more than the work of his chisel. He was holidaying in happiness. I
surprised him.
Sometimes Millet’s letters are finer than his paintings or etchings.
And I know Fromentin’s work with the pen surpassed the brush.
Another person I longed to look upon in the flesh was Vivekânanda,
who left a princely life of mediæval splendor in the Orient to come
to America to teach _The Way_.
In his young manhood, in India, when the insensitive, dazzled crowd
caught sight of him in the street, they thought that he must be
a God, because no human being could be at once so superb and so
beautiful. And with one acclaim they shouted: _SIVA!_
All gifts had been lavished upon him, both physical and mental.
He danced the sacred dances of his magic and ancient land like a
master. His singing voice was glorious and trained, and beyond
normal in range and power. His stature and strength were unusual. He
was brilliant and learned. And he renounced everything to become a
priest.
I took long journeys and went to far places, where he was announced
to lecture, only to find that that day some one else lectured in his
stead. For me to look upon him was not to be. He was example of a
kind of mind the West has not produced.
He admired the Christ. It chanced to be upon Christmas Eve when he
determined to renounce the world. During his early preaching days he
used to say to his followers: _Go ye and become Christs!_ Around camp
fires, at night, in remote, lonely, Indian settlements, he related
the story of The Crucified.
I did see Duse, however, whom I had longed to see, although it was
when she was old. Like Vivekânanda she was great of soul. To her and
her power, years were inconsequential.
I did not admire Bernhardt. Deep in her nature there was too much
that was vulgar, coarse—not fine. She had a too keen eye for the
box office. She was, of course, an accomplished technician. Duse
possessed that which made the art of primitive people supreme, the
pleasure-and-pain-distilled honey of the heart.
Flaubert insists that art is to speculation what heroism is to
morality—something useless.
Of Flaubert’s books, of which I am a reader, I like _L’Education
Sentimentale_ best. Flaubert was in the Orient two years. What must
he not have seen, he who owned amazing color sense! From oriental
mind he gained new splendors, fresh conceptions, all of which we can
sense in his salon-piece, _Salammbô_, and in _Herodias_. Palaces
and ruins he saw in India aided him in building those tremendous
architectural backgrounds of his Carthage. His eyes had seen, in the
marvelous East, such things realized.
It is only in case of weak, inconsequential books that men can
argue about realism, romanticism, _schools_. Great things are above
mind-mapping distinctions. They are all things at once. God has
touched them. He has said: _Let there be life!_
Chateaubriand declared that we paint well only our hearts, and genius
is merely assembled memory. Of course he meant memory distributed
through many different lives, in æons of time. In his haste he
condensed explanation.
I wonder in how many other lives I saw some such city as Venice
drifting with magic eloquence upon an opal sea! Venice, like Venus,
is a God and sea-born.
It is passing strange, this combination of memory and allurement from
which I can not get free. It is peril. It is unsealing a too deep
past, and then stealing the forgotten.
I even love summer in Venice. I love the hot Italian nights and the
glamour, the strangely irritating scent of the green lagoons. I love
the consciousness of all the glowing, unseen paintings in its closed,
vast palaces, and the beauty of its people made to paint, and the
giant magnolias which light dark, windless nights like mimic moons. I
never before measured accurately the torture of something one can not
forget.
What a background was Venice for such men as Titian, Marco Polo,
Aretino, and Casanova who made a profession of love and delight,
not to mention all the patricians of the 16th Century whom Yriarte
reproduced in words for us! Pompeo Molmenti has written gloriously of
Venice; all its grandeur he has shown; its gilt, dramatic decadence.
Albert Dürer was in Venice once. Think what his eyes could see there!
Dürer loved the sumptuous just as Rembrandt did. Dürer was one of the
first Europeans to try to learn about, then exploit, the loveliness
of great Indian palaces. A soul as rich as his always spends lavishly
for poorer fellow men. It maddened De Regnier just the same as it
maddens me. And for quarter of a century he wrote about it.
The sight of night falling upon Venice shakes me. It keeps the
eloquence of dim fatality. Night should not fall there!
