thunderous and splendid, I regret to tell you, but in Latin: _De
Cyri Expeditione_. Oxford Edition. The translation made by Thomas
Hutchinson. (What Latin scholars they made in England in the days of
the Oxford Press!) My edition was printed in 1735.
There are no false strokes. There are no vacillations. There are no
explanations. It marches onward with the iron feet of warriors. It is
proud as the crests upon their helmets.
This sure, this masterly carving upon metal, which only Time is
permitted to shade, is a lost art. It proceeded from a mental
equipment different from that with which the modern artist works.
The old writers put down what they knew. The modern writers put
down loosely, and sometimes eloquently, what they do not know.
Always in the vague, weedy, word-garden of the present, I miss
this unequivocating directness; clearness, firmness; this chiseled
accuracy.
No roads have been so clear in my mind as the road the warriors
of Cyrus traveled on the expedition which Xenophon recounts. No
cities have been so firmly situated beside the roads, alluringly, so
glowingly. No expanse of plain, of meadow or mountain, so reliably
bounded. After the Latin and Greek historians ceased writing, it
seemed suddenly to me that there were no roads left leading to Great
Asia. A part of the world had fallen into space.
They did not say anything for effect. Space upon bronze was too
precious to waste in filling in.
There are no vague foolishnesses. There are no indefinite horizons.
Words were serious, expressive things. They were treated like gold,
like silver. They did not throw them away.
They were majestic, these historians, like the Hebrew Prophets. They
force respect. The vision I keep in my eye of them is something the
same. They too were white robed, stately, brave, and eloquent.
I like the picture of the Persian princes,
_Darii et Parysatidis duo fuere filii_,
the two royal sons, come from that fabulous, painted palace of
Persepolis, upon the highlands of Persia, down, down, steep mountain
passes to the plains. Just where, Xenophon is careful not to tell
us. But we know it was not far from Babylon. These two sons were
Artaxerxes and Cyrus. Their names filled the known world.
I should like to look upon _urbes Ionicæ illæ_, about which he tells
us, those seductive Ionian cities, which the youthful eyes of Cyrus
saw. The cities of the past, spread out impressively upon the Syrian
plain which lay between Europe and Asia, have held the charm of magic
for me.
I should like to have looked upon Cyrus, too, in his young manhood,
moving upon Sardis. What a sight that must have been!
_Cyrus autem cum iis copiis Sardibus movit_, Xenophon begins to
relate.
Ovid, I think it was among the Romans, remembered it and alluded to
it. It teased his mind, too, with the perishing beauty of the past.
He saw in fancy, probably, the crisp curls of black, the crisp,
black, pointed, shining beard; the daring eyes whose gleam matched
gold; the lithe, arrow-like erectness; and the barbaric gemming of
Asia.
Even in his sumptuous Rome, which still kept something of the
vanishing greatness of vast ages that were perishing, it made him
tremble. His artist’s eyes loved the retrospective splendor of the
vision of black-eyed Asia moving in battle upon the proud, blond race
of the south, and giving it its death blow.
That is all history has been, will ever be, the swaying tides of a
human sea, now toward Asia, toward Europe. History is a wave lifted
by cosmic urge.
Today they go to battle wearing hideous clothing and disguising head
gear.
In the old days they moved in the pomp of purple and gold, semi-naked
and splendid, glittering with gems, under canopies of crocus silk,
while clarions shrieked and long plumes caressed the air.
Go refresh your eyes with a picture of it upon the bronze pages of
Xenophon! It is fortunate it was written in bronze. Otherwise it
might fade.
How lonely will they be in that new, scientific, commercially-minded
future, so rapidly approaching, whose eyes have kept a memory of the
picture which was the past.
The scholiast of Aristophanes tells us, among other interesting
things, that Timandra, who was born at Hykkara, in Sicily, was given
by the Tyrant Dionysius, to Philoxenus, the poet. With Philoxenus he
goes on to say, she journeyed farther. She came at length as far as
Corinth. Here she lived for a considerable time and was beloved of
many.
This is the kind of novel I like, one that I can expand at leisure,
to suit myself, one that unfolds long, radiant, geographical vistas.
In 1843, De Musset published a book called _Voyage ou il vous
plaira_, (_Travel Wherever You Wish_). How I should like that! And
how I now wish it were a part of life realized. In fancy I shall see
the antique world. The notes of the scholiasts contain fascinating
information.
