TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
THE
TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
BY EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD
[Illustration]
PORTLAND MAINE
THE MOSHER PRESS
MDCCCCXXX
COPYRIGHT
EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD
1930
Manufactured in the United States of America
TO THREE PROSATEURS
LOTI, BLANCO-FOMBONA, D’ANNUNZIO
_FOREWORD_
The Taste of Honey _is a genuine diary, of somewhat the same kind as_
De Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète, _or_ Diary of a Kentish Gentleman,
_in that it was not written for public approval, but for personal
pleasure. It is not dated nor arranged in order, partly because it
was jotted down upon loose leaves which were threaded upon a string;
partly because of the period of years covered and the vicissitudes
that befall perishable substances such as paper._
_Part was written at the age of sixteen, eighteen; part recently.
Many pages have been lost; indeed as recently as the spring of 1928 a
manuscript of over three hundred pages disappeared from the office of
a New York magazine. Some notes from this are included however._
_Selections from the Note Book have been published, in both French
and English_, Le Disque Vert _of Belgium carried pages, when Hellens
was director. American papers have carried other pages._
_It has not been edited nor changed for publication. It is the
unreserved expression of what was in the reader’s mind, set down with
malice toward none and always with sincerity._
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
Goethe wrote: _Was ich litt und was ich lebte, sind hier Blumen nur
im Strausz._ I paraphrase: _Was ich lese und was ich denke, hab ich
hier bewahrt für mich._ (What I read and what I think I have stored
up here for myself.)
This sentence from one of Concha Espina’s novels pleased me: _Acaso
han huido para siempre en el mundo las aves altarnaras de la
Humanidad._ (Perhaps vanished forever from the earth are the heavenly
wings of humanity.) That is what Spanish thinkers declare that we
lack more than anything else, human values.
Byron and Shelley created merely to console themselves for the fact
that they could not learn how to live. To them a man of action was
something strange, something enviable.
Maurois’s _Ariel_ (Shelley) is satisfying and unsatisfying at the
same time. I feel some of it might be better. It lacks substance,
and yet it is pleasant reading enough. The book is semi-fiction;
it was not meant to be yard-wide fact. But I keep the feeling of
being forced to look at a water-color when I am longing for a rich,
deep-pigmented oil. There is something I want and can not find. It is
bad form however to look a fact too firmly in the face.
What was really wrong with the lives of Shelley and Byron, and
some of their delightful friends, was the influence in cold, Saxon
England, with its peculiar ability to cling to a straight line and
ignore the nimble necessity of corners, of the French Eighteenth
Century. It made the duller English mad. They did not put on well the
mental clothes of French thought and philosophy. As a race they have
never been too successful in putting on any clothes.
They lacked humor and a kind of emotional release in the wearing.
The clothes did not fit. But they thundered ahead with desperate
earnestness, and neglected the gay occasional dandying trot. British
seriousness minus Gallic salt.
An English woman of cultivation and good intent, in America,
recently showed the same peculiarity. She started a movement to
suppress Mother Goose. She insisted the book would teach children to
lie, to distrust their elders. The following is one of her quoted
illustrations:
The little dog laughed to see such a farce
And the cow jumped over the moon.
The estimable, (and as it happens good looking woman), asserts
truthfully, that cows have not the habit of jumping over the moon and
that it is wrong to tell it to children.
She writes an article on the subject. She asks intervention of the
Press to back her statement that she has never seen a cow jump over
the moon. No one doubted her!
It did not occur to her the line is nonsense. Such writing is escape
from the prison of fact. Mother Goose is art of its kind. In a subway
city, of course, it is not easy to think of such exhibits—nor of
anything the other side of wit. It is being witty in good form—which
is the good form the polite English have overlooked. It registers by
what it is not—_like English wit_. Referring again to Maurois’ book,
one can not help being grateful for another glimpse of the bodily
beauty of Byron, of Shelley.
That delightful short story writer of Venezuela—Pedro-Emilio Coll,
was influenced deeply in boyhood by the sensuous, the finished
prose-technique of d’Annunzio. Who would not be, who could both read
and appreciate it? Coll could not forget it. It may have helped to
the commendable control he holds.
In the Eighteen Eighties, Venezuela had some _cuentistas_, whose
style, whose imaginative reach, was above the ordinary. Some of these
men could command a prose-surface greater than anyone save Hearne,
who was not American, but Irish and Greek. Latin people of the South
keep an art-sense, a kind of _finura_, that we of more mixed blood
to the north, have not. Spanish blood is having a second, a royal
flowering down there.
_Opopomax_, by Coll, is the story of a perfume. Aside from owning an
idea, this and his other stories have trained workmanship. It is well
done. I sometimes wonder if the novel ever reaches quite the same
intensity—the perfect fluidity of dissolving vision, as the short
story.
On this pallid, dove-grey morning of winter, I have finished
Blanco-Fombona’s _Man of Iron_, (_El Hombre de Hierro_). Fombona was
born in Venezuela too, like Coll, but now he is living in Europe. He
was in prison in Ciudad, Bolivia—1905, when he wrote this book.
