fancy. English poets have not cared so greatly, aside from Tennyson.
The idea has a sumptuousness a trifle un-English, a twist of mind not
usual with the race.
Although the Russians, in the old days, read French prodigiously
and spoke it, their mind was influenced by England, by Germany. The
philosophy of the latter ploughed furrows through the race which time
has not been able to efface. The effect of France over the mind of
Russia was greatest in the Eighteenth Century. The educated Russian
was always comparatively free to choose mental food, because it was
easy for him to read other tongues. Right here is mark of kinship
with the Orient, whose subtle thinking fell so easily into different
moulds.
Pio Baroja’s _Juventud Egolatria_ (read in Spanish. I have not seen
the English version), shows a man who has genius for going wrong.
After reading it, one does not have increased respect for his head
or his heart. It is too bad to be able to enjoy few things, in any
department of art, life. Envy, hatred, have eaten like rust. One
might perhaps guess him to be victim of some concealed, incurable
physical ill which blasts life.
In addition to individual hatreds, he is generous enough to share
those of the rest of the world. He remarks: “_Respecto a la
hostilidad que Nietzsche siente por la teatrocracia de Wagner, la
comparto._” In regard to _hostility_ I fancy Baroja would always be
generous enough to say _la comparto_, I share it.
His mind is peculiar in its reaction to ideas. But his modesty we
admit. I noticed a line in which he confesses the opposite of what
Loti happens to say in his last book, _Prime Jeunesse_.
“_No la quiero conservar: que corra, que se pierda. Siempre he tenido
entusiasmo por lo que huye._” (I do not care to preserve anything:
let it hasten away, let it be lost. Always I have felt enthusiasm
for that which was fleeting.) Loti declared he had devoted life to
preventing anything from perishing, _even memory_.
In Baroja there is visible joy in destruction. With it, insensibility
to beauty. A nature harsh, dry, cold. He is narrow, dogmatic. He
steps nimbly in a little circle where everywhere are marks of
poverty. He is not grandly gloomy, tragic, like Leopardi, nor can
he, like the Italian, create impeccable art. He suffers from lack of
sympathy, vision. He has neither the generosity nor expansive spirit
that permits him to enjoy, admire, learn. There is something about
the book which is crabbed, petty. In addition, words do not come
fluently. He is what Germans call _wortkarg_. His critical ability is
slight. He recalls faintly now Leopardi, Dostoievsky, as to constant
inclemency of mental weather. They, however, were moved by genius. He
hates splendor, the fury of great spirits with which he has little in
common. They make him feel small, cold, old.
He accuses Balzac of stupidity, delirium. That very likely is the way
the mountain looks to the mouse. Victor Hugo is rhetoric, vulgarity.
No wonder he was dazed by Hugo’s vocabulary! He can not admire the
prose of Flaubert. He is like a person who having lived in darkness,
has dwarfed eyes unable to respond to light. Again he seems a naughty
boy who stands in middle of the street for purpose of spattering
passers-by with mud, taking account neither of age, infancy, his
interest being to bespatter.
What he writes of Dostoievsky is rather brilliant. That is seldom
ascribed to Baroja. He says (translating as I quote): “In the
spiritual fauna of the Twentieth Century he will be something like
the Diplodocus.” He is perhaps an uncatalogueable monster, but a
monster of genius not easily to be equalled or imitated.
He could appreciate neither Sainte Beuve nor Taine. He read them
like a blind man. When he read Ruskin he had no comprehension that
whatever that critic’s opinions as criticism, as stylist he is worth
while. Baroja talks something like the conceited fop of an isolated
village. He may be scientist gone wrong, who uses a scalpel, where
his present profession calls for a pen. He makes attempt to vaccinate
his readers with his peculiar virus.
Baroja’s opinion of the Latin historians, Sallust, Tacitus, shows
an inclination to baseness. He thinks evil persistently. In these
two cases judgment and scholarship are weak. He grudges Tacitus
posthumous fame. But it must be admitted he can appreciate Caesar’s
_Commentaries_, and that his word of them is _juste_. It may be he
does not know how to envy them.
Baroja is not even pleased with the place where he was born,
something regarded with affection by people in general. He wishes,
plaintively, peevishly, it had been elsewhere. He wishes it had been
among the mountains or else beside the sea. He is displeased it was
a city where _foreign people_ come. He treats his fellow townsmen,
Sarasate, with disdain.
Stylists have been men of charm, kindliness. The lack of these
qualities, suavity of surface, is marked in Baroja. There is seldom a
sentence that gives pleasure.
Yet if he disavows ability of other men we must give him credit of
disavowing his own ability as frankly. That points to crabbed honor.
He does not forget to say a good word about Azorin, the critic. A
Yankee eye to business! But heaven forbid me from accusing him! None
could have the heart to wish him a disagreeable trait with which he
is not endowed.
