writer of Bogotá) as follows: “The old eloquent tongue of Castile
has been born again and made more virile in the colonies of South
America. The Spanish which Silvá writes is more subtile, flexible,
clear, than harsh classical Spanish.” He goes on to say that Silvá’s
reading of French has helped him construct a new tongue, with
memories of French sentence structure and more sensitive to the
rhythm of thought.
It is now more than a quarter of a century since I translated for my
own countrymen, who had no interest in it—Silvá’s immortal poem, _The
Nocturn_—which every cultivated South American knows by heart.
Traveling once—when I was young—in the South West, near the Rio
Grande, I met on a night train into some hot, lonely city, a homesick
old man who spoke Spanish. His clothing indicated poverty. In his
pocket he had a piece of dirty paper upon which he had copied down
a poem, which he kept reading over and over. And sometimes when he
read, he cried. I was puzzled. After awhile I told him I could read
Spanish, and asked to see it. It was _The Nocturn_—before it had ever
been printed. How I wish I had asked him about Silvá, and why he
cried! (Many disputed editions of it exist today, because not so long
after this, Silvá killed himself.) My translation was approved by
English reading, Spanish and French critics, but Americans had little
interest in it. None of them had heard of Silvá; and fewer knew
that his poem was one of the greatest written on the Twin Americas.
Later—some years—the _Mercure de France_ sent a representative all
the way to Colombia, to gain information about the life of Silvá.
To the United States he still remains _terra ignota_. The greatest
critics of the Continent have raved over this one exquisite creation
of Silvá, the great Colombian. Silvá was the first of the new and the
last of the old. Pedro-Emilio Coll declared he had never met a more
comprehensive intelligence, nor one more hospitable to every phase of
thought.
Years later, going up the pea-soup-hued, gloomy, shadowed Magdalena
River in Colombia, it was not the strangely engaging tropic world
about me that I thought of, but Silvá, exquisite creator, who like
Catullus, died in his youth. In my heart, to him I was saying ...
_Hail! And farewell._
It is a peculiar thing that Mrs. Asquith should write. It is
something for which she has no ability. In her case it is one of
the multiple shadows of conceit, too long, too unearned material
well-being. She has nothing to say. And she does not know how to say
nothing well.
Frequently she seems ungrammatical. Her power is personality, speech;
_nerve_. Another example of _Mr. Phinney’s Turnip_ growing beyond its
boundaries, in a period of time made for turnips. Only an age when
art is dying could have printed her. But when the house threatens to
fall, who can prophecy what will rush in!
In reading her books I do not recall finding one commanding idea,
sentence, not to mention beauty of any kind. In print her mind is
harsh, cruel, insensitive. One does not see the majestic moving
forward of that which charms, interests.
But such writing from England as Charles M. Doughty did makes up for
what Mrs. Asquith has inflicted upon a helpless public. How glorious
is this from Doughty’s _Arabia_:
“This vast Arabian upland is, in a word, a seered and wasteful
wilderness full of fear, where every man’s hand is ready against
another; a lean, wild, grit and dust, stiffened with everlasting
drouth, where running water lacks, and whose sun-stricken face
is seamed from of old, here and there, with shallow, dry water
courses....”
There Great England speaks! And I all but weep because I fear it is
for the last time ... in my day. England has given the world prose. I
am glad Doughty’s books are fat and many. They will hold out—perhaps.
_Metal that rings. No base alloy!_
There were sentences, phrases of De Gourmont, in his great, gay,
unshadowed, before-the-war days which I like to remember; they keep
that silken, warm, sun-penetrated and protected luminousness, I seek
continually and find seldom. It may be he was somewhat of an æsthetic
pedant—at times, too! Life escaped him. But he was the last fine
flower of something unnameable, now dead in a mechanized world, which
only rich European civilization could lift to fine, free blooming.
Such patient priests of beauty will not be numerous in a scientific
world, because there can be none to listen—none to praise. For a New
World, a new art. There are pages and pages of De Gourmont soaked
through and through with beauty. There are too few left to create
like him.
Hear what he writes of style: _Le style peut se fatiger, comme
l’homme même. Il veillira de même que l’intelligence et la
sensibilité dont il est le signe; mais pas plus que l’individu, il ne
changera de personalité a moins d’un cataclysme psychologique._
He declares again that style is being able to see, think, feel, and
nothing more.