I wish I could have seen Goldoni’s Venice! That was the rich, the
marvelously expanding Eighteenth Century. Or the Byzantine Venice
of the earlier Middle Age! And then there was Renaissance Venice,
violent and splendid, purple and dramatic, and Roccoco Venice which
Emma Ciardi has painted with languorous, emotional light, and much
lavish, clown-white satin.
La Rosalba painted there. Gabriel Soulages wrote this of La Rosalba:
_La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushes
Took up a drop of gold.
One single drop of gold:
With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the
Muses Nine._
Venice where men painted with gold and dreamed with gems. Sumptuous,
dead Capital City of an Old World that now too is dying! A symbol of
loveliness! When the Spanish Conquerors first caught sight of what is
now Mexico City they exclaimed: _The Venice of the Aztecs!_
As soon as time began to be considered something that could be
measured, controlled, then sold for counted pieces of silver, the
property of man in short, the making of things fine began to come to
an end. Books were rare possessions in days care-free of time, when
there was but one objective, _quality_.
I recall a _CICERO_ made in Venice in 1495, with a cover design
by Julien des Jardins, which for sheer loveliness is something to
linger over. In the center of the cover there is a panel of St. Yves,
surrounded by a border of mingled roses and lilies. One could sit and
hold it for days, to gain comprehension of the soul of design.
There is a _THUCYDIDES_ printed in Italy in 1483, in a Neapolitan
gilt binding, that holds in middle of the cover something that
simulates a gold expanding sun—superb and surprising, with its rich
seeming of dazzling, scattered light. This was made as gift for an
Aragon King.
There were printing presses in an early day in Sicily, Messina,
where now, since Ætna’s repeated earth shakings, America is busy in
building rows of useful and remarkably ugly dwellings.
How arts sprang up and then flowered in early Sicily! The soil seemed
to suit them. When Cardinal Bembo was Secretary to Pope Leo X, he
wrote a little book about Ætna, which fascinated him, and which the
Aldine Press was pleased to dress lavishly in print.
From Sicily, _Girgenti_ (now a dim poignantly lovely ruin), there
came, in the old days, a monk, by name Nicolas Valla, who rewrote in
resonant, heroic, Latin verse the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_.
Then he printed them with adorable wood-cuts, in Florence, in 1498.
I vaguely remember, too, that there was a vagabond mediæval printer,
from Sicily, by that name, Valla, who did a few rare books on his
little press, in old Italian cities, through which he wandered.
Rare books of Germany, rich in variety and number of their wood-cuts,
all bear about the same date. _Hrotsvitha_, printed in Nuremburg in
1501, with cuts by Albrecht Dürer. _Saint Brigitta_, Nuremburg, 1481.
A book by Jornandes, a kind of history of Gothic people, was made in
Augsburg in 1515. The wood-cuts are remarkable, by several hands,
and some of them signed. Many German cities put out these exquisite
things before time began to be considered. Anyone of them can fill
even an humble dwelling with beauty, like the sun the fields.
But what is significant in the fact, is that the making of things
supremely fine reached height and then began to decline at time of
discovery of the Americas. As soon as the Twin Continents were flung
so suddenly upon the Markets of Time, when gold, emeralds, pearls,
silver of a New World, began to distend European pockets, with means
to measure then buy the unbuyable, _Time_, the making of objects of
beauty slowly ceased. Even Venice and Genoa began to lose prestige,
to shrink to small subsidiary ports. A new, a surprisingly different
turn was given to the human mind.
The Americas are the fateful Continents. Slowly they have destroyed
the great living that existed before. And now they are forming the
background for the New World, the dangerous scientific world, when
values will be made over, and nothing will be as it was before, not
even gods. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the death
of beauty.
Some of the new and extreme schools of writing, of art in general,
are merely expressions of weakness. The mind is registering wonder,
uncertainty, and fear, at tremendous change. A close-up that is too
sudden has caused temporary loss of mental poise. And with it has
come the slower comprehension, that the old arts are dying, that they
can not live on, because they will not be needed nor able to interest
anyone, nor even amuse, in a scientific world.
