Part 5

Redon speaks of his art as a little door opening upon mystery. He insists thinking people are crushed by the grandeur of problems they try to solve. Sometimes such people possess heart, however, then they begin to comprehend.

Redon admired Degas. But he declared that the admiration of Degas for Ingres was of the head not of the heart. He thinks Degas marks the first halt in the journey to New World art. He calls him free, joyous, exultant artist.

Once Redon exclaims fretfully: “I can’t speculate about Alsace-Lorraine. How could I? Art is the refuge of the peace-loving, where can be no disputed frontiers. Wars are made by dull, imperfect, fragmentary minds, minds incapable of lofty logic, where suddenly a part assumes the false significance of a whole. In short, merely a loss of mental perspective.”

I do not often procure pleasure from reading Proust. His thoughts, the meat of the matter, are substantial, satisfying enough, if not alluring. But I do not like stumbling through so many twisting, cluttered alleys. His prose is dowdy. I do not call Proust a neglected genius. In the human realm (in word art) he is a plant which did not possess that which permits to flower. Proust’s _Swan_ helps date the death of creative art.

Among the things I regret, such as not looking upon the face of Loti, is not having had the opportunity to listen to the conversation of Anatole France, or rather, his monologues. They who had that opportunity tell me he was even greater there than in his writing, whose finished, scornful, scholarly paganism, gives me little, shining gold grains of joy. Nicholas Ségur writes enchantingly of the conversation of France.

Great artists, perhaps, possess the power to live always on the crest of emotions, which create or transform worlds for them at will. That is an element of genius. Other people rise to it under pressure of something extraordinary.

I have found pleasure in looking upon the backs of athletes, in bronze, marble, flesh, and the bodies of great beasts, such as tigers, lions, panthers. I have loved them partly for their beauty, and partly for their intensity. They are proud, powerful moments made tangible. They are highly perfected things where power focusses. Sometimes they are terrible. Then they possess the too keen beauty of bewilderment.

The sculptor Bourdelle has caught this fascinating something which fascinates, by blending beauty with terror. Then the two are elevated to uncontested power.

I saw some prose of Bourdelle, just a few lines, which charmed me more than the work of his chisel. He was holidaying in happiness. I surprised him.

Sometimes Millet’s letters are finer than his paintings or etchings. And I know Fromentin’s work with the pen surpassed the brush.

Another person I longed to look upon in the flesh was Vivekânanda, who left a princely life of mediæval splendor in the Orient to come to America to teach _The Way_.

In his young manhood, in India, when the insensitive, dazzled crowd caught sight of him in the street, they thought that he must be a God, because no human being could be at once so superb and so beautiful. And with one acclaim they shouted: _SIVA!_

All gifts had been lavished upon him, both physical and mental. He danced the sacred dances of his magic and ancient land like a master. His singing voice was glorious and trained, and beyond normal in range and power. His stature and strength were unusual. He was brilliant and learned. And he renounced everything to become a priest.

I took long journeys and went to far places, where he was announced to lecture, only to find that that day some one else lectured in his stead. For me to look upon him was not to be. He was example of a kind of mind the West has not produced.

He admired the Christ. It chanced to be upon Christmas Eve when he determined to renounce the world. During his early preaching days he used to say to his followers: _Go ye and become Christs!_ Around camp fires, at night, in remote, lonely, Indian settlements, he related the story of The Crucified.

I did see Duse, however, whom I had longed to see, although it was when she was old. Like Vivekânanda she was great of soul. To her and her power, years were inconsequential.

I did not admire Bernhardt. Deep in her nature there was too much that was vulgar, coarse—not fine. She had a too keen eye for the box office. She was, of course, an accomplished technician. Duse possessed that which made the art of primitive people supreme, the pleasure-and-pain-distilled honey of the heart.

Flaubert insists that art is to speculation what heroism is to morality—something useless.

Of Flaubert’s books, of which I am a reader, I like _L’Education Sentimentale_ best. Flaubert was in the Orient two years. What must he not have seen, he who owned amazing color sense! From oriental mind he gained new splendors, fresh conceptions, all of which we can sense in his salon-piece, _Salammbô_, and in _Herodias_. Palaces and ruins he saw in India aided him in building those tremendous architectural backgrounds of his Carthage. His eyes had seen, in the marvelous East, such things realized.

It is only in case of weak, inconsequential books that men can argue about realism, romanticism, _schools_. Great things are above mind-mapping distinctions. They are all things at once. God has touched them. He has said: _Let there be life!_

Chateaubriand declared that we paint well only our hearts, and genius is merely assembled memory. Of course he meant memory distributed through many different lives, in æons of time. In his haste he condensed explanation.

I wonder in how many other lives I saw some such city as Venice drifting with magic eloquence upon an opal sea! Venice, like Venus, is a God and sea-born.

