Part 20

“_Victimas de un sistema_.... Victims of an educational system which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,” writes Rodriguez.

It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew in childhood.

Of April in Caracas, he is enthusiastic: “It is a spectacle worthy of admiration, when the acacias flower, and trees wear crowns of purple and robes of flame!”

Sometimes Rodriguez warns against the dangers of democracies in words which remind us of León Daudet or De Tocqueville. There is no national soul, he says. And nothing is done to develop it. In Venezuela there are three ethnic unities which are hostile to any united progress.

He has written glowingly of the days of tropic summer. Again I translate from memory: “The cicadas sang. From every tree, every bush, rang their shrill announcement of summer. Near and far, every spot of green, every twig, leaf, was a strident trill, inescapable, like the high, glorious notes of crystal chords vibrating with frenzy until they snap. From the scanty vegetation on the edge of gorges, which, toward the north, divide capriciously the city ... swelled monotonous, sharp song.... From all points of the compass it came. And in Caracas, from every _patio_, surged the deafening song of the penetrating choir.”

Albert, idle in his studio, thought it was the tortured cry of a land sick with fever, praying the implacable blue for rain. The land was burned. This heat of fever quivered everywhere like a thirst. The fever leaped with violent color-cry to top boughs of the _búcares_. It leaped in blinding bloom to tall _tolu-trees_, to the acacias, which were breaking with blossoms. Nowhere in the city nor the forests could one see trees that were not covered with flowers, purple, red, and the hues of flame. From his window he confronted _tolu-trees_ completely enveloped like armor in purple petals.

Both Loti and Barrés suffered from a consuming fear of death, says Daudet. They were constantly preoccupied with the thought that some-time life for them would be no more. Loti fought the fear with change of place, traveling; Barrés, with political affairs. Both were fêted and flattered while they suffered continual boredom. That accomplished Portuguese, Fidelino de Figueiredo, declares that it was boredom which caused the death of Louis Cotter, historian, who wrote _Splendor and Decay of the House of Austria_.

He died of mental weariness because he could not adapt himself to the mediocrity of a provincial town, its petty quarrels, its local injustice, its horror and hatred of any kind of superiority.

The brilliant Portuguese goes on to say that it was this attitude of mind which caused the French Revolution, and which is now beginning to afflict the minds of men again, with close of a period of time. People sense dumbly that the treasures of emotion, treasures stored by rich soul life (being rapidly destroyed) can never be reassembled. The result means death of culture. Marie Henrietta once wrote that _to live_ does not mean to be upon the Earth either a brief time or a long time, but to be able _to feel_, to register a great range of sensations.

Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming.

A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard, Ballesteros de Martos. His _Artistas Españoles Contemporaneos_ is a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels is _Luz en el Camino_. He was one of the editors of that brilliant Spanish review, _Cervantes_.

I like this from Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_: “The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding ages.”

Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born, however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay William Hudson, in _Abbé Pierre’s People_, owns that graceful, alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts, the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but distinguished philosopher, thinker.

Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illumine _tædiam vitæ_ we have gain, efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place to place, _physical restlessness_. Monkeys in tropic forests move swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they have no mind and can not _live_. The people whose physical movements are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great Confusion!

There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice.

I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing from tall tropic trees.

Ellis Parker Butler declares _pigs is pigs_. Then monkeys must be monkeys, tails long or short.

I used to know a little shop in Paris where they kept only books about imaginary travels, travels that never existed. This kind of writing seems to have been done for a little while in the Eighteenth Century. One is about an imaginary trip to the pole and published in Amsterdam in 1723. Abbé Bordelon published a little earlier, a book about a hypochondriac who was forced to travel all the time whether he wanted to or not. Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_ belongs to this period. Louis Holberg wrote, about the middle of the Eighteenth Century, describing a strange journey to the interior of the earth. There was an Arab philosopher, by name Ibn Tophail, earlier by a century, in the late Seventeenth Century, who wrote one of the most fascinating travel books in the world. It tells about a boy shipwrecked on a desert island south of Asia, who by means of travel and contemplation, trained his mind to comprehension of the verities, and scientific knowledge. The writer himself had an amazing life spent partly in Africa and partly as Secretary to the Governor of Granada.