In France they say of him:—“A tender soul whom no emotion leaves
indifferent.” Fombona remarks that Herbert Spencer calls us _hybrid
beings_, with all the defects of hybridism. Once Rubén Darío wrote
a glorious appreciation of Fombona, as Rodo wrote one equally fine
of Darío. He declared: “My friend, Rufino, was born only to realize
great things.” Darío is dead now; when he was writing so eloquently
about his friend he was in Mallorca—and happy. _Alas!_
There is a Portuguese critic in South America—in Rio—by name José
Verissimo, who remarks that America was colonized at one of the most
powerful moments of European mind, and that this nature of explorers,
_conquistadores_, the something epic that makes poets, still lives in
Blanco-Fombona.
His novels have conquered two worlds; the Old and the New. Spain was
enthusiastic. Like Columbus, Fombona set her dreaming of a New World.
A young Spaniard says: “... When I think of Fombona I connect his
name with the charm of the city where he lived, Caracas ... the name
of that city remains a mythological place to me—remote, perfumed,
mysterious, a city which Fate will have it, that I shall sometime
see. How I have lingered over Fombona’s pages, when they picture
the sun of gold in that sky of azure; dawn-fresh, mountain mornings
that are chill; the romantic song of old bells in old towers; the
iced-water Americans drink ... lots and lots of things that suit my
dream-city, city made for adventure and love, and ill luck....”
Hear Blanco-Fombona for a moment himself: (I am translating from
memory)—... “and more important than everything else, more important
than people, than events, that brilliant sun of America, toward which
the breath of our lives ascends continually, like prayer....”
It is not true that the characters of _Man of Iron_ are commonplace
as the critics keep calling them. It is because Fombona has looked
down upon them from a great height. From such height, perhaps, all
the little figures in the game—_life_—are small and commonplace.
I can not forget his sentences. They sing on and on in my mind. They
have the charm of smooth satin. They feel good upon my tongue. _La
luna—de esas claras lunas_.... The moon—one of those clear moons of
tropic nights—was laughing down upon the water. Here is another:
_In the sky the little stars were twinkling, while afar I could hear
the night-thunder of the Carib Sea._
Fombona’s life has been worth while; poetic, enriched with vision,
with conscious power—in Caracas, the city of his delight. It is
something I like to think about. I can measure its invigorating pulse
in his prose. I have esteem for the artist, and admiration for the
man and brave fighter, who has never been a coward.
In _Man of Iron_, Fombona makes the character which is both pitiful
and noble, a man, just as Manuel Galvez does in one of his latest
novels—_La Pasión de la Pampa_. And Fombona like Manuel Galvez
registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts
that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the
difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea.
South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else.
One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths
by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a
sentence that shakes me with its splendor.
I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads
and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. He sought literatures
which could inspire him, which held the contagion of heat, Saxon
races are colder, weaker perhaps in art-sense. They peg along
diligently—more pedantically—with the consuming of many words like a
faulty engine giving out smoke. I am carrying along as I say this, an
undercurrent of memory of the stories of the English Buchan, which
are so deadly dull; uninspired; devoid of artistry, of life. To me
his books are sediment ... after sometime, somewhere, the pure, the
sparkling wine has been withdrawn. Only rare humorless Americans
could read them.
The great earthquake in Caracas as Blanco-Fombona shows it to us, is
masterly. And over it, the calm of night, and the yellow, resplendent
moon of the tropics. I had a thrill from this chapter.
Fombona was fascinated by the racial problem of the Americas, just
as I have been. He insists the great problem here is racial. To
quote him: “There is no racial unity, and consequently no national
ideal.... We may not depend upon them of mixed blood, because now
one element predominates, and now another, which education breaks
up and still more confuses. Out of three Venezuelans—white, negro,
and Indian, who could tell what could blend their energies into one?
In each case the ideals are different; they have different tastes,
different political impulses. We have no national soul.”
One of Fombona’s friends in old Spain, tells us how greatly Fombona
is repelled by a commercial, highly mechanized civilization, because
such things go against the grain of his exalted subjectivity, his
belief in the spiritual elite. He says Fombona hates equally what he
calls _Teutonic force_ and prosaic, Yankee-loving money-grubbing.
And especially he hates democracies, because they are arbitrary,
leveling, destructive of the aristocrat—_and North Americans_. _La
Lámpara de Aladino_ might be termed the breviary of his prejudices.
Somehow it makes me think—_The Man of Iron_—of youthful books by
Turgéniev, such as _Father and Sons_, _Spring Floods_ ... all show
drawing without obtruding outline. There is some similar spiritual
quality in the minds that were creating. In his two novels, he is the
equal of the great Russian. I like the sheer power of the man! His
steel-sharp delineations are memorable. And it has some of the same
kind of power as Balzac.
The companion novel—_Man of Gold_, (_El Hombre de Oro_).
The chapter in which the three old ladies take pitiful farewell of
the grand home of their ancestors, the rich, many-roomed, ancient
colonial mansion, with its courts, with its flowers, is a fine piece
of writing. It moved me deeply. Not many see the world we are forced
to live in as clearly as Fombona, with all the different parts in
reasonable and logical relation, not to mention the fine flashing
forth to others, the lifting power of vision, that dazzles, then
creates. There is both grandeur and fury in the soul of Fombona.
