Part 16

At last I have seen paintings by Ilya Repin! I thought the time would never come when I could. To see them means a trip to Russia. They are full of enjoyment and feeling. They are vehement, passionate, proud; and pagan in beauty; rich in firm characterization. His famous _Black Sea Pirates_ (large canvas) does not need a frame. Curiously enough the pale green foam of the pictured sea frames it. It is as important as the boat, or its occupants.

The portrait of his son, Yuri, likewise a painter whose canvasses of the Finnish Sea I have seen, is eloquent. Picture to yourself a face pale, dark, expressive, impassioned. It might symbolize Russia’s poet of tragic days, in youth, Puschkin. I could with difficulty look away.

The head is slightly turned to the left, a pose frequently chosen by Repin. He wears a coffee-colored caftan, bordered dully with white. He has dark brown eyes; large, beautiful, soulful. He has brown, dark, wavy hair; thick, a trifle long. The gesture of the folded arm and shoulder-line is arresting, peculiarly noble. The poetry of the Don Cossack country, the songs Schevschenko wrote in youth by the shores of rivers great as seas, are in the face. I recalled a song I translated years ago, from this Cossack poet, while I was looking at it:

When I die I pray you bury Me upon a hill, Where the great steppe’s circles widest My Ukraine Land fill, That the broad out-spreading meadows, The great river’s shore, And the bright on-rushing Dneiper I may see, and hear the roar, When it sweeps the foreign soldiers— The red blood of them we slew— Far away where skies are blandest Where my dear Ukraine lies blue.

The face has the warm, slightly sensual pallor, we see in painted dreams of proud Italian masters. An eloquent, impassioned brush caresses it to life. Yuri died during The War. Not long after this memorable portrait was made by his father! It stands for an ideal of Cossack youth.

Repin is a portraitist! Russian subtlety combined with forceful line. His portrait of Kerensky is interesting. It shows a blond, youthful figure with indecision in it. He is painted sitting by an open window, through which falls light strangely ruddy; a little wild. The line is sure, quick.

The single portrait of a _Black Sea Pirate_ is superb. Dramatically poised; brutal. It keeps wise contrast of pale blue and angry red, between which the brown, naked body rises; strong, muscled, slender. There is hint of Greece in this Black Sea body.

Repin has a brownish-yellow that is his. It is a dream of the deserts of his ill-fated Eastern forbears, under some slanting, despairing sun of desert autumn. His other _Black Sea Pirate_ has a different face, one of Mongol type, with controlled, still, ill-concealed ferocity of Asia. Past ages speak dazzlingly here.

_The Bandoura Player_ is gorgeous! A noble bit of color, with strength of some sublime, some savage past. There is red in it which totals the cruel splendor of a century of lost Black Sea sunsets. It fires muscular edge of arms, shoulders. It blazes, a sun which can not set, upon the head. There is something in form of the standing musician that is tantamount to defiance of death, destiny. There is, too, the flash of white teeth in song! The line of youth, and lift of love. Behind, a sky troubled, indeterminate; a sky with something of the sweet _souplesse_ of sound. A figure of glorious daring, unequalled spontaneity. Proud! Resentful! There is redoubling of rose-hues at end of the _bandoura_. It is echo of his song. With the brush Repin is a profound historian. History, perhaps, is written most weakly with words.

It is not easy to estimate what the poetry of such a technician, such a powerful virtuoso in words as d’Annunzio, was to me in an isolated village upon the plains, where everything was ugly, cheap, except the magnificent land-levels, and the sunsets. And it is not easy to estimate either how hard it was to get money to buy the books. New Italian writers came high. They were not procurable in the inexpensive outputs of older men. And then the long waiting for books to come. I ordered from Italy. When they did come, I literally wore out the pages of _Canto Novo, Intermezzo_.

I went around like a sleep walker for days. I forgot to eat. I sat up at night. I increased, if possible, the disapproval, the ill-concealed hatred of my relatives. It burst upon my thirsty, surprised senses like stars at midnight. The beating beauty of broken worlds was flung about me. It dazzled me. I published in obscure newspapers, the first translations from d’Annunzio to be printed in English.