Baroja boasts he is _modern_. This is something of which he is proud.
With him it has a local, countrified application, meaning that he is
not emotional, that he reserves accelerated motion for his feet. He
has a limited outlook. An unchanging view point.
The Spaniard, no matter what his condition in life, worships the
aristocratic idea, and is more or less guided by it. No race
cherishes more deeply ideal of class.
Baroja does have disconcerting directness. The result perhaps of
constitutional disillusion, motived by dislike for what charms
others. Steel-edged seeing, however, is his! It may be he is
disgusted with the sham men call life.
I would like to believe something akin to the pity of Dostoievsky
is mainspring of his hatreds, or a sense of justice which he sees
violated. And perhaps he regrets that life is becoming scientific,
collective, and must suppress the individual.
War we know has lost dramatic beauty. It is merely scientific
slaughter. We can not guess what science will do to transform life.
_La Busca_ (novel), by Pio Baroja. In the novel I find the same sad,
gloomy mind, with no sense of structure, of reasoned novel-building.
Once in a while, in this book, he has forgotten himself and written a
resonant sentence, (page 30, the top), which I feel sure if he knew,
he would pluck out, to throw away.
The novel shows that Baroja, in his mediæval Spain, has felt urge of
new forms, new bottles for wine of the spirit, but which he himself
is unable to procure because of imperfect technique. He has, too,
affiliation for filth. But he does not paint it well. He should
read Rachilde. _La Busca_ is a saving in too permanent print, of
trivialities.
I have read two novels for which it is not easy to find
justification. One is _La Busca_, the other Duhamel’s _Confession
de Minuit_. The latter shows, however, the miracle of writing three
hundred pages about nothing. That takes skill. You can not find a
better example. It is an attempt in abnormal psychology, providing
mind magnified sufficiently to find the idea.
_The Tour_, by Louis Couperus, is another disappointing book.
But the advertising agent of the House that published it is not
disappointing. I commend him. He deserves increase in salary. I
bought it upon his recommendation. I rose to the bait.
The book is full of missed opportunities. This may be fault of the
translation. I have read many translations, however, by De Mattos,
a veteran translator, which were splendid. I regret I did not read
Couperus in the original! I looked forward to glorious renewal of
joy in the rich past of Egypt, its astonishing architecture. What an
opportunity Couperus missed in describing that pilgrimage of people
to roof of the Temple of Serapis, where, under witchery of an African
moon, they were to sleep, royally robed, in honor of the god, then
garner dreams! I, myself, then began to dream hungrily of Africa,
amazing land which man has never conquered any more than the ocean;
of Tunis, in the barren wastes behind which, the Colossus of Thêbes
used to burst into radiant song when the sun came up and the burning
rays touched it. The book possesses neither beauty of portrayal nor
scholarly exposition, to lure the weary, discriminating epicure of
things of the mind.
There is a poised, a praiseworthy calm about René Bazin. There is
something that comes from nobility of nature that I like. He has
observed the good brown earth, the humble trees with happy little
leaves, in an intimate, loving, painstaking way that recalls Hardy’s
forests of Wessex.
I recall an autumn in the forests of Wessex, where the importance
of each gold-brown leaf that fell was lifted to power of romance.
Most subtly, delicately felt, then adequately reported. When I read
the early tales of Hardy, I regret that in America we have lost so
many rich Anglo-Saxon word-forms, that American English has become
anæmic. It has grown thin, showy. The novels of Hardy are England,
the fibre of England, while American novels are not of any land. They
might have been written in comfortable ingrain, or Brussels carpeted
places, where there is noise and a phonograph, in Fez or Ispahan.
It is a pity to miss savor of the soil. It is a pity to be flowers
grown in dry, movable, windowpots, instead of in the Earth’s brown,
wrinkled breast.
The soul of René Bazin is preeminently Christian, with seal of the
Christian ages. He can not conceive beauty for itself. For him it
must become morality. He speaks of the _grand refroidissement de
l’art national_, which has been called _The Renaissance_.
The soul of him belongs to the world in which pity was born, and
this, if I mistake not, is trait of his nature. Even in objective
seeing it threatens to become paramount.
In _Redemption, Le Blé qui Lève_, Bazin belongs to the group of
Millet, Rousseau, and Breton, only he happens to use words instead of
oil and brush.
The overflowing Loire in spring, (_Redemption_), the broad mist-dim
meadows it feeds, are magnificent. The great landscape art of France
is there. I felt a thrill of pleasure, sense of thirst for beauty
satisfied, as when I look upon a canvas. In this canvas, it seemed to
me the light was finely managed; balanced massing of shadow with sun.
The effect was ennobling. There was something that made one believe
again in one’s fellow men. It is good for the heart of the world to
read books like his.