There was a short story writer in Venezuela-Caracas, in the late
Eighties, whom I liked. Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. I am still on the
watch for the short story of power. Hear this description of music
from a story by Garcia. (Again I am translating and quoting from
memory.)
“They played a _joropo_. From the rough, coarse, toil-worn fingers
there spread out across the sensitive chords of the instrument, the
flower of Venezuelan music. A flower made of race-blood, old age
and its dreams; music that had come from very far away, from the
inexplainable melancholy of our Carib Fathers—music, indolent and
brutal, love-lustful, and cruel; music dripping through the clear
nights of tropic moons like tears down the black faces of fugitive
women ... plaintive, filled with rebellion and energy, like flame of
hatred across the fragile cane, then again thunderous, a fitting call
of bronze for war across the spaces.... In the _joropo_ dwells the
soul of our fatherland.... It is a sepulchre to guard the ashes of
our dead.”
Again Garcia, enamored of music, writes: “Listen I tell you! Here
comes a Creole waltz-song. _Ah_—how many times I have heard this
song float languid and ardent like our Creole women on the sad and
indifferent arms of lovers, heard it float on like a sparkling
diamond-gas, across the surface of sleeping night-water ... seen it
take on life and glow in the deep eyes of ranchmen at the _rodeo_ ...
in the dimming twilights of the solemn pampa.”
Passion, emotion, such as this is what I seek in story art. Cheap
work does not know it. Garcia has written two books I commend. They
are _Búcares en Flor_ and _Oro de Alquimia_. These books hold the
prose, great poets make sometimes in youth ... but seldom twice.
Never in the twilight of years, because regret, although it may own a
light all its own, can not gild like joy.
De Cela writes interestingly of Lima:
“_Lima!_ Your legends and your women are beautiful. Your palaces
romance-freighted and imposing; your cathedrals mysterious and
solemn. In your streets dwell the Middle Age, and the age-old soul of
Spain.”
The New World seems to embrace Old Spain. In _Humos de Rey_, by León,
an old nobleman soliloquizes:
“... No one understands me. Everyone speaks an unknown tongue, and
people look at me as if I were a fossil. It is not easy to find a
single individual who thinks, feels, or judges as I do....
“Another age has come, with other men; there is a new world which is
more than strange and inimical; more than indifferent.
“I do not need to go to cities to feel the winds of change strike
me. Right here in this poor, little, old, Castilian village, dozing
in shade of the tall cathedrals, where eternities have dreamed the
same dream, the strangeness of a New World begins to play about me—a
world that is materialistic, _speed-dizzy_; a peculiar life lived all
on the outside; of bestial appetites of the flesh; sterile; filled
with foolish emotions, plebeian ideals; and an alarming and useless
scattering of spiritual energy.”
León belongs to the Royal Academy of Spain. I have read him long, but
I did not expect just this of him.
When I take Italian, Spanish, or Russian books from the Public
Library in New York, they show by their worn, marked pages, their
general appearance of hard usage, that they have been read more
intimately, more emotionally, than English books by English readers.
It is evident that the passion on the pages has met and blended with
a corresponding passion, with a new kind of level of comprehension,
in the readers.
Books by other races (than American) still talk once in a while of
honor, nobility. They acknowledge that such things have been. They
accept the lofty realm of the spirit; bravery, sacrifice, virtues
of the soul. American books have neither time nor inclination to
mention such things which few seem to know anything about. Our books
show existence, dry, exterior, concerned with money, mechanics,
rapid physical movement from place to place, restlessness; cheapened
pleasures. With the Latins there is heat of utterance. There is
eloquence too. And rich native ability.
This novel by León, _Humos de Rey_, is well made. It commands respect
like honest work by a person who knows how to work. He wrote it
because he had something to say, and not for applause nor an itch
for limelight. As a piece of portraiture it is exceptional. And
there is the contrast between the Spain of great centuries dead, and
the Spain being standardized, commercialized, mechanized—in short
_Americanized_. This is going forward too speedily at the moment, and
other writers besides León are taking careful note of it. It is the
tragic motive in several books from Madrid and Barcelona which I have
bought recently.
León creates in a higher key than colder Saxon races of the North
can keep. There is intensely centered light. There is a different
_tempo_—and selection of portrayal. And he writes of course, for a
different public.
In the foreign books I am reading continually, the idea has been
creeping in more and more in the last few years, that ideals are
dying. In periodicals in North America, to one who reads many other
literatures, one is impressed, by the overstressing of two things:
_money_, _efficiency_. It is stupid, the recurring and recurring, of
the words. Next comes _speed_. León’s book is far away, in inception,
from such things. Faith breathes from it; bravery, and endurance. It
upholds the nobler banner of the past, before the present decadence
had set in, which is evident in printed art.
Don Carlos de Araoz, the nobleman in León’s novel, is a person.
Collective living has not touched him. He has made no compromise with
ideals. He is erect, fine, free. And brave. When he fights, he fights
openly, face to face. He does not strike, like the coward in the
night, in the back. Zurburan might well have painted him. The book
should have been called _The Last of the Caballeros_. There are not
many finer portraits than his.
