Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

To add to his original concentration, the Senior Surgeon’s linen collar began to chafe him maddeningly under his chin. The annoyance added two scowls to his already blackly furrowed face, and at least ten miles an hour to his running time, but nothing whatsoever to his conversational ability.

“Father,” the Little Girl whimpered with faltering courage. Then panic-stricken, as wiser people have been before her, over the dreadful spookish remoteness of a perfectly normal human being who refuses either to answer or even to notice your wildest efforts at communication, she raised her waspish voice in its shrillest, harshest war-cry.

“Fat Father! _Fat Father!_ F-A-T F-A-T-H-E-R!” she screeched out frenziedly at the top of her lungs.

The gun-shot agony of a wounded rabbit was in the cry, the last gurgling gasp of strangulation under a murderer’s reeking fingers, catastrophe unspeakable, disaster now irrevocable.

Clamping down his brakes with a wrench that almost tore the insides out of his engine, the Senior Surgeon brought the great car to a staggering standstill.

“What is it?” he cried in real terror. “For God’s sake, what is it?”

Limply the Little Girl stretched down from the White Linen Nurse’s lap till she could nick her toe against the shiniest woodwork in sight. Altogether aimlessly her small chin began to burrow deeper and deeper into her big fur collar.

“For God’s sake, what do you want?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. Even yet along his spine the little nerves crinkled with shock and apprehension. “For God’s sake, what do you want?”

Helplessly the child lifted her turbid eyes to his. With unmistakable appeal, her tiny hand went clutching out at one of the big buttons on his coat. Desperately for an instant she rummaged through her brain for some remotely adequate answer to this most thunderous question, and then retreated precipitously as usual to the sacristy of her own imagination.

“All the birds _were_ there, Father!” she confided guilelessly.

“All the birds _were_ there,
With yellow feathers instead of hair.
And bumblebees crocheted in the trees.
And--”

Short of complete annihilation, there was no satisfying vengeance whatsoever that the Senior Surgeon’s exploding passion could wreak upon his offspring. Complete annihilation being unfeasible at the moment, he merely climbed laboriously out of the car, re-cranked the engine, climbed laboriously back into his place, and started on his way once more. All the red, blustering rage was stripped completely from him. Startlingly rigid, startlingly white, his face was like the death-mask of a pirate.

Pleasantly excited by she didn’t know exactly what, the Little Girl resumed her beloved falsetto chant, rhythmically all the while with her puny iron-braced legs beating the tune into the White Linen Nurse’s tender flesh.

“All the birds were there,
With yellow feathers instead of hair.
And bumblebees crocheted in the trees,
And--and--all the birds were there,
With yellow feathers instead of hair.
And--”

Frenziedly as a runaway horse trying to escape from its own pursuing harness and carriage, the Senior Surgeon poured increasing speed into both his own pace and the pace of his tormentor. Up hill, down dale, screeching through rocky echoes, swishing through blue-green spruce-lands, dodging indomitable boulders, grazing lax, treacherous embankments, the great car scuttled homeward. Huddled behind his steering-wheel like a warrior behind his shield, every body muscle taut with strain, every facial muscle diabolically calm, the Senior Surgeon met and parried successively every fresh onslaught of yard, rod, mile.

Then suddenly in the first precipitous descent of a mighty hill, the whole earth seemed to drop out from under the car. Down, down, down, with incredible swiftness and smoothness, the great machine went diving toward abysmal space! Up, up, up, with incredible bumps and bouncings, trees, bushes, stone walls went rushing to the sky!

Gasping surprisedly toward the Senior Surgeon the White Linen Nurse saw his grim mouth yank round abruptly in her direction as it yanked sometimes in the operating-room with some sharp, incisive order of life or death. Instinctively she leaned forward for the message.

Not over-loud, but strangely distinct, the words slapped back into her straining ears:

“If it will rest your face any to look scared, by all means do so. I’ve lost control of the machine,” called the Senior Surgeon, sardonically, across the roar of the wind.

The phrase excited the White Linen Nurse, but it did not remotely frighten her. She was not in the habit of seeing the Senior Surgeon lose control of any situation. Merely intoxicated with speed, delirious with ozone, she snatched up the Little Girl close, close to her breast.

“We’re _flying_!” she cried. “We’re dropping from a parachute! We’re--”

Swoopingly, like a sled striking glare, level ice, the great car swerved from the bottom of the hill into a soft rolling meadow. Instantly from every conceivable direction, like foes in ambush, trees, stumps, rocks reared up in threatening defiance.

Tighter and tighter the White Linen Nurse crushed the Little Girl to her breast. Louder and louder she called in the Little Girl’s ear.

“Scream!” she shouted. “There might be a bump! Scream louder than a bump! Scream! _Scream! S-c-r-e-a-m!_”

In that first overwhelming, nerve-numbing, heart-crunching terror of his whole life as the great car tilted up against a stone, plowed down into the mushy edge of a marsh, and skidded completely round, _crash-bang_ into a tree, it was the last sound that the Senior Surgeon heard--the sound of a woman and child screeching their lungs out in diabolical exultancy!

(The second instalment of this three-part serial story will be published in the September ~Century~.)

