counted on fingers of the hand. Other novels are woven out of the
floating, uncounted richly wasteful threads of the great. In the
little popular story tellers of any day or race, there are few ideas,
seldom profound seeing nor anything worth while. There are few
originators. The works of Zola marked the death of the old novel.
Zola is not using imagination, but the cold observation of the
scientist. The scientific mind is dawning.
The fear which was to make Maupassant mad is the hidden, dramatic
_motif_ in his stories. It sat in his brain weaving patiently a
Penelope-web, which, at last, smothered him. Maupassant was cynic,
sensualist, and sumptuous master of the hidden soul. He touches the
heart, the intellect, and the senses.
_Timon le Magnifique_, (Max Daireaux), is a merited satire upon
today, its playthings, its vain, but would-be serious toys, a
clever synthesis, usually false, of how something may be made out
of nothing. It is written in a cold, detached manner. But I should
not be surprised if it were aimed at individuals of Paris. Cubist,
futurist art, is skillfully enough interpreted. There is sincerity.
Often there is perception. And there does not seem to be more malice
than necessary. The temper of mind of the central personality is
characterized by lukewarmness. The frail story gives opportunity to
display reflections about life, which have, as motive persistent
disillusion, and no small amount of scorn of that human animal,
_man_. It is the tragic skepticism of a world, once eloquent, at fire
heat, now tepid, among men who are weaker, who have fewer moments of
grandeur. There were things said brilliantly but without emotion.
Fine food, served cold. Take it or leave it, I do not care. If you
can think, you will see I am right.
It would have been as well if the author of _Timon le Magnifique_ had
hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story.
The display room would have been less obstructed.
Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He
likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work.
To every person his own wheels!
A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction.
The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no
more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and
they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly,
with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents.
_De Wandelende Jood_ (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and
critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The
description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh
the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It
banished inclination to read anything else.
The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is
formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it
possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon
form alone.
The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus
after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic
heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse
of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind,
of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “_Hij ging, het
hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit
meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande
in hem de zachte vlam van Christus._” This shadows forth—this story
of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the
Hebrew race.
It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome:
Zola’s _Rome_. Serao’s _Conquista de Roma_. Lagerlof’s _Rome_.
Pater’s Rome in _Marius_, with its memories of the wolves and snow
of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too
lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar
spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he
reads Suetonius, _the Twelve Caesars_. Ricarda Huch’s _Rome_.
Niebuhr’s _Rome_ is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s
_Cosmopolis_, which is Rome again.
Serao shows us Rome in _Lettere d’una Viaggiatrice_, a splendid piece
of the kind of resonant prose, she only knew how to make. Goethe’s
pictures in letters to friends in Germany, and in that remarkable
verse-sequence, _Die Römische Elegien_, and Winklemann’s _Rome_,
cold, plastic, devoid of color. I refer to what Winklemann called
his _little writings_ of Greek and Roman art, and the majestic,
almost too glorious Rome of d’Annunzio. It is interesting to follow
reactions of such people of power as these to the call of the Eternal
City. In the opening lines of d’Annunzio’s _Il Piacere_, there are
sentences so luxurious, silken, they remind me of rich reflections
upon old Venetian velvet.
Loti, accomplished _savoureur_ of all that was exquisite in space or
in time, steered carefully from Rome the Mighty. Rome, divine and
immortal, lured the immortals. Other superb cities have known and
felt the magic of his art. But Rome he left untouched.
Edward Lucas White’s novel of Rome, _Andivius Hedulio_, is a
moving-picture scenario printed in book form. It is a large and
attractive skeleton, wearing a little more flesh than skeletons in
good society have been in the habit of wearing, even in New York.
The most brilliant author’s introductions I know are those Nietzsche,
Poet of Philosophy, has written for books of his epoch-making
thinking. No one has been able to throw surer, more far-reaching
noose over the problematical future. His _Jenseits v. Gut u. Böse_
he called philosophy of the future. That is daring. It may be true.
It is conceivable at least, a world in which good and evil, as we
understand them, may not be standardized. Life cast huge shadows for
Nietzsche, like childhood’s flickering fireplace-shadows, on the
wall. His philosophy is these stalking shadows, terrifying sometimes,
astonishing and always superhuman, these shadows of men who live.
