Italian places of pleasure. She writes of this journey in a prose
book called _Le Strade_ (_Streets_). Delightful poet that she is,
with lines that flame in memory, her prose is commonplace. Not many
have written well both prose and verse.
Calzini was quite mad over Sicily. He tarried longest in Siracusa, to
worship at the feet of the _Landolina Venus_. Somewhere he exclaims,
thinking of the statue, “we have come to you across nations and
across time; we have come from a civilization which has put so much
despair, so much sadness and worry into love. Let us learn to worship
again in you the power of creating, _generating_, profound and
eternal as the sun of Sicily.”
Sicily gave birth to two delightful composers, one of whom was
Scarlatti. It pleases me to know that Wagner wrote his greatest love
music, the music of Isolda, by the canals of Venice, and his music
of inspired spiritual vision, when he flashed forth in tone, sublime
knowledge of a life that surpasses death, in Sicily.
Hear Andrew Lang:
Ah! Leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar
Of London and the bustling street,
For still by the Sicilian shore
The murmur of the Muse is sweet,
* * * * *
And shepherds still their songs repeat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian Sea.
How England has loved lands of sun! There was a young English
clergyman, by name Lefroy, who in the Eighties went to Sicily and
wrote some memorable verses there. I can recall the first line of one:
On shores of Sicily a shape of Greece!
That is just what men can find there today, the vivid memory of
something perfect.
Few things happened to mar the long hot monotony of the sun-swept
plains. Few people of importance came. Dude-ranching was of the
future.
But when I was in my first teens the Great Salvini came, and with
him a son. They played _The Three Musketeers_, in what popular
pride, somewhat feeble in fact, called the Opera House. The dramatic
production here was of slight importance to them. What they really
came for was to go quail hunting in the Indian Territory. My father,
as it happened, was the best wing-shot in the State. I had inherited
a little of his ability; I was permitted to go along.
The two Italians were impressed with the eloquence, the
space-surprise of the unmarked land-levels, where roads were just
anywhere you wished to go, and the sweep of light unimpeded. I
was impressed with the beauty, the charm of the young Italian. In
addition to genius, there was upon him the seal of an ancient rich,
finely tempered living.
The winter that followed I was in a university in the north, lonely
and homesick for the sun, for the south. Then I saw that Salvini was
billed.
After the first performance I went behind the scenes to renew
acquaintance with my gay hunting companion of the autumn. This was
the beginning of a week of delight such as my child’s soul had not
known, a week when I saw daily this engaging Italian youth, so unlike
the young men of the plains whom I had known. I, who even then, was
peculiarly sensitive to beauty, was all but stricken dumb by this
alluring personality. I sensed the splendid things he had known which
were unknown to me.
When at length he had to go away, I wept. He was beauty and youth
and love and charm. He was all the things I liked and dumbly wanted.
What remained was the snow-bound, duty-filled Michigan winter, where
day was too short, too quickly black-rimmed with dusk and night.
As in the case of Adonis of old, beauty was dead and my heart was
lamenting.
Years passed. Life like an uncontrollable tidal-wave swept in,
bearing the things I hated or had no interest in. In short, I grew
old with the years.
Then, one night in New York, in a little moving-picture theatre on
a cheap side street, one night of winter, when the snow outside was
deeply white, just as it used to be by black forest edges, in those
long forgotten Michigan winters, I saw laughing down upon me from the
silver screen, in a luxurious Roman garden-scene from _Quo Vadis_, a
face I seemed to have known. What dimly remembered delight was there!
In the eyes, mouth, the careless gesture of the head, the trained
grace of hands! It was the face of a man no longer in his first
youth, but keeping still youth’s slenderness, youth’s lines. A face
more eloquent, made more impassioned and moving by the years, and
crowned with the flowers I always loved, the fragile flowers of an
Italian spring. The background was an old, rich garden of the south,
and beyond—the Immortal City, _Rome_. Into the eyes as they looked
upon me crept a look I seemed to remember. _Salvini!_
The years rolled back. I was sixteen again. I was mounting my mustang
under swaying trees, in a windy dawn of early autumn. Shining and
resplendent was the outspread circle of the plains, and beside me,
moving along at speed, over the gold-hued grasses of dying summer,
a youth I liked, with the face of Italy; a dark impassioned face;
eloquent; and a voice speaking in my ear, with luscious, singing
phrase I never forgot. The young Salvini!
