Sévigné, dead long ago, but whose heart still beats. Mme. de Stael,
whom Napoleon hated, never achieved the supreme phrase. She was
logical, clear cut, sure, a problem in geometry. And plaintive,
poignant Villon. Some of Manuel Galvez’ descriptions of the
Argentine, in his novels about South America which are so fine, and
Coelho Netto’s word-paintings of Brazil, and the fabulously luxurious
life led on vast estates there.
The greatness of art of a race, is dependent upon the amount of joy,
sweetness, heat stored in its heart by happiness. It can give only
what is there. The joy of the ringing, triumphant clarions of the
Roman legions, and the passion of Christ, echo in grand creative
souls of France.
Perhaps great editors, competent critics, had something to do with
making word-artists of France. If we have not had great writers
in our country, neither have we great editors, at this moment,
to sponsor them, great, judging from the _power of perceiving_,
(the artist in the editor), not considering regularity of incoming
dollars. Here an editor seldom passes judgment upon the thing _per
se_. There must be an appetizer, so to speak, to lure him. More or
less violent usually. And then there are his personal feelings toward
the writer. The writing, itself, counts little.
One editor, for instance, finds a convict in a prison who
can scribble. There is glory in discovery. He proclaims him.
Commercialized publicity begins. He is likened to Dante in exile, and
Ugo Foscolo. Country papers, having no opinions, copy abundantly,
then praise. Soon it falls flat, because considered as poetry, its
value was nil. The editor was not interested _in poetry_, but only in
himself. The writing good or bad was not of the slightest importance,
in his judging.
If a girl broncho buster on an Arizona plain is good at broncho
busting, she is asked to write her opinion of the Apollo Belvedere.
This is excellent illustration of what is meant; the thing _per se_
does not count. In France it is the thing that does count.
I once knew a plaintive, romantic lady whose ambition was to be heir
to something or somebody. Editors in America have the same romantic
itch, only in their case, it is itch to be a _discoverer_.
I am interested in Conrad in criticism. He is troubled by Balzac,
penetrated by the perfection of Maupassant, haunted by the heights of
Flaubert. He could not accommodate himself to looking upon his own
work in the furious emotions they create. But why should he wish to
drag Conrad into such company? Only the Latin mind, I suppose, and
Bielinsky, have achieved impersonal criticism.
I had a wonderful time reading Heine! In my cheap edition the books
cost three cents, or five. I wish I could have it over again!
My mother knew that I was good-for-nothing, so she did not try to
make anything out of me. It was good sense on her part. She let
me idle and read. In reading I was out of the way, quiet, and as
usual, useless. At the same time I was the scandal of a reasonable,
hard-headed family who liked to work, and who knew without doubt in
which direction to go. When I was learning Russian minus a teacher,
at eighteen, they, my aunts, cousins, used to peer at me through
windows, door cracks, then whisper tragically to each other: “She has
looked at one page an hour! No one but a fool would do that!”
To them I have remained a fool. My grandmothers loved me too much to
call me that. I have since wondered if in love there be not wisdom,
distilled genius of perception. Love always dwells somewhere in the
realms of light. What was reading Russian at eighteen, in comparison
with making buttonholes that were not round like hogs’ eyes at both
corners, or cream puffs that did not split? When the women could not
think of any fresh gossip, they fabricated a new story about me, my
laziness. To them _work_ was _hand-work_.
Happy days of life, however, were spent in a lonely, ugly,
sun-and-wind-beaten, prairie village, reading in a dozen or more
languages, the word-masters of the world, while the neighbors
invented hair-raising tales of my laziness. I was scandal of the
village! Sense of justice, very likely, is rare!
There I read Heine, all of him, every word. And over and over! I wish
I could have the joy of it back. Those were memorable years in Europe
when Heine, Goethe, Chopin, were in their prime.