“_Padecia Don Carlos la decadencia_.... Don Carlos suffered because
of the falling away of power in his family, whose minds and energies
were turned toward base things, shabby results. The men of his family
were taking to wild and futile paths. They no longer had ideals nor
robust faith; nor in the heart the power of creative goodness. They
had no objective that was worth while; they were neither noble nor
generous, but dull, mentally blind, and lukewarm toward the things
of tradition. They could neither comprehend great things nor face
bravely the future....”
It seems that Spain, just as in Columbus’ day can still show _New
Worlds_ to us.
Zorilla has flung forth this sketch of Toledo: “A place black,
ruined, sad, and forgotten amid the sands—_Great Toledo_. Abandoned
now, at mercy of the winds, _Toledo_, and not sufficiently protected
by the mantle of royalty. Broken down, furrowed with sorrow and care,
a slave, without soldiers to protect it, nor laws, it sleeps wrapped
in its glory.
“All it owns is the great name of old, a kind of parody, with
which it attempts to wrap then cover its shame—_Toledo_, once the
sumptuous, the free. It has a great temple hid in a hollow, two
bridges, and between the ruins and the marble of old armorial
blazons, a stupid little village that sleeps on and on....”
_Venice pleases me infinitely._ I might have written this instead of
De Regnier—I, who love Venice.
Like De Regnier, I love its climate, its color, its light. The kind
of life men live there is the life that suits my taste.
There I have a happiness I never know elsewhere, a peculiar physical
well-being, and in the midst of a great variety of objects that
take up pleasantly the space of days. Both my eyes and my thoughts
are busy. Even the old history of commerce of Venice is a thing of
delight. Not many romances can equal it.
Nowhere else do days drop away so delightedly. Nowhere else is
loneliness wholly without bitterness. There is no other spot in the
world where I am myself—where neither years nor place, nor people can
touch me. There is no other city where I can so happily support the
necessary boredom of living.
My first sight of Venice gave me the greatest emotion, I think I have
ever felt. I was tired. I had just journeyed through the Austrian
Alps, the Bavarian Alps, and a corner of Switzerland. The train into
Venice was late. It was cold. It was threatening rain.
We got in at exactly twelve o’clock, at night. It took long to get
traveling bags through the customs. We left the trunks for the next
day’s struggle.
Long ago the little steamers and the noisy water boats had gone to
bed. We signalled a gondola with two oarsmen.
Then began the most amazing ride. We swung suddenly into the black,
mirroring water of the Grand Canal, which Napoleon called the finest
street in the world.
I saw a wide space of silent water. It was tideless, motionless, with
a strange scent of decay hanging over it. On either side, seeming to
slip farther and farther away—great, dim, tinted palaces that kept
memories of the architecture of the East, rich India, radiant Arabia.
And the grave Goth.
No glare of electric lights. There were dim little lamps swinging
in front of fabulous façades, sometimes painted. There was no sound
save the hiss of our long black oars against blacker water. I all
but lost my senses at the beauty and the strangeness of it—this
divine, dead city which seemed dropping away, on the point of
disappearing forever, beneath the water of the Adriatic.
For hours in the heart of the night, we swung noiselessly along cold,
black, shining canals. We slipped under the Bridge of the Rialto. We
slipped under the Bridge of Sighs. We saw dim ghosts of loveliness of
every conceivable color and form, tower above us in the darkness, and
the majesty of it and the beauty, combined with silence, kept a kind
of terror. Not a sound anywhere. Not a sign of life.
For a little while we lived in one of the old yellow, faded palaces.
And in the daylight again we drifted down this unrivaled street,
whose pictured palaces represent every period of Venetian history; on
some were placards telling who had lived there; such men as Wagner,
Byron, Murger, Maupassant.
Then we moved to the Royal Daniele, the famous hostelry of Venice,
once the home of a great family. It was built about the year 800.
Any of these renowned mansions are worth a trip across the Atlantic
to see. I remembered Ruskin said, that beauty began to die in the
world after the Eleventh Century. And I was pleased to think I had
discovered that fact myself.
Here again I was following the trail of Loti. Just before Carmen
Sylva, Queen of Rumania, died, she came to the Royal Daniele to stay
for a time. And she invited Loti to be her guest.
Its list of patrons down the ages is a rosary of great names. George
Sand has been here, Chopin, D’Annunzio; and Duse exclaimed over its
charm.
In an old Venetian garden, one day, I saw a dignified patrician woman
taking tea, with her servants bringing the food, while she stood
plucking those great, white ghostly roses which I have seen only in
Venice, and dreaming over the green water of the Grand Canal.
Everywhere delight for the eye! Such comprehension of the
possibilities of perfected living. Prince Metternich used to say when
he visited Italy: _God—what men it was who built these palaces!_ No
one today would know how to live in them, because the great life is
gone forever.
Democracies, plus money, can not make beautiful cities. It takes
something altogether different. It takes the pride, the petulance
of kings, slow centuries, and the caprice, the unreasoning love of
poets and men. As examples—Mad Louis of Bavaria, the Great Builder of
India, and the Pharaohs with their pyramids.
I dined at _Florian’s_ whose fêtes such artists as Guardi and
Canalletto painted; the center once of _la vielle finesse
venitienne_. What a place was Venice in the old days with its love of
elegant and impassioned life, and the ripeness and perfection of its
senses!