Now that I am no longer young the prose of Loti has the same power,
the same almost fateful charm over me, it had in my youth. How he
keeps words in place! I did not see my own youth; I saw only his. By
it I have kept a proxy perhaps by means of which I shall not grow
old.
I wonder if there is anything in the fact that we were born almost
upon the same day, month, and the stars keep for us still the fervent
memory of rare emotional moments which have perished!
I have never seen anyone else who could do the same thing to words.
He can spread apart their boundaries, then crowd and crush them
edgefull with meaning. He can make them glowing and magnificently
iridescent, like the necks of the wild ducks he used to hunt in the
misty autumn in Camargue.
He has loved the things I have loved. And among them Sicily.
Hear what he writes of this island over which almost all great
civilizations have at one time or another swept.
He was in Siracusa at the time; in January, the month of his birth
and mine; and almost the day. The year was in his diary:
“A classic land; ancient olive trees; and always snowy Ætna sparkling
above the clouds. I see again before me landscapes of old Italian
painters; ruins, pastoral scenes, shepherds, goats. I feel the sad
charm of winter. But it is a winter so gentle I am not surprised
to see palms, flowers, cacti. Siracusa keeps the melancholy, the
expanding mystery, of the Middle Age.
“Tonight I saw upon the Gulf a sunset of Italy. High up, Ætna kept
glowing like a brasier. When I came back to the ship I carried a
bouquet of wild anemones, the hue of pale violets, plucked by some
ancient temple.”
I am glad to have an opportunity to see the remainder of the diaries
of Loti’s youth. And what a youth it was! Do you know of another
so splendid? It was enhanced by contact (comprehension) with the
beauties of creation. And while he was writing his account of it, I,
in a far, lonely, wind-swept prairie village was living his youth
with him. I was caring almost nothing for the people or the things
about me. Instead, I was climbing the mountain highways of Persia,
_with Loti_, to look upon Persepolis, and dream of the face of that
Greek courtesan for whom Alexander the Great gave order that it be
burned.
I was slipping along hot jungle-ways, by night, to look for the first
time, with startled senses, upon fabulous Angor. _J’ai vu l’étoile de
soir se lever sur les ruines d’Angor._ Angor, too, under the swift
light of Eastern dawns, when the stealthy tigers come. I have lived
intensely in many lands through the prose of many masters.
I saw plum blossoms fall like rain in rare forgotten spring times of
Japan, and listened to the clear falling of sweet water in South Sea
Isles, where are men whose bodies keep black gleams like bronze.
I saw Pekin, with its gold and jade; perishing temples of Egypt, in
sumptuous and brilliant evocations, and deserted rose-marble cities
upon the highlands of India. I climbed the Street of the Kasbah, in
windless African nights, when scent of almond blossoms hung heavy on
the air. The too _troublante_ beauty of Africa brushed my senses. And
I enjoyed the rare, early African spring creeping northward over the
Sea, to Sicily, whose little old villages were literally buried in
flowers, and where there were violets as rich, as deeply fragrant,
and as purple, as the mists of England make. How I have loved night
and sunset on his distant seas, and chaste, too ardent tropic dawns.
I have not found my own country so lovely. Nothing has moved me
here in the same degree save human life, and for that I have kept
something resembling a scientist’s interest, because of our racial
complexity. We are the New World’s newly made people. Loti said he
was afraid of Dame Reality. Perhaps I am, too.
He was fortunate in being able to go from dream to dream. But if for
the briefest time this precious, inspired wandering were interrupted,
he suffered. He cried out: “_Il y a dans la vie de ces périodes
d’ennui que l’on traverse ... en compagnie de Dame Réalité_.
(There are periods of boredom which one is forced to traverse in life
... in company with Dame Reality.)”
The more ancient, the more manifold, the life of a city, the lovelier
I always find it. That is why Sicily has delighted me. Certain
villages, certain streets, in Sicily, and canals in Venice, are the
only perfectly satisfying things I have known. They are greater than
love, because they keep twice its intensity. Love may be a vulgarity,
but an enchanting city—never. And men are about the same, while
cities change.
Loti was so busy in the only genuine kind of living there is, which
is storing up emotion, subtile comprehensions, that life became so
exquisite a thing at last, he felt grief for each moment that sped.
