Part 14
I recall it in Quintillian. I recall it in Tertullian. And occasionally, but rarer, in Latin historians. It was in Catullus. And Virgil, the _Eclogues_, _Georgics_. It was something in solution in the world of that day, _honey from the heart of man_. Horace was too modern. Art was becoming fashionable, facile. He wrote with eye to what people would think, later say. But Virgil kept the seasoned sweetness of the past.
In writers of modern Spain I have seen it. In Galdós, the _Episodios Nacionales_, and its springing up again in the Spanish tongue, in South America.
In Italy, Italy of the great ages, it has been rich; d’Annunzio has been too proud perhaps to suffer, to learn with the patient anguish of the soul.
It has flowered best in France, the wild thyme, which goes to the making of honey. Consider Maurice de Guerin. Recall lines of Verlaine, Heredia! The great Balzac, Bazin, Bertrand, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Flaubert the Magnificent, letters of peasant Millet, the diary of Fromentin in Africa, Huysman, Mallarmé, and the Little Grandson of the Great Renan, Ernest Psichari, in the book about Africa, _The Centurion_.
I recall an occasional line Rimbaud wrote before he was twenty, which gleams in my mind today like cut steel; hard, perfect, indestructible, cruel. The great poetry of France is prose, which is the world’s best.
When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there was another, a different England from that of today. As examples Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings, Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm, the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished, she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested _modernism_, which does not become her, are working their will.
The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it.
I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best is doing the impossible.
I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, _Die Familie Golowlef_, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same power by which the African desert grows grand, _monotony_, a level unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it vividly for years.
I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know, to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble.
In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease, hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises.
Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see. People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener, in pleasure, the _arrière pensée_. Before that, the Merrie England, gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy fields, the flowers of England.
If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music, rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and the sea.
But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence can only be written through _the great forgetting_. One slight touch of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.
In Daudet’s _Contes du Lundi_ I usually begin with the words: _Cette nuit le mistral était en colère_. What a _charmeur_ was Daudet! Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in _Le Pape est Morte_, the morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he ran away! Next, Flaubert’s _L’Education Sentimentale_. The opening lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine, evocative precision of etching, with that _beauty beyond_ no one can name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century, that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. _My old age regrets the rivers._ Loti’s descriptions of the Orient.
Passages from the monumental Balzac, who, by the way, was not made for the ear, but for the mind. Sentences of André Gide, and the essays of Nicolas Ségur, the verses of Verlaine which I love:
_Rimbaud mort, Mon grand, peché radieux._
Certain frail, pitiful phrases of forgotten love, from Mme. de Sévigné, dead long ago, but whose heart still beats. Mme. de Stael, whom Napoleon hated, never achieved the supreme phrase. She was logical, clear cut, sure, a problem in geometry. And plaintive, poignant Villon. Some of Manuel Galvez’ descriptions of the Argentine, in his novels about South America which are so fine, and Coelho Netto’s word-paintings of Brazil, and the fabulously luxurious life led on vast estates there.
The greatness of art of a race, is dependent upon the amount of joy, sweetness, heat stored in its heart by happiness. It can give only what is there. The joy of the ringing, triumphant clarions of the Roman legions, and the passion of Christ, echo in grand creative souls of France.
Perhaps great editors, competent critics, had something to do with making word-artists of France. If we have not had great writers in our country, neither have we great editors, at this moment, to sponsor them, great, judging from the _power of perceiving_, (the artist in the editor), not considering regularity of incoming dollars. Here an editor seldom passes judgment upon the thing _per se_. There must be an appetizer, so to speak, to lure him. More or less violent usually. And then there are his personal feelings toward the writer. The writing, itself, counts little.
One editor, for instance, finds a convict in a prison who can scribble. There is glory in discovery. He proclaims him. Commercialized publicity begins. He is likened to Dante in exile, and Ugo Foscolo. Country papers, having no opinions, copy abundantly, then praise. Soon it falls flat, because considered as poetry, its value was nil. The editor was not interested _in poetry_, but only in himself. The writing good or bad was not of the slightest importance, in his judging.
If a girl broncho buster on an Arizona plain is good at broncho busting, she is asked to write her opinion of the Apollo Belvedere. This is excellent illustration of what is meant; the thing _per se_ does not count. In France it is the thing that does count.
