Part 6

Here are descriptions of castles like that impregnable one of the Niebelungs. Here are lines that tally with Dante—

_Come i gru van cantando lor lai._

Here is the modern storehouse of romance, in short, from which scholars, from which poets, drew material. Here are pictures in words which Watteau painted again in colors. Here is an art of writing rich, fluent, as the countless carven marbles of Italy.

No one can write such books today. It belongs to the mammoth, the monumental past. We are _little_. Its fluency, ease, grace, its inventive power, are incomparable.

There lingers about it the tapestried leisure of ancient monarchies. Not many books keep so securely the atmosphere in which they were first read. The atmosphere that created it dominates.

It belonged to a period that did not know subways nor moving pictures.

It belonged to sheltered corners of old-world gardens, graveled, bordered gravely with cypress, with ilex, where fountains played, where the yellow marbles of Greece, of Rome, were not out of place.

It belonged to luxurious drawing rooms, lighted by long oriel-topped windows, where furniture was slenderly shapen, gilt, and where hundreds of tall white tapers glimmered crisply in the twilight. It belonged to dim corners of walnut or oak, wainscoated libraries, where the early, pale, precious celadon of China gleamed, and ancient pink and blue globes stood, mounted in silver, mounted in crystal.

How different was the place where I read it! How far removed from nobly beautiful, romantic Italy!

I read it in the hot summers of the plains, with all the curtains drawn down tightly, with just one exception, which permitted a narrow strip to be open, through which filtered sunlight yellower than the peach’s heart, while outside through deep sand, green farm wagons rumbled heavily, laden with ripe melons, or painted Indians pranced on limber-legged ponies, which bright floating blankets covered.

To me the romance of Italy was a golden arabesque, covered with gems, covered with glowing enamels, a noble, far-reaching arabesque of art, which generously connected me in my little dwelling upon the plains with the gracious, the splendid thinking of gifted Mediterranean peoples.

I can renew youth and delight by opening its worn, finger-printed covers.

From the court-romances of Italy, much of the art of France came, when a daughter of the luxury loving Medici condescended to become Queen of France.

Ah!—what did she not teach these younger, these more ingenuous people of the north, of art, of crime, of subtlety, of luxurious thinking!

The long tradition of the Caesars was in her blood. Her heart had ripened for crime in palaces whose far architectural ancestry had been in Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, while over her cumulative consciousness there had drifted all the sins of Asia. I would like to look into her eyes! I would like to peer into those deep wells of the past.

There is a book that is chiseled in bronze. Do you know it? It has splendid, bare monotonous spaces where echoes beat like iron. It has resonance. It responds like metal struck by savages for battle. It is richly hued, deepened in splendor, with the dusty accumulated gold of centuries.

It is Xenophon’s story of _The Expedition of Cyrus_. Not in Greek, thunderous and splendid, I regret to tell you, but in Latin: _De Cyri Expeditione_. Oxford Edition. The translation made by Thomas Hutchinson. (What Latin scholars they made in England in the days of the Oxford Press!) My edition was printed in 1735.

There are no false strokes. There are no vacillations. There are no explanations. It marches onward with the iron feet of warriors. It is proud as the crests upon their helmets.

This sure, this masterly carving upon metal, which only Time is permitted to shade, is a lost art. It proceeded from a mental equipment different from that with which the modern artist works.

The old writers put down what they knew. The modern writers put down loosely, and sometimes eloquently, what they do not know. Always in the vague, weedy, word-garden of the present, I miss this unequivocating directness; clearness, firmness; this chiseled accuracy.

No roads have been so clear in my mind as the road the warriors of Cyrus traveled on the expedition which Xenophon recounts. No cities have been so firmly situated beside the roads, alluringly, so glowingly. No expanse of plain, of meadow or mountain, so reliably bounded. After the Latin and Greek historians ceased writing, it seemed suddenly to me that there were no roads left leading to Great Asia. A part of the world had fallen into space.

They did not say anything for effect. Space upon bronze was too precious to waste in filling in.

There are no vague foolishnesses. There are no indefinite horizons. Words were serious, expressive things. They were treated like gold, like silver. They did not throw them away.