I have read _The Mandarin_ by Eça de Queiroz. It brought back to
memory charming old restaurants of Lisbon, such as _Martinho_, in
the Largo de Camões, not far from the national theatre, and Campo de
Santa Clara, which reminds me of the Thieves Market in Mexico City,
the _Volador_.
Latin mind is substantially different from Saxon mind. The Saxon mind
flowers at contact with older, more impassioned races. The spark
must be struck by something of greater power. But Mediterranean mind
flowers richly all alone.
De Queiroz knows how to say charming things. He speaks of—the
penetrating peace of old monastery gardens of Portugal, in some deep
valley at the sweet, sad end of evening, when one can listen to a
river’s voice.
There is a merriment, a lifting joy of the moment in speech, the same
kind of joy in life, in the gay, more facile Portuguese, the stately,
graver Spaniard does not have. And the Portuguese have racial humor
not unlike the Irish, which differentiates them again. This quality
is evident in their city, Lisbon; something there that ensnares the
heart of even the careless traveler. Only gay-spirited, friendly
people could have built it and then known how to keep its care-free
atmosphere complete. There is a rhythm of mental release, a power
outside command of will, in Portuguese poets and prosateurs I do
not find in many races. This novel, _The Mandarin_, by De Queiroz,
seems to be about the same story as _Brewster’s Millions_, peculiarly
enough.
I first heard the ancient, singing speech in the Azores, one day in
late spring. But the Azores were cold and drenched with rain, which
was as sad as if they had been drenched with tears. The gardens were
spacious and numerous, but minus that astounding, glad greenness one
thinks of in the tropics.
Along the black and water-soaked garden paths were quaint, old wooden
settles, romantic in shape, painted green, streaked with plaintive,
faded violet, beside which tall lilies tried to hold their petals in
the rough, cold wind, old settles which looked as if they might have
been made for the romantic lovers of Julia Romano.
There are two ancient churches, one the _Matriz_, which touched my
heart, keeping perfectly some loving tenderness in line of long ago,
churches built in the great age of conquest. The word Azore (_açor_)
means falcon. They are the Islands of the Falcons—warlike birds
hovering above lonely seas.
As we sailed away the wind brought to me that strange odor I have
noticed in island towns before. How can I name it? Spices, perishing
vegetation mingled with wetness, and the odors of many things that
are dying.
Then the old cathedral bells rang out. But the sea muffled them with
velvet. Night began to come. And the splendor of the sea grew grey.
The mountain tops looked black and lonely as I said good-bye to them,
and veiled with the long floating ribbons of the rain. Three days
later I was in Portugal.
The weather had been rough and stormy. There was rain, mist, and
continued cold. Then suddenly there blossomed out of the mist and the
sea a rich, vari-tinted city—_Lisbon_. The sun began to shine.
It is a city of glowing gardens, narrow streets, whose painted,
stucco dwellings are more than charming—gem-pink, sulphur-yellow,
weary violet. They jostle each other in little square places of
flowers.
Barefoot women go from door to door to sell fish, carried in baskets
upon their heads; slim seminary students in long black, eloquent
capes, move about, statues in ivory and jet. And children and girls
have the charm of Latin youth.
The _Avenida de la Liberdad_—wide, tree and flower bordered, paved in
black and white stone (from which Rio de Janeiro copied Rio Branco),
lined with fanciful, sugar-frosted, gay palaces, is a street of which
all Portuguese are proud. It ranks among the lovely thoroughfares of
the world.
Because cities possess personality, I say that Lisbon is lovable. It
strikes the senses like some forgotten melody of delight. I found
an old buff-colored hotel, with black iron-grilled windows and tall
green doors, set far back in a quaintly old-world garden, facing
a tiny _Praça_, where I wish I could have lingered—and then been
forgotten, and so stayed on forever.
Architecturally speaking, the two loveliest things in Lisbon are the
Tower of Belem and the Convent of San Jerónimo, both tributes to the
great explorer, Vasco da Gama. The pallid, ivory carven surface of
the Convent is not less lovely than the Taj Mahal. It has minarets,
too, from which muezzins might have called. The entire building owns
a kind of perfection.
In one of its little interior chapels, sleep side by side, Vasco da
Gama and the proud poet of Portugal, who wrote in Homeric verse his
history—Camoens. And Camoens was not only poet, but warrior, explorer
and one of the world’s bravest adventurers. Camoens lived many lives,
and all of them were great. The world was his playground. His fiery
spirit, which none own today, longed to give his Emperor continents
for gifts. He is still Portugal’s great poet; the years have not
permitted him to be surpassed.
To refer again to our novelist, De Queiroz, he was a memorable figure
in Lisbon in his youth. He was tall, very thin, with an eagle-beak
for a nose. He was immaculate in dress. He had his clothes made in
London and he always wore a monocle. He was likewise a figure on the
Boulevards of Paris. He had unusually fine eyes, with an expression
of kindness, quick comprehension, and deep intelligence. His two
commanding traits were an Irish sense of humor and the imagination
of a poet; this last kept him from joining the ranks of Zola as
novelist. This was in 1880.