I once knew a plaintive, romantic lady whose ambition was to be heir to something or somebody. Editors in America have the same romantic itch, only in their case, it is itch to be a _discoverer_.
I am interested in Conrad in criticism. He is troubled by Balzac, penetrated by the perfection of Maupassant, haunted by the heights of Flaubert. He could not accommodate himself to looking upon his own work in the furious emotions they create. But why should he wish to drag Conrad into such company? Only the Latin mind, I suppose, and Bielinsky, have achieved impersonal criticism.
I had a wonderful time reading Heine! In my cheap edition the books cost three cents, or five. I wish I could have it over again!
My mother knew that I was good-for-nothing, so she did not try to make anything out of me. It was good sense on her part. She let me idle and read. In reading I was out of the way, quiet, and as usual, useless. At the same time I was the scandal of a reasonable, hard-headed family who liked to work, and who knew without doubt in which direction to go. When I was learning Russian minus a teacher, at eighteen, they, my aunts, cousins, used to peer at me through windows, door cracks, then whisper tragically to each other: “She has looked at one page an hour! No one but a fool would do that!”
To them I have remained a fool. My grandmothers loved me too much to call me that. I have since wondered if in love there be not wisdom, distilled genius of perception. Love always dwells somewhere in the realms of light. What was reading Russian at eighteen, in comparison with making buttonholes that were not round like hogs’ eyes at both corners, or cream puffs that did not split? When the women could not think of any fresh gossip, they fabricated a new story about me, my laziness. To them _work_ was _hand-work_.
Happy days of life, however, were spent in a lonely, ugly, sun-and-wind-beaten, prairie village, reading in a dozen or more languages, the word-masters of the world, while the neighbors invented hair-raising tales of my laziness. I was scandal of the village! Sense of justice, very likely, is rare!
There I read Heine, all of him, every word. And over and over! I wish I could have the joy of it back. Those were memorable years in Europe when Heine, Goethe, Chopin, were in their prime.
Germany helped enlarge boundaries of the human mind, when she began putting out cheap editions of the world’s printed art. Here, for a few pennies, one can procure in scholarly renderings, classic writers of India. _Kausika’s Zorn_, (a play) by Kschemisvara; _Savîtri_, a dramatic story of the supremacy of love from the Mahabharata, _Mudrarakschasa_ (The Chancellor’s Seal Ring), a play of the ancient Indian Drama, _Malati u. Madhava, Urvasi_, a dramatic piece by popular Kalidasa.
In reading these books, I found where Goethe procured short, surprising meters that do not belong to Germany, (despite the _Stab-Reim_), which he uses in Faust. They were a borrowing from Indian Drama. Goethe borrowed from Persian writers too. He was enchanted with this newly presented art of the East, this world of beauty and blazing light. And so was Heine! Heine was akin to it. The Orient was in his blood. The soul of him dwelled under its mighty sun. I fancy his dream of the Orient was more superb than realization could have been, had he had health and money at the same time, to make the journey. Blessed be poverty! Poverty is still the _nobile donna_, of the divine dream of Dante. Her road is straight. Her road is narrow. But it leads far.
Occasionally pages of Indian literature are richly studded with color, like their white lace-work marbles. The Peacock Throne, for example, with gems! The same lavishness! The same piling of richness upon richness, that not even their astounding sun could destroy, and which their black eyes, deep and disconcerting as pools of ebony, knew how to love.
Compare this, (to return to Goethe’s borrowing), from the _Hitopadesa_, with Faust:
_Grausam zart, Sanft und hart, Falsch und wahr Immerdar. Spenden Gabe, Suchend Habe, Immer gebend, Guterstrebend._
Would you not think you were reading Faust? Goethe’s _West-Östlicher Divan_ is merely a divine way, a proud impenitent poet’s way, of translating Firdusi, Hafiz, Saadi. He declared that in reading life-giving books of the East, he had cast off years, grown young. Somewhere in _The Divan_ he cries: _Once more I will be young! I will mingle with the herdsmen on the plains. I will travel with the caravan!_
I expected a revel of delight from Verhaeren’s _Helen_. I did not get it. At the same time I admired its reason, logical unfolding, keeping in key; few lines of color and great passion, wisely distributed. Verhaeren is best in lyrics, occasional poems, which picture Flanders. In this, if I mistake not, he is great. _Les Flamands_ is a masterpiece. And so is _Villes Tentaculaires_. What can equal those portraits of the monks! He paints with words as Flemish artists painted, The van Ostade, (Adrian and Isaac), the Brothers Maris, later, for example. Nothing too humble.
