Part 13
I have enjoyed vastly traveling with Hardy along fresh, green, sea-bound highways of the land he loved, with the bracing sea breeze in my face, my hair, and lazy, long winged sea-birds wheeling over head. I have enjoyed the peace of old-fashioned country gardens under high heat of noon, and his quaint, careful naming of old time garden-flowers. And I have liked, too, sometimes feared, the tragic lonely blackness of the downs at night, with only the wild, steel-grey flash of the far away sea and above my head dim, forgotten stars. He has flashed moments of sensation upon me which I treasure. He is always sincere, and sometimes great, because he can both think and feel. The keenest memory he has left with me, is of the roads and the forests of Wessex.
In the novel of the mid Nineteenth Century the Jew has been too often exploited as the modern _roué_. This is injustice. Neither history nor observation justify it. To mention a few books because they are important and led the way, which prove this, I call attention to _The Harlot’s Progress_, by Balzac, Zola’s _Nana_, Paul Bourget’s _Cosmopolis_, and many a short story by Maupassant. In each a rich Jewish banker uses wealth to buy women. And in each the character of the Jew is so similar it could be lifted from one book to the other without injury to the _mise-en-scène_. They are Jews from Germany. They have similar names, Steiner, Hafner. Their methods of procedure, business enterprises, amusements, ambition, home life are the same. This is true likewise of _La Garçonne_, the book by Victor Margueritte, of which France has expressed disapproval. The _Jew_ in Zola’s _Nana_, seems lifted over, with this new book.
The blond courtesans in all are alike, too. It is peculiar that courtesans of the world of fiction, women who have been thoroughly bad, have been blonde.
The history of the antique world happens to corroborate this. She has been the type without heart, soul; most lustful, mercenary, cruel, uncaring. What was back of this? Was it borrowed impulse handed on, or was it reason founded upon observation?
The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the dictionary of a race.
Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy, sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light, bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight.
In the person of _Nana_, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in reach, conviction, resonance.
The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full, natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction.
Zola, in _Nana_, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: _Das Gefährliche Alter_. (_The Dangerous Age._)
Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at last, huge enough to embrace the universe. _Nana_ is a little outcast of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now, marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see _Nana_ symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.
In his _Rome_, too, he shows world forces again, again expanding, magnificently triumphant. Over them, queening it as of yore, stands the glorified Venus of the Greeks, meaning that natural impulses in the heart outlast laws made to subdue them, just as after building, destroying again what is built, the red earth remains, insolent, sullen, but always dominant.
History tells how poor people of Rome went, for generations, to the crumbling Colosseum for material with which to build humble homes. Just so today lesser novelists go to these massive creative monuments, such as Zola’s _Rome_, for purpose of a similar quarrying. The tiny germ for little novels, stories, is concealed in these giant accumulations. We find what may have been initial impulse for _Imperial Purple_, by Saltus. We recall Zola saying, in this book, that _the imperial purple of the Caesars has slipped down upon the shoulders of the priests_. Here is the ghost of Bourget’s _Cosmopolis_. In the labyrinths of Zola’s rich, masterful _Rome_ not only these books, but others I might name, float, disembodied shadows.
There are only a few novelists counting all races. They can be counted on fingers of the hand. Other novels are woven out of the floating, uncounted richly wasteful threads of the great. In the little popular story tellers of any day or race, there are few ideas, seldom profound seeing nor anything worth while. There are few originators. The works of Zola marked the death of the old novel. Zola is not using imagination, but the cold observation of the scientist. The scientific mind is dawning.
The fear which was to make Maupassant mad is the hidden, dramatic _motif_ in his stories. It sat in his brain weaving patiently a Penelope-web, which, at last, smothered him. Maupassant was cynic, sensualist, and sumptuous master of the hidden soul. He touches the heart, the intellect, and the senses.