Whenever I am in Paris I go to a bench beside the Medici Fountain, in
the Gardens of the Luxembourg, to sit a little while where Loti used
to sit and look out happily upon his blond, beloved Paris.
The individual is passing so rapidly in America, and collective
living being substituted, that we can not expect to enjoy again
such an exquisite personality. Here the daily paper thinks for us,
the Movie feels for us, the radio talks us deaf and dumb, and the
department stores put upon us what clothes they wish, while we remain
limp and unresisting. _Collective living_ where mind and senses grow
dull.
The old arts are dying. They have no place in a mechanical
civilization. Man has procured a strangely noisy set of grown-up toys
that engross his energies.
I hope that in the struggle for world supremacy which is plainly
threatening, the older mind of Asia will triumph sometimes, instead
of American mind. A purely commercial civilization is dangerous.
Just as the good go to heaven, it is supposed, sometime, the
painters, poets, people who have given me greatest pleasure, go to
Sicily.
Pedro-Emilio Coll, that delightful Venezuelan, writes about it. He
says: The king starts out to enjoy himself—meaning Blanco-Fombona.
For pleasure he went to Palermo to dwell a time under the azure shell
of the Sicilian sky confronting an azure sea. Coll goes on to say
that ever afterward, Fombona experienced something like homesickness
for Sicily.
I myself would much rather live and go to Palermo, than die and go to
Heaven. To everyone his Heaven! I wonder why no one thought before
of likening Palermo’s rich, old Moorish palaces to the dwellings of
Paradise!
Once I wrote to engage rooms in an hotel in Palermo. I had just
replied to a publisher a few days before, to a request asking me what
my next novel would be, telling him that I had one in mind which I
heard in the music of Parsifal. I learned, later, that in the Hotel
Des Palms where I had engaged rooms, Wagner finished writing the
music of Parsifal, and his last really great writing, on Friday, at
the eleventh hour, January 13—almost at the exact moment when I was
born.
To reach Sicily I sailed south past Sardinia. Naples, the night
before from the sea, looked lovelier than from land. It was hot.
There was scent of sulphur in the air. But I bought, in Naples,
some charming cameos, to look at, not to wear, because on them were
poignant little figures copied from the painted walls of Pompeii. The
one I like best is of a dancing girl. I remember well her tomb.
From Naples it was at the edge of sunset we sailed past the islands
south. One is Procida, where Lamartine wrote _Graziella_; Capri, with
its ancient Phœnician stairway, cut in solid rock. With deepening
twilight, we passed such shore places as Sorrento, Torre del Greco.
Then away for the open sea and the night.
The next morning when I opened my port-hole we were anchored in front
of dazzling white and pink mountains of stone, wild-lined, lofty.
This was Sicily. We anchored far out. Little pink and violet-blue
boats, roughly and heavily made, came for us and our luggage.
When at length we landed, the glare of light on white chalk-soil was
terrifying, and I recalled swiftly that one of Sicily’s other names
is _Island of the Sun_. Suddenly the buildings of a very ancient
world swept around me. The Greeks made settlements here almost a
thousand years before the Birth of Christ.
Palermo is a large city. It has wide and spacious streets, bordered
with palaces of beauty—proud palaces of the Houses of Aragon,
Bourbon, Orleans, Guise. Solemn, dignified, magnificent. It was
here the Bourbons came for their last wild fling at power. The city
is almost as lovely as Venice, which is all I am able to say, the
highest praise I know.
One reason that the architecture of Sicily is alluring, is because
at one time or another, almost all great races have owned it, so
all lovelinesses are united. And since it does not rain from May to
October, the light was dazzling.
Civilizations reached heights. The Greeks settled it at a dizzy
number of centuries before Christ. The Romans held it awhile; the
Norsemen. Once it was a center of Moorish culture. And then there was
French, Spanish, and Italian rule.
Roger of Sicily, of song and story, built fairy palaces, and then
helped bring the learning of the Orient into Europe. He inspired and
caused to be built three buildings which are wonders of beauty, among
them _Mon Reale_ whose interior is covered with pictures made of gold
and precious marble mosaics.