“... _of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black roaring
winters, of the gloom of high-lying old stone cities, imminent on the
windy seaboard._”
This quotation from Stevenson’s _Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes_
illustrates something not unworthy notice.
Its beauty, which no one will dispute, is not a spiritual question,
nor one of mind wholly. It is founded upon the flesh.
Stylists play with vowels, with consonants, just as the pianist plays
with black and white keys of his instrument. He, indeed, is not a
dissimilar musician.
To return to the sentence in question. The underlined letters, _i_,
_a_, _oo_, in the words _wind_, _black_ and _gloom_ mean the opening
wider and wider of the back of the throat to emit sound, going from a
short _i_, to long _oo_, a skillful climax, a physical emotion where
muscles of the body are the instrument played upon.
The use of alternating vowels is remarkable. It is witchery. After
height of stressed sound is reached in the word _gloom_, he glides
gently down to rest, satisfied sound-completeness, in the slightly
muted final _s_ of the word _cities_.
The sentence gives pleasant sense of slipping quietly into a blue,
smiling harbor, after storm.
Stevenson performed miracles in handling sound. His verse, however,
was merely graceful, which is a word good to apply to him.
Lafcadio Hearn was another master of the same kind, working with
a sentence-line of keener, sharper, spirit-winged beauty. Few
literatures of the world can show anything to surpass Hearn at his
best.
It is possible to diagram with something approaching accuracy the
effect of a sentence upon the muscles of the body.
A fine sentence is a geometrical sound-picture affecting the body
as line affects the eye, built up out of vowels, soft padding of
consonants packed between, to keep them from bruising each other in
their expanding ecstacy, their lift, their lyric laugh.
The greatest rhythms are personal rhythms, that conform to no rule
save deeps of self, consciousness of world-currents, the moment’s
inspired emotion.
Lafcadio Hearn is a delicate, learned, vowel-musician. No language
has a master who surpasses him. Listen to this, (I quote from
memory): “So I wait for the poet’s Pentecost, the inspiration of
nature, the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will
come when the wild skies brighten and the Sun of the Mexican Gulf
reappears for his worshipper, with hymns of wind and sea, and the
prayers of birds.”
Learned, exquisite, infinitely wise in construction. He has worked
magic.
Hear this from Aristophanes: “Our splendid dithyrambs are misty and
duskyish, and dark gleaming, and high flown.”
This from Euripedes, from one of the choruses of Electra:
“In ancient song is the tale yet told,
How Pan the master of forest and mead,
Unearthly sweet while the melody rolled,
From his pipes of cunningly linked reed,
Did of yore from the mountains of Argus lead
From the midst of the tender ewes of the fold....”
The construction shines through the none too skillful turning into a
modern tongue, in both examples. And in both we still feel recurrence
of balanced sound that can not be reproduced in English, and unmapped
spaces of loveliness.
Goethe declares, thinking, perhaps, of this: “_Man studiere nicht die
Mitgeborenen und Mitstrebenden, sondern grosse Menschen der Vorseit,
deren Werke seit Jahrhunderten gleichen Wert und gleiches Ansehen
behalten haben.... Man studiere Molière, man studiere Shakespeare,
aber vor allen Dingen, die alten Griechen, und immer die alten
Griechen._”
(Study not always men of your own age and those engaged in the same
occupation as yourself, but likewise the great men of antiquity whose
works have kept the same worth for centuries.... Study Molière, study
Shakespeare, above all things study the ancient Greeks, _and always
the ancient Greeks_.)
The choruses of Euripedes are among the loveliest things in
existence, an undying beauty, which not time nor change mar. Do you
happen to recall this?
_The long white reach of Achilles’ Beach
Where his ghost feet shine on the sand._
After centuries, after wasted ink and paper, the thundering, the
fault-finding of teachers, we know no more about words than the Attic
Greeks, centuries before the birth of Christ. No more did I say? We
do not know as much.
The age of Attic splendor antidated, I believe, the Birth of the
Saviour by some five hundred years. In nobility of form, in beauty of
tone, they are masters. We do not learn easily.
I wonder if beauty is a pagan thing which Christianity helped to
kill? Has anything so supremely lovely been done since? And I am
quoting at random, and always from memory. Memory, of course, is not
a storehouse for so great a treasure as the past.