Truth does not stand still and let us build clean, white, picket
fences around it, and label it _Exhibit A_. It changes, takes new
forms, under new suns. There is nothing fixed, eternal, except the
pitiful drama of man, and the hopeless hope in his heart. It may be
real; at the same time, it is unstable as the sea.
It would not be easy to be happy, even keep sane, and look upon
existence with the scorn with which Nietzsche viewed it. A bitter,
laughing tongue with deadly penetrating power, was his. As the French
Revolution cleared the air for different social, economical living,
the philosophy of Nietzsche (by surprising power to destroy), helps
clear the atmosphere for less prejudiced thinking.
Nietzsche is the mischievous boy in school of the old philosophers.
He insists upon knocking down with hard, well-made paper balls, the
idols they set up. He is brilliant phrase maker. He transforms the
heavy, slightly ponderous German tongue to frothiness of French. He
stands behind it with up-lifted whip, cruelly lashing it to fresh
agilities. His word acrobatics are worth considering. Yet he is
seldom pleased with the result. He can not, like little people,
rejoice in what he himself has done. The outlines of words as they
are do not suit him. He shades them. He sets them differently. He
cuts off edges. He insists they no longer falsify his thought. No
written statement suits him. He wishes it a little different. The
exactitude of his thinking is superb. It is difficult for words,
whose sense boundaries are not exact, to express it.
Wonderful, lightening clear, shining, far, problematical glimpses
he flashes forth. In certain, to him inconsequential asides, he
is Prophet of Hebraic height. It is in words like these, of great
thinkers, with prodigious power of self-projection, that living men
gain idea of the civilizations that are on the way.
There are few more distinguished literary critics than Nietzsche. His
seeing is revealing. He has few superiors in sympathetic appreciation
of the printed word in hands of a master. He has fine ear for music
of the sentence, too. No subtlety, no fineness, is lost. What he says
about Petronius makes me long to read him again after the years.
It fills me with zest, with pleasure. “_Wer endlich dürfte gar
eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen der mehr als irgend
ein grosser Musiker bisher der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in
Erfindung, Einfallen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sumpfen
der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der Alten Welt, wenn man wie er,
die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athen, den Befreienden Hohn
eines Windes, der alles gesund macht indem er alles laufen macht!_”
Nietzsche wants to know who would dare make a translation into
German of this book by Petronius, who more than any other of the
great musicians, was master of the _presto_! What magnificent things
Nietzsche writes about him! He insists he had the swift feet of the
wind, and the wind’s breath, which clears and makes clean, with a
scorn that sets free, and so forth. Here I found again that _Feast of
Trimalchion_ I stumbled through dully in school days, and later read
with zest, while glorious visions of Rome brought from Latin poets,
likewise from etchings of Piranesi, crowded my memory as I read.
Nietzsche makes the same statement Hardy makes. There is no writing
today for the ear. There are no architects of the sonorous sentence,
sculptured phrase, hinting at vast resources, wherein a multitude
of minds could swarm and find safety; no sentence of mighty curve,
powerful sweep. Cicero wrote such sentences. So did Demosthenes.
Speech is crumbling. The rock is fretting itself back again to sand.
It is no longer strong enough to contend with the forces of creation,
chaos, the desolating forces so rapidly destroying the old, it is
suitable now for petty writers, the little men, and the wilful winds.
A force of disintegration is at work. That is why the little men with
swollen ego are able to handle it, then feel proud.
Nietzsche impresses me as an artist gone wrong rather than
philosopher _sang pur_. He makes reasoning conform to eye-delight in
noble line, distinguished color. He feels, he enjoys first, thinks
afterward. Sometimes he impresses me as an artist who did not have
courage to try his artist’s wings, who felt, feared, perhaps, they
were feeble. So he fell back upon brilliant, learned, fault-finding.
He became the distinguished spier-out of men’s weaknesses. It is not
easy for Nietzsche to see without passion. To see with passion is not
of the philosopher. His seeing is bound too closely to the emotions
of self. His hatreds, his envies, play commanding part. His hatred,
for example, for Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Locke, Carlyle,
and so forth, and so forth. And his envy of Wagner and the Songs of
Schumann. A strange combination of opposites for a man of his gifts!