They were majestic, these historians, like the Hebrew Prophets. They force respect. The vision I keep in my eye of them is something the same. They too were white robed, stately, brave, and eloquent.

I like the picture of the Persian princes,

_Darii et Parysatidis duo fuere filii_,

the two royal sons, come from that fabulous, painted palace of Persepolis, upon the highlands of Persia, down, down, steep mountain passes to the plains. Just where, Xenophon is careful not to tell us. But we know it was not far from Babylon. These two sons were Artaxerxes and Cyrus. Their names filled the known world.

I should like to look upon _urbes Ionicæ illæ_, about which he tells us, those seductive Ionian cities, which the youthful eyes of Cyrus saw. The cities of the past, spread out impressively upon the Syrian plain which lay between Europe and Asia, have held the charm of magic for me.

I should like to have looked upon Cyrus, too, in his young manhood, moving upon Sardis. What a sight that must have been!

_Cyrus autem cum iis copiis Sardibus movit_, Xenophon begins to relate.

Ovid, I think it was among the Romans, remembered it and alluded to it. It teased his mind, too, with the perishing beauty of the past. He saw in fancy, probably, the crisp curls of black, the crisp, black, pointed, shining beard; the daring eyes whose gleam matched gold; the lithe, arrow-like erectness; and the barbaric gemming of Asia.

Even in his sumptuous Rome, which still kept something of the vanishing greatness of vast ages that were perishing, it made him tremble. His artist’s eyes loved the retrospective splendor of the vision of black-eyed Asia moving in battle upon the proud, blond race of the south, and giving it its death blow.

That is all history has been, will ever be, the swaying tides of a human sea, now toward Asia, toward Europe. History is a wave lifted by cosmic urge.

Today they go to battle wearing hideous clothing and disguising head gear.

In the old days they moved in the pomp of purple and gold, semi-naked and splendid, glittering with gems, under canopies of crocus silk, while clarions shrieked and long plumes caressed the air.

Go refresh your eyes with a picture of it upon the bronze pages of Xenophon! It is fortunate it was written in bronze. Otherwise it might fade.

How lonely will they be in that new, scientific, commercially-minded future, so rapidly approaching, whose eyes have kept a memory of the picture which was the past.

The scholiast of Aristophanes tells us, among other interesting things, that Timandra, who was born at Hykkara, in Sicily, was given by the Tyrant Dionysius, to Philoxenus, the poet. With Philoxenus he goes on to say, she journeyed farther. She came at length as far as Corinth. Here she lived for a considerable time and was beloved of many.

This is the kind of novel I like, one that I can expand at leisure, to suit myself, one that unfolds long, radiant, geographical vistas. In 1843, De Musset published a book called _Voyage ou il vous plaira_, (_Travel Wherever You Wish_). How I should like that! And how I now wish it were a part of life realized. In fancy I shall see the antique world. The notes of the scholiasts contain fascinating information.

“... _of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard._”

This quotation from Stevenson’s _Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes_ illustrates something not unworthy notice.

Its beauty, which no one will dispute, is not a spiritual question, nor one of mind wholly. It is founded upon the flesh.

Stylists play with vowels, with consonants, just as the pianist plays with black and white keys of his instrument. He, indeed, is not a dissimilar musician.

To return to the sentence in question. The underlined letters, _i_, _a_, _oo_, in the words _wind_, _black_ and _gloom_ mean the opening wider and wider of the back of the throat to emit sound, going from a short _i_, to long _oo_, a skillful climax, a physical emotion where muscles of the body are the instrument played upon.

The use of alternating vowels is remarkable. It is witchery. After height of stressed sound is reached in the word _gloom_, he glides gently down to rest, satisfied sound-completeness, in the slightly muted final _s_ of the word _cities_.

The sentence gives pleasant sense of slipping quietly into a blue, smiling harbor, after storm.

Stevenson performed miracles in handling sound. His verse, however, was merely graceful, which is a word good to apply to him.

Lafcadio Hearn was another master of the same kind, working with a sentence-line of keener, sharper, spirit-winged beauty. Few literatures of the world can show anything to surpass Hearn at his best.

