Part 17

I have not cared a picayune to see the kings, potentates, princes, who have come to America on various successfully disguised errands of selfishness, to visit, and at the same time to gather stray dollars. I did long to see the face of Loti. I wanted to look into eyes that had looked understandingly upon the earth’s loveliness. I wanted, too, to look upon the man who can weave such superb tissue out of words.

I stood gladly outside the Waldorf in the rain. I waited for hours. I watched across the street from the public school he was going to visit. But I did not see him. My consolation had to be what I read in the papers when I reached home that night, his farewell to America: _All the winds of winter cry me home to Turkestan!_ Such a sentence ought to be consolation enough for any one.

Loti has seen the world. Its poets, princes, have entertained him. His eyes have rested upon the fallen glory of the monarchies of the past. Now, like Alexander, he sighs for new ones.

What a delight in the long ago, upon the burnt, barren plains, where Presbyterianism thrived like a green bay tree in Purgatory, were the early books of Loti: _Pécheur d’Island_, _Pasquala Ivanovich_, _Madame Chrysanthème_, _Fleurs d’Ennui_, and an earlier one about an adventure in the South Seas, the name of which I can not recall. It was Loti’s first published book.

I was always vexed that Presbyterianism thrived upon sand. It was connected, in my mind, with unloveliness, both of matter and spirit. There was never a surface that refracted so bitterly the light, as the white front of that church. It had three sharp points, in a row, that stuck up ready and willing to impale sinners. The priests of Presbyterianism are stormy and iron hearted.

Once Lily Langtry came here, to the plains, in a private car, with Frederick Gebhardt. They remained a number of days, to go hunting in the Indian Territory. I used to follow her around upon the street, for the joy of looking up at her face. I lived in the desert you know! Her face looked, in those days, like blue-eyed flowers that grow upon the fields of England, where rain falls without stress, and mists come.

Salvini, the younger, came likewise to go hunting. I was overjoyed to meet him. He was hero of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, come to life. Brown, supple, gay, and young! Nothing ever came again after that, except the wind, sand....

But hope grew astonishingly. The less soil there is, the better hope grows. Hope is what you might call the indestructible mushroom of the soul. If I were a poet, instead of faultfinder, it might impel me to an ode to courage. But here’s the rub! I might find difficulty in distinguishing between courage and folly.

Everyone was a prospective millionaire, in good old days of wind and sand. The strangest thing was that the entire state was drunk. What was it drunk upon? You see Kansas was like the Isle of Champagne, in the story by that name, where each individual was intoxicated. Only here they were drunk on air instead of champagne. Air came cheap and did not have to be bottled. Champagne cost money, and a bottle. The State was drunk on glittering, mirage-making air. It enfolded the minds with rosy glamour just as it enfolded the landscape. Prohibiting fact lost power. The penniless wanderer in his prairie schooner, felt magic of it, as readily as the dweller in the village. It inflamed the brain through the eye. It wrapped the mind in rosy vision. Just beyond the next land-fold, lay prosperity, the culmination of dreams.

That is the reason Kansas grew wild political fads, long-haired and long-legged, soap-box orators. It was upon air like this, upon which oratory could thrive. No one could see realities. Corn, cabbages, and cranks grew to monstrous size. Being poor today did not matter, because tomorrow we were going to tickle Caesar under the chin.

There was unworn power in the untilled earth that gave vigor. It keeps some of it still. Today there is something there of youth that can not grow old, joy that does not become tinsel, or cheap, an unfading fire in the heart. What can humanity do without youth?

It leaked out through the post office, which was one small unpainted room with a hole in the wall, for things to go into or come out of, that I was buying packages of wicked books from Europe. The neighbors called to investigate. They carried away the startling report that it was packages of _yellow-back novels_. _Probably, highly immoral!_ One of these books disappeared. It happened to be a volume of Bossuet’s _Funeral Orations_. It did not come back. They burned it for safety’s sake. The town, however, was saved.