He has given me pleasure. For forty years Flanders has had an increasingly talented company of men, in the novel, short story, verse, and in the history of art and art criticism, they have such commanding and accomplished figures as Dr. Josef Muls, whose books are available in most of the countries of the Continent in adequate translations. They are too little known, on this side the Atlantic. No one can count, it seems, the vagaries of editors who accept translations. Couperus, the Hollander, and Ibañez, the Spaniard, are not representative of the races to which they belong. Both, however, have been heralded as that by American editors.
As an editor Mr. Kreymborg is not a success. But I admire his individual work. It is genuine. It is original. It is unblushingly itself. I think Mr. Kreymborg a man of power in a new field. He has a strange, queer, colorless daintiness. He fine-foots it, with muffled vowels like a learned fugue of long ago. He is as afraid of their bold, gay, brass blatancy, as a small boy of a scare-crow, in a cherry garden. A quaint, low-voiced, dull-hued, crotchety, somewhat ill-tempered little figure, dreaming of conjuring worlds into vision, with dim, small gestures. May he multiply and grow fat!
Stuart Merrill dedicates a volume of poems to Verhaeren, whom I admire, with two lines so noble they should not be forgotten. He speaks of him as a
_Nom qui sonne comme un fracas d’armes Qu’un roi barbare aurait laissé choir dans la nuit._
Albert Samain gives me something the sensation of those warmly lucid, those golden, early evenings of Lorraine which hold out life’s pitiful false promise of perfection. The same distilled imagined richness of the past! The picture of the pagan world snared his heart. His verse keeps the sensations of _un beau soir d’Italie_. It is a magnificent antique world he saw, and knows how to show.
_Chariot d’Or_, by Samain, presents a way to journey with the mind, a little while, delightfully. Imagine if you can that this book of his went through eighteen editions, with speed, in France. What kind of verse-book could do that in America? Not one of _this_ class! You can not serve your soul and an editor’s taste, at the same time. _And greed!_ In America gold must be served. And then _family_!
Of his sonnet sequences I enjoy the _Versailles Sequence_ best. He learned how to make it from Heredia. But a good thing is good, bastard or honest-born. Lines cling to memory. Such for instance as:
_Ce mépris de la mort, comme une fleur aux levres!_
But it should not have closed with an exclamation point. Perhaps it did not! My memory is at fault. There is no need of blowing a trumpet after such a line.
Silvá, like Venice, is a phantom of delight, I can never forget. He was _an exquisite_, on a level with Petronius, and he lived in a city to which patrician memories and the royal pride, of that royal race, the Spanish, had been transplanted, Bogotá.
He loved butterflies and childhood and the first early nights of May; fleeting things, light lovelinesses which pause only long enough to die. He loved the flight of swallows which he liked to call the wings of Spring.
I have read verses of his which give me exactly the same sensation as verses of the Greek Anthology.
Old windows were another passion of his. Very frequently occur the words, _vieja ventana_.
_En la estrecha calle una muy vieja ventana colonial_
_Penetrando al traves de los rejas de antigua ventana_
_El cantor ... de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra_
_Per la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—_
... _del espacio la negra sombre flitran por la ventana rayos de luna_ ...
I think of him as the _poet of windows_. I wonder why they fascinated him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening, unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a speechless, but willing prisoner.
His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his days, _alas! so few_. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we find fact.
A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells.
There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among verse-forms, the sonnet is king.
He can give perfectly the aroma of the season of the year. _A few words_.... I smell the winds of autumn in a high mountain-land and taste the purpling grape. All from three chained words of Silvá! Then I see white mist distort the meadows and feel the frost. He witches back the spirit of what has vanished, and with a lordly gesture. The past, perhaps, perfumed his dreams. The trembling fragility of his sensations is something almost beyond comprehension. I have received tremendous emotion from the haunting beauty of old windows, in old grey, stone-stucco, tinted, crumbling palaces of the _conquistadores_—after Silvá has taught me to see.