I fancy Hardy regrets poetry was going out of fashion when he began
to write, or he would have been a poet. Like two other novelists,
Paul Bourget and Anatole France, he was born with gift for it. The
delicately woven texture of his thoughts belongs more to poetry than
prose. His brush is a poet’s brush, his are a poet’s observations.
And he has read them prodigiously, great and little. English and
Latin poetry few know better. He is too sensitive for the broad blare
of prose.
Hardy does not know women. His women are monotonous, undeveloped.
They are little more than sketches. To be sure it may be objected
that the peasant type he prefers does not lend itself to shading, to
differences. But I will venture to assert, without definite knowledge
of any kind on the subject, that he himself did not know women. If
there had been anything of Burns in his nature it would have come to
the surface, either in life or in books.
But no one has described inanimate, humble life of the fields as he
has; the lonely downs, grass, furze, the forsaken sea’s edge; the
desertion and chill of winter or early autumn, on lonely settlements
and isolated homesteads. To read him is good as taking a vacation,
he gives so truly the freshness of open spaces. He paints in words
the same type in England that Millet painted with brush in France. In
both is reverence, sincerity. Like Millet he lived among the people
he pictured.
His observation of the fields, the folds is loving, fine. The total
effect is that his novels are _rooted_ somewhere; they have definite
place. They are homely, solid, instead of brilliant, detached. Now
almost everything is superficially observed. I enjoy contact with a
mind that knows basic things of the land written about, and I like
his scholarly respect for old English and Latin masters. I like all
that dissevers from cheap, showy, tinsel, blatant novelty.
Hardy said once that the speaking age is passing for the writing age.
Now the writing age is passing for the _seeing_ (Movie) Age. It is
too bad suns insist upon shining singly! As for me I shall remain,
perhaps all my time, in the first two ages, finding in them, as I do,
pleasure.
In the world of Hardy, the amusements of his characters are things
that are no more. Imagine, if you can, a novelist of today having
characters play _chess_. It seems a thousand years ago! It relegates
them to the Romans. And the puritan manners, outlook, of his women
are something inconceivable, even in strait-laced little-town places.
This narrowness, puritan prejudice, which covers the lives of his
characters, seems old. It gives us means by which to measure changes
which have swept life of English speaking peoples since he wrote. And
years have been few. We have been going at cyclonic speed. We are on
the down-hill spin of civilization.
Hardy’s books bespeak leisure; leisure to observe, think, live,
write. They are to be read, leisurely, with loving attention to small
details. They are made to sip like wine whose supply is not great
and may not be made again. He does not believe in art written in
shorthand.
I like to contemplate his England: England of stately, ordered
living, great country homes; of love of forests and fields; and the
sustained interest in noble scholarly things, in extensive knowledge
of masters of Greek and Latin.
The feeling for caste is strong, reflecting truthfully the England he
knew, that feeling for class, which the new civilization will destroy.
Old age comes soon in Hardy’s novels, and lessening of courage. He
lacks faith in life through excessive sensitiveness. His men are
middle aged at thirty.
Sometimes there is Miltonic ring to a sentence of Hardy’s. This, for
instance: “Grimness was in every feature and to its very bowels the
universal shape (cliff) was desolation.”
The words Milton used have lost edge in today’s speaking, I notice by
observing afresh the above. We do not feel as Milton did, the full,
far ring of their meaning. We use a lot of words we partially sense,
instead of few we sense in entirety. When I read books of English
writers of long ago I have sensation of handling bright, crisp coins.
The words of Milton are large, clear, round, beautiful.
The story of the youth of England as Hardy depicts it is story of
martyrdom transferred from Rome to Victorian England. It is not easy
to believe it could have changed so since _Merrie England_. This,
joy-destroying puritanism is as out of reason as licentiousness.
Fate strikes in the Hardy novels with inexorableness of Greek
tragedy. Did he learn this from life? Or did he imbibe it as rule of
creation from careful, classical training? The physical world Hardy
shows is lovely. The spiritual world is stern and life difficult,
where natural right wears garb of wrong.
Hardy believes in fickleness of women. To him they remain Biblical
characters, creatures under a curse, workers of woe, whom he has
seen at a distance and not well. He lavishes phrases upon them,
careful meticulous description, but still he does not paint them
understandingly. Only a _roué_ could do that, who had found favor
with them, and who knew their hearts. I do not believe he admired
women greatly, except those whom he created to suit himself, and only
fleetingly then, as one admires, then regrets, beautiful glass which
is broken. Hardy has seen life and judged it, in light of the puritan
Scriptures.
In conversation among workers on thriving Wessex farms, men of the
field, forest, there is something Shakespearian. There again is the
tough, dependable fibre of England, England of conquest. And no one
has loved better than he its fields, spring-time and harvest; and
its brave, mist-covered, protecting sea. How many dawns, how many
sweet noons of summer, he has patiently watched it, or observed with
critical eyes of connoisseurship, then loved it deeply!