A DOUBLE STAR

BY LEROY TITUS WEEKS

Give me Love’s password--fearless I’ll face God.
Love spoke the word when bloomed the primal soul;
It freed the Son of Man from Death’s control.
All paths of life its happy feet have trod:
Love dons the wooden shoe to moil and plod,
It crowns Madonna with the aureole,
By every hovel takes its golden toll,
And walks the royal court in velvet shod.

Two lovers be who drank pain to the lees
Yet o’er all lovers else exalted are;
Twin luminaries in the heaven, these,
In Love’s bright galaxy a double star:
And when Love whispers softly--“Héloïse!”
The firmament will echo--“Abélard!”

ROMAIN ROLLAND

AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE”

BY ALVAN F. SANBORN

“Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”--_Rolland._

~Romain Rolland~ is to-day a world celebrity. On June 5 he was
awarded the “Grand Prix” of the French Academy.

_Jean-Christophe_, the dominant figure of the enormous work which
Rolland was a score of years in writing, and nearly half a score
in publishing, is gradually becoming a household name upon two
continents.

“Jean-Christophe” is the detailed life of a man from the cradle to
the grave, a prose epic of suffering, a narrative of the evolution
of musical genius, a pæan to music, and a critique of composers,
the history of an epoch, a comparative study of the civilizations
of France and Germany, an arraignment of society, a discussion of
vexed problems, a treatise on ethics, a “barrel” of sermons, a
storehouse of dissertations, and a blaze of aspirations. It is also,
the protestations of the author to the contrary notwithstanding, a
novel, but a novel at once so earnest and so austere that it has
performed the miracle of imparting to Anglo-Saxons a belief in
French seriousness. Edmund Gosse pronounces it “the noblest work
of fiction of the twentieth century,” and George Moore, “one of
the most remarkable novels France ever produced.” It has also been
characterized by American critics as “an epoch-making departure in
fiction,” “the greatest literary work that has come out of France
since Zola.”

“From behind the house mounts the murmuring of the river,” is the opening phrase of the first volume of “Jean-Christophe.” The last chapter of the last volume represents St. Christopher crossing the river, with “the Child, the day that is to be,” upon his shoulder; and beneath all the intervening pages the river flows, emerging ever and anon with whisperings, babblings, and gurglings, with purlings, trillings, and trumpetings, with roarings, swishings, and swashings, with plashings, splashings, and crashings. “There are human lives,” says Romain Rolland, “that are placid lakes; others are great, open skies wherein the clouds sail; others, fertile plains; others, jagged peaks. _Jean-Christophe_ has always seemed to me to be a river.”

This preoccupation with the river, amounting almost to an obsession, is probably due to the prominence of water in the landscape in which Romain Rolland’s early years were passed. Clamecy, the little town of the Morvan in which he was born (January 29, 1866), is situated on the Nivernais Canal, in the angle formed by the junction of the rivers Beuvron and Yonne. The volume entitled “Antoinette” is replete with memories of the scenes of his childhood. In it he has described lovingly and charmingly not Clamecy itself, but a representative community of the same province, which is one of the most heavily wooded, as well as one of the most picturesque, of France, and little infested by tourists; and he has portrayed a family which, despite deliberate and ingenious disguises, bears a close resemblance to his own.

Furthermore, the refined and altogether lovable _Olivier Jeannin_ is more like Romain Rolland than is his hero, the often insupportable _Jean-Christophe Krafft_, whom his creator, unwittingly perhaps, made something of a cad and a good deal of a boor, a “fresh,” bumptious fellow, always going about with a chip on his shoulder, looking for trouble.

ROMAIN ROLLAND, AUTHOR OF “JEAN-CHRISTOPHE.”

FROM A PORTRAIT DRAWING BY GRANIÉ]

In the Morvan, the physical type of the Gauls remains exceptionally pure, and of this type Romain Rolland is an almost perfect specimen. He is tall, he is spare; he is very blond, and his eyes are very blue. Despite a tendency to pallor and a slight stoop, he appears to be of the wiry breed that is capable of doing a great deal of hard work without excessive fatigue; but those who should know affirm that his “fine faculties were imprisoned by nature in a feeble and ailing body,” and that he has always been a close approach to an invalid in consequence. His demeanor is austere, and he is prone to long silences; but when he breaks his silences, he breaks them with a vengeance, like a pent-up torrent sweeping away a dam, and one sees that his austerity is only a cloak for sensitiveness, for passion, and for a mighty kindliness. He is an ideal comrade, a loyal friend, and a sort of patron saint or father confessor of young or struggling writers who have “the root of the matter” in them. For instance, Alphonse de Châteaubriant, having fallen under the spell of Dostoyevsky, was so oppressed by the pessimism of the great Russian that he was made nearly ill and was tempted to renounce all endeavor. Rolland, by tactful and tender encouragement, rescued him from this slough of despond, restoring to him his lost interest in life and art. The result was the beautiful sylvan novel, “Monsieur des Lourdines,” one of the sweetest and purest works of the last few years, which, without this intervention, probably never would have been written.