_Timon le Magnifique_, (Max Daireaux), is a merited satire upon today, its playthings, its vain, but would-be serious toys, a clever synthesis, usually false, of how something may be made out of nothing. It is written in a cold, detached manner. But I should not be surprised if it were aimed at individuals of Paris. Cubist, futurist art, is skillfully enough interpreted. There is sincerity. Often there is perception. And there does not seem to be more malice than necessary. The temper of mind of the central personality is characterized by lukewarmness. The frail story gives opportunity to display reflections about life, which have, as motive persistent disillusion, and no small amount of scorn of that human animal, _man_. It is the tragic skepticism of a world, once eloquent, at fire heat, now tepid, among men who are weaker, who have fewer moments of grandeur. There were things said brilliantly but without emotion. Fine food, served cold. Take it or leave it, I do not care. If you can think, you will see I am right.
It would have been as well if the author of _Timon le Magnifique_ had hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story. The display room would have been less obstructed.
Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work. To every person his own wheels!
A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction. The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly, with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents.
_De Wandelende Jood_ (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It banished inclination to read anything else.
The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon form alone.
The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind, of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “_Hij ging, het hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande in hem de zachte vlam van Christus._” This shadows forth—this story of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the Hebrew race.
It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome: Zola’s _Rome_. Serao’s _Conquista de Roma_. Lagerlof’s _Rome_. Pater’s Rome in _Marius_, with its memories of the wolves and snow of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he reads Suetonius, _the Twelve Caesars_. Ricarda Huch’s _Rome_. Niebuhr’s _Rome_ is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s _Cosmopolis_, which is Rome again.
Serao shows us Rome in _Lettere d’una Viaggiatrice_, a splendid piece of the kind of resonant prose, she only knew how to make. Goethe’s pictures in letters to friends in Germany, and in that remarkable verse-sequence, _Die Römische Elegien_, and Winklemann’s _Rome_, cold, plastic, devoid of color. I refer to what Winklemann called his _little writings_ of Greek and Roman art, and the majestic, almost too glorious Rome of d’Annunzio. It is interesting to follow reactions of such people of power as these to the call of the Eternal City. In the opening lines of d’Annunzio’s _Il Piacere_, there are sentences so luxurious, silken, they remind me of rich reflections upon old Venetian velvet.
Loti, accomplished _savoureur_ of all that was exquisite in space or in time, steered carefully from Rome the Mighty. Rome, divine and immortal, lured the immortals. Other superb cities have known and felt the magic of his art. But Rome he left untouched.
Edward Lucas White’s novel of Rome, _Andivius Hedulio_, is a moving-picture scenario printed in book form. It is a large and attractive skeleton, wearing a little more flesh than skeletons in good society have been in the habit of wearing, even in New York.
The most brilliant author’s introductions I know are those Nietzsche, Poet of Philosophy, has written for books of his epoch-making thinking. No one has been able to throw surer, more far-reaching noose over the problematical future. His _Jenseits v. Gut u. Böse_ he called philosophy of the future. That is daring. It may be true. It is conceivable at least, a world in which good and evil, as we understand them, may not be standardized. Life cast huge shadows for Nietzsche, like childhood’s flickering fireplace-shadows, on the wall. His philosophy is these stalking shadows, terrifying sometimes, astonishing and always superhuman, these shadows of men who live.
Truth does not stand still and let us build clean, white, picket fences around it, and label it _Exhibit A_. It changes, takes new forms, under new suns. There is nothing fixed, eternal, except the pitiful drama of man, and the hopeless hope in his heart. It may be real; at the same time, it is unstable as the sea.
It would not be easy to be happy, even keep sane, and look upon existence with the scorn with which Nietzsche viewed it. A bitter, laughing tongue with deadly penetrating power, was his. As the French Revolution cleared the air for different social, economical living, the philosophy of Nietzsche (by surprising power to destroy), helps clear the atmosphere for less prejudiced thinking.