My money reached only to buy one more verse-book—_Isottea_, and one novel: _Le Vergini della Rocce_. To read, where I lived, _in the daytime_, was one shade less criminal than stealing. I was a convicted culprit of long standing. The neighbors looked at me with untranslatable expressions in depths of their eyes, just as you look at people who have recently served a prison term.

I bought Leopardi (his verse), next. He was an older writer. He did not cost so much. I could procure a copy for a few _lire_. I waited all one long hot summer for that book to come. I read his magnificent _Ode to the Moon_ by light of a prairie moon no whit less lovely, in a sky no less purple tinged and cloudless, than that of Italy.

_Dove vai silenziosa luna?_

When I read it over again today, and the _Hymn to an Asiatic Shepherd_, I see the superb, languid moons of autumn above the plains, as they looked long ago. I sweep back the years; I become young again, and happy. That is one of the great poems of the world. And written by one of the world’s exquisite artists.

Leopardi was a favorite of Gladstone. I translated then and published, Gladstone’s favorite among his verses, _The Infinite_.

Gladstone ranked him with masters of antiquity, Greeks of flawless technique. It was from the Greeks he learned his technique, lofty standards, unswerving measure of judgment.

When I finished reading what was inside the book, I read all the advertisements on both covers, over and over. There is no shabby writing done by people who have been thoroughly _thrashed_ through their Greek and Latin.

One can sit in reverence before the great soul of Leopardi, as one sits at foot of Attic marbles, dumb, worshipful, dazed with unreachable beauty. Someone should coin a phrase for him as fine as Gautier coined for Tertullian. I wrote to Italian publishers to send me lists of their new books. Out of these lists I got the same pleasure a hungry cat gets out of a canary in a lovely, gold, glittering, swinging cage.

It was months before I could buy another book. When at length the pennies were scraped together, the selection was careful and painstaking, like that of a miner sifting gold. I at length decided upon the _Odi Barbare_ of Carducci, to whom Dante’s words apply without strain: _Degli alti poeti ognore e lume_.

Reading Carducci gives something the sensation of looking at the etchings which Piranesi made of Rome; noble, imperial, history-freighted, unforgettable.

The only difference is that Piranese made his pictures upon paper, while Carducci chiseled upon resisting stone. I have always liked best the ode to Rome, entitled merely _Roma_.

_Roma ne l’aer tuo lancio l’anima altira Volante, accogli o Roma e avvolgi l’anima mia di luce, Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo, Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?_

To be sure, who would pause to chase fire-flies under the Arch of Titus? Who would care what one’s neighbors, what one’s relatives thought, when one could stand beneath that same Arch, and look up at the sky of Italy?

Carducci, like poets of the south, such as Apollinaire, (whose real name I believe savored of the north, being Ostrowsky) liked the romantic, serious minded German poets of long ago. He read and translated some of Klopstock, Platen, while a friend of Carducci’s translated him back again into Latin, where he really belongs.

If your pocketbook refuses a ticket to Italy, do not be unhappy. Read Carducci! Read d’Annunzio! There is usually somewhere an _Ersatz_, something to set, without discord, in place of the thing desired.

I wished to read English, American books, but they cost too much. They were seldom procurable at a price less than a dollar. There were almost none in the village. The few who owned books would not lend them. I read Shakespeare and Poe first in German. Admirable, adequate translations they were! The cheaply-priced books of the old world, of Italy, France, Germany, are a blessing. They are the well in the desert to them who are thirsty. I recall buying some plays of Alfieri, put out by Georgio Franz, Monaco, bearing the publishing date of 1846; tiny, tiny books they were, printed on grey newspaper paper with no separate outer cover. They cost about four pennies each. And I bought a large cheap Ariosto, on similar unbleached paper, which was priced at a quarter. The _Orlando Furioso_ is a charming fable. I can not commend it too highly. It has delighted me just as _Alice in Wonderland_ delights a child. It is a gracious, bright-hued, arabesque, that has kept color throughout the centuries.