It was from Lisbon that Madame de Stael’s last famous lover came,
when she was trying to console herself for the death of Benjamin
Constant. I refer to the Duke of Palmella—one of the men who had most
influence over this woman whom Napoleon hated. The Duke of Palmella
was at the Congress of Vienna; he was companion of Metternich.
Who knows what this too intelligent French woman inspired him to
think—_and then to say_—that had influence upon the now dwindling
good-luck of the Man of Destiny. But he forgot her easily; brilliant
as she was, to him she was just a pleasant toy—something to fling
aside when days of idleness or loneliness were over.
The Portuguese insist that he was the hero of Madame de Stael’s
_Corinne_, and that in that book, the portrait of him is true, and
very carefully drawn from life—once when they were happy together
and free, away from war-torn France.
Delightful short stories are written in French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, Russian, but almost never in America. The reason is not
that Americans can not write them or are less talented. The fault
lies with the editors. The good short story, as its creator made it,
and God, can not get through to the reading public. First it has to
be changed to suit the policy of the magazine. It may be a magazine
which prints square purple stories with pink corners; or, round green
stories with yellow dots. Secondly, it has to be changed to suit the
personal inclination of the editor. He may like only oblong white
stories with crimson points. Thirdly, the editor must change it a
little to comply with his dignity, and carry out what he considers
duty. What is the result? A kind of ruin for which there is no name.
Then the story has to suit the season of the year, and religious,
social, and political conditions of the community.
All this _à propos_ of many books of short stories from old Spain,
and the Spanish lands to the south, which I have had recently.
Calderon shows an enticing geographical background, in remote South
American places, especially interior Peru. But he does not write so
well as Coll, and some of the older Venezuelans.
Down there not so many people who can not write, but who want to,
are able to get past Spanish editors, who sometimes love art for
its own sake. They do not so often try to put off upon cultivated
readers astonishingly advertised books of short stories, written by
prize fighters, long-distance swimmers, bronco-busters, aviators,
prize-winning high-jumpers, telling you gravely at the same time,
that if they do these things well, it follows logically, they write
short stories well, which is part of America’s original procedure in
destroying genuine ability.
Calderon has some sentence-pictures which I have remembered, showing
savage mountain land and lonely jungle.
“... _aquel poblado solitario_ ... that lonely little settlement,
where life kept the golden color of autumn mornings—in some barbarous
land.” What side-glancing, plaintive light he has shivered across the
words!
I am changing my opinion of Baroja. I have been hasty. In his later
books many of which I read at one time, I stumble upon something
that makes me think of nuggets of unknown metal, which scientists
have neither named nor been able to classify, rolled up perhaps by
clear water of streams in lonely mountains, in some lonely land. But
still I feel that just as his life may lack some combined joy and
interest to weld it firmly into use and unity, effect the miracle
of—_Let there be life!_—his written art lacks the same thing, some
fiercer flame of love, to let it hold together, resist the forces
that crumble. It lacks the _glue_ of art’s practiced and perfected,
surface-logic.
Just as the mother of Redon—painter of exotic, super-terrestrial
flowers—was born in Martinique, and then moved to Marseilles where
the painter first saw the light, and began to feel force of her
baffled homesick dreams of unseen—but too vividly remembered—tropic
nights, tropic days, over seas that are hauntingly lovely, so the
grandfather of Francis Jammes—poet and short story writer—lived in
the Antilles, Guadalupe, in the village of Point-à-Pitre, and here
the poet’s father was born, heir to certain antique memories and
haunting comprehensions.
As for Francis Jammes himself, he lived always in France, between the
Pyrenees and the Atlantic, or as he expresses it, between a grain of
sand and a drop of water. It is a tiny Pyrenean village—_Orthez_.
Yet in the soul of Jammes there were inherited moments of
homesickness for something he had never seen, for that glamourous
giddy sun that gilds the seas of the south.
The word-craft of Jammes, in prose, is lovely. His stories are
delicate and delightful. There is one called _Manzana de Onis_, which
gives me exactly the same emotion as the canvasses (_flower-pieces_)
of Redon. In both prose writer and painter, the tendrils of living
had struck deep, gone far. Unconscious flesh-memory, uncoiling and
uncoiling. I have seen French water-colors by masters, or flower
gardens by that engaging Spaniard, Rusiñol ... corners of blonde
gardens of summers of long ago, which gave the same emotion. It is
something I would not like to lose.
This story aroused, too, the nerves of taste, of scent. There were
charming passages of writing. There were evocations of luxurious, of
finished living—such as only old races know.
I happened to be reading these stories of Jammes in a Spanish
translation—the translation of a man (Canedo), who can press both
grief and beauty into words. Sometimes he makes words weep like the
superfine strings of old violins, as for example, in the opening
lines of this story—_Almaida de Etremont_. When I finished the first
paragraph I felt overwhelmed by some gold-hued, guilty, sudden grief.
I wonder if this Spaniard writes better prose than the original
French? I can not recall Jammes being (before) so lusciously phrased.
Perhaps Spanish, however, is the proper dress for his soul. As I
progress, I think how many are writing in America today without the
slightest natural ability to write.
These three short stories are exquisite. They have a delicately
graded, _shaded_ surface. They are permeated with beauty. They are
buried in richness, and a kind of soul-splendor. I am glad that there
is such writing somewhere in the world.