Silvá’s _Nocturns_ are as rich as the twilights of Chopin. I wish I knew how to hand on his charm to others, in my colder English tongue! But no one will ever do it. Behind each word lie layer after layer of emotion, vision, all the hauntingly sweet, indefinite horizons of great poets, who have suffered.
No one could snare twice (I am thinking of the work of the translator) the suggestive charm of all these unseen landscapes of the soul, of space, of time, and over them the perfume of divine, unspeakable regret. The _Nocturns_ are windows, the windows of his soul, open upon forlorn and fanciful worlds, which allure too greatly, with some sad, not sufficiently forbidden fatality. The greater the poet, the richer his evocativeness.
He loved the faint blue light of tardy twilights; and white luminous August, with its restless clouds. He kept always a lingering backward glance toward the magic valleys of childhood.
In many languages I have read the poets of the world, but none have touched me quicker to the keen emotion which blasts the present, and whirls on toward the deeps. Like Goya in painting, he was one of the first to take the important step from the old to the new. In verse-forms, he was one of the path makers. Coll said he had built Silvá an altar in his heart.
I do not understand how a man could write such a charming book as Jacques Blanche wrote in _De David à Degas_, and follow it with such inane useless things as the _Cahiers d’un Artiste_. I regret I wasted money on a copy of the last set. I haven’t money to waste.
He wrote the art criticisms for love. He knew what he was talking about. He talked well.
He wrote the last for money, bolstered up by a questionable sense of duty to say something about war. He said it. His friends regret it.
The introduction to the book on art, is by Marcel Proust. It is delightful; fresh, spontaneous, joyous. I read it three times.
_De David à Degas_ is a book of perceptions, just appreciations, knowledge. I was surprised, however, in his article on Whistler that he should omit the influence of incomparable Chinese and Japanese draftsmen. He can see but one influence, of course, _France_. He does not relish the genius of Whistler; he gives us to understand he was not so much, _in Paris_. He feels about Whistler as Conrad feels when he thinks of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant. Conrad was never really great. He merely coquetted with greatness. No page of Conrad ever satisfied my thirst for beauty! Perhaps English was not the proper garment with which to dress his soul!
Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an unacknowledged _point de départ_ for modernism. There is some unexplained law operative why a man of such genius as Condor can not grasp what is his during life. Is it envy of the base? Is it envy of the little ones? The little are always so greatly in the voting majority.
The portraits by Jacques Blanche in oil, are not more alluring than some he draws with pen. For instance, listen to this about Manet: ... _ce joli homme blond, gracieux, elegant, à la cravate Lavalière bleue, à pois blancs_. Does not that make you feel as if a friend said hello over the telephone, or a speckled trout nibbled your bait, on a bright blond morning of May? He makes delightful Fantin live again. He declares that after Courbet, Manet was the last painter of tradition.
Papini, wild-eyed Italian youth, with surprised up-standing hair, who edited _Lionardo_ in Florence is, in my opinion of slight consequence as poet, prose writer, philosopher. To put the cart before the horse, his philosophising is acute indigestion from too much Nietzsche, Kant, Jungs-Stilling, Hegel, _et cetera ad infinitum_. In this melange of German mind and northern morals, he was unable to see his surprised way, or anybody’s way. He read. He suffered. He vomited words. His philosophy is account of the peregrenations of a nostalgic, young and ambitious mind. His early verse might be called pretty, puerile, powerless. Lines like these are not great poetry:
_Quaderno bianco, principio di giorno, Conto vergine pagina prima— non si parli di ritorno che in cima all’ultima cima._
His verse is weak. His twenty little reasonings about verse are no better. There does not seem to be reason for being. They possess neither logic of art nor life, nor discrimination for the dull. However, in South America, in Buenos Aires (or as they say down there, B. A.), and in Rio, they prize him. I respect their opinion, those Spanish and Portuguese _literati_. It may be _mea culpa_! They are ahead of us in appreciation of arts of the Old World.