It is passing strange, this combination of memory and allurement from which I can not get free. It is peril. It is unsealing a too deep past, and then stealing the forgotten.

I even love summer in Venice. I love the hot Italian nights and the glamour, the strangely irritating scent of the green lagoons. I love the consciousness of all the glowing, unseen paintings in its closed, vast palaces, and the beauty of its people made to paint, and the giant magnolias which light dark, windless nights like mimic moons. I never before measured accurately the torture of something one can not forget.

What a background was Venice for such men as Titian, Marco Polo, Aretino, and Casanova who made a profession of love and delight, not to mention all the patricians of the 16th Century whom Yriarte reproduced in words for us! Pompeo Molmenti has written gloriously of Venice; all its grandeur he has shown; its gilt, dramatic decadence. Albert Dürer was in Venice once. Think what his eyes could see there! Dürer loved the sumptuous just as Rembrandt did. Dürer was one of the first Europeans to try to learn about, then exploit, the loveliness of great Indian palaces. A soul as rich as his always spends lavishly for poorer fellow men. It maddened De Regnier just the same as it maddens me. And for quarter of a century he wrote about it.

The sight of night falling upon Venice shakes me. It keeps the eloquence of dim fatality. Night should not fall there!

I wish I could have seen Goldoni’s Venice! That was the rich, the marvelously expanding Eighteenth Century. Or the Byzantine Venice of the earlier Middle Age! And then there was Renaissance Venice, violent and splendid, purple and dramatic, and Roccoco Venice which Emma Ciardi has painted with languorous, emotional light, and much lavish, clown-white satin.

La Rosalba painted there. Gabriel Soulages wrote this of La Rosalba:

_La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushes Took up a drop of gold. One single drop of gold: With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine._

Venice where men painted with gold and dreamed with gems. Sumptuous, dead Capital City of an Old World that now too is dying! A symbol of loveliness! When the Spanish Conquerors first caught sight of what is now Mexico City they exclaimed: _The Venice of the Aztecs!_

As soon as time began to be considered something that could be measured, controlled, then sold for counted pieces of silver, the property of man in short, the making of things fine began to come to an end. Books were rare possessions in days care-free of time, when there was but one objective, _quality_.

I recall a _CICERO_ made in Venice in 1495, with a cover design by Julien des Jardins, which for sheer loveliness is something to linger over. In the center of the cover there is a panel of St. Yves, surrounded by a border of mingled roses and lilies. One could sit and hold it for days, to gain comprehension of the soul of design.

There is a _THUCYDIDES_ printed in Italy in 1483, in a Neapolitan gilt binding, that holds in middle of the cover something that simulates a gold expanding sun—superb and surprising, with its rich seeming of dazzling, scattered light. This was made as gift for an Aragon King.

There were printing presses in an early day in Sicily, Messina, where now, since Ætna’s repeated earth shakings, America is busy in building rows of useful and remarkably ugly dwellings.

How arts sprang up and then flowered in early Sicily! The soil seemed to suit them. When Cardinal Bembo was Secretary to Pope Leo X, he wrote a little book about Ætna, which fascinated him, and which the Aldine Press was pleased to dress lavishly in print.

From Sicily, _Girgenti_ (now a dim poignantly lovely ruin), there came, in the old days, a monk, by name Nicolas Valla, who rewrote in resonant, heroic, Latin verse the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_. Then he printed them with adorable wood-cuts, in Florence, in 1498. I vaguely remember, too, that there was a vagabond mediæval printer, from Sicily, by that name, Valla, who did a few rare books on his little press, in old Italian cities, through which he wandered.

Rare books of Germany, rich in variety and number of their wood-cuts, all bear about the same date. _Hrotsvitha_, printed in Nuremburg in 1501, with cuts by Albrecht Dürer. _Saint Brigitta_, Nuremburg, 1481. A book by Jornandes, a kind of history of Gothic people, was made in Augsburg in 1515. The wood-cuts are remarkable, by several hands, and some of them signed. Many German cities put out these exquisite things before time began to be considered. Anyone of them can fill even an humble dwelling with beauty, like the sun the fields.

But what is significant in the fact, is that the making of things supremely fine reached height and then began to decline at time of discovery of the Americas. As soon as the Twin Continents were flung so suddenly upon the Markets of Time, when gold, emeralds, pearls, silver of a New World, began to distend European pockets, with means to measure then buy the unbuyable, _Time_, the making of objects of beauty slowly ceased. Even Venice and Genoa began to lose prestige, to shrink to small subsidiary ports. A new, a surprisingly different turn was given to the human mind.

The Americas are the fateful Continents. Slowly they have destroyed the great living that existed before. And now they are forming the background for the New World, the dangerous scientific world, when values will be made over, and nothing will be as it was before, not even gods. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the death of beauty.