Then I learned northern tongues from printed advertisements sent by a clothing house, for the purpose of selling men’s clothing. A pile of little books they sent; one in English, the others, literal translations into various northern tongues, to sell to untamed Westerners, whom New York’s more untamed imagination had evidently given wild tongues, civilized, conventional clothes. It was of course an incomparable piece of humor. But it was useful to me. It is a poor sail-boat indeed that can not take advantage of an opposing wind or any wind that happens to blow.

I used to hope, every New Year’s Day, to be able to subscribe to _Century_, or _Harper’s_, our leading magazines. But I never reached such height of reckless extravagance. I read Dante the oftener instead. I knew pages by heart. Repeating him aloud was all the music there was in the lonely place in which I lived. There was hardly a wheezy asthmatic melodian. Luck, you see, was not wholly absent.

Once an old Italian priest, noble of heart and mind, came to the lonely, white chapel of his faith, that had been erected upon the plains. He used to recite Dante with resonance, and a kind of regretful, tragic fury, in which unuttered homesickness centered. He was very old then. It must have been an half century since he had seen Italy. He could say superbly, too, the sonnets of Petrarch. He said oftenest the one beginning:

_La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora, e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate, e le cose presenti e le passate mi danno guerra, e le future ancora:_

I used to wonder what things, in the past, he was remembering when he said it. Because even a priest must remember! If his body dies, his mind does not.

Someone asked me one day why I read so much.

Are you ambitious?

No.

Why then?

For pleasure perhaps! I have no desire to know anything.

Then why?

It may be this. Some one asked the giraffe why his neck was long. He replied: Because the distance from head to body is great. I read because the distance from birth to death is great. Some way, it has to be filled in.

I wish now I knew those beautifully written tongues of the Orient, which scribes of old traced upon vellum, ribbon-books of Persia, the things hidden in alphabets which are lovely to the eye. I have seen pictures of Persian calligraphers as enchanting as paintings. Hand writing, as art, is dead. It belongs to the past. Perhaps sometime printed books will be just as dead, and replaced by something else, some diminutive form of moving-picture, some mechanical device attached to the head which will tell stories aloud for the ear, in the manner of a graphophone, and reflect them in pictures upon a paper fan. When we fly around the world in twenty-four hours, we can not waste time in anything so slow, old-fashioned, as reading. Taste will be perverted until something new is made. Something new will always be made. The possibilities of science are like time, endless. Perhaps nothing lovelier will be made for an older generation. But something new is sure to be. In twenty years there will be few book shops.

Talking about stylists, there are none that surpass the scientists. They have accuracy. They have economical fitting of word to thought, leaving no surplussage, shortage. I read them partly for this.

Changes are near. We are poised on edge of the old. It will not be long before man will live centuries, instead of a few paltry years. Then his brain will change more. It will make discards for the long game ahead. In the length of time I have lived, I can see the human skull is different. Its tendency is to grow higher above the ears, broader in front, shorter in length toward the rear. One of the things being discarded is _fear_.

Sympathy, many old exquisitenesses, went long ago. Fear would be bad baggage to carry in the prodigious transportation feats of the future, when man sets out to make week-end visits to the stars, look in upon Mars, shake hands with Madam Venus. Imagination, of the artistic kind, a kind of bastard first cousin of fear, will be eliminated. Imagination is practically gone now. Fact will so surpass it, it will be useless. It will be a kindergarten pupil in the school of kings.

There will not be need of fiction, nor fiction writers, when Science gets booted, spurred, ready for conquest. Fiction writers belong to the world’s generously believing childhood. Its mature, reasoning manhood is here. The simplest fact of Science will dim the shabby glamour of romance. It will put out its light, as the sun puts out the stars. Ah—the stories Science will tell! Science will unravel the long adventurous past of the lily, the rose, the orchid, the story of which will be unfolded logically from cells. The memories of the rose, the meditations of the lily, the pensive regrets of the violet, in days of the future, will make novels like Jack the Giant Killer, again children’s toys.