They say the cedars of Lebanon can not grow in the modern world.
There is something that kills them as soon as the city, modern
civilization, begin to approach. Their last stronghold is the slopes
of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Now they tell us, the French, who
are trying to change ways of living there, that few young trees are
springing up and the old are showing rapid signs of decay, the same
decay that ruined their beauty in the Holy Land.
_The Cedars of Lebanon and Beauty!_ Can they exist only in a
pre-Christian world? It will never be possible to harmonize the
Hellenic and the Hebraic spirit.
There has been no poet in these calm centuries of Catholic Spain to
compare in quality with the poets under reign of the Moor, and the
proud Prophet of Islam.
The Hellenic spirit and the Hebraic spirit are oil and water. We do
not know how to mingle them. We can not perform the miracle. The
alkahest is missing.
THE POEM OF DUMAS
In rummaging among writers on Russia the other day I came upon a
forgotten article by Dumas the Elder, whose native charm and great
story-telling power have made critics forget his scholarly traits
and his usually sure and reliable information. As long ago as the
Eighteen-fifties Dumas _père_ was telling mentally receptive France
of Russian writers which America would begin to think about an half
century later. This article contained a poem by Dumas, who is not
known as writer of verse.
Dumas journeyed across Crimea, the Caucasus. Dumas was a diligent
world-explorer long before days of steam and Pullmans. He went to
Baku, on his homeward way from Russia, where oil had already been
discovered. He visited Derbend, too, historic city of the iron gates,
so fateful strategetically, for the East and the West.
Baku and Derbend have always been points of dispute between Russia,
Persia, and the Caucasus. Baku was taken over by Catherine the Great
just before she died. It was one of her last acts of diplomatic
plundering. It was a small place then, and insignificant. It was
merely a Tartar _aul_ of a few hundred houses.
It is Derbend that is the gateway between Europe and Asia, Derbend,
perched like an eagle high among mountains that guard dramatically
the passes to productive Baku, and the plains. Through this ancient
gateway of narrow, goat-like defiles, the invading Mongols came. And
the Scythians. Through this same ancient Pass of Derbend, Mithridates
the Great, with his entire army, disappeared, as if by magic, from
astonished eyes of the pursuing Greeks.
Here Dumas the Elder came when he was rich with years and honors. He
was accompanied by Moynet, the artist, who was at work upon his now
famous book of costumes. They spent several years together in Russia.
When Dumas started home for France, he sailed from Baku, after
having explored both Crimea and Caucasia. But he was forced to wait
several days for a steamer. Moynet put in his time sketching the old
Tartar town, while Dumas finished the novel called _Ball of Snow_,
then he hunted ducks, and arranged his Russian cook-book, remarking
while he worked upon it, that the French were the only people who
still knew how to dine, and converse. Young Prince Bagration joined
them here. It was his mother who had once been mistress of the Great
Metternich, and one of the first woman spies whom that statesman
employed.
Dumas started for Baku from interior Russia, from Novogorod, to be
exact. Here the connoisseurship of Dumas was delighted by two jewels
made of iron, a ring and a bracelet, which he considered gems of
metal work. On inquiring about their origin, he was told that they
had been made by Bestushev-Marlinski, the Russian poet, goldsmith,
romancer, artist, and member of the epoch-making Decembrist
Conspiracy, while in Siberia, where he had been exiled for life,
by Nicholas the First. The jewels were the property of Countess
Annenkov, and had been made from the hand-cuffs and shackles of
her handsome husband, Count Annenkov, likewise condemned to exile.
Countess Annenkov was a French woman, of humble birth, who had
followed Count Annenkov, then her lover, to the mines of Siberia.
About this incident Dumas made another novel, _The Master of Arms_,
and the story related in it is true.
Some of the finest descriptions of Petersburg in the last days of
Alexander, in any language, are in this book. From Novogorod, Dumas
and his cook-book journeyed happily southward, and at length came
to Derbend of the Iron Gates, the city from which the astounding
Tartar Wall starts wandering prodigiously over great mountains, and
unscalable hillsides, proving, beyond doubt, the blood-kinship of its
ancient builders with the race that conceived and executed the great
Wall of China.
He tells us his first warning that he was approaching the historic
gate between the old world of the perishing East and the new
commercial, more enterprising world of Europe, was a Tartar cemetery,
perched upon an amphitheatre-like hill overtopping the Caspian Sea.