Rolland’s father was a notary, descended from notaries, and his mother was the daughter of a magistrate, descended from magistrates, who were related to Guillaume and Guillaume-Henri de Lamoignon, first President of the Parliament of Paris (seventeenth century) and Chancellor of France (eighteenth century), respectively. At a very early age the boy studied music with his mother, who was an accomplished musician, and as soon as he dreamed of the future at all, he dreamed of a musical future. When he had exhausted the educational possibilities of Clamecy, whose communal college corresponds roughly with the average American high school, his parents, fearing to allow him to shift for himself, probably because of his delicate constitution, broke up their Nivernais establishment, and went with him to Paris, the father, with a self-sacrifice verging on heroism, exchanging the prestige of being one of the first citizens of a town to which he was devotedly attached for the effacement of a modest clerkship in the capital. In Paris, Romain entered, first, the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and, later, at twenty, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating at the latter not in the department of letters, to which his tastes inclined him, but in that of history and geography, a concession, no doubt, to the father, who would have liked to see his son in the Ecole Polytechnique.

The choice was fortunate, since it put him under the tutelage of the historian Gabriel Monod, who possessed a fine personality and was a stimulating teacher, exerting a salutary moral as well as intellectual influence upon his pupils, in whom he inspired a sort of filial affection.

While at the Ecole Normale, Rolland was profoundly impressed by Wagner and by Tolstoy. In October, 1887, he was the happy and proud recipient of a letter from Tolstoy, saluting him as “Dear Brother,” which he published later, preceded by a fervid introduction, in “Les cahiers de la quinzaine.” “I loved Tolstoy profoundly,” he says in this introduction, “and I have never ceased to love him. For two or three years I lived enveloped in the atmosphere of his thought. I was certainly more familiar with his creations, with ‘War and Peace,’ ‘Anna Karénina,’ and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ than with the works of any of the great French writers. The goodness, the intelligence, the absolute truthfulness, of this great man, were for me the surest of guides in the midst of the moral anarchy of the time.”

Shortly after being graduated from the Ecole Normale, Rolland was admitted to the French School of Archæology and History at Rome. Although prejudiced against Italy from his boyhood, he surrendered promptly and unconditionally not only to the splendor of the art enshrined in its monuments and museums, but to the ineffable charm of its landscape and its sky. “He took his revenge for the asceticism of the gray visions to which he had hitherto been condemned.... He was as a new man beginning life over.”

During his stay in Rome, he became a great favorite of the aged Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug, an extraordinary woman, who had known intimately and shared the hopes of all the European revolutionary movements from 1848 to 1870. Fräulein von Meysenbug’s “Memoirs,” wherein she gives her impressions of her illustrious friends, Kossuth, Mazzini, Hertzen, Ogareff, Garibaldi, Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Wagner, Lenbach, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen, contains this reference to the protégé of her declining years: “I find in this young Frenchman Rolland the same idealism, the same lofty aspiration, the same profound understanding of all the great intellectual issues that I have found in the superior men of other nationalities.”

To this period of Rolland’s life belong a number of historical plays,--“Les Baglioni,” “Le siège de Mantoue,” “Niobé,” “Caligula,” “Jeanne de Piennes,” “Orsino,”--which Fräulein von Meysenbug, not an entirely impartial judge, pronounced admirable, but which thus far their author has not seen fit to give to the world. They were inspired in a certain degree by Shakspere. “Despite Tolstoy, Wagner, etc.,” Rolland wrote to a friend, “Shakspere is the one artist I have most constantly preferred from my childhood. And if the Shakspere of the historical dramas is not the only Shakspere I love, he is at least the Shakspere who has influenced me most directly by opening up to me the horizons of this new artistic world and providing me with incomparable models.”

When Rolland returned to France, he had become not only an archæological and historical pundit, but under the influence of the ardent humanitarian Von Meysenbug and of the advanced artists, agitators, and reformers who gravitated about her, an insurgent and just a bit of a fanatic. He was consumed with generous ardor to edify and elevate his compatriots, who seemed to him crushed and degraded by subserviency to convention and tradition.

Thenceforth his every act was to be combative, was to possess an unequivocal social significance, was to count, if not for revolution, at least for radical reform. His thesis for the doctorate, “The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,” sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne, June 19, 1895, was the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body. It was intended as a protest against the disdain with which music, in contradistinction to painting, sculpture, and architecture, had always been treated by the university, and was a move to secure for music the consideration it deserves.

Rolland’s next moves were the organization (1898) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales of a department of music, in opening which he delivered a pithy and brilliant address on the place of music in general history; the unobtrusive but bold transformation (1903) of the course on the history of art, with which he had been intrusted by the Ecole Normale (in 1897), into a course on the history of music; and the stubborn maintenance of this iconoclastic orientation after the absorption of the Ecole Normale by the Sorbonne.

Rolland was also the leading spirit of a movement, so impassioned that it amounted to a veritable crusade, for the democratization of the drama, “for the creation,” to employ his rather ambitious phraseology, “of a new art for a new world.” He aspired to replace the contemporaneous stage by a stage more human and fraternal, that should edify and improve the masses on one hand, and emancipate and develop art on the other, and to found “a theater of, by, and for the people,” that should “share the bread of the people, their restlessness and anxieties, their battles and their hopes,” and that should be for them “a fountain-head of joy and of life.” In March, 1899, he signed, with Lucien Besnard, Maurice Pottecher, Louis Lumet, and Gabriel Trarieux, a somewhat turgid manifesto which ended thus: “Make no mistake. It is no mere literary experiment we are proposing. It is a question of life or death for art and for the people. For, if art is not opened to the people, it is doomed to disappear; and if the people do not discover the pathway of art, humanity abdicates its destinies.” To this propaganda, Rolland contributed a volume entitled “Le théâtre du peuple,” which contained both eloquent and grandiloquent passages, and a virile and highly colored, if slightly declamatory, tetralogy of the Revolution,--“Le quatorze juillet,” “Danton,” “Les loups,” “Le triomphe de la raison,”--designed to “resuscitate the forces of the past, reanimate its capacities for action, and rekindle the national faith and heroism with the flames of the republican epoch, in order that the work interrupted in 1794 may be resumed and completed by a people more mature and more fully aware of its destiny.” “Danton,” “Les loups,” and “Le triomphe de la raison” were given two or three performances each by dramatic societies of one sort or another; and “Le quatorze juillet” was finally produced by a regular theater (La Renaissance), but its run was short.