There is only one other thing I remember with equal delight, equal
vividness. It is night. And likewise a night of long ago. It is
near a Latin land, by the Mexican Gulf; a sultry night of summer; a
silent, outspread, sullen water, with faint, far stars winking down
into it, and the white gleam, and the drunken, too heavy scent of
magnolia blossoms. These two memories sway my senses.
Now I know that the reason is because they keep securely the same
emotional height.
I have found something in a French writer I like: _Only Cezanne knew
the color of Provençe._ I have been fluttering, mentally, long,
around that idea, searching for it, trying to seize it like a bird
its nest, at night.
Why was Margaret of Navarre the helpless sport of fate and accident?
Whenever I re-read _The Heptameron_ I wonder more. She had beauty,
youth, health, intelligence above the ordinary, something that
resembled the gift of genius, and in her old French world none were
more highly placed. She was born and lived beside a throne. Yet she
had no power of direction over days. She was as helpless on the
current of years as driftwood. What was lacking? Was it the saving
grain of salt of the commonplace? Or are human beings sport of deep
tides of time, and the so-called _lucky ones_, who get what they want
the way they want it, grow conceited, and cry out like the little fat
boy in Mother Goose: _See what a plum I found!_ The fact is, they had
nothing to do with it.
A delusion is not a bad thing to grow. It is superior to reality
because it is out of range of attack and can not wear out. It
transcends time and accelerates action.
When one is young one wants happiness to last. When one grows old one
finds it was made to taste of, never to keep. Happiness is merely the
wholesale price of wisdom.
The mind that is perfectly clear, if such a thing were conceivable,
would not be the mind to succeed. A certain amount of prejudice
(little wrongs for alloy with pure gold) is necessary. It guides.
To one deprived of it, whose crystal-clear, dispassionate
intelligence sees all sides at once, whose brain is weakened in
its progress toward choice by weighing infinitesimal differences,
selections, resolute action, would not be easy. We keep many unpaid
debts to wrong. That is where right gets its crown. As brevity is the
soul of wit, delusion is the fiber of life.
A curiosity in America today is the insistent effort to make the
dollar rule ideas and ideals.
Keeping house resembles a clock. You wind it up on Saturday night and
it puts in the rest of the week in running down.
Life is about as satisfactory in its attempts as the thrusts of
swordsmen fencing with blindfolded eyes.
One of my greatest regrets has been that life has no back door.
Necessity is quite as often the mother of goodness as invention.
In the old wars recorded eloquently in tapestries, marbles,
canvasses, men died and kept their faith. The coming wars will be
wars of science. They will be fought largely by the brain, in lonely
rooms. Men will die just the same, but they will not keep their
faith. Sacrifices will be heaped to a new God—Super-Mechanics.
Yet the Greeks used to write songs to Apollo in which they called him
both _Destroyer_ and _Healer_. If circles of time are vast, still
they are circles.
Republics have been the world’s dream of justice. Now Science is
shaking them sadly. What is there Science is not shaking? Is there a
field of mind not attacked?
The thinking of France, the philosophical dreaming of Germany, the
peculiarly destructive quality in the brain of the Hebrew, have
together been helpful in hastening change. There is no value not
suffering transformation.
Hear what De Tocqueville writes about democracy in America. He had
one of the most dangerously penetrating minds the world has known:
_I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations
are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before ... men are
seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from
acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence._
The gentle, the humanity loving philosophizing of the painter, Redon,
in his notes, is good to know. It tells us, too, how great his heart
was. He insists continually upon something I have always believed,
that, in supreme creating, the heart, nobility of nature, play a not
yet credited part.
As the Bhagavad Gita is a breviary for the soul, some of the notes of
Redon are a breviary for art and its making. Few can read him without
feeling an impulse to be better, loftier visioned. His brief notes,
his diary jottings, are a kind of New Testament of Beauty.