Prince Bagration, who was still accompanying him, exclaimed:
“_Look! That is the tomb of Sultanetta!_” pointing enthusiastically
toward a monument of rose color and green towering conspicuously
among the sacred graves turned toward the East.
“Who is she?” queried Dumas.
“Once the mistress of a Tartar Prince, and renowned throughout the
entire Caucasian country for her beauty ... _and her adventures_,” he
added.
“Perhaps you will hear the story at Derbend.”
At Derbend they found an invitation awaiting them from the Commandant
of the Fortress, to take dinner on the following day. While at dinner
the wife of the Commandant remarked:
“Monsieur Dumas, just outside the window here”—pointing with her
hand—“near where you are sitting, is the grave of Oline Nesterzof!”
“And who is she?” inquired again the great romancer, scenting avidly,
as was his habit, a novelty for his eager, prolific pen. “She was the
mistress of Bestushev-Marlinski.”
“Ah! that name again! _Poet, goldsmith, artist, romancer,
revolutionist!_” he enumerated with relish and excitement.
“I heard of him first at Novogorod, and saw the jewels he made of
iron. Unavoidably I seem to be setting out on the trail of Marlinski.”
After dinner was over, the Commandant’s wife guided them up a steep
hillside, to a little lowly mound, marked by one humble stone.
“Bestushev-Marlinski, you know,” she went on to explain, “was
condemned to be quartered alive by Nicholas the First, for his share
in the Decembrist Uprising, which he steadily refused to disavow. But
by some caprice in the heart of him who never knew mercy, he changed
the sentence to exile for life in Siberia, and wrote under it the now
famous—_So be it, Nicholas!_ That was early in the summer of 1826,
before the crowning of Nicholas.
“In 1828, the young Czar was beginning fresh wars in his new
Caucasian possessions, for peace and safety here at Derbend, and also
for the city of newly discovered wealth in oil, over the mountains,
Baku. He had need of trained officers. He remembered Bestushev who
had refused to disavow his guilt. Above all things Nicholas revered
the truth. He changed his sentence again. He sent him, this time, to
the Caucasus. But lest he be accounted too merciful, he stripped him
of military honors, and made him a soldier in the ranks.
“In the bloody and perilous warfare that was being waged continually
here, Bestushev, who had now changed his name to Bestushev-Marlinski,
rapidly won promotion and became an officer again. Then he came
to live right here, in the old bullet-shattered, smoke-blackened
Fortress of Derbend,” pointing to walls above their heads marked by
many sieges.
“Not long after his promotion, he fell in love with a young and
beautiful girl, of poor family, in the village, by name, Oline
Nesterzof. After a time she came to live with the writer.
“One night some Russian officers from Petersburg, were being
banquetted in the very room where we have just been dining. When they
were well under influence of wine, a friend of Bestushev, who had
drunk too heavily, laughing, wagered he could prove the lovely Oline
Nesterzof was untrue to her poet-lover. This enraged Bestushev to
such degree he lost his head and took the wager. For days thereafter
the friend of Bestushev spied upon the young and innocent girl, who
was barely nineteen at that time, in order to win his wager. Finding
it impossible to do so by fair means, he made a plot with other young
friends of the poet—who had been present at the banquet—in order
to play a trick upon him, and gave to Bestushev, at length, the
‘_framed_’ proof of her falsity.
“The emotional, unrestrained nature of Bestushev was deeply affected
by treachery of the girl he sincerely loved. The very next day when
Oline Nesterzof, ignorant of what had happened, and Bestushev were
alone together in a room of this old Fortress of Derbend, a shot
was heard. Bestushev, palled, disheveled, ran out to the courtyard,
waving his arms wildly, calling for help. Oline Nesterzof was found
upon the floor dying, having been shot through the breast. She was
still able to speak, however. In her great and forgiving love for
Bestushev, she declared that in attempting to clean his pistol she
had shot herself by accident. This noble declaration of the dying
girl, made in the presence of a priest, under the last rites of the
Church, saved Bestushev from the death penalty.”
“And this is her grave, you say?” asked Dumas with emotion, looking
down upon the humble marker of stone, which Bestushev had made.
The only adornment upon the piece of marble was a rose, which the
poet carved there, and which was now blackened with powder, broken.