_Mon Reale_ is several miles from the city, on the side of one of
the towering, treeless, forbidding, pink-hued mountains of rock. The
road that led to it was suffocating, white with dust, and the sun
made me know that Africa was only eighty miles away. Barefoot women
bearing burdens on their heads the size of their bodies, and leading
donkeys, toiled along beside us. Every moment the view grew more
astonishing, and greater the dazzle of unshaded light. At our feet
lay the famous _Concha d’Oro_, (_Shell of Gold_), the fruitful plain
that frames Palermo, filled with groves of oranges, figs, palms, and
the bright blue curve of the shore, with the giant pink mountains of
rock that mark it at either end.
On the road to _Mon Reale_ we visited Villa Tasca, a palace of
rose-tinted marble. Its garden is famous. Out of the dust-white road
into a paradise of flowers! Only oriental people, like the Arab, who
have known the desert and thirst and the sun’s too direct heat, know
how to make gardens. It was one of their perfected arts. And in these
gardens they knew how to set pleasure places of unbelievable charm.
All the old gardens of the South, of Latin races, are among the
richest enchantments. It takes centuries and wars and changing
kings, caprice and madness, and love, to ripen gardens. Money and
haste can not do it. A garden, in the finest acceptance of the term,
will be impossible in our country for centuries. Even the flowers
are lovelier in Latin gardens of the South, because they seem to be
freighted with so many memories.
VILLA TASCA
If Love could build a place for pure delight
’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace,
Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower,
With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways,
And plaintive settles princely lover chose;
With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray.
Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily,
Since centuries alone make gardens rich—
Caprices, memories—royal death—and love.
Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare gold
Is like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
As long ago as the Twelfth Century, the brilliant, unfettered mind of
the Eighteenth Century was active in Sicily. The Renaissance would
have begun earlier, if Europe had been able to comprehend, and then
seize the astonishing intellectual development of this little island.
I used to wonder where Wagner drew the impetus, the power, for the
sacred music of the close of Parsifal, with its dizzy heights of
impassioned vision. Now I know. It was from religious paintings done
in gold and gems, by inspired Twelfth Century builders, here in
Sicily. He caught fire from a great age of faith.
Goethe, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, knew that this was
a land drenched with a kind of power that was passing. He lived here
long. And daily he went to write in a lovely garden, called _Villa
Giulia_, and he, too, had hard work to drag himself away. Hence the
fable, perhaps, of the Sirens. The Square of the Great Cathedral
(partly Moorish) is perhaps the loveliest thing I ever looked upon,
save old Venetian Palaces. And it haunts me still, like the Grand
Canal of Venice, under some unforgettable light.
The giant-bodied, blond, Norse sea-kings who came were robbers. But
that which was Greece and the Orient touched them mightily. They
became followers of the Christ, planned Crusades, married princesses
of France, and all the time dwelled in a Moorish Court and spoke both
the tongues of the East and the West. Here East and West met, then
blended. A superstition was shattered.
We visited the graveyard where sleep Roger of Sicily and his
descendant, Manfred, of whom Byron wrote, men who helped make the
civilization of Europe. Here again I am on the trail of Loti.
He declared this graveyard is the loveliest in the world save
one—_Eyoub_—in Stamboul.
It is a long hot journey by rail to cross Sicily in summer. It is a
day spent amid pale yellow fields of ripening grain. They shimmered
like canary-hued satin. I recalled that it was to raise grain for the
Caesars, and forget his long sad years of service in the East, that
Pontius Pilate came here to end his days. A French writer makes him
say: “_Il me fallut ... sous le coup d’une disgrace immeritée...._
I was held by the blow of unmerited disgrace. Swallowing my tears, my
heart filled with bitterness, I retired to my Sicilian estates, where
I should have died of loneliness, if my daughter Pontia had not come
to console me. Here I raised grain, the finest in the land. Today
life is over. Let the future judge between me and Vitellius.”
The man who was talking with Pontius Pilate in the French story,
says to him after awhile, this man had known him, been a companion,
when the older was Prefect of Judea. They are talking together of
old days of youth in Asia. The younger confesses: ... It was harder
for me to do without a beautiful woman whom I knew there, than even
the wines of Greece. A long time later I learned that this mistress
of mine had joined a little band of men and women who followed a
Galilean Prophet. They called him Jesus the Nazarene, and for some
deed he was put to the cross. Do you happen to remember this man, my
friend Pontius?
Pontius Pilate drew his brows together. He frowned. He thought and
thought. His reply was simple and sincere. Jesus, you say his name
was? Jesus, the Nazarene? No, I can’t seem to recall any such name.