It is possible to diagram with something approaching accuracy the effect of a sentence upon the muscles of the body.

A fine sentence is a geometrical sound-picture affecting the body as line affects the eye, built up out of vowels, soft padding of consonants packed between, to keep them from bruising each other in their expanding ecstacy, their lift, their lyric laugh.

The greatest rhythms are personal rhythms, that conform to no rule save deeps of self, consciousness of world-currents, the moment’s inspired emotion.

Lafcadio Hearn is a delicate, learned, vowel-musician. No language has a master who surpasses him. Listen to this, (I quote from memory): “So I wait for the poet’s Pentecost, the inspiration of nature, the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten and the Sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshipper, with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds.”

Learned, exquisite, infinitely wise in construction. He has worked magic.

Hear this from Aristophanes: “Our splendid dithyrambs are misty and duskyish, and dark gleaming, and high flown.”

This from Euripedes, from one of the choruses of Electra:

“In ancient song is the tale yet told, How Pan the master of forest and mead, Unearthly sweet while the melody rolled, From his pipes of cunningly linked reed, Did of yore from the mountains of Argus lead From the midst of the tender ewes of the fold....”

The construction shines through the none too skillful turning into a modern tongue, in both examples. And in both we still feel recurrence of balanced sound that can not be reproduced in English, and unmapped spaces of loveliness.

Goethe declares, thinking, perhaps, of this: “_Man studiere nicht die Mitgeborenen und Mitstrebenden, sondern grosse Menschen der Vorseit, deren Werke seit Jahrhunderten gleichen Wert und gleiches Ansehen behalten haben.... Man studiere Molière, man studiere Shakespeare, aber vor allen Dingen, die alten Griechen, und immer die alten Griechen._”

(Study not always men of your own age and those engaged in the same occupation as yourself, but likewise the great men of antiquity whose works have kept the same worth for centuries.... Study Molière, study Shakespeare, above all things study the ancient Greeks, _and always the ancient Greeks_.)

The choruses of Euripedes are among the loveliest things in existence, an undying beauty, which not time nor change mar. Do you happen to recall this?

_The long white reach of Achilles’ Beach Where his ghost feet shine on the sand._

After centuries, after wasted ink and paper, the thundering, the fault-finding of teachers, we know no more about words than the Attic Greeks, centuries before the birth of Christ. No more did I say? We do not know as much.

The age of Attic splendor antidated, I believe, the Birth of the Saviour by some five hundred years. In nobility of form, in beauty of tone, they are masters. We do not learn easily.

I wonder if beauty is a pagan thing which Christianity helped to kill? Has anything so supremely lovely been done since? And I am quoting at random, and always from memory. Memory, of course, is not a storehouse for so great a treasure as the past.

They say the cedars of Lebanon can not grow in the modern world. There is something that kills them as soon as the city, modern civilization, begin to approach. Their last stronghold is the slopes of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Now they tell us, the French, who are trying to change ways of living there, that few young trees are springing up and the old are showing rapid signs of decay, the same decay that ruined their beauty in the Holy Land.

_The Cedars of Lebanon and Beauty!_ Can they exist only in a pre-Christian world? It will never be possible to harmonize the Hellenic and the Hebraic spirit.

There has been no poet in these calm centuries of Catholic Spain to compare in quality with the poets under reign of the Moor, and the proud Prophet of Islam.

The Hellenic spirit and the Hebraic spirit are oil and water. We do not know how to mingle them. We can not perform the miracle. The alkahest is missing.

THE POEM OF DUMAS

In rummaging among writers on Russia the other day I came upon a forgotten article by Dumas the Elder, whose native charm and great story-telling power have made critics forget his scholarly traits and his usually sure and reliable information. As long ago as the Eighteen-fifties Dumas _père_ was telling mentally receptive France of Russian writers which America would begin to think about an half century later. This article contained a poem by Dumas, who is not known as writer of verse.