I can not help but regret the short stories of my land. But editors,
we must remember, have this in common with cats; a pulse of free life
maddens them. It impels them to pounce down, destroy.
Since the Great War everything is out of place. This naturally, with
no malice intended, includes the editor. He has outgrown the limits
of his chair. He resembles Longfellow’s first poem of _Mr. Phinney’s
Turnip_—which grew and grew until it could grow no taller. Then Mr.
Phinney took it up and put it in the cellar. Here is hoping that
the number of black, freezing, and never-again-to-be-opened cellars
increase!
There are too many writers. There are too many poor, anæmic books.
Paper could be put to better use. Every round dot you see upon the
ground and might mistake for something else, is a stone, under which
sits a too energetic would-be writer, who tells you work, experience,
and native ability are not necessary.
_Alas!_ I can say nothing. Cicero’s invectives have given out. And
Shakespeare cursed satisfactorily only for the English. An English
curse upon American lips would resemble the British matron’s earnest
disapproval of moon-jumping cows.
Amy Lowell was never really a writer. She wanted to write. She had
leisure and money. She put words upon paper. But she never projected
the powerful phrase, produced ideas, nor kept in key. As a scholar
she was slipshod, of slight importance. She was merely another rich
wholly American problem in addition. And the bloodless, numbing sun
of New England summers had shone too long, too coldly upon her.
Catullus was beauty, youth, joy, and the delight of a lovely city of
long ago, and my enduring outpost of pleasure. I read him daily. He
helps correct for me the barren, fleeting years, which are sweeping
me away from all the things for which I have ever cared.
To me the greatest love-poem in existence is that pitiful one:
_Si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas._
To procure pleasure from reading, I must have some of the perfection
pitiful Catullus kept. I must have passion and word-craft, and
penetration, power, and the deep, quick sensing of truths. In these
days of art-predatory pedants, jazz-extras, circus-advertising, and
writing-schools, I turn to the Roman; I turn to the Greek Anthology;
the old dreaming masters of the East. Beauty belonged to the elder
world, story-telling wisdom, and the careless phrase of completeness.
The antique world ... that understood _form_. The scientific world
upon whose threshold we stand will not need the old arts. It will
have new ones all its own. That is why they are dying. And so when I
say anything derogatory, it is not I who speak, but the age, through
me.
What a tragic, bitter love was that which ate up the heart of
Catullus! His cry pierced the centuries. It has even silenced the
multiple voice of mighty cities.
_You took away from me all my joy!_
But when he ceased to love and suffer, he ceased to write. He was
most brilliant and compelling when he was lifted upon the brutal edge
of great emotion. To me he has cut words with keener lament than
Sappho. When he reached the height of the fury of youth, the poet
died. Or did the sadness of the Christian centuries—now swinging
near—shadow his sensitiveness? But how every little broken fragment
of his days still shines! Only the sincere, the unforced, has
vitality.
What a delightful maker of the mind’s gay moments, was Pliny the
Younger! As I read along, the comprehension is forced upon me, that
in my day the human mind is not so fine, or I am living at a period
of time when something vastly different is being projected. I am
conscious of a process of deterioration going forward rapidly in
the present. Leaving the firmness and the power of his thinking out
of the question, in grace of letter-writing, he equals Madame de
Sévigné, whose genius was born of her heart.
That letter to Canino Rufo makes me happy, with its freshness of
emotion, its ease, its carefreeness. And that gay beginning! _Quid
agit Comum, tuae meaequae deliciae?_
What are you doing at Como, lovely village we both like so well?
Right away with the words a bright butterfly wing brushes me. And
yet that letter gives me a kind of grief, too, something resembling
homesickness for something I never could have seen (as in his day),
and always wanted to.
And there is the letter to Tacitus, in which he explains to him how
good are hunting, physical exercise—the outdoor world—for the mind.
Listen to the beginning:
_Ridebis et licet rideas_—Laugh all you want to! I give you lief!
Then he proceeds to tell Tacitus, how, when he goes hunting, he takes
his writing material along. This letter has peculiar freedom from
blemishes, which almost nothing under the sun can escape. It has
richly that something which keeps me reading Latin masters throughout
the years. It gratifies and helps keep alive a submerging passion for
perfection.
How near in time he seems to us—Pliny! Here is a letter which might
have been written from New York today. It is to Fundanus. _Mirum est
quamvis singulis diebus_.... It is amazing how swiftly time passes
here in our Rome. And how we waste our days over trifles.... Here in
the country I amuse myself only with my books. O delightful existence
that injures no one! Run away from the city, Fundanus! Break all the
foolish, frivolous chains which bind you! It is infinitely better to
be idle, than to work so hard at doing nothing.
Pliny speaks reverently of the vast genius of Plato. _Platonicam
illam sublimitatem et latitudinem._ This old Latin mind originated
the art of the critic.
And there is a brief note of a few words to a friend, which keeps
airy grace, while yet preserving precision and fact. _You say you
have nothing to write to me?_ Very well, then write me that! At
least you can jot down what our ancestors placed at opening of their
letters. _Si vales, bene est; ego valeo._
This year—Pliny goes on to explain—we have a surfeit of poets. There
has not been a day of the month of April, without its new poem, new
poet. But he feels forced to complain that people no longer like to
hear the poets recite.