Bossuet, whose silenced voice helped mark the decline of the great age of Louis XIV, had been confessor, in court circles, to fair ladies of France. But I will wager that even he would have been surprised at human inventiveness in the fields of sin, at what happened to his orations for the dead bodies of these same ladies. They felt the red rag of revolution was as evident in these books they could not read, as the red flannel around the lantern the old, bent, fat Santa Fé night-watchman carried, which spotted the long, lonely streets with round dots of light. After that I became a dangerous person. The eyes that were in the habit of glancing at me sideways were bright and shining with disapproval.

But I was deliriously happy through it all, as long as pennies held out with which to buy books, and those magnificent, low, yellow moons of summer swung majestically out of the unknown to poise above the plains. I have never forgotten the feel of the warm winds of those nights of summer so long ago, upon my arms, upon my shoulders. It is one of the things I would like to know again.

The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking. The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges, until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s trained seeing.

The more we enjoy a picture, the more, for that fleeting moment, we are in harmony with the mind that produced it. Pictures flash us out of our dull selves into clear, unvexed dominance. There is healing, health, in beauty. It represents that from which imperfections have been taken. Pictures are temperamental tuning forks.

Small, paper-bound, cheaply-priced books containing prints should be as common upon reading tables as papers. It is not easy to measure the good of contact with the silent things of art.

I like prints. I have something that resembles affection for them. That is why I regret that the skies of Piranesi are troubled. I wanted them to be glowing, clear.

The simply treated skies of Le Père please me. They are barely marked.

The etched line of Pennell is feminine. When he etched the Panama Series he forced it to Brangwyn bravoura, for which it is not suited. They are not art, these plates, whether the initial be large or small.

The etchings of Piranesi resemble the musical compositions of Handel. Both made temples stern, lofty, with mystery in the depths.

The etchings of Daubigny recall Virgil, in the _Bucolics_. The lovely, Latin land where cities are not near, fields are cultivated, and little rivers draw water birds! The line of Daubigny is gentle, loving. It is of the unforced rhythm of Virgil.

The line of Haden is cold, pure.

The line of Whistler is fretful, nervous, capricious. But marvellously sensitive! If he is not big, genial, he is exquisite. For one fretful moment Whistler could love gleam of a surface. He never at any time cared what was beneath. He could not hold calmness long enough to love anything into serenity. He possessed audacity, as much as skill. There floated before his keen, sensitive mind, memory of mighty Japanese, Chinese craftsmen, who outdistanced him by force of love, that self-sacrificing humility, which makes men great. He liked to startle. He liked to shock by technical surprises. He liked to lash observers with virtuosity.

He was a Czar bent upon forcing submission. With his genius there was commingled the trickster, mountebank. Nothing Whistler etched had weight. He could not bother with a vulgar thing. Instead it had witchery. The butterfly in flight!

I like the wet streets of Buhot when restless clouds are reflected on them, or the fleeting carriage of some Parisian _mondaine_. They are refreshing. He loves rain as Hiroshige loved it. But he shows it differently because he is of a different race. He has not the childlike sincerity of the Japanese. The sad wisdom of the decadent Latin is in him. Shadows are black which speeding wheels of Parisian beauties leave. But memory fills distance with magic, with wistfulness.

In the dim streets, the twilight corners of the Paris of Meryon, dwells old French romance. Gay, interesting, pathetic figures of Balzac! Dumas the Elder, Hugo! It is the Paris that inspired Baudelaire, Gautier.

Etching has humming-bird grace; it has poignancy and intimacy. One holds it to the heart like a violin. It catches the moment which vanishes. It holds cruelly, derisively, the flash of sunlight that caressed some surface we regret but love. Etching is near the soul.

There is a print of an actor by Kiyotsune which shows pink of Watteau made strange by being seen by the Orient’s black beetle eyes. This same artist has a red dark, bronzed, brutal, that rings with metal blare.