Some of the new and extreme schools of writing, of art in general, are merely expressions of weakness. The mind is registering wonder, uncertainty, and fear, at tremendous change. A close-up that is too sudden has caused temporary loss of mental poise. And with it has come the slower comprehension, that the old arts are dying, that they can not live on, because they will not be needed nor able to interest anyone, nor even amuse, in a scientific world.

I have read novels in German all my life and now I am asking myself why I do not have the impulse to write about them. There must be a reason. But I can not find it. I do not think that the English tongue carries German printed art any too well, when it is translated.

It is silly to say that people love different things. But sometimes it is necessary. Our friends love us only when we are foolish and they can look down upon us. A dangerous gesture always.

Some women when they are young love kittens, dogs, dolls or men, and always themselves, because they can not see themselves. As for me, I have loved words. Only words could give me the supreme emotion, because they were suffering strange and inexplainable change, which enchanted then puzzled me; transformations of sound, sense, down long alley-ways of time and living; and calling with voices changefully beautiful and broken, keeping always beyond the magic of perfect realization, and in addition, like a false love, prodigal of promises, infinite and unkept. The emotion of words, with their different rhythmic passions, in many races, in many lands, lured me. Following etymological laws, I have watched them, like gay actors on a stage in a play that never ends, put swiftly on varying vowel and consonant raiment. I have held my breath at the capricious orders of change. I have felt delight at their fresh grotesqueness.

Words are our oldest playmates. There is nothing else save the air we breathe with which so long we have been in contact.

At this moment, as a civilization changes, a period of time comes to an end, (and all else is useless and time-stained), women who play Bridge, patronize Beauty Parlors, fly in aeroplanes, use the root-words their Ayrian ancestors used, upon Indian highlands, at time of the dispersal of races, when they say _sew_—Indian _siv_. Since then the physical body has been made over in some degree, gods and religions have come and gone, the human voice has circled the globe and man learned to fly like the birds, but the little, helpless, drifting word with which we cry remains the same.

In _El Modernismo, Poetas Modernistas_, R. Blanco-Fombona has written an interesting, comprehensive, and necessary book about South American poets, and poets of old Spain.

He has related some facts which explain the discussed mystery of the meaning of the _Great Nocturn_ of Silvá. He says that where the poet speaks of their shadows (Silvá and his sister, Elvira) meeting, he is relating, in his grief, a memory of their childhood. Once they went, in summer, to a dwelling, high in the Andes, for cooler air. At night upon a balcony, with the house lights behind them, Silvá and Elvira were standing, while the flickering lamp’s flame painted their gigantic, grotesque shadows across the night-black mountains.

My translation was made long ago, the first translation of Silvá into any language.

NOCTURN OF SILVA

It was night time, Night time lonely, It was night time filled with murmurings of sweetness, With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings, It was night time, It was night time, and the darkness hymeneal, deep and dewy, Shone fantastical with fire-flies. By my side then, slowly, slowly, by my side then silent, pallid, As if to you there came knowledge of a future dark and bitter, Troubling hidden, secret, soul-depths and the fibers of your being, By my side along the pathway of the flowers across the pale plain, You were walking, And the full moon Then up-swinging through the sweet sky’s serene azure shed upon us its white light; And your shadow, Graceful, languid, And my shadow From the moon’s pale light out-floating, On the sand-plain sad and lonely Where the path wound, were united And made one there, Were united in one lone and somber shadow, Were united in one lone and somber shadow, Were united in one lone and somber shadow.

It was night time, Night time lonely, And my heart held naught save memory of your death and agony; Separated now forever, separated by time from you, by space, by the tomb forever, And by shadows black and blacker, Where my voice can never reach you, Silent, dumb, sad and alone By the pathway I was walking.... At the lone moon dogs were baying, At the moon so sad and lone; I heard harsh and ghostly croaking Of the frogs beneath the moon.... I felt chilly, and the chill was that which held you in your chamber, Held in your white, ghostly chamber, hands and breasts and cheeks I loved. Held between the snowy marble Of the pale, dim plain of death.

’Twas the chill of things sepulchral, ’twas the ancient chill of death, ’Twas the chill of nothingness, And my shadow, From the moon’s pale light out-floating, Walked there lonely, Walked there lonely, Lonely walked the pale plain o’er, And your shadow grown more lovely, Graceful, languid, As upon that night of spring-time—fleeting spring of long ago; As that night time filled with murmurings of sweetness, With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings, Reached my shadow and swept with it, Reached my shadow and swept with it, Reached my shadow and swept with it—O! twin shadows interlacing! O the interlacing shadows of twin bodies reuniting with the shadows of their souls! O those interlacing shadows which are seeking, still are seeking, Through all night times, on, forever, for each other in their tears!