People are losing interest in novel-reading. And the stage is dead. I have watched it gradually grow weak year by year. Great novels and great plays are not being written. One of the causes of new writing, both verse and prose, is merely exhibition of disintegration. It is one more dropped stitch in the past. The rock is crumbling to sand. The inescapable alternating progression of the ages is at work visibly.

The speech of primitive peoples was monolithic. They hurled at each other boulders of uncut thought. From crumbling boulders, prepositions, conjunctions, tiny connective sand-like particles out of which we have made what we call speech was born. Even written Latin was blocks of uncompromising marble, in comparison with our written word.

Science will give power to look down vistas of time. It will poise us upon unthinkable heights. Perhaps too we shall learn to unchain the soul, then make it obedient messenger until it flies, Mercury like, through dead, forgotten days. Each human being will be his own novel. There can be nothing superior. There will be neither great nor little. We shall see, then talk at the same time, with friends on the other side of the globe, sitting comfortably in an easy chair. And perhaps upon other globes, across space! We shall live lonely lives of terrific cerebral power, which will change even shape of the skull, until to man of today we would look stranger than Martians. We are near that surprising future. In Metchnikow’s _Prolongation of Life_ we glimpse this romance quality. It is time for novelists to stop sharpening goosequills and join the scientists. Science is rose of a million petals, in whose unfolding the future lies. In that future the novelist, professional story teller, playwright, will be as useful as a bootjack to an old maid. Upon the outspread shop-counter of the mind will be found goods never seen, nor dreamed.

Art is dying. Something else must be made to light the heart. Only people with the wonder, the love of little children within them, can create it now, or understand it. They will perforce join the discards.

There are three pictures by Manet I saw in Paris which I have thought about too much. One, a woman in grey skirt, loose coat of the same color, her hand to her lips. She wears a small dark toque upon dark hair. A strange puritan grey for Manet to love, dominates the picture; a grey sensitive, fastidious, his somewhat English tempered soul created in midst of orgies of pagan Paris—Paris of unrestraint, aesthetic sensuality, intellectual freedom. It is an ascetic color that recalls old Spanish masters. It has the chill, the sternness of Cathedral cloisters. Spanish masters used similar grey, but from dissimilar impulse.

Manet was exquisite. He was the conversationally charming. But into depths of his soul no friend was permitted to peep. There is hint of this sensitive secretiveness in these three pictures, I remember. The gossiping, disclosing shorthand of self is in colors he chose. The picture of the woman is what one might call _artistically wise_. It keeps a reticence of brush which the maker’s facile, dissembling tongue did not have. Likewise it has something in common with Chinese portraits, whose distinguished personages wore woven robes of sad metallic hues. More than is grasped at a glance! Here is the direct transcribing! The same dignity. Here are sober colors Chinese noblemen wore. The picture is notable for absence of what is meretricious. Nothing for show. Nothing for compromise. It has the reliability of faith.

_Soap Bubbles_, by Manet. The same grey, but paler for youth; slightly sun-enriched. A truthful piece a Hollander might have signed. A boy by a table. He is blowing bubbles, whose airy grace delighted the maker. Dark, unrelieved background. Hues in the foreground that recall preciousness of ivory.

_Still Life_—Manet. Apples, pears; one dull, grey-green; one yellow rose; a black bottle; a tall white glass. Sober, against a dull background. Painted in low key, a key chosen for grey-yellow he loved.

How far removed from the blue-grey of Whistler! It is founded upon gift for reality of the Latin, his basic vision for things as they are.

Manet was gloomy beneath the flowering of his moods. An interesting article could be written on the _greys_ of great masters; upon colors that are coefficients of mind. I see difference between those used by Velasquez, Greco, Goya, and those used in France, in the period of 1830, or in Holland, in the Seventeenth Century. Or the grey created by Manet.

I saw the other day a large, lovely Cazin, kept in higher key than is customary, which is Schumannesque. We do not find the dull, wet grass we know; the grey, sage-green of some sad world’s end he has made his.

This picture shows a blond, sun-dusted field on a hot day. A field whose gold, whose perpendicular light is dulled by its own splendor. The field forms the foreground. The background one end of a low farm house, whose coral roof all but touches the ground. A low, green tree makes out the house-line, with aid of one of his windmills. Above, blue heat of noon; happy, white, harvest clouds.