Rolland was a vehement Dreyfusard, with a special enthusiasm for Lieutenant-Colonel Picquart. “He who can see injustice without trying to combat it is neither entirely an artist,” he observed, in this connection, “nor entirely a man”; and he protested vigorously against the British invasion of the Transvaal with a play, dedicated to “Civilization” and entitled “Le temps viendra,” in which he makes one of the characters say: “Everything that is unjust is my enemy.... Wherever liberty is violated, there is my country.”

Sadly disillusioned by the triumph of might over right in South Africa, by the altogether shameless manner in which the righteous indignation of the sincere Dreyfusards was exploited by the professional politicians, and by the failure of his efforts to regenerate the stage, Rolland found fresh force and new courage in a study of the lives of heroes, the men who were great of heart in the face of seemingly insuperable obstacles, the noble souls who suffered for the sake of right; and always a propagandist, he straightway endeavored to found a cult of heroism, to persuade his fellows “to read in the eyes” of those sanctified by suffering, and in the histories of their careers, that “life is never greater, more fruitful, and more blessed than in affliction.” To this end he wrote a series of biographies of heroes (“Beethoven,” “Michelangelo,” “Tolstoy,” “Millet,” “Handel,” “Hugo Wolf,” etc.), which he presented to the French public and to the rest of the world with these ringing words: “The air is heavy about us. Old Europe is waxing torpid in an oppressive and vitiated atmosphere. A materialism devoid of grandeur cumbers thought and fetters the action of governments and of individuals. The world is dying of asphyxia in its prudent and vile egoism. The world is stifling. Fling the windows wide open! Let the free air rush in! Let us inhale the vivifying breath of the heroes!”

“Jean-Christophe,” which is a ten-volume biography of an imaginary hero, synthesizes and supplements the “Théâtre du peuple” and the heroic biographies. It is, like them, an act of propaganda, conceived in a similar spirit of revolt, and animated by a similar desire to help people “to live, to correct their errors, to conquer their prejudices, and to enlarge from day to day their thoughts and their hearts.” “I was isolated,” writes Rolland, regarding the origin of this now famous work; “I was stifling, like so many others in France, in a hostile moral atmosphere; I wanted to breathe, I wanted to react against a sickly civilization, against a thought corrupted by a false élite.

“I wanted to say to this élite: ‘You are liars! You do not represent France!’ And for that I needed a hero of pure eyes and of pure heart, with a soul sufficiently unblemished to have the right to speak, and with a voice strong enough to make itself heard.”

The veritable drubbing the fourth volume of “Jean-Christophe” gives Germany was inspired by sympathy, not by antipathy; it was the rod, so to speak, indispensable to the salvation of the child. “I am not in the least an enemy of Germany,” Rolland wrote in a personal letter bearing the date of September 12, 1907, “and the best proof is that I have chosen a German for my hero. The absolute sincerity, the creative energy, and the moral rigidity of _Christophe_ offset his rather severe criticisms of his countrymen. No German can love more than I the Germany of Goethe and of Beethoven. But I believe that the Germany of to-day is sick; and, in her interest, some one must have the courage to say so. You may be sure that _Christophe_, at present in Paris, will be as hard upon my compatriots as he has been upon his own.”

This prediction was amply verified, as we know, by Volume V, “La foire sur la place,” which, in its turn, proceeded not from malevolence, but from a deep-rooted determination to “battle for the life and the honor of the race”; not from anti-patriotism, but from the high and pure form of patriotism that wishes its country to be blameless. “Whosoever has divined the soul that animates the body of this people, which does not want to perish, can and must boldly lay bare its vices and its follies, in order to combat them--in order to combat especially those who exploit them and who live off them. To struggle is even to inflict pain that good may come.”

The entire ten volumes preach that all things work together for good to the persons or the peoples who hitch their wagons to the stars.

Incidentally, Rolland seems also to teach in “Jean-Christophe” that the Gallic ideal and the Germanic ideal, “the vast culture and the combative reason of France” and “the inner music and the feeling for nature of Germany,” have everything to gain by joining forces.

Romain Rolland has not solved the riddle of existence. His works are less a revelation than an inspiration; he is a well-nigh peerless kindler of ambition of the higher order. He has not done much toward making life comprehensible, but he has done a good deal, and possibly this is better, toward making it livable, at least for those who have renounced trying to comprehend it. He aids and encourages the downcast or despairing not with tenets of philosophy or religion,--dogmas are his _bête noire_,--but with stories of heroic souls whose example arouses them to a consciousness of their own capacity for virtue, inspires them with faith in themselves and in the future, and shows them how blessedness may be wrought out of wretchedness. It is the old, old, but always new, message of joy through sanctified suffering.