Looking at the collection of Japanese prints, large and fine, in the Boston Museum, I have had a good time. I found browns etherealized to grey, with vast, uncanny, spacial suggestiveness. This is background of Horunobu. He has an orange I remember. It has lost its fire, to be sure, with years; vicissitudes of change. Now it keeps merely memory of some sun of summer of long ago. He combines this with what a prosaic person would call green, but which is a Roman olive orchard in the autumn. He has colors that float with maddening indecision between pink, yellow, brown, grey, blue, green, to unite the shores of the unseen, to surprise then delight.

Koriusai has the weary, meditative violet of gay fête-days that fail. And a red, full of joy as throat of a thrush. I wish they could sing me back, these music-winged colors, out of the sad, beseiging, present, through radiant centuries, to some fabulous, gold-lacquered Palace of Tang!

Kiyonaga made a print where cherry blossoms veil with pink mist the shores of the Sumida, and women wear plain robes of faded hues while their faces keep archaic calm.

Kiyonaga is unique for reds. He has widened with them the gamut of emotion. Some reds are tragic; some terrible. Some are hesitating. Some are sullen, brooding, regretful. Some weigh heavily with memory of deeds not forgotten. Some indiscreet, too full of meaning.

I know a print by Shunsho that makes me cool. It is green, black, grey. There is an old man with twist of coral silk about his waist. The green, one faint stain, gives refreshing sensation of accumulated springs. In the grey I have watched the monstrous blackening clouds of midsummer tempests swing.

I know an Utamaro, which is the loveliest thing in existence! Two tall women. One wears enchanting faded pink, one of the unforgettable colors of poet-print-makers; the misty brown that floats above paper with silken shining threads, only Japan could make. The added splendor of incomparable accents of black. The pauses in South American tango dancers, are like these black accents in Eastern art.

If you think black is just black, go to the East. Learn! There are blacks that surpass in depth, mystery, a thousand nights of Egypt.

Inexplainable, dreadful, has been the fate of the dreamers of the world who have carried to heights the power of vision. A curse followed them, because they dared cross boundaries of the commonplace. To look long upon the sun, is to go blind. I am thinking of Heine.

Heine liked his place of exile, France. It was a Promised Land for Children of the Spirit. He hated England, because England did not possess mental flexibility. Lermontov, the Russian poet, disliked England too, and for the same reason.

In Heine there was the broad culture of Germany, lightness of the Latin, and the commanding passion of the Hebrew. The first thing I did in Paris, was to search out his grave. No one in Paris was more alive, more real, than he.

He blended the sad, serious, comic, light, in much the same way as Gogol. This too is trait of Hungarians.

There were many men of stormy revolutionary mind in Heine’s day. The spirit of Byron was abroad in the world. That which we call modernism, was breaking through prejudice.

The last time Heine went out of doors, he staggered to the Louvre, in order to look once more upon his beloved Venus. He burst into tears at the sight. I wonder if he recalled then his youth’s proud, boastful words: “I have never had but two loves: _Venus, and the French Revolution!_” What did he think when worn to a ghost he lay dying, and they intoned beside him the hoary desert songs of Judea?

Heine and Goethe, when they met repelled each other. How could two men be more dissimilar! Goethe was Greek; Heine, first of the moderns. The Hebrew is the only man who is ever able accurately to estimate the day in which he lives. Not geographical spaces, but centuries lay between Goethe and Heine. He is the only one who can focus, with perspective, the present.

Paris was full of commanding figures during Heine’s exile. There were Ary Scheffer, and Delacroix. Horace Vernet was exhibiting for the first time. Felix Mendelssohn, an old friend of Heine’s from Berlin, was here; Malebran, Rossini, Meyerbeer. There was a brilliant crowd of exiled Poles. Liszt and Chopin were both here. It was an engaging Paris. It has at no time been greater. And Heine was not least; slender, handsome, blond, young, reading aloud his verses in the salons of fashion, the verses whose structure he had learned from Uhland. He knew Victor Hugo, de Musset, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Beranger. Since Heine died, the world has had no great idealist.

