Annette and Sylvie (The Soul Enchanted)

by Romain Rolland. Translated by Ben Ray Redman. New York: Henry Holt and Company 1925. 12mo. viii+329 pp. $2.50.

ROMAIN ROLLAND writes, as Wagner composed, by a species of clairvoyance, and the rhythm of his work, like that of the Prelude to Das Rheingold, is announced on the opening page of this the first volume of his feminist epic, The Soul Enchanted. It is a rhythm of red and gold, the red of passion and the gold of intellect. Not by accident do the lines from the Rig-Veda graven on the title-page of Annette and Sylvie read: —

Annette Rivere, a passionate Diana, highhearted and high-minded, left an orphan, discovers a half-sister sprung from an alliance of her Don Juanesque father. Sylvie is her opposite: shrewd, humorous, of the earth earthy, a lovable worldling. The narrative throbs with life. Two experiences universal to youth fill this opening volume: friendship and love; friendship with Sylvie and love for Roger Brissot.

The Brissots are a triumph of the Comic Muse. When has the middle class been chaffed as genially and as mercilessly as this? Here the artist in M. Rolland has attained an Olympian altitude from which he can drench the Evil Genius of our time with immortal hilarity. . . . Roger is a good fellow. But he will not do. And his fatal lack is that of his class and the age it dominates — a lack of imagination. He is no mate for a free woman: he is no helmsman for a voyage of liberation. He is, in short, the average upper-middle-class college-educated youth of America to-day who is succeeding in athletics and business and failing in statecraft, in culture, and in the ennoblement of human relationships.

As in music, the major theme of the book is frequently restated: —

‘The need of change and the need of permanence, those two passionate instincts of all vigorous lives . .’ ‘It is almost, always those who are capable of a great love who are also Lhe most enamored of independence. For in them, all is strong. . . .’

And the answering theme is sounded in counterpoint: —

‘The union of two beings ought not to become a mutual enchainment. It should be a twofold blooming. I should like each, instead of being jealous of each other’s free development, to be happy in assisting it.’

The craftsmanship is superb. Here is portrait-painting in which you feel the very aura of the personality: the thought-swirl of its unconscious mind. The landscapes are touched in hauntingly as one’s own memories of spring in youth. Women, young and old, have told me that they are disconcerted that any man should so guess their inmost thoughts. Guess? No. Inmost thoughts are irrespective of sex. Let him who would read them in any woman or man do as M. Rolland has done — listen at the door of his own heart.

Is not the goal of this new pilgrimage already in view? Is it not to be the harmonization of the as yet imperfectly reconciled extremes of our natures — passion and thought? ‘The sole true morality,’ he says in one place, ‘would be a morality of harmony. But, so far, human society has known only a morality of repression and renunciation — tempered by lies.’

Has ever an age so needed this evangel as ours? And Remain Rolland is the musician of musicians to resolve these our discords into harmony. For he is the Beethoven of the novel. He is a composer whose scores happen to be written in prose. His every work is symphonic. Annette and Sylvie is the first movement of another symphony.

LUCIEN PRICE