Venice, that lovely city by the sea, has been described a thousand
times by the painter’s brush, by the poet’s pen. It is the last bit of
poetry left to us, in the ever increasing dulness of this world—the
only place that one would expect to meet a goblin or a genial Irish
fairy. It is not the intention of this paper to describe the queenly
city. More than a thousand kodak fiends are daily doing that work,
with the eagerness of a money-lender and the artistic sense of a
fence painter. A city may, however, have many attractions, other than
its magic beauty; nay, even a dull uninteresting place may become
interesting from some great historic event that happened there, or
from some impression caught and treasured in memory’s store-house.
Venice has a charm for me other than the poetry that lurks in its every
stone; it was there that I first dipped into one of those rare hooks
whose charms grow around the heart soft and green as a vine-tendril.
A professor of mine, one of those men who hugs one saying in life,
thereon building a false reputation for wisdom, was in the habit
of saying, “Accidents are the spice of life.” As it is his only
contribution approaching the threshold of the philosopher’s goddess
that I heard in the five years of his weary cant, I willingly record
it. To me it expresses a truth, albeit five years is a long hunt.
Illustrations sometimes improve the text, and this brief paper, by the
way, is but a design to enhance the professor’s. It was an accident,
pure and simple, that made me wend my way to the Rialto, there to lean
against the parapet watching some probably great unknown painting,
something that might be anything the imagination cared to conjure up.
It was an accident that made an English divine ask me in sputtering
French what the painter was working on. It was an accident that made
me inform him in common American English that my telescope, by some
accidental foresight, was at my lodgings. The divine was a genial
man, one of those breaths of spring that we sometimes meet in life.
Invited to my lodgings, he fancied a few tiny volumes of the apostle
of “sweetness and light” to pass those hours that hang heavily, in all
lands save Eden. In my pocket he thrust, as he remarked, “a no ordinary
book, one that will hold you as in a vice.” This proceeding was rather
remarkable, had he not in the same breath invited me to take a gondola
to one of the isles, and there enjoy the pocketed volume. It is
delightful to meet a genuine man, speaking your mother-tongue, after
weary months of Italian delving. To the little isle we went, an isle
known to readers of Byron, as the place where he labored long under
Armenian monks to learn their guttural tongue, the monks say “with
success.” I knew nothing, in those days, of destructive criticism.
After a tour in the monastery, of the ordinary Italian type, I lay down
on the green sward under the beneficent shade of a huge palm, wrapped
in the odors of a thousand flowers that sleepily nodded to the music
of the creamy breakers on the rocky shore. Books have their atmosphere
as well as men. Deprive them of it, and many a charm is lost. I drew
the little volume from my pocket, and there in that atmosphere, akin to
the one in which it was begot, I read of life in summer seas, life that
floats along serene and sweet as a bell-note on a calm, frosty night,
life
“Where the deep blue ocean never replies
To the sibilant voice of the spray.”
My Anglican friend was unable to give any clue to the author’s
identity, other than what the meagre title-page afforded. The
title-page was of that modest kind that says, “Enter in and see for
yourself.” It had none of the tricks of book-making, and none of the
airs of a _parvenu_. Under other skies than Italian I learned that
the author of “South Sea Idyls,” Charles Warren Stoddard, poet and
traveller, was one of the kindest and most modest of men. In truth,
that it was the combination of these rare qualities that had kept him
from the crowd when lesser men made prodigious sales of their wares.
To the man of mediocrity, it is a tickling sensation to float with the
current to the music of the shore-rabble, who shout from an innate
desire to hear their voices. With the possessor of that rare gift,
genius, the mouthings of the present count little; it is for a future
hold on man, that he toils. It is to do something, to paint a face,
to carve a bust whose glorious shape shall hand to the ages a form
of beauty, to weave a snatch of melody that shall go down the stream
of time consoling dark souls. Mediocrity is mortal, genius immortal.
The common mind, without bogging in metaphysics or transcendentalism,
subjects so dear to American critics, may readily grasp the destination
by a comparison in poetry of the “Proverbial Philosophy” with “In
Memoriam,” in prose “Barriers Burned Away,” with “Waverly.” Another
point for mediocrity, perhaps from its possessor’s view the best:
it is well recompensed in this life. The very reverse is the case
with genius. If then the author of the “South Sea Idyls” is not as
popular with the crowd as the writers of short stories who revel in
analysis, whether it be a gum-boil or the falling of my lady’s fan,
he can have no fear. It is but his badge of superiority. The few great
men, who are the literary arbiters of each century, have spoken, and
their verdict is the verdict of posterity. “One does these things but
once,” say they, “if one ever does them, but you have done them once
for all; no one need ever write of the South Sea again.” Here, it is
well to impress on the casual reader, in the light of this verdict, a
great historic truth cobwebbed over by critical spiders; that it was
not the Italians that gave the chaplet to Dante, nor the Spaniards to
Cervantes, nor the Portuguese to Camoëns, nor the Germans to Goethe,
but the great cosmopolitan few, scattered over the world, guardians of
the garden of immortality.
Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, N. Y., 7th August, 1843.
At an early age he left his native state, with his family and emigrated
to California, that fertile foster-mother of American literary men.
In that delightful state, region of plants and flowers, was passed his
boyhood, a boyhood rich in promise, strengthened by a good education.
With a natural bent for travel, fed by the tales of travellers and the
waters of romance, it was his happy luck, at the age of twenty-three
to find himself appointed to that really bright journal, the _San
Francisco Chronicle_, as its correspondent. The commission was a roving
one, and the young correspondent was left free to contribute sketches
in his own inimitable way. Let us believe that the editor well knew
the choice mind he had secured in the young writer, and so knowing was
unwilling to put restrictions of the common newspaper kind in his way.