But it is a powerful, outreaching comprehension such as is not given
to two of one race in a generation. In Nietzsche I think sometimes I
found what the word _comprehension_ means, (namely), a wide reaching
out, then a skillful pulling together of many far powers, with the
quick, firm, magic welding into one; the swift, clean focus.
However important Nietzsche may be as philosopher, I am sure his
greatest merit is as master of words. In the German tongue, his is
virtuosity. He recreates the language, as a Pope once said d’Annunzio
had done with Italian. He has made possible a new, a different tempo.
He has increased too its flexibility. Ruskin has not written with
greater joy of art of Turner, than Nietzsche of music that charmed
him. Nietzsche can do such things with words as Wagner with tone. The
power of the two has kinships broader than racial, the kinship of men
who had climbed patiently to heights.
Nietzsche declares that the appearance of Napoleon in the world made
Goethe change his opinion of man. Evidently Napoleon demonstrated
something that not even the imagination of a Goethe could reach. The
Little Grandson of the Great Revolution made men of genius open their
eyes. In few has there been such will to power.
Wagner in music, and Nietzsche in _Also Sprach Zarathustra_, were
among originators of modern art. _Zarathustra_ was perhaps the first
new verse. The movement has been carried on by other nations. I am
not sure that Germany did not discover the modern world. England
seldom originates.
Nietzsche speaks of loving the south as a school of healing. There
we hear the poet. He thinks music in the north grows pale, yellow,
sick for the sun. There his longing burst forth. There was something
resplendent, tropical, luxurious, in Nietzsche, which the north could
not let flower. The soul of Nietzsche resembled glowing canvasses of
Turner. It was filled with the same bursts of light. He needed, to
be happy, effective, some equatorial land of the soul, lighted by
greater suns of forthcoming strange civilizations, whose boundaries
are non-geographical, where his superhuman dreams could find
encouragement. While his body was bounded by Germany, his mind lived
anywhere, at will.
In modern art, even France is borrower, like England. France
habituated to lead the way, because her new art came from Wagner,
and the north. It was in the glowing, resplendent mirror of his
music, that brilliant, receptive France, surprised at first and
not a little vexed, caught the thought, _vision_, of strange,
revolutionary, æsthetic ways, which later she tried to persuade
herself she found first, then pursued alone. Wagner, in short, taught
expression, something different. He was first to fit closely, and
with skill, another garment to the soul, the soul that had changed
after the Great Revolution, and was no more capable of holding
proudly the princely toga.
The range of emotions, expressions, is greater in modern art than in
classic art. And certainly more richly, subtly shaded. Modern art
does not let a fragment slip away. It takes account of the ugly,
brutal, disgusting, obscene. Classical art preserved only beauty.
It skimmed the cream, then threw the milk away. The ages have made
us poor. Now we must take care of the milk beneath. Now we must set
about making cheese. Now we must not disdain peasant work.
Among early ones to take firm stand against the classic order, were
Wagner with tone, Nietzsche with words, Delacroix with color. Classic
art was a straight line. Modern art is a line infinitely curved. But
fresh complexities were creeping into life, with gradual rise to
power of the masses of voracious appetite, multiple mood. Art is not
now for aristocrats of superb culture. It is not made for a lonely
Petronius in the silence, the secrecy of a violet-perfumed palace.
I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans.
I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough
undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less
accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge
that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a
prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are
to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light
of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as
delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth.
The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual
aristocrats, the people of trained taste.
The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means
achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome.
It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad,
mist-covered north.
That which is finest of the old civilization that is passing, of the
culture, wisdom, faith, love, of two thousand years, is stored in the
prose, the verse of France.