I have read novels in German all my life and now I am asking myself
why I do not have the impulse to write about them. There must be a
reason. But I can not find it. I do not think that the English tongue
carries German printed art any too well, when it is translated.
It is silly to say that people love different things. But sometimes
it is necessary. Our friends love us only when we are foolish and
they can look down upon us. A dangerous gesture always.
Some women when they are young love kittens, dogs, dolls or men, and
always themselves, because they can not see themselves. As for me,
I have loved words. Only words could give me the supreme emotion,
because they were suffering strange and inexplainable change,
which enchanted then puzzled me; transformations of sound, sense,
down long alley-ways of time and living; and calling with voices
changefully beautiful and broken, keeping always beyond the magic of
perfect realization, and in addition, like a false love, prodigal
of promises, infinite and unkept. The emotion of words, with their
different rhythmic passions, in many races, in many lands, lured me.
Following etymological laws, I have watched them, like gay actors on
a stage in a play that never ends, put swiftly on varying vowel and
consonant raiment. I have held my breath at the capricious orders of
change. I have felt delight at their fresh grotesqueness.
Words are our oldest playmates. There is nothing else save the air we
breathe with which so long we have been in contact.
At this moment, as a civilization changes, a period of time comes
to an end, (and all else is useless and time-stained), women who
play Bridge, patronize Beauty Parlors, fly in aeroplanes, use the
root-words their Ayrian ancestors used, upon Indian highlands, at
time of the dispersal of races, when they say _sew_—Indian _siv_.
Since then the physical body has been made over in some degree,
gods and religions have come and gone, the human voice has circled
the globe and man learned to fly like the birds, but the little,
helpless, drifting word with which we cry remains the same.
In _El Modernismo, Poetas Modernistas_, R. Blanco-Fombona has written
an interesting, comprehensive, and necessary book about South
American poets, and poets of old Spain.
He has related some facts which explain the discussed mystery of the
meaning of the _Great Nocturn_ of Silvá. He says that where the poet
speaks of their shadows (Silvá and his sister, Elvira) meeting, he
is relating, in his grief, a memory of their childhood. Once they
went, in summer, to a dwelling, high in the Andes, for cooler air. At
night upon a balcony, with the house lights behind them, Silvá and
Elvira were standing, while the flickering lamp’s flame painted their
gigantic, grotesque shadows across the night-black mountains.
My translation was made long ago, the first translation of Silvá into
any language.
NOCTURN OF SILVA
It was night time,
Night time lonely,
It was night time filled with murmurings of sweetness,
With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings,
It was night time,
It was night time, and the darkness hymeneal, deep and dewy,
Shone fantastical with fire-flies.
By my side then, slowly, slowly, by my side then silent, pallid,
As if to you there came knowledge of a future dark and bitter,
Troubling hidden, secret, soul-depths and the fibers of your being,
By my side along the pathway of the flowers across the pale plain,
You were walking,
And the full moon
Then up-swinging through the sweet sky’s serene azure shed upon us its
white light;
And your shadow,
Graceful, languid,
And my shadow
From the moon’s pale light out-floating,
On the sand-plain sad and lonely
Where the path wound, were united
And made one there,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow.
It was night time,
Night time lonely,
And my heart held naught save memory of your death and agony;
Separated now forever, separated by time from you, by space, by the
tomb forever,
And by shadows black and blacker,
Where my voice can never reach you,
Silent, dumb, sad and alone
By the pathway I was walking....
At the lone moon dogs were baying,
At the moon so sad and lone;
I heard harsh and ghostly croaking
Of the frogs beneath the moon....
I felt chilly, and the chill was that which held you in your chamber,
Held in your white, ghostly chamber, hands and breasts and cheeks
I loved.
Held between the snowy marble
Of the pale, dim plain of death.
’Twas the chill of things sepulchral, ’twas the ancient chill of death,
’Twas the chill of nothingness,
And my shadow,
From the moon’s pale light out-floating,
Walked there lonely,
Walked there lonely,
Lonely walked the pale plain o’er,
And your shadow grown more lovely,
Graceful, languid,
As upon that night of spring-time—fleeting spring of long ago;
As that night time filled with murmurings of sweetness,
With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings,
Reached my shadow and swept with it,
Reached my shadow and swept with it,
Reached my shadow and swept with it—O! twin shadows interlacing!