Nietzsche is the mischievous boy in school of the old philosophers. He insists upon knocking down with hard, well-made paper balls, the idols they set up. He is brilliant phrase maker. He transforms the heavy, slightly ponderous German tongue to frothiness of French. He stands behind it with up-lifted whip, cruelly lashing it to fresh agilities. His word acrobatics are worth considering. Yet he is seldom pleased with the result. He can not, like little people, rejoice in what he himself has done. The outlines of words as they are do not suit him. He shades them. He sets them differently. He cuts off edges. He insists they no longer falsify his thought. No written statement suits him. He wishes it a little different. The exactitude of his thinking is superb. It is difficult for words, whose sense boundaries are not exact, to express it.
Wonderful, lightening clear, shining, far, problematical glimpses he flashes forth. In certain, to him inconsequential asides, he is Prophet of Hebraic height. It is in words like these, of great thinkers, with prodigious power of self-projection, that living men gain idea of the civilizations that are on the way.
There are few more distinguished literary critics than Nietzsche. His seeing is revealing. He has few superiors in sympathetic appreciation of the printed word in hands of a master. He has fine ear for music of the sentence, too. No subtlety, no fineness, is lost. What he says about Petronius makes me long to read him again after the years. It fills me with zest, with pleasure. “_Wer endlich dürfte gar eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen der mehr als irgend ein grosser Musiker bisher der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in Erfindung, Einfallen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sumpfen der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der Alten Welt, wenn man wie er, die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athen, den Befreienden Hohn eines Windes, der alles gesund macht indem er alles laufen macht!_” Nietzsche wants to know who would dare make a translation into German of this book by Petronius, who more than any other of the great musicians, was master of the _presto_! What magnificent things Nietzsche writes about him! He insists he had the swift feet of the wind, and the wind’s breath, which clears and makes clean, with a scorn that sets free, and so forth. Here I found again that _Feast of Trimalchion_ I stumbled through dully in school days, and later read with zest, while glorious visions of Rome brought from Latin poets, likewise from etchings of Piranesi, crowded my memory as I read.
Nietzsche makes the same statement Hardy makes. There is no writing today for the ear. There are no architects of the sonorous sentence, sculptured phrase, hinting at vast resources, wherein a multitude of minds could swarm and find safety; no sentence of mighty curve, powerful sweep. Cicero wrote such sentences. So did Demosthenes. Speech is crumbling. The rock is fretting itself back again to sand. It is no longer strong enough to contend with the forces of creation, chaos, the desolating forces so rapidly destroying the old, it is suitable now for petty writers, the little men, and the wilful winds. A force of disintegration is at work. That is why the little men with swollen ego are able to handle it, then feel proud.
Nietzsche impresses me as an artist gone wrong rather than philosopher _sang pur_. He makes reasoning conform to eye-delight in noble line, distinguished color. He feels, he enjoys first, thinks afterward. Sometimes he impresses me as an artist who did not have courage to try his artist’s wings, who felt, feared, perhaps, they were feeble. So he fell back upon brilliant, learned, fault-finding. He became the distinguished spier-out of men’s weaknesses. It is not easy for Nietzsche to see without passion. To see with passion is not of the philosopher. His seeing is bound too closely to the emotions of self. His hatreds, his envies, play commanding part. His hatred, for example, for Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Locke, Carlyle, and so forth, and so forth. And his envy of Wagner and the Songs of Schumann. A strange combination of opposites for a man of his gifts!
But it is a powerful, outreaching comprehension such as is not given to two of one race in a generation. In Nietzsche I think sometimes I found what the word _comprehension_ means, (namely), a wide reaching out, then a skillful pulling together of many far powers, with the quick, firm, magic welding into one; the swift, clean focus.
However important Nietzsche may be as philosopher, I am sure his greatest merit is as master of words. In the German tongue, his is virtuosity. He recreates the language, as a Pope once said d’Annunzio had done with Italian. He has made possible a new, a different tempo. He has increased too its flexibility. Ruskin has not written with greater joy of art of Turner, than Nietzsche of music that charmed him. Nietzsche can do such things with words as Wagner with tone. The power of the two has kinships broader than racial, the kinship of men who had climbed patiently to heights.