There slips into the best prose of French writers of great periods,
phrases, sentences, from deeps of the subconscious, the world-soul,
dwelling, in the powerful, seldom seen, creative places, that other
races have neither been able to see, seize, nor make visible; a
superb letting go of the ego. This is something we do not find. Our
land is too new, young, too devoted to the fleeting thing _self_,
which has progressed no further than today, than that reasoning
mind with which as children we used to learn the multiplication
table. The creating of art has no little in common with teaching of
Eastern philosophies, _the death of self_. It, too, is an effect of
time. It is proof of rich ripening, under multiple suns. Old World
nations possess this in some degree. The sorrows of much living
and contending faiths have taught them. In addition, _Good_ wears
many faces. Deeper spiritual revelation is theirs, enveloping, then
penetrating the subject under discussion, with something sweeter,
more eloquent, than the sumptuous sunsets of Lorraine, something to
be sought among masters, as wild honey is sought in the forest. To
the mind, indeed, that is what it resembles, _The Taste of Honey_.
It is something that all but shatters with delight, blinds with
unshakable truth. It is a lightning flash from the racial soul.
Among Greek writers I have thought of this. It has occurred to me
most often perhaps when reading Aristophanes, a joy whose memory
remains. Again it is in the superb, cumulative, spendthrift, piling
of adjectives of Homer. It is in that on-rushing, resistless,
cataract of verbal music of Æschylus.
I recall it in Quintillian. I recall it in Tertullian. And
occasionally, but rarer, in Latin historians. It was in Catullus.
And Virgil, the _Eclogues_, _Georgics_. It was something in solution
in the world of that day, _honey from the heart of man_. Horace was
too modern. Art was becoming fashionable, facile. He wrote with eye
to what people would think, later say. But Virgil kept the seasoned
sweetness of the past.
In writers of modern Spain I have seen it. In Galdós, the _Episodios
Nacionales_, and its springing up again in the Spanish tongue, in
South America.
In Italy, Italy of the great ages, it has been rich; d’Annunzio has
been too proud perhaps to suffer, to learn with the patient anguish
of the soul.
It has flowered best in France, the wild thyme, which goes to
the making of honey. Consider Maurice de Guerin. Recall lines of
Verlaine, Heredia! The great Balzac, Bazin, Bertrand, Maupassant,
Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Flaubert the Magnificent, letters of
peasant Millet, the diary of Fromentin in Africa, Huysman, Mallarmé,
and the Little Grandson of the Great Renan, Ernest Psichari, in the
book about Africa, _The Centurion_.
I recall an occasional line Rimbaud wrote before he was twenty,
which gleams in my mind today like cut steel; hard, perfect,
indestructible, cruel. The great poetry of France is prose, which is
the world’s best.
When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in
those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in
case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there
was another, a different England from that of today. As examples
Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings,
Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm,
the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her
sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished,
she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been
monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested _modernism_,
which does not become her, are working their will.
The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in
Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion
enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of
centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have
seized it.
I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in
the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken,
tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept
swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor,
half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of
the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight
enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best
is doing the impossible.
I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, _Die Familie
Golowlef_, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its
monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same
power by which the African desert grows grand, _monotony_, a level
unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it
vividly for years.
I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened
me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little
wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific
revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know,
to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a
yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble.
In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the
blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding
light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he
found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease,
hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises.
Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most
people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see.
People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the
same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been
sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that
the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener,
in pleasure, the _arrière pensée_. Before that, the Merrie England,
gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought
at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy
fields, the flowers of England.
If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things
that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French
prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music,
rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old
weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and
the sea.
But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose
I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy
back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such
delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence
can only be written through _the great forgetting_. One slight touch
of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.
In Daudet’s _Contes du Lundi_ I usually begin with the words: _Cette
nuit le mistral était en colère_. What a _charmeur_ was Daudet!
Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power
of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art
like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the
broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of
the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in _Le Pape est Morte_, the
morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the
Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he
ran away! Next, Flaubert’s _L’Education Sentimentale_. The opening
lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine,
evocative precision of etching, with that _beauty beyond_ no one can
name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away
into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century,
that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom
Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things
in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. _My old
age regrets the rivers._ Loti’s descriptions of the Orient.
Passages from the monumental Balzac, who, by the way, was not made
for the ear, but for the mind. Sentences of André Gide, and the
essays of Nicolas Ségur, the verses of Verlaine which I love:
_Rimbaud mort,
Mon grand, peché radieux._