O the interlacing shadows of twin bodies reuniting with the shadows of
their souls!
O those interlacing shadows which are seeking, still are seeking,
Through all night times, on, forever, for each other in their tears!
In Bogotá, city of old churches, patrician pride, grave gray stone
palaces, the room in which Silvá killed himself was found filled with
books, in many tongues, collections of precious perfumes, and rare
orchids.
How vastly learned was Tertullian! How eloquent! And how bronze
muscled was his prose! As I read, I recall sharply old, resonant
bronzes of Han, black and polished archaic pottery from fabulous
dead cities upon the slopes of the Andes, in Peru, such as that
fluent painter and distinguished scientist and explorer, A. Hyatt
Verrill, discovered, where in the long black night of time forgotten
civilizations flowered then disappeared, and tides of Spanish
conquest and exploration rose and fell, the black marble of the
Baiæan pleasure-palaces of Tiberius Caesar, and black pearls from the
Indian Ocean.
In truth Tertullian’s prose is black and splendid. It glows with the
magic light of poignant drowned moons in perished Egyptian midnights,
and the pictured onyx pendants that chilled the cruel breasts of
Herodias. It moves me tremendously. And what power to swing the great
sentence, then make it humbly sinuous, simple, and supple! Hear him:
“O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches, through whose fault
Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the Imperial decease, that
the Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so
unworthy!...”
“And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates which
gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to
the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is not undoubted that not a few of
your gods have reigned on earth as men.”
“If from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep,
and the Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians
embroidered with the needle and the Babylonians with the loom, and
pearls gleamed and onyx-stones flashed, if gold had issued with the
cupidity which accompanies it from the ground, if the mirror had
license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from Paradise, already dead,
would have coveted these things!”
The preachments of Tertullian keep the interest of romance and the
exciting, restless intrigue of the novel. It is not surprising that a
few books could satisfy so well the elder world: It is because each
of the few kept the power of many. In the confusing complexity of
today, Tertullian and Procopius could take the place of many for me.
The long breath of power was theirs.
The sentences of Procopius are packed richly with meaning. Each has
meat for meditation. And it is that rare writing that I love, because
I keep the illusion of it being chiseled upon metal. It is firm. And
it keeps a gleam in my mind. The attack of the first lines of his
chapters is frequently magnificent. Here is an example:
“The Taurus mountain range of Cilicia passes first Cappadocia and
Armenia and the land of the so-called Persarmenians, then Albania
and Iberia both independent or subject to Persia. It extends a great
distance, and as one proceeds along its range, it spreads out to
extraordinary breadth, rises to imposing height....”
What an eminence from which to view the outspread plain of events of
the chapter, and what harmony of mind and emotion he has given us, by
the powerful placing of words and the unfolding of idea.
The old writing has kinship with plastic art; it was of line and form
and surface, instead of color, emotion, nerves. Thought is a plastic
thing when it is not chipped, sliced thin, like cheap cheese. That
sense of plasticity, the need of a different moulding process, is
something lost in word-craft. It helps give that which is deathless
to much antique art. That, and a sincerity which is priceless.
I can read Tertullian and Procopius over and over. They are always
new; they are filled with the essential of thought, which is
something inexhaustible. They inspire. They give comfort and courage.
But the old writers wrote because they had something to say, not for
applause, popularity, nor money.
The Bible tells us somewhere, that in the end of the world there
will be many gods. As writing, as an art, a conveyance of thought,
of idea, comes to an end, before all writing is used for purely
scientific matter, there are many writers.
It is too bad they do not make children’s books for grown people
today, delightful, unreal fables for adults, to temper the prosaic
duties of living, to make them forget the regrettable, cast off care,
and be joyous. There are none who need such books more than grown
people. I am thinking of Ariosto, his _Orlando Furioso_. How long ago
Ariosto was born! Before the discovery of America.