“Seek not happiness, seek blessedness. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him!” thundered the British worshiper and biographer of heroes, Carlyle.

The French biographer and worshiper of heroes expresses essentially the same thought in slightly different terms:

And the little fifteen-year-old Puritan heard the voice of his God.

“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

Author of “The Spell of Egypt,” “The Holy Land,” “The Garden of Allah,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY JULES GUÉRIN

Stamboul is wonderfully various. Compressed between two seas, it contains sharp, even brutal, contrasts of beauty and ugliness, grandeur and squalor, purity and filth, silence and uproar, the most delicate fascination and a fierceness that is barbaric. It can give you peace or a sword. The sword is sharp and cruel; the peace is profound and exquisite.

Every day early I escaped from the uproar of Pera and sought in Stamboul a place of forgetfulness. There are many such places in the city and on its outskirts: the mosques, the little courts and gardens of historic tombs; the strange and forgotten Byzantine churches, lost in the maze of wooden houses; the cemeteries, vast and melancholy, where the dead sleep in the midst of dust and confusion, guarded by giant cypresses; the lonely and shadowed ways by the walls and the towers; the poetic glades and the sun-kissed terraces of Seraglio Point.

Santa Sophia stands apart from all other buildings, unique in beauty, with the faint face of the Christ still visible on its wall, Christian in soul, though now for long dedicated to the glory of Allah and of his prophet. I shall not easily forget my disappointment when I stood for the first time in its shadow. I had been on Seraglio Point, and, strolling by the famous royal gate to look at the lovely fountain of Sultan Achmet, I saw an enormous and ugly building, decorated with huge stripes of red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscure the sun. The immensity of it was startling. I asked its name.

“Santa Sophia.”

I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyes dwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold, its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork, and plaques of gray and brown marble.

It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighbor was almost repellent. But at length--not without reluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappointment--I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica, and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, so wonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was aware at once of a perfect satisfaction.

At first this happy sense of being completely satisfied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In no other building have I had this exact feeling, that space had surely taken an inevitable form and was announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the great dome, one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height, and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed and released.

For a long time I was fully aware of nothing but the vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending upon me, wrapping me round. I saw moving figures, tiny, yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances, pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light falling upon a white turban; an Arab in a long pink robe leaning against a column of dusky-red porphyry; a dove circling under the dome as though under the sky. But I could not be strongly aware of any detail, or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I was in the grasp of the perfect whole.

The voice of a child disturbed me.

Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began to sing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boyishly. The voice was not a treble voice; it was deeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. And the melody sung was bold, indeed, almost angry, and yet definitely religious. It echoed along the walls of marble, which seemed to multiply it mysteriously, adding to it wide murmurs which were carried through all the building into the dimmest, remotest recesses. It became in my ears as the deep-toned and fanatical thunder of Islam, proclaiming possession of the church of Divine Wisdom which had been dedicated to Christ. It put me for a time definitely outside of the vast harmony. I was able at last to notice details both architectural and human.

Santa Sophia has nine gates leading to it from a great corridor or outer hall, lined with marble and roofed with old-gold mosaic. As you enter from the Porta Basilica, you have an impression of pale yellow, gold, and gray; of a pervading silvery glimmer; of a pervading gleam of delicate primrose, brightly pure and warm. You hear a sound of the falling of water from the two fountains of ablution, great vases of gray marble which are just within the mosque.

Gray and gold prevail in the color scheme, a beautiful combination of which the eyes are never tired. But many hues are mingled with them: yellow and black, deep plum-color and red, green, brown, and very dark blue. The windows, which are heavily grated, have no painted glass, so the mosque is not dark. It has a sort of lovely and delicate dimness, as touching as the dimness of twilight. It is divinely calm, almost as nature can be when she would bring her healing to the unquiet human spirit. We know that during the recent war Santa Sophia was crowded with suffering fugitives, with dying soldiers and cholera patients. I feel that even upon them in their agony it must have shed rays of comfort, into their hearts a belief in a far-off compassion waiting the appointed time to make itself fully manifest.

The great dome is of gold and of either black or very deep blue. Myriads of chandeliers, holding tiny glass cups, hang from the roof. Pale-yellow matting covers the plain of the floor. The silvery glimmer comes from the thousands of cups, the primrose gleam from the matting. The walls are lined with slabs of exquisite marble of many patterns and colors. Gold mosaic decorates the roof and the domes. Galleries, supported by marble arcades, and leaning on roofs of dim gold, run round a great part of the mosque, which is subtly broken up and made mysterious, enticing, and various by curved recesses of marble, by innumerable arches, some large and heavy, some fragile and delicate, by screens, and by forests of columns. Two-storied aisles flank the vast nave, through which men wander, looking almost like little dolls. So huge is the mosque that the eyes are deceived within it, and can no longer measure heights or breadths with accuracy. When I first stood in the nave I thought the chandeliers were hanging so near to the ground that it must be dangerous for a tall man to try to pass underneath them. They are, of course, really far higher than the head of a giant.

