He groaned, unable to breathe; his pain was so
close and oppressive, that he had no room to draw his breath. With
the prophetic hyper-sensitiveness of the artist, who often lives in
tomorrow with more intensity than in the present moment, his agonised
eyes and heart foresaw all that was to be. This inevitable war between
the greatest nations of the world, seemed to him the failure of
civilisation, the ruin of the most sacred hopes for human brotherhood.
He was filled with horror at the vision of a maddened humanity,
sacrificing its most precious treasures, strength, and genius, its
highest virtues, to the bestial idol of war. It was to him a moral
agony, a heart-rending communion with these unhappy millions. To what
end? And of what use had been all the efforts of the ages? His heart
seemed gripped by the void; he felt he could no longer live if his
faith in the reason of men and their mutual love was destroyed, if he
was forced to acknowledge that the Credo of his life and art rested on
a mistake, that a dark pessimism was the answer to the riddle of the
world.
He turned his eyes away in terror, he was afraid to look it in the
face, this monster who was there, whose hot breath he felt upon him.
Clerambault implored,--he did not know who or what--that this might
not be, that it might not be.
Pages:
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30