I like the name an old Italian historian applied to him in his youth,
_uno gentiluomo ferrarese_. His charm of manner won him appointment
as gentleman in waiting at the Court of Cardinal Hippolyte of Este.
He was grateful for this. It meant life among lettered men, nobles,
beauties, at Court of a powerful Cardinal.
In the first Canto of the _Furioso_ he thanks him.
_Ippolito aggradír questo che vuole
e darvi sol puo l’úmil sérvo vostro
Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole
Pagare in parte, e d’opere d’inchióstro._
He can pay only in part and with words; with pen and ink, he declares
humbly.
The story-telling splendor of the world is in this glowing, complex,
impossible fable, written when chivalry was in flower, in Italy.
Its remote forebears were great Indian Epics, the heroic tales of
Firdusi, who was the Persian Homer; and its relative in time in his
own land, was Virgil’s _Æneid_. All this accomplished invention went
to its grace.
The opening is from Virgil:
_Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amóri,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto._
One of this book’s gay far descendants (It has many!) wandered from
Italy northward, to fields of France. There it was known as _The
Three Musketeers_. It has had rollicking, gay followers, imitators
in the art of letters, throughout the world; not only merry, entire
book-sequences, like the romance of Dumas _père_, but individual
lines have been re-written down the centuries.
Tennyson was a renowned borrower from Latin, from Italian masters. It
is difficult indeed to estimate his debt to Horace.
Here are descriptions of castles like that impregnable one of the
Niebelungs. Here are lines that tally with Dante—
_Come i gru van cantando lor lai._
Here is the modern storehouse of romance, in short, from which
scholars, from which poets, drew material. Here are pictures in words
which Watteau painted again in colors. Here is an art of writing
rich, fluent, as the countless carven marbles of Italy.
No one can write such books today. It belongs to the mammoth, the
monumental past. We are _little_. Its fluency, ease, grace, its
inventive power, are incomparable.
There lingers about it the tapestried leisure of ancient monarchies.
Not many books keep so securely the atmosphere in which they were
first read. The atmosphere that created it dominates.
It belonged to a period that did not know subways nor moving pictures.
It belonged to sheltered corners of old-world gardens, graveled,
bordered gravely with cypress, with ilex, where fountains played,
where the yellow marbles of Greece, of Rome, were not out of place.
It belonged to luxurious drawing rooms, lighted by long oriel-topped
windows, where furniture was slenderly shapen, gilt, and where
hundreds of tall white tapers glimmered crisply in the twilight. It
belonged to dim corners of walnut or oak, wainscoated libraries,
where the early, pale, precious celadon of China gleamed, and ancient
pink and blue globes stood, mounted in silver, mounted in crystal.
How different was the place where I read it! How far removed from
nobly beautiful, romantic Italy!
I read it in the hot summers of the plains, with all the curtains
drawn down tightly, with just one exception, which permitted a narrow
strip to be open, through which filtered sunlight yellower than the
peach’s heart, while outside through deep sand, green farm wagons
rumbled heavily, laden with ripe melons, or painted Indians pranced
on limber-legged ponies, which bright floating blankets covered.
To me the romance of Italy was a golden arabesque, covered with gems,
covered with glowing enamels, a noble, far-reaching arabesque of art,
which generously connected me in my little dwelling upon the plains
with the gracious, the splendid thinking of gifted Mediterranean
peoples.
I can renew youth and delight by opening its worn, finger-printed
covers.
From the court-romances of Italy, much of the art of France came,
when a daughter of the luxury loving Medici condescended to become
Queen of France.
Ah!—what did she not teach these younger, these more ingenuous people
of the north, of art, of crime, of subtlety, of luxurious thinking!
The long tradition of the Caesars was in her blood. Her heart had
ripened for crime in palaces whose far architectural ancestry
had been in Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, while over her cumulative
consciousness there had drifted all the sins of Asia. I would like to
look into her eyes! I would like to peer into those deep wells of the
past.
There is a book that is chiseled in bronze. Do you know it? It has
splendid, bare monotonous spaces where echoes beat like iron. It has
resonance. It responds like metal struck by savages for battle. It is
richly hued, deepened in splendor, with the dusty accumulated gold of
centuries.