In Santa Sophia intricacy, by some magical process of genius, results in simplicity. Everything seems gently but irresistibly compelled to become a minister to the beauty and the calmness of the whole: the arcades of gray marble and gold; the sacred mosaics of holy Mary and the six-winged seraphim, which still testify to another age and another religion; the red columns of porphyry from Baalbec’s Temple of the Sun; the Ephesus columns of verd-antique; the carved capitals and the bases of shining brass; the gold and gray pulpit, with its long staircase of marble closed by a gold and green curtain, and its two miraculously beautiful flags of pearly green and faint gold, by age made more wonderful than when they first flew on the battle-field or were carried in sacred processions; the ancient prayer-rugs fixed to the walls; the sultan’s box, a sort of long gallery ending in a kiosk with a gilded grille, and raised upon marble pillars; the great doors and the curtains of dull-red wool; the piled carpets, which are ready against the winter, when the cool yellow matting is covered up; the great green shields in the pendentives, bearing their golden names of God and His prophet, of Ali, Osman, Omar, and Abu-Bekr. Everything slips into the heart of the great harmony, however precious, however simple, even however crude. There are a few ugly things in Santa Sophia--whitewash covering mosaics, stains of fierce yellow, blotches of plaster--which should be removed. They do not really matter; one cannot heed them when one is immersed in such almost mysterious beauty.

PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN]

Men and birds are at ease in Santa Sophia. Doves have made their home in the holy place. They fly under the long arcades, they circle above the galleries, they rest against blocks of cool marble the color of which their plumage resembles. And all day long men pass in through the gateways, and become at once little, yet strangely significant in the vastness which incloses and liberates them. They take off their shoes and carry them, or lay them down in the wooden trays at the edges of those wide, railed-in platforms covered with matting, called _masbata_, which are characteristic of mosques, and which are supposed to be for the use of readers of the Koran, and then they are free of the mosque. Some of them wander from place to place, silently gazing; others kneel and pray in some quiet corner; others study or sing or gossip or sink into reverie or slumber. Many go up to the masbata, take off their outer garments, and hang them over the rails, hang their handkerchiefs beside them, tuck their legs under their bodies, and remain thus for hours, staring straight before them with solemn eyes, as if hypnotized. Children, too, go to the masbata, settle cozily down, and read the Koran aloud, interspersing their study with gay conversation. On one of them I found my singing boy. Small, fanatical, with head thrown back and the fez upon it, he defiantly poured forth his tune, while an older companion, opposite to him and looking not unlike an idol in its shrine, stared impassively, as if at the voice.

Santa Sophia is mystical in its twilight beauty. Its vastness, its shape, its arrangement, its beautifully blended colors, the effects of light and of sound within it, unite in creating an atmosphere that disposes the mind to reverie and inclines the soul to prayer. Along the exquisite marble walls, in the mellow dimness, while Stamboul just outside is buying and selling, is giving itself to love and to crime, the murmur of Islam’s devotion steals almost perpetually, as mysterious as some faint and wide-spread sound of nature. The great mosque seems to be breathing out its message to the Almighty, and another message to man. The echoes are not clear, but as dim as the twilight under the arches of marble and beneath the ceilings of gold. They mingle without confusion in a touching harmony, as all things mingle in this mosque of the great repose.

And yet not all things.

One day I saw standing alone in the emperor’s doorway a child in blood-colored rags. The muezzin had called from the minaret the summons to the midday prayer, and far off before the mihrab, and the sacred carpet on which the prophet is said to have knelt, the faithful were ranged in long lines: pilgrims on the way to Mecca; Turks in quilted coats and in European dress; two dervishes with small, supple limbs and pale faces smoldering with reverie; and some hard-bitten, sun-scorched soldiers, perhaps bound for the battle-fields of the Balkan War. Moving almost as one man, they bent, they kneeled, they touched the floor with their foreheads, leaned back, and again bowed down. Their deep and monotonous voices were very persistent in prayer. And the echoes, like secret messengers, bore the sound along the arcades, carried it up into the vast space of the dome, under the transverse arches and the vaulted openings of the aisles, past the faint Christ on the wall, and the “Hand of the Conqueror,” with horrible outspread fingers, the Sweating Column, and the Cradle of Jesus, to the child in the blood-red rags. He stood there where Theophilus entered, under the hidden words, “I am the Light of the World,” gazing, listening, unaware of the marvelous effect his little figure was making, the one absolutely detached thing in the mosque. The doves flew over his head, vanishing down the marble vistas, becoming black against golden distances. The murmur of worship increased in power, as more and more of the faithful stole in, shoeless, to join the ranks before the mihrab. Like incense from a thurible, mysticism floated through every part of the mosque, seeming to make the vast harmony softer, to involve in it all that was motionless there and all that was moving except the child in the emperor’s doorway, who was unconsciously defiant, like a patch of fresh blood on a pure-white garment. The prayers at last died away, the echoes withdrew into silence; but the child remained where he was, crude, almost sinister in his wonderful colored rags.