Nietzsche declares that the appearance of Napoleon in the world made Goethe change his opinion of man. Evidently Napoleon demonstrated something that not even the imagination of a Goethe could reach. The Little Grandson of the Great Revolution made men of genius open their eyes. In few has there been such will to power.
Wagner in music, and Nietzsche in _Also Sprach Zarathustra_, were among originators of modern art. _Zarathustra_ was perhaps the first new verse. The movement has been carried on by other nations. I am not sure that Germany did not discover the modern world. England seldom originates.
Nietzsche speaks of loving the south as a school of healing. There we hear the poet. He thinks music in the north grows pale, yellow, sick for the sun. There his longing burst forth. There was something resplendent, tropical, luxurious, in Nietzsche, which the north could not let flower. The soul of Nietzsche resembled glowing canvasses of Turner. It was filled with the same bursts of light. He needed, to be happy, effective, some equatorial land of the soul, lighted by greater suns of forthcoming strange civilizations, whose boundaries are non-geographical, where his superhuman dreams could find encouragement. While his body was bounded by Germany, his mind lived anywhere, at will.
In modern art, even France is borrower, like England. France habituated to lead the way, because her new art came from Wagner, and the north. It was in the glowing, resplendent mirror of his music, that brilliant, receptive France, surprised at first and not a little vexed, caught the thought, _vision_, of strange, revolutionary, æsthetic ways, which later she tried to persuade herself she found first, then pursued alone. Wagner, in short, taught expression, something different. He was first to fit closely, and with skill, another garment to the soul, the soul that had changed after the Great Revolution, and was no more capable of holding proudly the princely toga.
The range of emotions, expressions, is greater in modern art than in classic art. And certainly more richly, subtly shaded. Modern art does not let a fragment slip away. It takes account of the ugly, brutal, disgusting, obscene. Classical art preserved only beauty. It skimmed the cream, then threw the milk away. The ages have made us poor. Now we must take care of the milk beneath. Now we must set about making cheese. Now we must not disdain peasant work.
Among early ones to take firm stand against the classic order, were Wagner with tone, Nietzsche with words, Delacroix with color. Classic art was a straight line. Modern art is a line infinitely curved. But fresh complexities were creeping into life, with gradual rise to power of the masses of voracious appetite, multiple mood. Art is not now for aristocrats of superb culture. It is not made for a lonely Petronius in the silence, the secrecy of a violet-perfumed palace.
I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans. I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth. The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual aristocrats, the people of trained taste.
The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome. It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad, mist-covered north.
That which is finest of the old civilization that is passing, of the culture, wisdom, faith, love, of two thousand years, is stored in the prose, the verse of France.
There slips into the best prose of French writers of great periods, phrases, sentences, from deeps of the subconscious, the world-soul, dwelling, in the powerful, seldom seen, creative places, that other races have neither been able to see, seize, nor make visible; a superb letting go of the ego. This is something we do not find. Our land is too new, young, too devoted to the fleeting thing _self_, which has progressed no further than today, than that reasoning mind with which as children we used to learn the multiplication table. The creating of art has no little in common with teaching of Eastern philosophies, _the death of self_. It, too, is an effect of time. It is proof of rich ripening, under multiple suns. Old World nations possess this in some degree. The sorrows of much living and contending faiths have taught them. In addition, _Good_ wears many faces. Deeper spiritual revelation is theirs, enveloping, then penetrating the subject under discussion, with something sweeter, more eloquent, than the sumptuous sunsets of Lorraine, something to be sought among masters, as wild honey is sought in the forest. To the mind, indeed, that is what it resembles, _The Taste of Honey_. It is something that all but shatters with delight, blinds with unshakable truth. It is a lightning flash from the racial soul.
Among Greek writers I have thought of this. It has occurred to me most often perhaps when reading Aristophanes, a joy whose memory remains. Again it is in the superb, cumulative, spendthrift, piling of adjectives of Homer. It is in that on-rushing, resistless, cataract of verbal music of Æschylus.