In Bogotá, city of old churches, patrician pride, grave gray stone palaces, the room in which Silvá killed himself was found filled with books, in many tongues, collections of precious perfumes, and rare orchids.

How vastly learned was Tertullian! How eloquent! And how bronze muscled was his prose! As I read, I recall sharply old, resonant bronzes of Han, black and polished archaic pottery from fabulous dead cities upon the slopes of the Andes, in Peru, such as that fluent painter and distinguished scientist and explorer, A. Hyatt Verrill, discovered, where in the long black night of time forgotten civilizations flowered then disappeared, and tides of Spanish conquest and exploration rose and fell, the black marble of the Baiæan pleasure-palaces of Tiberius Caesar, and black pearls from the Indian Ocean.

In truth Tertullian’s prose is black and splendid. It glows with the magic light of poignant drowned moons in perished Egyptian midnights, and the pictured onyx pendants that chilled the cruel breasts of Herodias. It moves me tremendously. And what power to swing the great sentence, then make it humbly sinuous, simple, and supple! Hear him:

“O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches, through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the Imperial decease, that the Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy!...”

“And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates which gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is not undoubted that not a few of your gods have reigned on earth as men.”

“If from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered with the needle and the Babylonians with the loom, and pearls gleamed and onyx-stones flashed, if gold had issued with the cupidity which accompanies it from the ground, if the mirror had license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from Paradise, already dead, would have coveted these things!”

The preachments of Tertullian keep the interest of romance and the exciting, restless intrigue of the novel. It is not surprising that a few books could satisfy so well the elder world: It is because each of the few kept the power of many. In the confusing complexity of today, Tertullian and Procopius could take the place of many for me. The long breath of power was theirs.

The sentences of Procopius are packed richly with meaning. Each has meat for meditation. And it is that rare writing that I love, because I keep the illusion of it being chiseled upon metal. It is firm. And it keeps a gleam in my mind. The attack of the first lines of his chapters is frequently magnificent. Here is an example:

“The Taurus mountain range of Cilicia passes first Cappadocia and Armenia and the land of the so-called Persarmenians, then Albania and Iberia both independent or subject to Persia. It extends a great distance, and as one proceeds along its range, it spreads out to extraordinary breadth, rises to imposing height....”

What an eminence from which to view the outspread plain of events of the chapter, and what harmony of mind and emotion he has given us, by the powerful placing of words and the unfolding of idea.

The old writing has kinship with plastic art; it was of line and form and surface, instead of color, emotion, nerves. Thought is a plastic thing when it is not chipped, sliced thin, like cheap cheese. That sense of plasticity, the need of a different moulding process, is something lost in word-craft. It helps give that which is deathless to much antique art. That, and a sincerity which is priceless.

I can read Tertullian and Procopius over and over. They are always new; they are filled with the essential of thought, which is something inexhaustible. They inspire. They give comfort and courage.

But the old writers wrote because they had something to say, not for applause, popularity, nor money.

The Bible tells us somewhere, that in the end of the world there will be many gods. As writing, as an art, a conveyance of thought, of idea, comes to an end, before all writing is used for purely scientific matter, there are many writers.

It is too bad they do not make children’s books for grown people today, delightful, unreal fables for adults, to temper the prosaic duties of living, to make them forget the regrettable, cast off care, and be joyous. There are none who need such books more than grown people. I am thinking of Ariosto, his _Orlando Furioso_. How long ago Ariosto was born! Before the discovery of America.

I like the name an old Italian historian applied to him in his youth, _uno gentiluomo ferrarese_. His charm of manner won him appointment as gentleman in waiting at the Court of Cardinal Hippolyte of Este. He was grateful for this. It meant life among lettered men, nobles, beauties, at Court of a powerful Cardinal.

In the first Canto of the _Furioso_ he thanks him.

_Ippolito aggradír questo che vuole e darvi sol puo l’úmil sérvo vostro Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole Pagare in parte, e d’opere d’inchióstro._

He can pay only in part and with words; with pen and ink, he declares humbly.

The story-telling splendor of the world is in this glowing, complex, impossible fable, written when chivalry was in flower, in Italy.

Its remote forebears were great Indian Epics, the heroic tales of Firdusi, who was the Persian Homer; and its relative in time in his own land, was Virgil’s _Æneid_. All this accomplished invention went to its grace.

The opening is from Virgil:

_Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amóri, Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto._

One of this book’s gay far descendants (It has many!) wandered from Italy northward, to fields of France. There it was known as _The Three Musketeers_. It has had rollicking, gay followers, imitators in the art of letters, throughout the world; not only merry, entire book-sequences, like the romance of Dumas _père_, but individual lines have been re-written down the centuries.

Tennyson was a renowned borrower from Latin, from Italian masters. It is difficult indeed to estimate his debt to Horace.