Close to Santa Sophia in the Seraglio grounds is the old Byzantine church of Saint Irene, now painted an ugly pink, and used by the Turks as an armory and museum. It contains many spoils taken by the Turks in battle, which are carefully arranged upon tables and walls. Nothing is disdained, nothing is considered too paltry for exhibition. I saw there flags riddled with bullets, but I saw also odd boots taken from Italian soldiers in Tripoli, caps, belts, water-bottles, blood-stained tunics and cloaks, saddles, weapons, and buttons. Among relics from Yildiz Kiosk was a set of furniture which once belonged to Abdul-Hamid, and which he is said to have set much store by. It shows a very distinctive, indeed, a somewhat original taste, being made of red plush and weapons. The legs of the tables and chairs are guns and revolvers. As I looked at the chairs, I could not help wondering whether ambassadors were invited to sit in them, after they had been loaded to their muzzles or whether they were reserved for subjects whom the ex-sultan suspected of treachery. Near them were several of Abdul-Hamid’s favorite walking-sticks containing revolvers, a cane with an electric light let into the knob, his inkstand, the mother-of-pearl revolver which was found in his pocket, and the handkerchief which fell from his hand when he was taken prisoner by the Young Turks, who have since brought their country to ruin.

In a series of galleries, under arches and ceilings of yellow and white, stands, sits, reclines, and squats, in Eastern fashion, a strange population of puppets, dressed in the costumes of the bygone centuries during which Turkey has ruled in Europe. Those fearful ex-Christians, the Janizaries, who were scourges of Christianity, look very mild now as they stand fatuously together, no longer either Christian or Mussulman but fatally Madame Tussaud. Once they tucked up their coats to fight for the “Father” who had ravished them away from their fathers in blood. Now, even the wicked man, who flees when no one pursueth, could scarcely fear them. Near them the chief eunuch, a plump and piteous gentleman, reclines absurdly upon his divan, holding his large black pipe, and obsequiously attended by a bearded dwarf in red and by a thin aide-de-camp in green. The Sheik ul Islam bends beneath the coiled dignity of his monstrous turban; a really lifelike old man, with a curved gray beard and a green-and-white turban, reads the Koran perpetually; and soldiers with faces made of some substance that looks like plaster return blankly the gaze of the many real soldiers who visit this curious show.

One day, when I was strolling among the puppets of Saint Irene, some soldiers followed me round. They were deeply interested in all that they saw, and at last became interested in me. Two or three of them addressed me in Turkish, which, alas! I could not understand. I gathered, however, that they were seriously explaining the puppets to me, and were giving me information about the Janizaries, and Orkhan, who was the founder of that famous corps. I responded as well as I could with gestures, which seemed to satisfy them, for they kept close beside me, and one, a gigantic fellow with pugnacious mustaches, frequently touched my arm, and once even took me by the hand to draw my attention to a group which he specially admired. All this was done with gravity and dignity, and with a childlike lack of self-consciousness. We parted excellent friends. I distributed cigarettes, which were received with smiling gratitude, and went on my way to Seraglio Point, realizing that there is truth in the saying that every Turk is a gentleman.

THE ROYAL GATE LEADING TO THE OLD SERAGLIO

FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN]

Upon Seraglio Point I found many more soldiers resting in groups by the edge of the sea, upon the waste ground that lies at the foot of the walls, beyond the delightful abandoned glades that are left to run wild and to shelter the birds. If you wish to understand something of the curious indifference that hangs, like moss, about the Turk, visit Seraglio Point. There, virtually in Stamboul, is one of the most beautifully situated bits of land in the world. Though really part of a great city, much of it has not been built upon. Among the trees on the ridge, looking to Marmora and Asia, to the Bosporus and the palaces, to the Golden Horn, Galata, and Pera, lie the many buildings and courts of the Old Seraglio, fairy-like in their wood. The snowy cupolas, the minaret, and towers look ideally Eastern. They suggest romantic and careless lives, cradled in luxury and ease. In that white vision one might dream away the days, watching from afar the pageant of the city and the seas, hearing from afar the faint voices of the nations, listening to strange and monotonous music, toying with coffee and rose-leaf jam in the jewel-like kiosk of Bagdad, and dreaming, always dreaming. There once the sultan dwelt in the Eski-Serai, which exists no longer, and, there was built the great Summer Palace, which was inhabited by Suleiman I and by his successors. Hidden in the Old Seraglio there are many treasures, among them the magnificent Persian throne, which is covered with gold and jewels. Beyond this neglected wonder-world the woods extend toward the waters--hanging woods by the sea; and the Turks care nothing about them. One may not wander through them; one may not sit in them; one may only look at them, and long to lose oneself in their darkness and silence, to vanish in their secret recesses. The Turk leaves them alone, to rot or to flourish, as Allah and nature will it.

On the third of Stamboul’s seven hills stands the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, all glorious without, as Santa Sophia is not, but disappointing within, despite its beautiful windows of jeweled glass from Persia, and the plaques of wonderful tiles which cover the wall on each side of the mihrab. Somber and dark, earth-colored and gray, dark green and gold, it has a poorly painted cupola and much plastered stone, which is ugly; but there is fascination in its old dimness, in its silence and desertion. More than once I was quite alone with it, and was able, undisturbed, to notice its chief internal beauty--the exquisite proportions which trick you at first into believing it to be much smaller than it is.

When seen from without, it looks colossal. It is splendid and imposing, but it is much more, for it has a curiously fantastic and, indeed, almost whimsical charm, as if its builder, Sinan, had been a playful genius, full of gaiety and exuberance of spirit, who made this great mosque with joy and with lightness of heart, but who never forgot for a moment his science, and who could not be vulgar even in his most animated moments of invention. Massiveness and grace are blended together in this beautiful exterior. Round the central dome multitudes of small domes--airy bubbles thrown up on the surface of the mosque--are grouped with delightful fantasy. Four minarets, the two farthest from the mosque smaller than their brethren, soar above the trees. They are gray, and the walls of the mosque are gray and white. In the forecourt there is a fine fountain covered with a cupola; the roof of the cloisters which surround it is broken up into twenty-four little domes. A garden lies behind the mosque, and the great outer court is planted with trees.