After a time, above the satin-yellow of the grain fields, towered
Ætna, white with ice, with snow. I recalled the songs of Greek poets
written on this very plain. I recalled the pride and joy in the lines
of Theocritus who dwelled just where we were spinning along:—These
lines have always thrilled me.
_I, Thêtis of Ætna, have come! I, Thêtis of Ætna, will sing!_ It was
in Siracusa that Theocritus was born. _Ah!_ how long ago, and his
lines so fresh today. Three hundred B. C.
South of Siracusa, upon this radiantly blue sea, Greece fought some
of her greatest battles, and it was here, and on these waters to the
south, that the twilight first began to fall upon perhaps the most
perfect civilization the world has seen.
The Greek Theatre, in the hillside, where the plays of Æschylus and
Aristophanes were produced, is still in good condition. They had just
given a play. It seats twenty thousand. The old Roman Theatre is
close beside it. It is not so lovely.
Just a step from the theatres, in another of these unforgettable
gardens of long ago, the _Villa Landolina_, the German poet, Count
Von Platen, is buried. And in the Museum of Siracusa there is a
lovely object, likewise from this same garden, the _Landolina Venus_.
Headless, without arms, she stands upon a pedestal in a dim, pink
room in which there is no other object. After you look at it in
the twilight, they open a window and fling the day upon it, and
the marble is of a texture so unusual it seems upon the moment to
palpitate, to breathe, to live again, because beauty never dies. It
is form divine. It was made in an age when there were still many
people who could appreciate form. It is said to have been one of the
treasures of Heliogabulus who gave it to Siracusa, a city he loved.
What heart-fire in the antique world! And in how many ancient tongues
we have heard men say they loved cities.
The next morning early I went back again to the Museum. I offered my
entrance fee, five lire. The keeper shook his head. Are you not going
to let me see it? I gasped. Yes Madame. But you who know beauty may
go in always free.
Over Siracusa, in summer, bends a sky of blue enamel as unbroken and
changeless in hue as the sky of Africa. And along the streets and
country ways are flowering trees, wisteria-blue, gold and white, and
hibiscus-pink, which add to the enchantment.
It was to a friend in Sicily, I think his name was Lucillus, that
Seneca wrote letters of wisdom. And once in a while he used to
mention what he termed _the world renowned mountain, Ætna_.
Seneca wrote to him: If you would be free you must be poor, or else
you must make yourself like unto the poor. Wisdom is a peculiar
treasure, Seneca goes on to explain; you begin to acquire it as you
lose everything else.
And Tu Fu, a Chinese poet of the Eighth Century, wrote:
_It is only the beggar who sings._
That kind of perception and that freedom of mind is lost. One finds
the minds of these great thinkers of old something firm among the
shifting ages. In the present flux they are safe to anchor to. As
a nation, as a people, we are not old enough to appreciate such
statements. Money can not buy anything that is genuinely fine. Only
the invisible coin of the soul can purchase the genuine. The age that
worships money, measures with money, is an age both base and stupid.
José Maria de Heredia wrote some of his most splendid sonnets about
Sicily. He says in one of them, that it is Ætna that ripens best the
purple and gold of the wine. We learn that here Greek blood unites in
the veins with Saracen fury, and imperial pride of France. But time
passes and everything dies. Even marble grows old and worn. Agrigenti
(_Girgenti_) is nothing but a shadowy ruin, and Great Siracusa, (once
most populous and powerful city of the Mediterranean world), dozes
dully under the too blue sky. But metal lives. And today metal coins
keep the rare perfection of profile of Sicilian maids.
Loti has moulded upon Sicily phrases lovely and indestructible as the
coins of Siracusa, which preserve the unforgettable beauty of youth.
It is surpassing strange that I who was always moved to emotion by
the prose of Loti, who tried so many times and failed to look upon
his face, should receive almost the last letter he wrote, and that he
should sign his name to his calling card to send me, just before he
died. Love, perhaps, is a powerful magnet. The avenues of the air are
now plotted and mapped, the trackless roads of the sea, the land, but
the roads of the spirit are still free, unmarked, and sure-leading.
Baedeker, thank God, has neglected to chart them! Loti called this
young girl’s diary charming. He said it made him want to read other
things.