Novels which give us the souls of races and the ancient historical progression of peoples such as: Reymont’s _Peasants_, Hamsun’s _Growth of the Soil_, are precious, powerful things. In no other way can we know thoroughly other lands and them who dwell there. A series of novels is being published in South America by that accomplished artist and man of letters, Manuel Galvez, which does just that. He is writing a series of fascinating historical novels of the wars in Paraguay, and of life in that great rich country Argentina. At this moment the Paraguay Trilogy is ready. The books are _Los caminos de la muerte_, _Humaitá_ and _Tierra de espectos_. One of his earlier books, _El solar de la raza_, won the Argentine Prize. It is a travel book of old Spain. There are eloquent pages about Castile, strong, proud, noble, profound, whose glories Galvez says he has faith to believe will be duplicated again in Argentina. In this, Galvez has written as eloquently of time-stained, tragic Toledo as Zorilla, or Blanco-Fombona. As prelude to his description of the old stronghold of Spanish cities he says: “Now we are living in an epoch of transition; it is the imperialism of energy under two expressions, namely, will and muscle, while the older civilization of Spain was founded upon imperialism of the spirit. There the soul dominated. In modern cities of the New World people live preoccupied exclusively with material things; sensual pleasures, health, fashion, the acquiring of wealth. In the old days, in old cities such as Toledo, people were preoccupied with questions of the soul, God. Today we have the combative man, the pioneer, the self-made. We have epics of multitudes, whose interests are wholly material.”

“Toledo affirms for us the indelible quality of grief. It is one more illustration of the sudden end of things human. Even the stones of Toledo keep telling that life is continuous death. Cities, philosophies, glories of empire, books—everything—die. In time the civilization of Europe will pass into oblivion too. Later, American civilization will disappear, and with it the civilization of Argentina. Then some writer a thousand years hence will make a soulful and elegiac description of the end. He will find in the abandoned streets of my beloved Buenos Aires the same lofty sorrow, the same memories of the past, which, in nights I can now never forget, the stones of Great Toledo have revealed to me.”

Galvez is the author of many powerful novels of Argentina of today. Among them _El mal metafísico_, _La vida multiple_, _La sombra del convento_, _La tragedia de un hombre fuerte_, _Nacha Regules_. To me his most powerful book is _El cántico espiritual_. A book that has qualities which permit it to rank with the great novels of the world. It is the story of a young South American artist who goes to Paris to live, to continue his profession. There he falls in love with a rich, beautiful, but married woman from his own Argentina. For many years this love dominates his life. He pays court to her. He tries to make her his mistress, but without success. There are pages and pages of noble and inspired writing, rich revelations into the depths of an impassioned heart. After the years they both go back to Argentina again, to Buenos Aires, and here he finds out that she is ready to yield to his pleas and become his mistress. Then he finds his love for her is a thing of the spirit not of the flesh. He finds that she was merely the protective star that watched over his ambitions, his art. These years of sorrow had without his knowing it become years of progression for him, in which he had left behind forever his longing for the inferior beauty and had passed on to a nobler thing. Beauty Absolute, which is divine. In _El cántico espiritual_, Galvez writes (the close of the novel) the triumph of the spirit over the material, the triumph of an ideal world over a world of reality. It is the long pilgrimage of the soul toward the Absolute, the love of Dante for Beatrice, the philosophy of Socrates in the Banquet. It should be the hymn of a love that was pure, love eternal, a thing of comprehension of the soul, powerful enough to disdain the flesh. At their last meeting when he takes farewell of her, Suzanna, in his studio in Buenos Aires, he says: (This is the close of the novel.) I quote: “For this work which I wish to create, Suzanna, we must be pure. We must forget the flesh and the body. We must be able to life up our souls to the Great Beauty.”

“The darkness was drawing closer about them. They did not light the light. After Morris touched her brow fleetingly with his lips, his face again wore its noble ecstatic expression, his eyes too were strangely revealing of some richer happiness that seemed foreign, far.... With the eyes of the spirit he had confronted the Beauty which is Absolute. He had progressed from the love of one woman toward love of all human things, and from old art which was limited, to a comprehension of the essence of all art, the Divine.”

This book is nobly felt, nobly executed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Quotation marks have been added to the following paragraphs to be consistent with similar occurrences within the text: Pg 7: “There is ... national soul.” Pg 8: “Lima! Your ... of Spain.” Pg 27: “Il y a dans ... Dame Reality.)” Pg 31: “Il me fallut ... and Vitellius.” Pg 41: “Figure aux ... last God.”