Dumas journeyed across Crimea, the Caucasus. Dumas was a diligent world-explorer long before days of steam and Pullmans. He went to Baku, on his homeward way from Russia, where oil had already been discovered. He visited Derbend, too, historic city of the iron gates, so fateful strategetically, for the East and the West.

Baku and Derbend have always been points of dispute between Russia, Persia, and the Caucasus. Baku was taken over by Catherine the Great just before she died. It was one of her last acts of diplomatic plundering. It was a small place then, and insignificant. It was merely a Tartar _aul_ of a few hundred houses.

It is Derbend that is the gateway between Europe and Asia, Derbend, perched like an eagle high among mountains that guard dramatically the passes to productive Baku, and the plains. Through this ancient gateway of narrow, goat-like defiles, the invading Mongols came. And the Scythians. Through this same ancient Pass of Derbend, Mithridates the Great, with his entire army, disappeared, as if by magic, from astonished eyes of the pursuing Greeks.

Here Dumas the Elder came when he was rich with years and honors. He was accompanied by Moynet, the artist, who was at work upon his now famous book of costumes. They spent several years together in Russia. When Dumas started home for France, he sailed from Baku, after having explored both Crimea and Caucasia. But he was forced to wait several days for a steamer. Moynet put in his time sketching the old Tartar town, while Dumas finished the novel called _Ball of Snow_, then he hunted ducks, and arranged his Russian cook-book, remarking while he worked upon it, that the French were the only people who still knew how to dine, and converse. Young Prince Bagration joined them here. It was his mother who had once been mistress of the Great Metternich, and one of the first woman spies whom that statesman employed.

Dumas started for Baku from interior Russia, from Novogorod, to be exact. Here the connoisseurship of Dumas was delighted by two jewels made of iron, a ring and a bracelet, which he considered gems of metal work. On inquiring about their origin, he was told that they had been made by Bestushev-Marlinski, the Russian poet, goldsmith, romancer, artist, and member of the epoch-making Decembrist Conspiracy, while in Siberia, where he had been exiled for life, by Nicholas the First. The jewels were the property of Countess Annenkov, and had been made from the hand-cuffs and shackles of her handsome husband, Count Annenkov, likewise condemned to exile. Countess Annenkov was a French woman, of humble birth, who had followed Count Annenkov, then her lover, to the mines of Siberia. About this incident Dumas made another novel, _The Master of Arms_, and the story related in it is true.

Some of the finest descriptions of Petersburg in the last days of Alexander, in any language, are in this book. From Novogorod, Dumas and his cook-book journeyed happily southward, and at length came to Derbend of the Iron Gates, the city from which the astounding Tartar Wall starts wandering prodigiously over great mountains, and unscalable hillsides, proving, beyond doubt, the blood-kinship of its ancient builders with the race that conceived and executed the great Wall of China.

He tells us his first warning that he was approaching the historic gate between the old world of the perishing East and the new commercial, more enterprising world of Europe, was a Tartar cemetery, perched upon an amphitheatre-like hill overtopping the Caspian Sea. Prince Bagration, who was still accompanying him, exclaimed:

“_Look! That is the tomb of Sultanetta!_” pointing enthusiastically toward a monument of rose color and green towering conspicuously among the sacred graves turned toward the East.

“Who is she?” queried Dumas.

“Once the mistress of a Tartar Prince, and renowned throughout the entire Caucasian country for her beauty ... _and her adventures_,” he added.

“Perhaps you will hear the story at Derbend.”

At Derbend they found an invitation awaiting them from the Commandant of the Fortress, to take dinner on the following day. While at dinner the wife of the Commandant remarked:

“Monsieur Dumas, just outside the window here”—pointing with her hand—“near where you are sitting, is the grave of Oline Nesterzof!” “And who is she?” inquired again the great romancer, scenting avidly, as was his habit, a novelty for his eager, prolific pen. “She was the mistress of Bestushev-Marlinski.”

“Ah! that name again! _Poet, goldsmith, artist, romancer, revolutionist!_” he enumerated with relish and excitement.

“I heard of him first at Novogorod, and saw the jewels he made of iron. Unavoidably I seem to be setting out on the trail of Marlinski.”