As wit, Heine ranks with Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift. Of such superb ability there can be but one to a race. These four men I have mentioned represent Judea, France, Spain, and England. Heine reached two heights; wit and lyric poet. He knew how to take what was best in artistic France, intellectual Germany, and then blend them.

Brandes compares Goethe with Heine, to detriment of the latter. What he is really comparing without seeing it, is two ages of time.

Liszt said, in describing rare evenings spent at Chopin’s, when Chopin consented to play to his friends: “Heine, the saddest of humorists listened with the interest of a fellow countryman to the narrations made by Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted his ethereal fancy, and of which he, too, had explored the beautiful shores. At a word, at a glance, at a tone, Chopin and Heine could understand each other: The musician replied to questions murmured in his ear by the poet, giving in tones the most surprising revelations from unknown regions, about that glorious goddess, Genius.” Ziem used to look in upon these evenings at the home of Chopin, whenever he could tear himself away, for any length of time, from the alluring City by the Adriatic, he painted again and again.

The enemies who resist us help us more than the friends who flatter us. They perform the service of unpaid gardeners.

The art madness of Germany was astonishing about the time of Heine. The young wife of Stieglitz, the poet, killed herself so that grief might make her husband great. This gives us key to that gloomy, melancholy north from which a new, a more complex art, was to come, first to oppose and then to surprise the clean-lined Mediterranean classicism, with its plasticity, its reasoned assurance.

People of genius are people of intuition. Plodders are the intellectual. Now scientists rule. They are trying first to isolate _self_, then exploit it. This is a period of egotism, when man keeps the importance of the microbe, while he feels like the mountain. Money has no meaning as a measure of excellence.

In a city of huge size like New York, pressure upon the individual is great. It equals ocean pressure, upon deep-sea life. It deforms. It makes shapeless.

Gigantic pieces of engineering shock the senses. People suffer from surfeit of everything. They can not indulge the luxury of longing. They are overfed. They have mental indigestion. Satiety comes. Individuals, in so large a city, become sea sand; uniform, uninteresting, individually inconsequential. Such center of prodigious living becomes the wilderness, in spite of law, a place where savages may roam, the most terrible, civilization’s savages; men who prey upon men. They have become beasts. They people solitudes. Heights, depths, touch then blend. Ambition, inspiration, self-respect, die. No poet can live here, then write poetry. (Only the painter, the etcher, seem to survive.) Look at Percy McKaye for example! When he came from his wooded New England hills, he had gifts of a poet. What does he write now? I would not like to name it. To be humble I do not think I could. It is bare of poetry. His _Washington_ is not a creditable high school performance. It is almost as bad as Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_! Success kills too often today. George Sterling was wise enough to get out of New York, to Carmel, the blue sea, the mountains. I recall a sonnet-sequence of his, which is the best of American make.

Consider, too, Tarkington after he wrote _Beaucaire_, and turned to New York, quick dollars. _Beaucaire_ was writing. Compare it with his later prose!

When conflict for life is keen, not only is love between man and man impossible, but kindliness, justice, friendship. Man becomes prey of man. His emotions are those of the beast that destroys. For the body to live, the soul dies.

In well advertised benevolent institutions, the normal feelings of humanity are shut, in order to keep them alive. Soon we shall go to institutions sight-seeing, on Sunday, as we go to the Zoo, to observe queer, useless appendages, that once belonged to man. _À la_ incubator method, they are kept alive. They are as surprising to Twentieth Century eyes as the One Horse Shay. In the future noble feelings, (like exotic flowers) will be kept under glass of hot-houses. In no other way can they survive.

In New York the mean is sacrificed. There is nothing that is good. It is best or else it is worst. The people live, breathe, and have their being in superlatives. We have become a poster art, where everything is black or white. Intermediary shading disappears. Values are not considered. Distinctions are lost. In such a multitude, mind, manners, levels, disappear. Compilation takes place of life.

We pose as the world’s _Wunderkind_. We are looked over, called _l’enfant terrible_, while we throw bouquets, dollars at them and waste champagne we ought to save. The doings of this self-conscious _Wunderkind_ occupy the front elevation of illustrated papers.