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 3: ‘Eightheenth Century’ replaced by ‘Eighteenth Century’. Pg 5: ‘a Portugese critic’ replaced by ‘a Portuguese critic’. Pg 7: ‘some the same’ replaced by ‘some of the same’. Pg 11: ‘of great variety’ replaced by ‘of a great variety’. Pg 17: ‘the Pyranees and’ replaced by ‘the Pyrenees and’. Pg 17: ‘Pyranean village’ replaced by ‘Pyrenean village’. Pg 25: ‘a sered and wasteful winderness’ replaced by ‘a seered and wasteful wilderness’. Pg 26: ‘irridescent, like the’ replaced by ‘iridescent, like the’. Pg 29: ‘Lamertine wrote’ replaced by ‘Lamartine wrote’. Pg 30: ‘unbelieveable charm’ replaced by ‘unbelievable charm’. Pg 31: ‘of Eighteenth’ replaced by ‘of the Eighteenth’. Pg 32: ‘Gallilean Prophet’ replaced by ‘Galilean Prophet’. Pg 35: ‘English clerygman’ replaced by ‘English clergyman’. Pg 41: ‘shores of Gallilee’ replaced by ‘shores of Galilee’. Pg 46: ‘Salâmmbo’ replaced by ‘Salammbô’. Pg 64: ‘by many seiges’ replaced by ‘by many sieges’. Pg 69: ‘the hysop of the’ replaced by ‘the hyssop of the’. Pg 74: ‘Heine’ day was’ replaced by ‘Heine’s day was’. Pg 75: ‘in the quartrain’ replaced by ‘in the quatrain’. Pg 79: ‘exclamed with joy’ replaced by ‘exclaimed with joy’. Pg 79: ‘thanks to me like’ replaced by ‘thanks to men like’. Pg 81: ‘quartrains of Persia’ replaced by ‘quatrains of Persia’. Pg 82: ‘After period of’ replaced by ‘After the period of’. Pg 82: ‘born on the crest’ replaced by ‘borne on the crest’. Pg 82: ‘in his Rubiayat’ replaced by ‘in his Rubaiyat’. Pg 84: ‘into a quartrain’ replaced by ‘into a quatrain’. Pg 87: ‘loved banks of’ replaced by ‘loved the banks of’. Pg 95: ‘with new irridescence’ replaced by ‘with new iridescence’. Pg 96: ‘at stated intervales’ replaced by ‘at stated intervals’. Pg 97: ‘Man of Weimer’ replaced by ‘Man of Weimar’. Pg 98: ‘Pagannini is a good’ replaced by ‘Paganini is a good’. Pg 99: ‘Zucker und Zaubar’ replaced by ‘Zucker und Zauber’. Pg 101: ‘Marcel Schwab’ replaced by ‘Marcel Schwob’. Pg 112: ‘accused Bryon of’ replaced by ‘accused Byron of’. Pg 113: ‘of metamorphasis’ replaced by ‘of metamorphosis’. Pg 115: ‘dust of milleniums’ replaced by ‘dust of millenniums’. Pg 117: ‘Aristophenes’ replaced by ‘Aristophanes’ (twice). Pg 118: ‘L’Enchanteur Pourissant’ replaced by ‘L’Enchanteur Pourrissant’. Pg 119: ‘que Nietzche’ replaced by ‘que Nietzsche’. Pg 119: ‘entusiasm por’ replaced by ‘entusiasmo por’. Pg 125: ‘of connoiseurship’ replaced by ‘of connoisseurship’. Pg 128: ‘crumbling Colisseum’ replaced by ‘crumbling Colosseum’. Pg 130: ‘Riccarda Huch’ replaced by ‘Ricarda Huch’. Pg 132: ‘die Fusze eines’ replaced by ‘die Füsse eines’. Pg 133: ‘his is virtuousity’ replaced by ‘his is virtuosity’. Pg 135: ‘Aristophenes’ replaced by ‘Aristophanes’. Pg 142: ‘laisser choir dans’ replaced by ‘laissé choir dans’. Pg 148: ‘he is priest’ replaced by ‘he is a priest’. Pg 149: ‘in French journels’ replaced by ‘in French journals’. Pg 149: ‘It is case’ replaced by ‘It is a case’. Pg 152: ‘in ancestry of’ replaced by ‘in the ancestry of’. Pg 159: ‘been throughly’ replaced by ‘been thoroughly’. Pg 161: ‘Are you ambitions’ replaced by ‘Are you ambitious’. Pg 164: ‘is Schumanesque’ replaced by ‘is Schumannesque’. Pg 166: ‘quote him verbatum’ replaced by ‘quote him verbatim’. Pg 166: ‘Aristophenes’ replaced by ‘Aristophanes’. Pg 166: ‘From Chauteaubriand’ replaced by ‘From Chateaubriand’. Pg 182: ‘the Saumurai Creed’ replaced by ‘the Samurai Creed’. Pg 183: ‘Chauteaubriand’ replaced by ‘Chateaubriand’. Pg 189: ‘The superanuated’ replaced by ‘The superannuated’. Pg 194: ‘as critisicm, but’ replaced by ‘as criticism, but’. Pg 195: ‘almon-eyed beauties’ replaced by ‘almond-eyed beauties’. Pg 200: ‘Hanson’ replaced by ‘Hamsun’.