"Solely the Queen's own invention are the cycle of stories that followed this book, called "Leidens Erdgang" (Sorrow's Earthly Pilgrimage).* Disconnected stories, they are yet bound together by one fundamental idea, an idea wholly symbolical. The Queen has here dealt with the eternal question, Whence and wherefore is sorrow in the world? Sorrow is brought before us as a child, the daughter of life and strife, a lovely child, and yet one upon whom none can look without weeping. She has no home, but wanders restlessly from place to place, turning in now here, now there, and ever creating havoc by her visits. It is in these visits the author lets us follow her. Sometimes we remain in the realms of pure allegory or of fairy tales; sometimes the stories are so modern, so realistic, that we are startled when, at the end, the symbolical element reenters. After touching the whole gamut of human misery in the last story, the objective character is abandoned, and in autobiographical form, under the title, "A Life," the royal author has told the history of her sufferings. It is veiled under a slight cover of fiction, but it is unmistakable that here we have Carmen Sylva's soul laid bare before us.
"I wanted to find Truth. Then Sorrow took me by the hand and said: 'Come with me. I will lead you to Truth, but you must not fear on the way!' No, I fear nothing. I am so strong I can carry mountains." Thus she begins her earthly wanderings, guided by Sorrow. She is led into the domain of the arts, and chooses music; and she sings and plays until her voice is weak and her hand fails her, and yet she cannot attain her ideal. Mournfully she puts aside the instrument, seeing she cannot be an artist. She then seeks Truth in science, but is forced to recognize that wisdom is for her but death and dust, and what she desires is to live. Then Sorrow leads her to the death-bed of a youth who fought long and sorely with dire sickness until at last he succumbed. She is made acquainted, too, with other death-beds; she weeps bitter tears beside the graves of her beloved, until at last she would die of grief. "What! die already?" said Sorrow. "You who said that you could carry mountains! Why, you have not lived yet, for you have not loved." Then Sorrow brings her to the man to whom she is to belong for life. "And Sorrow led me into matrimony and made me a mother, and loaded great and rich labors upon my shoulders. I groped about to find the right road, for we had to encounter misunderstanding and mistrust, and on the steep path stood Hate and Strife. But I did not fear, for I was a mother. Yet not many years was this high dignity mine; the beaming eyes of my child were closed, and I laid its curly head in the cold grave. Yet I stood erect, notwithstanding the fire in my breast, and asked of Sorrow, 'Where is Truth? Now that all earthly joys, all earthly hopes, have been borne to the grave, there remains for me nothing save Truth, and I have a right to find her.' Then Sorrow pressed into my hand a pencil and said, 'Seek.' And I wrote and wrote, and I knew not that I exercised an art, since years ago I had, with heavy heart, renounced an artist's life." She then strives to do good where she can; she learns to know mankind. War shakes her realm with his iron heel; she solaces the wounded and afflicted. She is ill and weary, she is no longer young, she has drunk deep of the cup of bitterness, and yet she has not looked upon Truth. "'There she stands,' said Sorrow; and when I lifted my eyes I saw a silent water and a little child stood beside it whose eyes gleamed. 'Is that child Truth?' I asked. Sorrow nodded. ' But as Sorrow said this the child grew bigger and bigger, until it held the whole world in its hand and embraced the entire heavens. 'Do you see Truth?' asked Sorrow. 'And now look within you; she is there also.' And as I looked within, I cried, 'Why have I fought and suffered? She was ever there about me and within me, and now I will die.' 'Not yet,' spoke Sorrow. Then it grew misty before my eyes, and I saw nothing more. Sorrow took me by the hand and led me onward."
The Queen's next work was written in verse. It is called "Jehovah," and is a new treatment of that oft-told tale about Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, a legend that may truly be interpreted as a type of its own persistence. Carmen Sylva's version of the myth is by no means the least fortunate and profound, treating the Jew as seeking belief and love, who cannot die till he has found God. And it is both bold and new to treat this motive from a wholly modern and Darwinian point of view. Many stages of existence, many metamorphoses of being has Ahasuerus to go through before he is brought to recognize that God is no visible great King, but a spirit and a truth, a working power pervading the all, whose manifestations have been evoked and made evident throughout the ages in the form best suited to the people, and the temperaments wherewith it dealt; that God in brief is too great for human grasp, but that each man knows him according to his power of comprehension. He learns this at last when, broken and weary, he has given up all hope. Both tender and powerful is the scene in which cognition comes to him, when the spell that bound him is broken, and he dies blessing the great Life that lives eternally.
From her earliest childhood Queen Elizabeth had been in the habit of noting down in large, album-like books her impressions of men and things, her life and thought experiences. Many of these detached utterances were written in French, and when, a couple of years ago, the Parisian journalist Louis Ulbach visited the Queen and regretted that he could not read her writings, he was permitted to see these. Greatly struck, he asked permission to publish a selection,--a permission which was accorded,--and under the collective title of "Les Pensées d'une Reine," these maxims and paradoxes were given to the world. In my opinion, they are quite the best work the Queen has done, and, had she written nothing else, would have given her a standing as an author. They are most remarkable, revealing acute insight, a wide range of intellectual capacity, a broad background of ripe thought."
"One does not know what most to be struck with, her profundity of thought or the naive simplicity, the frank sincerity, she has preserved amid courtly surroundings. Indeed, talking with her, one is almost tempted to think that she herself is greater than anything she has yet produced; that would she but write less rapidly, she might take that high rank among modern writers her ambition desires. She thinks it is her title that stands in her way. "That terrible title; you don't know what a block it is. No one will believe in you. They think you are only praised because you are a queen, or think this is all very well for a queen." But she is mistaken; it is not the title, but the office, that hampers her. Though it is Carmen Sylva's ardent desire to be a poet and an author, she desires with equal ardor to fulfill the duties of her station; and, in striving after this, she tries to do more than human strength will allow. She endeavors to lead a dual existence. Thus she rises daily at four A. M. (at one time she rose at three, but this she found too fatiguing), trims her lamp, and works till eight. Those hours, she explained to me, were the only ones that were truly hers in the course of the day, when she might be an author and a woman; the rest she is Queen of Roumania....When she and the King sit down to dinner they are often so tired they cannot speak a word. Yet early sleep is not for her. Bucharest is a very gay capital -- the city of pleasure, it has been called -- and a very late one. Gala performances and balls do not begin before ten or eleven at night. The Queen rarely gets to bed before one, and so has but four hours' sleep. This must wear out her mental and physical organization. In the summer the court retires to Sinaïa, a health resort in the Carpathians that combines the grand scenery of Switzerland with the more lovely and romantic features of the Italian Alps. Here in a fine old monastery was the temporary residence of the court, now vacated for the quaint castle that has been built after their Majesties' own designs at a rather higher level. But even here there is no rest for the hard-worked Queen; she must receive and entertain as in the capital. Only three weeks, three precious weeks, in the autumn, are quite her own, when Sinaïa is emptied of all but its royal guests. Then she retires to a small chalet she has built for herself in the wood, within sound of the gurgling Pelesch. Here her pen has full play to hurry along as quickly as it pleases. Here she transmutes her personal sorrows and experiences into impersonal works of art."
Helen Zimmern
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine - August, 1884