In the garden are the _turbehs_, or tombs, of Suleiman the Magnificent and of Roxalana, “the joyous one,” that strange captive from Russia, who by her charm and the power of her temperament subdued a nation’s ruler, who shared the throne of the sultan, who guided his feet in the ways of crime, and who to the day of her death was adored by him. For Roxalana’s sake, Suleiman murdered his eldest son by another wife, and crept out from behind a curtain to look upon him dead; and for Roxalana’s sake that son’s son was stabbed to death in his mother’s arms. Now the fatal woman sleeps in a great octagonal marble tomb near the tomb of her lord and slave.

An atmosphere of peace and of hoary age broods over these tombs and the humble graves that crowd close about them. Mulberry-trees, fig-trees, and cypresses throw patches of shade on the rough gray pavement, in which is a small oval pool, full of water lest the little birds should go thirsty. A vine straggles over a wall near by; weeds and masses of bright yellow flowers combine their humble efforts to be decorative; and the call to prayer drops down from the mighty minarets to this strange garden of stones, yellow flowers, and weeds, where the lovers rest in the midst of Stamboul, which once feared and adored them. They were two criminals, but there was strength in their wickedness, strength in their pride and their passion. Romance attended their footsteps, and romance still lingers near them.

One morning, as I sat beneath the noble fig-tree which guards Roxalana’s tomb, and listened to the voice of the muezzin floating over old Stamboul, and watched the birds happily drinking at the edge of their little basin in the pavement, I thought of the influence of cities. Does not Stamboul forever incite to intrigue, to lawlessness, to bloodshed? The muezzin calls to prayer, but from old Stamboul arises another voice, sending forth an opposing summons. Suleiman heard it echoed by Roxalana and slew his son; Roxalana heard and obeyed it; and how many others have listened and been fatally moved by it! It has sounded even across the waters of the sea and over the forests of Yildiz, and Armenians have been slain by thousands while Europe looked on. And perhaps in our day, and after we are gone, old Stamboul will command from its seven hills, and will be horribly obeyed.

I shall always remember, among many less famous buildings, the small mosque of Rustem Pasha near the Egyptian bazaar, with its beautiful arcade and its strangely confused interior, full of loveliness and bad taste, of atrocious modern painting and oleographic horrors, mingled with exquisite marble and perfect tiles. The wall of the arcade gleams with lustrous faience, purple and red, azure and milk-white, and with patterns of great flowers with green centers and turquoise leaves. I recall, too, the Mosaic Mosque, once the church of the monastery of the Chora, which stands on a hill from which Stamboul looks like a beautiful village embowered in green, cheerful and gaily fascinating. The church is ugly outside, yellow and lead-colored, with a white plaster minaret, and it is surrounded by wooden shanties like booths; but its mosaics are very interesting and beautiful, and its chief muezzin, Mustafa Effendi, is a delight in his long golden robe and his yellow turban.

Mustafa Effendi was born near Brusa in Asia Minor, but for forty-two years he has held the office of chief muezzin at the Mosaic Mosque, on which all his thoughts seem centered. He speaks English a little, and has an almost inordinate sense of humor. As he pointed out the mosaics to me with his wrinkled hand, he abounded in comment, and more than once his thin voice was almost overwhelmed by ill-suppressed laughter. He seemed specially entertained as he drew my attention to two birds on the wall--“Monsieur Peacock and Madame Peahen,” and he was obliged to abandon all dignity and to laugh outright when we came to a company of saints and angels.

The most sacred mosque in Turkey lies outside of Stamboul, at Eyub, far up the Golden Horn and not very distant from the “sweet waters of Europe.” In it, on their accession, the sultans are solemnly girded with Osman’s sword instead of being crowned. Eyub is a place of tombs. Chief eunuchs and grand vizirs sleep near the sea in great mausoleums inclosed within gilded railings, and some of them surrounded by gardens; on the hillside above them thousands of the faithful rest under cypresses in graves marked by dusty headstones leaning awry.

The center, or heart, of Eyub is a pleasant village, which gathers closely about the mosque, and is full of a quietly cheerful life. Just beyond the court of the mosque is a Turkish bath, where masseurs, with shaven heads and the usual tuft, lounge in the sunshine while waiting for customers. Near by are many small shops and cafés. In one of the latter I ate an excellent meal of rice and fat mutton, cooked on a spit which revolved in the street. If you stray from the center of the village toward the outskirts, you find yourself in a deserted rummage of tombs, of white columns, white cupolas, cloisters, rooms for theological students, mausoleums of white and pink marble. No footsteps resound on the pavement of the road, no voices are heard in the little gardens, no eyes look out through the railings. As I wandered through the sunshine to the small stone platform where the sultan descends from his horse when he comes to be girded with the sword, I saw no sign of life; and the only noise that I heard was the persistent tap of a hammer near the sea, where his Majesty is building an imperial mosque of white stone from Trebizond.