How could such a correspondent be harnessed in the dull statistics
and ribald gossip of these days? It was otherwise, as we his debtors
know. He was to wander at his own sweet will. The slight vein of sweet
melancholy that came with his life, drove him far from the grimy haunts
of civilization, far from the sickening thud of men thrown against the
cobble-stones of poverty. He sailed away with not a pang of sorrow to
those golden isles embedded in summer seas, where the moon
“Seems to shine with a sunny ray,
And the night looks like a mellowed day.
Isles where all things save man seem to have grown hoar in calm.
In calm unbroken since their luscious youth.”
To a man of Stoddard’s genius and delicate perception, one thing could
have been foreseen. These lands yet warm with the sunshine of youth
would play melodies on his soul, as the winds on Æolian harps; melodies
hitherto unknown to the jaded working world. That he could catch these
airs and give them a tangible form, was not so sure. Others had heard
these siren airs, but failed to yoke them to speech. Melville, now and
then, had reproduced a few notes; notes full of dreamy beauty, making
us long for the master who was to give the full and perfect song. That
master was found in Stoddard. He produced, as Howells so finely has
said, “the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that ever were
written about the life of that summer ocean,” things “of the very make
of the tropic spray,” which “know not if it be sea or sun.” Whether you
open with a prodigal in Tahiti and see for yourself “that there are
few such delicious bits of literature in the language,” or follow the
writer, who, thanking the critics, prefers to find out for himself the
worth of a writer, commences at the beginning with the charming tale
of “Kana-ana,” you will be in company with the acute critic who has
pronounced the life of the summer sea, “once done,” by Stoddard, “and
that for all time.” What should we look for in such a book? “Pictures
of life, for melody of language, for shapes and sounds of beauty;”
and these are to be found without stint in the “South Sea Idyls.” The
form of Kana-ana haunts me, “with his round, full girlish face, lips
ripe and expressive, not quite so sensual as those of most of his
race; not a bad nose, by any means; eyes perfectly glorious—regular
almonds—with the mythical lashes that sweep.” Kana-ana, who had tasted
of civilization, finding it hollow, pining for his own fair land, and
when restored to the shade of his native palms, wasting away, dying
delirious, in his tiny canoe, rocked to death by the spirit of the
deep. Or is it Taboo—“the figure that was like the opposite halves
of two men bodily joined together in an amateur attempt at human
grafting, whose trunk was curved the wrong way; a great shoulder
bullied a little shoulder, and kept it decidedly under; a long leg
walked right around a short leg that was perpetually sitting itself
down on invisible seats, or swinging itself for the mere pleasure of
it,” meeting him by the enchanting cascade. Or is it Joe of Lahaina,
whose young face seemed to embody a whole tropical romance. Joe, his
bright scape-grace, met with months after in that isle of lost dreams
and salty tears, the leper-land of Molokai. Who shall forget the end of
that tale, where the author steals away in the darkness from the dying
boy?
“I shall never see little Joe again, with his pitiful face, growing
gradually as dreadful as a cobra’s, and almost as fascinating in its
hideousness. I waited, a little way off in the darkness, waited and
listened, till the last song was ended, and I knew he would be looking
for me to say good night. But he did not find me, and he will never
again find me in this life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of
his sepulchre—sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave—clothed all
in Death.”
It matters little whether it be Kana-ana, Taboo or Joe of Lahaina,
the hand of a master was at their birth, the spell of the wizard is
around them. The full development of Stoddard’s genius is not found
in character-drawing, great as that gift undoubtedly is, but in his
wonderful reproduction of the ever-changing hues of land and sea, under
the tropical sun. What description is better fitted to fill the eye
with beauty, the ear with melody, than these lines from the very first
page of his “South Sea Idyls?”
“Once a green oasis blossomed before us—a garden in perfect bloom,
girdled about with creamy waves; within its coral cincture pendulous
boughs trailed in the glassy waters; from its hidden bowers spiced
airs stole down upon us; above all the triumphant palm trees clashed
their melodious branches like a chorus with cymbals; yet from the very
gates of this paradise a changeful current swept us onward, and the
happy isle was buried in night and distance.”
It is not easy to make extracts from this charming book. It is a
mosaic, to be read as a whole. A tile, no matter how beautiful it may
be, can give no adequate conception of the mosaic of which it forms a
part. It may, however, stimulate us to procure it. These extracts taken
at random, would that they might have the same effect. The book, once
so rare, is now within the easy reach of all. The new edition lately
published by the Scribners is all that one could ask, and is a fitting
home for the undying melodies of the summer seas. To read it is to be
reminded of the opening lines of Endymion.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but will keep
A bower quiet for us and a sleep,
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
Stoddard’s other works are a volume of poems, San Francisco, 1867;
“Mashallah,” a work that produces, as no other work written in English,
the Egypt of to-day. In this work his touch is as light as that of
Gautier, while his eyes are as open as De Amicis; and a little volume
on Molokai. At present he is the English professor at the Catholic
University.
With the quoting of a little poem, “In Clover,” a poem full of his
delicate touches, I close this sketch of a writer to whom I am much
indebted for happy hours under Italian skies and in Adirondack camps.
“O Sun! be very slow to set;
Sweet blossoms kiss me on the mouth;
O birds! you seem a chain of jet,
Blown over from the south.
O cloud! press onward to the hill,
He needs you for his falling streams
The sun shall be my solace still
And feed me with his beams.
O little humpback bumble bee!
O smuggler! breaking my repose,
I’ll slily watch you now and see
Where all the honey goes.
Yes, here is room enough for two;
I’d sooner be your friend than not;
Forgetful of the world, as true,
I would it were forgot.”