His sense of humor must not be neglected. Not kindly American humor
be it said, nor brilliant, crackling Irish humor, like hoar frost on
clear, thin crystal, but one that is English, like an English sun,
shining persistently (which is the habit of suns), but, never burning
with brightness, something, however, we ought to be grateful for,
because of reliability, as English people are grateful for niggard,
hard-fought living. The happiness, grief, discreet merriment of his
stories are framed just as the life of England is framed, against
background of ancient churches. They are a series of pictures within
eloquent curves of mullioned, Gothic windows.
Human love (with Hardy) got mixed with religion. He expected women to
resemble saints. Life did not come to his expectation. He could not
love where he could not reverence. So he passed it by. He had puritan
inability to make concessions. Puritanism, without his knowledge,
ingrained life, until it fashioned dreams. He could not forget and be
happy, in the present beauty of a thing as it is, without inquiring
minutely into condition of its soul, both before and after. The pagan
put in practice this, _forget_. The puritan never learned the noblest
teaching of his faith, _forgive_.
I have enjoyed vastly traveling with Hardy along fresh, green,
sea-bound highways of the land he loved, with the bracing sea breeze
in my face, my hair, and lazy, long winged sea-birds wheeling over
head. I have enjoyed the peace of old-fashioned country gardens
under high heat of noon, and his quaint, careful naming of old
time garden-flowers. And I have liked, too, sometimes feared, the
tragic lonely blackness of the downs at night, with only the wild,
steel-grey flash of the far away sea and above my head dim, forgotten
stars. He has flashed moments of sensation upon me which I treasure.
He is always sincere, and sometimes great, because he can both think
and feel. The keenest memory he has left with me, is of the roads and
the forests of Wessex.
In the novel of the mid Nineteenth Century the Jew has been too often
exploited as the modern _roué_. This is injustice. Neither history
nor observation justify it. To mention a few books because they are
important and led the way, which prove this, I call attention to
_The Harlot’s Progress_, by Balzac, Zola’s _Nana_, Paul Bourget’s
_Cosmopolis_, and many a short story by Maupassant. In each a rich
Jewish banker uses wealth to buy women. And in each the character
of the Jew is so similar it could be lifted from one book to the
other without injury to the _mise-en-scène_. They are Jews from
Germany. They have similar names, Steiner, Hafner. Their methods of
procedure, business enterprises, amusements, ambition, home life are
the same. This is true likewise of _La Garçonne_, the book by Victor
Margueritte, of which France has expressed disapproval. The _Jew_ in
Zola’s _Nana_, seems lifted over, with this new book.
The blond courtesans in all are alike, too. It is peculiar that
courtesans of the world of fiction, women who have been thoroughly
bad, have been blonde.
The history of the antique world happens to corroborate this. She has
been the type without heart, soul; most lustful, mercenary, cruel,
uncaring. What was back of this? Was it borrowed impulse handed on,
or was it reason founded upon observation?
The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French
writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from
their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming
to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two
older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by
virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the
dictionary of a race.
Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully
in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev,
Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little
dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their
command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders.
Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe,
less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget,
then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in
his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical
end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world
atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now
our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy,
sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light,
bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where
promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight.
In the person of _Nana_, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern
world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France
through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style
founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in
reach, conviction, resonance.
The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His
exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full,
natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction.
Zola, in _Nana_, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for
women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: _Das
Gefährliche Alter_. (_The Dangerous Age._)
Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in
sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from
the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles
an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at
last, huge enough to embrace the universe. _Nana_ is a little outcast
of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been
lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring
sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not
satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now,
marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see
_Nana_ symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the
pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.
In his _Rome_, too, he shows world forces again, again expanding,
magnificently triumphant. Over them, queening it as of yore, stands
the glorified Venus of the Greeks, meaning that natural impulses in
the heart outlast laws made to subdue them, just as after building,
destroying again what is built, the red earth remains, insolent,
sullen, but always dominant.
History tells how poor people of Rome went, for generations, to
the crumbling Colosseum for material with which to build humble
homes. Just so today lesser novelists go to these massive creative
monuments, such as Zola’s _Rome_, for purpose of a similar quarrying.
The tiny germ for little novels, stories, is concealed in these
giant accumulations. We find what may have been initial impulse
for _Imperial Purple_, by Saltus. We recall Zola saying, in this
book, that _the imperial purple of the Caesars has slipped down
upon the shoulders of the priests_. Here is the ghost of Bourget’s
_Cosmopolis_. In the labyrinths of Zola’s rich, masterful _Rome_ not
only these books, but others I might name, float, disembodied shadows.