No. 59—A Schreyer. White Arab horses; mettlesome, fine. Eloquent outline of horsemen. A red bournous that lights the picture. A heavy, heat-smoking Algerian sky.

Diaz and Harpignies are represented. Rousseau has a ruddy-tinted Forest of Fontainbleau.

Ziem is here! This is a charming canvas. _Venice of my dreams_—in the distance! One large building; cream, rose flushed. Foreground—the sea. A bold, lovely, cobalt sea. Sky of gold. The rich effect of enamel, and muted music.

No. 31—An unusual Harpignies. Trees in middle distance. Under them, ripe level grain, with cold, clear light. In foreground little figures; clear cut, in brown, in dull red.

Diaz shows merry grouped women in a wood. They wear rich costumes. The jeweled splendor of Monticelli is here. Ballard Williams looked upon pictures like this.

There are portraits from England. But I am not in the mood for them. I prefer tawny, rolling, desert hills, the blue harbor of Algiers as Fromentin paints them, or rich autumn woodlands of Rousseau.

No. 48—The dull, storm beaten, resentful black-green of Jacque. _Splendid!_

No. 58—Ziem again! Stately old Venetian palaces I love. They border a canal of cool, even flowing water. On the right, a red building, which peculiarly enough brings touch of the exactitude, coldness of Canaletto, and which I do not like. The sky is happy. Sun flecked, dappled ... this sky bends over Venice!

No. 54—Ziem. Again superb. At his best. In distance the long, elegant, aristocratic line of the Sea’s Queen City, Venice, which he knew better than any one else. White buildings flushed rosy. Beyond, violet-blue. High above, a sky, clear, sweet, but touched with quiver of heat. In the foreground a grassy space and there a tree, (superbly painted) whose top is touched with rose-hued light. Beneath the tree, happy figures wearing vivid colors. High, light, lyric note. Love.

The Corots are of his late manner, when he had grown sentimental, and thought retrospectively. I like best the pictures of Italy he did in youth.

No. 5—A small Pasini. It makes me regret my pocket holds doughnuts not dollars. Delightful picture! A Moorish doorway; white, eloquently curved, bordered with mosaics in faded blue. In front, an Arab, whose red upper garment outdazzles the ruby when the sun pierces its heart. A laugh of color! Pure, delicious, lyric.

Quintillian is a fine phrase maker. He speaks of the milky exuberance of Livy. What could be more _juste_! If one could forget the Latin text, one would think it the printed page of some incisive French critic. Writers who come at end of periods that have been æsthetically productive, are alike, just as, perhaps, peaches and pears, in the youth of Nero, or William the Silent. Few make figures of speech more startlingly brilliant, vigorous in casting light, than Quintillian. They are exploding suns.

Quintillian declares the evenly sustained mediocrity of Apollonious is not to be despised. To quote him verbatim: “The old comedy retains alone the pure grace of Attic diction.” He means Aristophanes, Eupolis, Cratinus.

The power to distinguish, differentiate, at command of Quintillian is marvellous. I seldom have greater pleasure than his pages have been giving me. Quintillian knows how to balance meaning. He splits an hair evenly with the thin edge of wit. He possessed calm, dispassionate, critical, penetrating intellect. There are few more reliable judges of men’s minds. He does not become color of the thing he reads, as small worms take color of what they feed upon. Writers of the antique world stimulate mind. Modern writers seldom do this. They are more likely to enervate me, or make me weary. The old are life giving.

That sensitive prose of Loti is expression of a tradition that goes far back in Latin life. It is in Ovid. It is in the early Italians. It is in songs of Provençe. It is in early French _prosateurs_. From Chateaubriand the road to him lies clear. There is no great stylist who leaps up unheralded. The mind must form a chain with some past, to which self-forgetful love has welded him.

Loti has been faithful to the garden of the soul God gave him. He kept out of it things foreign. Nothing ugly grows there. But it sheltered the beauty of the world.