A Biblical soul, flinging forth proud, powerful phrases! A prophet
painting super-terrestrial flowers, too ripe in color, too wise,
graceful, lovely, but weighted with divine regret!
Redon could see and feel. Sometimes his words are poetry, especially
when he addresses the sea. In words he snares amazing, unexpected
revelations. In his unselfconscious hours of meditation, sometimes
he is a thinker. Again I am impressed with the fact that they who
are great, keep within untapped deeps of good. He declares that
that which comes from the heart can not die. Goethe said something
similar. And that was the teaching of Faust. The last resolve of
its united modern and mediæval wisdom was the heart’s supremacy.
Beethoven asserted it. Redon, as it happened, adored Beethoven. As I
recall the musician’s words they were these: “Man’s title to nobility
is his heart.” Now I recall Goethe’s words: _Nur was vom Herzen
kommt, zum Herzen geht._ This completing of logic in word-phrase is a
characteristic, I think, of the great German.
Redon goes on to say that if on some centenary of Michael Angelo he
were chosen to make the address, he would speak only of the great
soul of the man.
There were long periods when Michael Angelo neither painted nor
modeled. In these between spaces his sonnets were written. I recall
at this moment a sonnet in that old Italian tongue I have loved so
long, which tells how he likes sleep and the substance of stone:
_Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso._
The woman whom Michael Angelo loved declared she wrote only to give
vent to inner grief:—
_Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia._
He was greater. He wrote selflessly.
It was in Bordeaux, a letter informs me, that Redon was born, instead
of Marseilles.... He seems to have possessed a noble nature, with a
peculiarly personal quality of penetration. He stood face to face
with basic emotions.
He declares the dilettante amuses himself, while the artist, going
through agony, produces grain for broader sowing. Mixed with his
love, his knowledge of art, there was reverence.
He explains how memories of what his father used to tell him in
childhood helped him. Of his father, he remarks: “He loved the
outdoor world. He talked often about the pleasure the great spaces of
America gave him, and forests, where once he was lost for days. He
liked to recall the wild life of his youth, this daring follower of
luck and liberty.” His father was in New Orleans at time of the Wars
of the First Empire.
In his sensitive childhood, Brittany made him sad. He explains that
in Celtic lands the human soul has accumulated too much emotion. The
passion of days, of years, is piled there, until material things
become uncannily imbued. Hence the wealth of legends. Legends and
poetry become the permanent safety vault of the agony, of the
desires, of a race.
Once he pauses to praise the wines of France. He blesses men who
grow the grape, who make precious liquid to dilute bitter fate with
a little optimism. He calls it _liquid of dreams_. He rejoices that
there is something that can exalt mind.
He tells of his first art teacher who did not try to teach. He kept
still and rejoiced when the boy went mad over the canvasses of
Delacroix. From that man, he declares, I learned the essentials of
creation.
I have found another reason for his devotion to flowers. In his
impressionable boyhood he became companion of a famous botanist,
Clavand. This man was fascinated by the imperceptible, unsteady
boundary line which separates flower-life from human-life. In the
plastic arts, Clavand could appreciate both the serenity of Greece
and the riotous Middle Age. He loved Delacroix just as Redon did.
He kept telling Redon, the boy, of the intensity of life, the vital
irradiation of the canvasses of Delacroix. He compared them to the
plays of Shakespeare, because they held the same quality. In stored
up depth of life they were Elizabethan.
Redon expresses belief that there is no such thing as art until
pressure of idea, vision, force then form speech.
Remy de Gourmont applies the word _metaphore_ to the paintings of
Redon. They live by logic of imagination.
His reflections are always illuminating. Speechless nature, (plants,
flowers), have normal, secret life-laws which landscape painters
must feel to express. There is an art of design freed from burden of
details.
In life there is suffering. Art is made to console. He insists
Rembrandt created _clair-obscur_ just as Phidias created _line_.
New art, outside law and vision of pagan Greece, must derive from
Rembrandt.
He thinks that the power to put into a work of art more significance
than the creator suspects is done by them whose hearts are perfectly
true, they who hold in the soul something greater than art. This
means it is the rich heritage of them who have lived.
