somewhere in the middle of her girlhood—it came in one overmastering impulse which transformed the direction of her life—with the urgency of a poet's thought clamouring for expression,—it came to her that she would be an actress!
What was the world but a theatre for the performance of tragic struggles and aspirations, for the enactment of a role that spans the immeasurable space between birth and death? What was youth but at once the most wistful and the gayest of all plays? To stand up before an audience and portray and interpret life, what could be more wonderful! To make the whole personality a medium for the expression of thought and feeling, to wrap herself aroimd the hearts of people, to fire them, to make them laugh and weep, what destiny could be more beautiful ? It was in the exuberance of her girlhood that she conceived the idea of being an actress, and it sprang equally out of her joy in the beauty of human personality, out of her belief in the dreams of liberators and poets that the lives of all could be made beautiful and great. Always she had suffered from a kind of civic sorrow, and had felt that her strength, her youth, her aspiration, her talents were as by nature itself consecrated to the service of the people. She could not know where her existence left off and the existence of others began. And it occurred to her that in being an actress she would satisfy her love of mankind, that it would be one way of engaging in the endless battle with the people, for the people, that it would be one way of belonging to the world and to herself at the same time.
She must be an actress because she was a world-spirit, was dramatic in the sense that life is dramatic.
Under the quiet stars, among the silent tombs, it was decided by her that this should be, that she should hurl herself into the middle of the stream, to make good a promise that seemed given for her at her very birth. Often she lay awake at night, while picture after picture passed before her closed eyes. She saw herself holding a great stage, in a part that was all soul and fire. She saw her audience, and loved it. Her hand waved to it for one frenzied moment.
One need not accept the tragedies of natural law; how then yield to the artificial tragedies of existence? She would show how one must fight these, even if one were all alone in the world to do it; one must combat cruel and barbarous conditions, wanton waste and suffering, insults placed upon yet imborn generations. She would give plays that did not teach patience with the present or tolerance towards the past.
Because life was anguish, she would cling to it. She would hope because despair was on every hand. She would fraternise with all the world from her stage, would inspire people to revolt and to struggle, would show them the ways of love.
To this end she worked, and her mind revolved about the new drama that would burst on the world, unconventional, unrelated to anything that preceded it, because rising not out of the actual but out of an ideal— towards which life was only approaching. Perhaps she would write her own plays, perhaps she would find words for all she had thought and known of age, and love, and work, and of the new world that must replace the old.
She would add the art of poetry to that of acting! To be a poet! Would she not barter all her years for the privilege? To be a poet she would break her heart like all poets, would take her vantage ground on the outskirts of the earth.
Her grandfather called her devotion to the stage and her ecstatic attitude towards her own dramatic ambition religious, but Violette laughed at his inability to part with a word because it had been in good repute throughout the centuries of human history. She was interested in religion solely as it affected other people. It had neither meaning nor content for herself, and she was impatient of those who called reUgious every humane tendency, every fine feeling. Did not reUgion stand for faith in something extra-human and super-human; was it not a code of conduct imposed upon people in the name of something they could not understand? Was it not a crude weapon in the hands of age-old, barbarous law-givers that found its way even to the present ? She explained its dire persistence by the fact that so much else that was barbarous still existed —she went further, and said that the basis of life was as yet barbarism, crude and cruel beyond words, a long night unbroken throughout the ages.
Not out of the tendency to goodness, always latent in people, not out of strength and faith in themselves, and hope of the future, and love of life, but out of fear was religion bom—out of fear of the elements, out of fear of the hand of fate, out of that fear which all feel who are sore beset by conditions over which they can have no control, and most of all out of the fear of death, out of the knowledge of death and its threat against the first and most vital of all instincts, that of love. Love was the strength of man, and religion the weakness of that strength.
Violette asked herself whether in that day which she and her friend foresaw for the future of the world, love, too, would not grow different in nature from the love we feel today in our half-lived, thwarted existences, whether then, love would not meet the truth of death triumphantly, and with a glad heart.
VII. Three Altars
THREE altars existed for her in Pere Lachaise,—the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, the tomb of Rachel, and the monument to death that stood facing the gate.
Abelard and Heloise—they had killed love and abandoned each other, and they lay together under a canopy of stone, side by side, their eyes closed in death, their hands devoutly clasped, married and divided forever. They who had given up their love for the sake of the world, for the sake of what they called religion, how many worlds would they now give up to regain their love, had they the chance ? Violette asked how many lovers there were in the Paris of her day that would do as did these ancient Parisians. In the future of that world for which she lived, love would not thus be slain.
At the tomb of Rachel, she worshipped art, and it seemed to her that of all the destinies that lay buried here, hers was the one she understood best. She had divined a little of the passion for art, even before her studies for the stage began, through reading and frequent visits to the theatre, through roaming on long afternoons in galleries and museums, and through her thoughts on her walks of what it was that lured and enchanted people, of what it was they really loved, of what the goal was towards which they strove. Art always brought to people something they had not known before, but which they recognised. Had Rachel been an actress, she told herself, she would have foimd something to do that would have brought her to the people. Had not her grandfather striven, in that youth of his, towards the people? He had forgotten. The fire had died out, but in her it burned with a steady white heat, threatening to consume her girlhood, her art; stretching tongues of flame even towards her dreams! She would reach the people with her physical presence, with her voice and eyes and hands, with her passion and ideals.
VIII. The Crucible
WHEN Violette, as a result of all her studies, received an invitation to read before the Academy, she held it