After dinner was over, the Commandant’s wife guided them up a steep hillside, to a little lowly mound, marked by one humble stone. “Bestushev-Marlinski, you know,” she went on to explain, “was condemned to be quartered alive by Nicholas the First, for his share in the Decembrist Uprising, which he steadily refused to disavow. But by some caprice in the heart of him who never knew mercy, he changed the sentence to exile for life in Siberia, and wrote under it the now famous—_So be it, Nicholas!_ That was early in the summer of 1826, before the crowning of Nicholas.

“In 1828, the young Czar was beginning fresh wars in his new Caucasian possessions, for peace and safety here at Derbend, and also for the city of newly discovered wealth in oil, over the mountains, Baku. He had need of trained officers. He remembered Bestushev who had refused to disavow his guilt. Above all things Nicholas revered the truth. He changed his sentence again. He sent him, this time, to the Caucasus. But lest he be accounted too merciful, he stripped him of military honors, and made him a soldier in the ranks.

“In the bloody and perilous warfare that was being waged continually here, Bestushev, who had now changed his name to Bestushev-Marlinski, rapidly won promotion and became an officer again. Then he came to live right here, in the old bullet-shattered, smoke-blackened Fortress of Derbend,” pointing to walls above their heads marked by many sieges.

“Not long after his promotion, he fell in love with a young and beautiful girl, of poor family, in the village, by name, Oline Nesterzof. After a time she came to live with the writer.

“One night some Russian officers from Petersburg, were being banquetted in the very room where we have just been dining. When they were well under influence of wine, a friend of Bestushev, who had drunk too heavily, laughing, wagered he could prove the lovely Oline Nesterzof was untrue to her poet-lover. This enraged Bestushev to such degree he lost his head and took the wager. For days thereafter the friend of Bestushev spied upon the young and innocent girl, who was barely nineteen at that time, in order to win his wager. Finding it impossible to do so by fair means, he made a plot with other young friends of the poet—who had been present at the banquet—in order to play a trick upon him, and gave to Bestushev, at length, the ‘_framed_’ proof of her falsity.

“The emotional, unrestrained nature of Bestushev was deeply affected by treachery of the girl he sincerely loved. The very next day when Oline Nesterzof, ignorant of what had happened, and Bestushev were alone together in a room of this old Fortress of Derbend, a shot was heard. Bestushev, palled, disheveled, ran out to the courtyard, waving his arms wildly, calling for help. Oline Nesterzof was found upon the floor dying, having been shot through the breast. She was still able to speak, however. In her great and forgiving love for Bestushev, she declared that in attempting to clean his pistol she had shot herself by accident. This noble declaration of the dying girl, made in the presence of a priest, under the last rites of the Church, saved Bestushev from the death penalty.”

“And this is her grave, you say?” asked Dumas with emotion, looking down upon the humble marker of stone, which Bestushev had made. The only adornment upon the piece of marble was a rose, which the poet carved there, and which was now blackened with powder, broken. Beneath the rose one Russian word, _sondba_, was engraved, which means an _Act of Fate_. On the other side were her name and age.

Here lies the body of Mademoiselle Oline Nesterzof Born 1814. Died 1833.

Dumas was deeply touched by the humble grave and its story. He stood silent some time beside the pitiful, lonely, little mound of the ill-fated girl, hidden beneath grim walls of the Fortress of Derbend. Then he took his note book. He wrote a verse, something rare from hands of that single-hearted _prosateur_. He handed it to Commandant of the Fortress, asking him to have it engraved beneath the word _fatality_, with his name attached, as lasting memory of his visit to Derbend. Dumas said he loved poetry but he left the writing of it to other people.

The following proves sufficiently it was excessive modesty that impelled him to do it.

She had lived twenty years. She was loved, she was fair, On a twilight she fell like a rose on the wind; Where she sleeps with the dead, earth, press lightly there, For her weight was so light upon human-kind.

After the tragedy of Oline Nesterzof, melancholy madness fell upon the brilliant Bestushev, who, by the way, was distantly related to Russia’s great and extraordinary Chancellor, Bestushev-Rjumin, of the days of Catherine the Great.