Redon remarked: “When I am alone I can love the highways.” Tu Fu, a
poet of Eighth Century China, sang:
“I find that I like to walk alone.”
Thinking, evidently, is a thing outside of time. Redon says that with
God, he can enjoy natural things. I prefer rough ways, uncultivated
spaces, untouched by the human hand. I even love black woods when
they are sad. I love wild storms, abundant rain, cold, snow and the
frost. I love these harsh things men grumble over. They even keep a
language which enchants me.
Long ago Redon felt sensitively the coming of the dangerous,
scientifically minded New World; an age dry of emotion. He exclaimed
in words touched with both grief and fear: “Plastic art is dead,
because the wind of the infinite has blown upon it.” That is exactly
what science will prove to be; _the wind of the infinite_.
Somewhere else I recall, he declares that the superiority of the
Christ is the fact that all loved Him without argument. Over the
memory of man there floated the candor of His smile, and the fact
that He could love every one who approached Him.
This makes me remember a poet’s portrait of Christ, drawn by Leconte
de Lisle. It is too lovely ever to forget:
_“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée,
Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu,
Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scellée
O jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!_
The boyish Christ, a halo of flame about His head, wandering along
the shores of Galilee. Humanities last God.”
The dilettante plays. The great artist learns to suffer; creating is
the pendant of unselfish anguish.
“How good it is to read in a quiet room!” Redon exclaims—“with
a window upon a forest.” He could say that, because he had not
permitted the tumult of the world to touch his heart. That was a
finer thing to do than to collect dollars. Success, what is popularly
called so, is more or less vulgar, and a little too noisy now-a-days.
Redon is a poet in words without suspecting it. Hear him!
Painters—go look upon the sea!
There you will find color, find light;
And a deep sky that lives.
There you will catch song of the sands,
Countless imperceptible shadowings,
You will come strengthened back from the sea,
Until the great word will be yours.
It is under the charm of autumn evenings that I resume my memories.
There is something in this season that turns my thoughts toward the
past. It is sad, a little. It helps recall that which is gone. In my
soul it makes silence; sweet and discreet, like autumn leaves that
drop.
Once Redon met a man named Chenavard who had known Delacroix. This
was in 1878. The man’s memories of the great painter gave him impulse
to paint, he states. Delacroix always stood at his easel, or else he
walked rapidly back and forth, whistling an opera of Rossini’s. The
man could not forget the abandon, fertility, power of invention, _the
fury_, of Delacroix.
Redon insists that success can destroy and then pervert an artist’s
sense of beauty. And he was of the opinion that it is in winter when
music has its greatest influence. It belongs to the skies of the
evenings of winter, with their silence. Music is art of night and its
dreams. But painting belongs to day and the sun!
Exactitude, truth, action, are of the domain of words. Therefore not
native to Germany, land of music, abstract thought, visions. It is
most at home in France, in England. He dislikes the music of England.
He loved the Basque Country. The soil seemed an ancient fatherland
where he must have lived, loved, suffered. There the wandering winds
of summer, the slightest motion of water, sound of the human voice,
awoke imperious memories. Everything touched his heart.
In life we may be always stumbling upon our ancient and forgotten
dwelling places, where in some other dress of flesh we played. One
life for the manifold mind is inconceivable, for its uselessness, its
injustice. Lives are multiple. Science will teach us how, _some day_,
to remember.
In Holland he was unhappy. He felt fear like a child, in that
melancholy country, filled with the inexplainable silences of water;
strange, too dim shadow-lighting; and a sky where rain clouds shift.
The brush of Franz Hals won him. He says that if genius ever proved
itself nature’s outlaw, it is in the paintings Hals made after
eighty. Then to Hals came fresh fluency, supreme disdain of details.
Then genius deluged him with the power to fling forth reality.
He refuses to worship Rubens, because Rubens never suffered. He
who has not suffered can not attain excellence. But Rubens touched
his painter’s sense to emotion. Rubens has all greatnesses, all
richnesses. But he has not suffered! Therefore I refuse to place him
among the few. Masters are always alone, bowed beneath weight of
lofty power.