Beneath the rose one Russian word, _sondba_, was engraved, which
means an _Act of Fate_. On the other side were her name and age.
Here lies the body of
Mademoiselle Oline Nesterzof
Born 1814. Died 1833.
Dumas was deeply touched by the humble grave and its story. He
stood silent some time beside the pitiful, lonely, little mound of
the ill-fated girl, hidden beneath grim walls of the Fortress of
Derbend. Then he took his note book. He wrote a verse, something
rare from hands of that single-hearted _prosateur_. He handed it to
Commandant of the Fortress, asking him to have it engraved beneath
the word _fatality_, with his name attached, as lasting memory of his
visit to Derbend. Dumas said he loved poetry but he left the writing
of it to other people.
The following proves sufficiently it was excessive modesty that
impelled him to do it.
She had lived twenty years. She was loved, she was fair,
On a twilight she fell like a rose on the wind;
Where she sleeps with the dead, earth, press lightly there,
For her weight was so light upon human-kind.
After the tragedy of Oline Nesterzof, melancholy madness fell upon
the brilliant Bestushev, who, by the way, was distantly related to
Russia’s great and extraordinary Chancellor, Bestushev-Rjumin, of the
days of Catherine the Great.
He courted death. He was in the front of the battle. And always as if
by magic he escaped. Bullets whizzed past him, but they did not touch
him. Unscathed he emerged from combat.
In the spring of 1838, a particularly unsettled period for the
Caucasus, the commanding officer, Captain Alberand, had been told to
capture some mutinous mountaineers. They were said to be in hiding
in a little piece of woods. Just before order to attack was given,
a messenger rode up in haste to tell them the woods were filled
with concealed soldiers, and to enter meant death to every man. The
Captain ordered retreat. Bestushev-Marlinski disobeyed the order. He
put spurs to his horse. He rode into the woods and out of sight. He
was never seen nor heard from again.
Fifty Mingrelian Chasseurs were sent by the Captain to rescue his
valiant officer whom he loved, and to bring him back. But nothing was
ever heard of him. With entry of the forest he disappeared from face
of the earth. He had hastened to self-chosen death.
On return to the Fortress, the daughter of the Commandant showed the
room which Bestushev-Marlinski had occupied, to Dumas, and to his
surprise and delight, pointing to a chest of drawers, she said: “Some
unpublished writing of the poet, done after the sad murder of Oline,
is still there.”
The next day Dumas’ Russian secretary, a young student of literature
from the University of Moscow, read aloud in French, to the great
romancer, the last writing of the tragic Russian. One of these
forgotten manuscripts was a novel, _Sultanetta_, (the woman whose
picturesque grave of rose color and green, Prince Bagration had
pointed out with emotion, in the little Tartar Cemetery that crowned
the hill, on their arrival). Dumas was so delighted with the
faithful, colorful story of adventure and love among Tartar peoples
of the mountains, that he rewrote the novel himself, and published it
later in Paris, under the same name Bestushev-Marlinski himself had
given it.
During the weeks Dumas spent in Derbend, he devoted himself to this
rewriting, and to collecting recipes for his cook-book, which he
tried and perfected with pleasure. He found here a ragout of lamb
which pleased his epicurean knowledge of food. Also he sampled
with delight the white wine of Erivan and the red wine of Kislar.
He enjoyed himself tremendously. The only drawback to perfect
contentment was that he could not procure, in the humble shops of
Derbend, blue paper of an especial tint, which was what he used for
his work. But he added vastly to his collection of splendid weapons,
almost more than he was able to transport. Some were historic,
and bore names of great warriors, or blessings from the Koran, in
gold, along the blade. And he jotted down in his diary: “_I wrote
like a God all the time I was in Derbend!_” Moynet, his friend and
companion, was making the first colored pictures of costumes worn
in the Caucasus, which are familiar today in authoritative works on
dress.
The second manuscript which the daughter of the Commandant of the
Fortress brought to the attention of Dumas was Bestushev-Marlinski’s
_Ode to a Nose_, which Dumas asserts is not only one of the
most original things that has been written, but one of the most
delightful. We append this poem in Dumas’ prose translation, taking
no credit ourselves, remarking at the same time, as inconsequential
aside, that in one of Dumas’ later novels he gives another, a freer
version of _The Nose_, without taking the trouble to refer to the
dead Russian poet as author.