Other cities permit you to be yourself. New York does not. It begins to set seal upon you. It makes changes in body, in mind. Its distances, its streets, its miles of gallery floors, exhaust the flesh. Its emotional appeal is great. After weariness has done wrong to body, brain, it dulls with superfluity. Buildings of excessive size stun instead of stimulate. They who endure it, survive, become of a separate race; a highly specialized race. They are deformed like athletes who manned the triremes of Caesar. It is a city without national stamp of any people. It is made, to wonder at.

It is so huge the individual is inconsequential. He feels this. It reacts upon him. He loses hope. A less fine pride envelopes him. Cabbages of course grow largest in gardens. There is no other city where money, its power, is so worshipped. There is no other, where life is discounted, where the young so speedily become the old. There is no other place where life just as life, counts so little. Here labor loses dignity, because it is looked down upon. It becomes ignoble. It slips back too soon to that thing called _servitude_. Visions of useless, unearned wealth breed discontent. Into the port of New York the splendors of the world are poured. Superlatives are standards: highest buildings, the largest shops, greatest park, the most expensive houses. Taste, discrimination, weaken.

Races, religions are poured together like left-overs from a boardinghouse table, to make soup for beggars. Honor is lessened. The premium is so high man cannot buy. Even if man has not honor, he must have meat. Honor is old-fashioned, a rag. Before the eyes that see, minds that judge, merit is nothing; system everything. In his palmiest days Louis the Fourteenth was not acclaimed as New York, city of democratic America, acclaims the dollar, and only what the dollar buys.

I can not read Romain Rolland, Claudel, nor O. Henry. If I had to be punished with one of the three I think I should choose Rolland.

It is too bad that in the letters of Seneca, in which he mentions Pompeii, he does not describe the city. He saw it in its heydey. What a picture he could draw! Not one single glimpse can I get from his letters, however I search. What a Rome it was that had passed in long, glittering pageant before his eyes! He is old, weary of life, as he writes. He tries to prop himself up with stoic mind. Like the majority of thinkers, he learned poverty is best. He declares a life of continued prosperity is a Dead Sea. Lao Tzu on one side of the globe, the Roman thinker on the other declare: _He is not poor who has little, but he who desires much._

Again Seneca writes: _Riches keep you from wisdom. But poverty is free and without care._ The Latin letters of Seneca, and Cicero, have given me a kind of courage I can not procure elsewhere. Cicero is master stylist. There are climaxes in the orations not to be surpassed. I have liked the winged, broad visioned, eagle-mind that contemplated old age in _De Senectute_.

There will be no more essays like _De Amicitia_, because friendship does not exist. It perished with the _toga virilis_, the muscular manhood of Rome. Powerful dramatic anger is gone. And glittering, sword-swinging satire! Where is a Firdusi to write against Sultan Mahmoud? Small, base, worm-like, eating envies crawl in, in place of kings. Not the noble, fearless lion, but the crawling lizard keeps assuredly today the palaces where Mahmoud gloried.

Greek and Latin are out of fashion. However, I do not know of many things of which I should be so proud, as to be called, _Greek Scholar_. And then merit the name.

The finest piece of translating in modern English is Curtin’s translation of the _Polish Trilogy_ of Sienkiewicz. It can not be adequately praised nor the publisher who has issued it worthily again and again.

There are few better judges of weight of words, stretch of margins. Sienkiewicz has merry characters as waggish as Falstaff, as boisterously humorous as Rabelais, and quite as hilarious as Abu-l-Hasan, who delighted in disguising grotesques and the threading of long mysterious alley-ways, in gay _Arabian Nights_, in which famous story collection there are no greater characterizations than Sienkiewicz’ _Zagloba_, Prince of Liars. Almost all literatures that have been great have produced, in art, one immortal liar. We are not great. But we have George Washington and a cherry tree, which I have always considered one of the divinely stupid stories of the world. This has, in America, one parallel in stupidity, Henry Ford’s collection of pumps.