Pliny believes it is better to love honest laziness than
distinguished place and embarrassment. The Roman had his appreciation
of virtues. And the cultivated Roman could appreciate all the
exquisiteness of words. He tells us how he loves Catullus.
Of a good book, Pliny declares: The longer it is, the better! When
only a few, as in his day, were educated, had leisure, money,
idleness, luxurious living, they surpassed the men of my day, in
range of pleasure, in mental power, in _completeness_.
Speaking of Suetonius wishing to buy a house, he writes: These
writers and students need only a little place, because they are so
mentally absorbed. They need a place to walk, a little scenery to
refresh their eyes, a grape-vine or two, and some trees to count.
All the great prose to come, of Latin races, is in Pliny _in little_.
Here is something fascinating. He says that a man of Cadiz, touched
to such deep emotion by the glory of Livy, traveled from the ends of
the earth just once to look upon his face. And then—content—he turned
right around and traveled back again. What books today fire the blood
like that! And where is the blood to be fired?
England made better use of Latin, of Greek mind, than other races,
by incorporating them into daily life. She made of them an integral
part of the nation. Wide-spread mental contact, with such great
races, which were both old and enriched with much experience, ripened
her ahead of time, strengthened her, gave her most of what she has
best. England set about forming life and mind upon some of the finest
thinkers the world has seen. That was her master-stroke of diplomacy.
She transposed geniuses into living, breathing ideals. She claimed
them as her own realities. England was first attracted, not by their
mental power, but by gravity, their dignity; their very genuine
_weight_.
One can see in Pliny just how lovely Roman homes looked, both in
city and country. He owned several, he built. He describes them with
engaging zest and frank detail.
Among the poorest books—most inadequate translations—printed in the
United States, is _The Wanderer_, by Fournier, delightful, satisfying
worker in his own tongue. And I must add to this, Mrs. Ayscough’s
verses from the Chinese, in collaboration with Amy Lowell. (This
last is the judgment of Chinese-reading poetry-scholars and Chinese
themselves who know the originals by heart.) Mrs. Ayscough has no
natural gift for words. She ought to play with something else.
Fournier’s _Wanderer_—in translation—is a masterpiece of wrong doing.
It reminds me of this passage from the Prayer Book: We have done
those things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those
things we ought to have done. And there is no health in us.
It is amazing how loveliness and charm have evaporated! I wonder
why it is so bad? I suppose there are publishers’ readers and
editors-in-chief, once in a while, who are word-deaf; insensitive;
dull; not to be reached by genuine fineness. Not to mention beauty!
To sense beauty surely, a certain amount of nobility of nature is
necessary. The translation suggests to the mind what a picture would
be painted by a person who was color-blind. I can not recall who
published the books, merely memory of awkward writing remains.
Tarascon, Nicaragua, fantastic name of fancy and fable, is where
Rubén Darío was born. Once, in Paris, Darío, with another delightful
South American poet—Leopoldo Lugones—were together in the house of
a doctor. They both declare solemnly that they saw there the spirit
of a dead man walking about. Darío asserts, that two or three times
during his life, he saw beyond the boundaries of the ordinary—beyond
our materialism—and confronted existences upon another plane.
_Yo habia desde muy joven tenedos occasion, si bien rares veces,
de observar la presencia y la accion de las fuerzas misteriosas y
extraños_....
“Several times during my life I have had the opportunity to take note
of the presence and action of forces beyond this world of ours....
In _Caros y Caretos_ I have written about them. There, I told once
how, in the Square of the Cathedral of León in Nicaragua, in the
early dawn, I saw and touched one who had passed beyond.... At the
moment I was sane and in complete possession of my powers of mind and
judgment.” Darío and Lugones talked often together about the occult
sciences.
It was in July, 1890, that Darío came to Guatamala. He had been hired
to edit a paper. On this paper his collaborator was young Gomez
Carrillo, of whom Darío wrote at that moment, as follows: ... he was
a young fellow with brilliant eyes and a sensual face, touched with
the hue of tropic suns—and he was enjoying his first love affairs.
Darío, and three other poets, had a comical experience. In a most
amusing manner, they prevented the Cathedral of San Juan from being
destroyed by a cannon. The General in command was eager to show how
well he could shoot.
He summoned his friends for the exhibition—among them Darío—and the
poets. Down there—poets are everywhere! He gave a dinner. Darío
suggested that he put off the shooting until each improvised a poem.
The General agreed. They spun the poems out one entire night. They
improvised and improvised. After a time the General fell asleep, and
in the morning he awoke so hungry, and so tired, that he forgot about
the Cathedral. It was saved.
The prose of Carillo is good. An immense charm coupled with immense
primeval fury, is in Chocano, who calls himself—_el almo primitivo
de los Andes_. Once I just missed Chocano, by an half-hour, at a
South American hotel—I have regretted it many half-hours. He has, _in
excelsis_, just what the poets of our north do not have.
We should like and enjoy our Latin neighbors to the South greatly, if
we knew their tongue better, and through that, their rich and varied
art.