He dwells upon the prolific exuberance of the few who take no account
of creative energy. At length they sweep beyond human, beyond
material limits. Dürer was one of these, when, to illustrate little
books, he made designs too grandiose for walls of antique palaces,
vainly dreaming there would be at least a few who could comprehend
him.
Redon lived the life worth while. What a vulgar stupidity is
money beside it! It can give neither ideas, emotions, nor even
comprehension or appreciation of what money can buy. The pure joy of
the heart is honey. It dwells hidden in deep centers of flower-gold.
It is not easy to find nor procure. God has to send his winged
messengers to collect the honey of the heart.
Seeing is supposed to be something of general possession. The fact
is, it is unusual. It is not eyes which keep men from being blind.
Once some savages from Tierra del Fuego came to France. Redon looked
at them. He called them proud, haughty, cruel, powerful, grotesque.
They made him vision the perished primitive world. He found in them
grandeur. He saw all the other grandeurs of civilization, too, shine
in their eyes. He enjoyed their uncorrupted, plastic beauty. They
were rare bronzes; fine, firm. They had not learned the error of
decoration.
He found nudity sublime. He compared them with luxurious, motionless,
royally expanded, radiant flowers of tropic India. He longed to see
their bronzed and splendid flesh encircled with monstrous forest
growths, or stretched out on sand that is hard and smooth.
Chamfort thought that people with cold, reasoning minds exist, but
only the impassioned know how to live; I too am most grateful for the
rare times I have had strength to leap petty, picket fences which
shut in the too safe, the usually relied upon; when I have dared,
kept to faith of self.
They do wrong who mock the testimony of the saints, the seers,
such as Saint Teresa of Avila. There must be facts beyond the
registering of commonplace faculties. Just as there are musicians and
painters, with their special endowments, there are people great in
_soul-power_, possessing, perhaps, extra-terrestrial vision.
Goethe’s mind was clear and fine. He always wished he could have
had more details about the statements of St. John, which allured
then troubled him. But Goethe was too great to deny the unknown or
mock the unmeasured genuine. He could guess what wonders might dwell
there. They who go ahead, go guided by something greater than man’s
reason.
Redon speaks of his art as a little door opening upon mystery. He
insists thinking people are crushed by the grandeur of problems they
try to solve. Sometimes such people possess heart, however, then they
begin to comprehend.
Redon admired Degas. But he declared that the admiration of Degas
for Ingres was of the head not of the heart. He thinks Degas marks
the first halt in the journey to New World art. He calls him free,
joyous, exultant artist.
Once Redon exclaims fretfully: “I can’t speculate about
Alsace-Lorraine. How could I? Art is the refuge of the peace-loving,
where can be no disputed frontiers. Wars are made by dull, imperfect,
fragmentary minds, minds incapable of lofty logic, where suddenly a
part assumes the false significance of a whole. In short, merely a
loss of mental perspective.”
I do not often procure pleasure from reading Proust. His thoughts,
the meat of the matter, are substantial, satisfying enough, if not
alluring. But I do not like stumbling through so many twisting,
cluttered alleys. His prose is dowdy. I do not call Proust a
neglected genius. In the human realm (in word art) he is a plant
which did not possess that which permits to flower. Proust’s _Swan_
helps date the death of creative art.
Among the things I regret, such as not looking upon the face of Loti,
is not having had the opportunity to listen to the conversation
of Anatole France, or rather, his monologues. They who had that
opportunity tell me he was even greater there than in his writing,
whose finished, scornful, scholarly paganism, gives me little,
shining gold grains of joy. Nicholas Ségur writes enchantingly of the
conversation of France.
Great artists, perhaps, possess the power to live always on the crest
of emotions, which create or transform worlds for them at will. That
is an element of genius. Other people rise to it under pressure of
something extraordinary.
I have found pleasure in looking upon the backs of athletes, in
bronze, marble, flesh, and the bodies of great beasts, such as
tigers, lions, panthers. I have loved them partly for their beauty,
and partly for their intensity. They are proud, powerful moments made
tangible. They are highly perfected things where power focusses.
Sometimes they are terrible. Then they possess the too keen beauty of
bewilderment.
The sculptor Bourdelle has caught this fascinating something which
fascinates, by blending beauty with terror. Then the two are elevated
to uncontested power.