Fiction
A Rainbow in Germany
THE persuasive voice that meditates, recollects, and appeals through all the musical movements of the beautiful book called Maria Capponi is a more powerful advocate for inter- national love than the tongues of many diplomatists. It is not a novel that will immediately impress the public like the huge cinema-history works of Feuchtwengler, for the decoration is aerial and the sound has no fiercer fury than that of birds and violins. But the rare sensibility, the exquisite tolerance, with which these gracious visions of Alsace, Venice, the Cote d'Azur, and the Black Forest besiege the imagination, are the essentials of the fine art of reconciliation.
Rene Schickele is one of the contributors to the famous Expressionist Anthology, The Twilight of Humanity.
" What I would have the world to be First must I be myself "
he writes there ; and in this book an ardent and charming boy works out his conflicting individual loves into a healing tenderness for humanity.
Some of the younger German writers have turned to a past in which the figure of Charlemagne, and the holy spire of Strasbourg, and great cycles of romance maintain the spiritual values-not to forget their present suffering there, but to regain confidence from a finer tradition than the Prussian. And there they recover the ancient spell of Italy, and remember the Emperors irresistibly drawn to woo with swords and kisses that lovely land. So Claus von Breusek- helm, the hero of Maria Capponi, feels that he goes through Italy like " a secret Hohenstaufen, a private Kaiser, riding south."
Claus, the young German Alsatian, is, we feel, an attractive creature, beautiful and beloved. A picture of the Rheims Annunciation angel is over his bed ; his imagination is haunted by a sweet obsession of tulips, as he waits in hope for Maria. He has lost Doris, his wife, in a " crystalline adven- ture " in the Alps. She has been steadfastly loved by him ; yet in the moist violet-scented spring he writes to call Maria Capponi, to whom he has been strangely bound since when, fourteen years old, they plighted a kind of troth in Venice. While the reply tarries, he thinks back to his childhood, to Italy, to love's consummation in Antibes, to the last farewell in Venice. Round the two figures of Maria and himself crowd many friends and other lovers ; and his dreaming mind often loses his own story in coloured and passionate side-issues. In the end has come the War, and the shattering of amities. Now it is over ; and Claus has been irritated, not by the coming of the French, but by the behaviour of fellow-Alsatians. Let Maria come at last with her child to him and his child that they may together re-create love and beauty. The answer is " No " ; and the volume ends with suffering, but not despair.
Though the story of the complex imaginative attitude of Claus towards Maria, who is siren Italy, and its later confusion with his true love for Doris, pure in the virgins' city of Cologne, is the main theme of the book, it is impossible to describe briefly all the intercrossing interests and the rich corollaries. The earlier and most enchanting part of the narrative describes an adolescence fervent, poignant, and frank; with airs of gallantry both amusing and touching. As Claus has been richly reared on Greek myths by his tutor, l'Abbe Simon, and realizes " the delicate propinquity of heathendom and Christianity," he must not be judged by English standards. But nothing ugly befalls his beauty-dreaming heart, or hardens his tender sensibility. He is young, romantically young. The air quivers, the flowers loom mystic, like thurifers, the women -Sidonia, who looked like a Javanese and whose laugh sounded like a flight of doves ; Maria with wild eyebrows, red mouth, and pale face, all the other dreamlike creatures whq faintly -recall Heine's Florentine Nights-are a masque of bewildering angels.
The men who are his friends and kinsfolk are even more Aim: There is comradeship in the book, and passion of manj degrees and qualities. There is a bright irony, and a dancing paganism, and the fairy-tale s*eetness- of the paradise-pictures of the Rhenish masters. The encounters of the witty fair people are set in great spaces of sun and air ; and their affairs are part of the mighty plot of. the throbbing world. The Carnaval de Venise has-iti wilder enchantment as seen through the eyes of two children, and the cypresses and carnations: and sea-pools of Antibes conspire ecstatically with young love and sorrow. Above all, the extraordinary suavity of mood, - the unfailing loyalty to beauty in every land, the love of every lovely relationship—these cnnvince us that there is a rainbow of delight somewhere in Germany. A rainbow in Germany, a - bright fountain in France What symbol of hope we can find in our own self-conscious literature of the moment is still.
uncertain.- .
ItACIIEL ANNAND TAYLOR.
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