Germany helped enlarge boundaries of the human mind, when she began
putting out cheap editions of the world’s printed art. Here, for a
few pennies, one can procure in scholarly renderings, classic writers
of India. _Kausika’s Zorn_, (a play) by Kschemisvara; _Savîtri_,
a dramatic story of the supremacy of love from the Mahabharata,
_Mudrarakschasa_ (The Chancellor’s Seal Ring), a play of the ancient
Indian Drama, _Malati u. Madhava, Urvasi_, a dramatic piece by
popular Kalidasa.
In reading these books, I found where Goethe procured short,
surprising meters that do not belong to Germany, (despite the
_Stab-Reim_), which he uses in Faust. They were a borrowing from
Indian Drama. Goethe borrowed from Persian writers too. He was
enchanted with this newly presented art of the East, this world of
beauty and blazing light. And so was Heine! Heine was akin to it. The
Orient was in his blood. The soul of him dwelled under its mighty
sun. I fancy his dream of the Orient was more superb than realization
could have been, had he had health and money at the same time, to
make the journey. Blessed be poverty! Poverty is still the _nobile
donna_, of the divine dream of Dante. Her road is straight. Her road
is narrow. But it leads far.
Occasionally pages of Indian literature are richly studded with
color, like their white lace-work marbles. The Peacock Throne, for
example, with gems! The same lavishness! The same piling of richness
upon richness, that not even their astounding sun could destroy, and
which their black eyes, deep and disconcerting as pools of ebony,
knew how to love.
Compare this, (to return to Goethe’s borrowing), from the
_Hitopadesa_, with Faust:
_Grausam zart,
Sanft und hart,
Falsch und wahr
Immerdar.
Spenden Gabe,
Suchend Habe,
Immer gebend,
Guterstrebend._
Would you not think you were reading Faust? Goethe’s _West-Östlicher
Divan_ is merely a divine way, a proud impenitent poet’s way, of
translating Firdusi, Hafiz, Saadi. He declared that in reading
life-giving books of the East, he had cast off years, grown young.
Somewhere in _The Divan_ he cries: _Once more I will be young! I
will mingle with the herdsmen on the plains. I will travel with the
caravan!_
I expected a revel of delight from Verhaeren’s _Helen_. I did not get
it. At the same time I admired its reason, logical unfolding, keeping
in key; few lines of color and great passion, wisely distributed.
Verhaeren is best in lyrics, occasional poems, which picture
Flanders. In this, if I mistake not, he is great. _Les Flamands_
is a masterpiece. And so is _Villes Tentaculaires_. What can equal
those portraits of the monks! He paints with words as Flemish artists
painted, The van Ostade, (Adrian and Isaac), the Brothers Maris,
later, for example. Nothing too humble.
He has given me pleasure. For forty years Flanders has had an
increasingly talented company of men, in the novel, short story,
verse, and in the history of art and art criticism, they have such
commanding and accomplished figures as Dr. Josef Muls, whose books
are available in most of the countries of the Continent in adequate
translations. They are too little known, on this side the Atlantic.
No one can count, it seems, the vagaries of editors who accept
translations. Couperus, the Hollander, and Ibañez, the Spaniard, are
not representative of the races to which they belong. Both, however,
have been heralded as that by American editors.
As an editor Mr. Kreymborg is not a success. But I admire his
individual work. It is genuine. It is original. It is unblushingly
itself. I think Mr. Kreymborg a man of power in a new field. He
has a strange, queer, colorless daintiness. He fine-foots it, with
muffled vowels like a learned fugue of long ago. He is as afraid of
their bold, gay, brass blatancy, as a small boy of a scare-crow, in a
cherry garden. A quaint, low-voiced, dull-hued, crotchety, somewhat
ill-tempered little figure, dreaming of conjuring worlds into vision,
with dim, small gestures. May he multiply and grow fat!
Stuart Merrill dedicates a volume of poems to Verhaeren, whom I
admire, with two lines so noble they should not be forgotten. He
speaks of him as a
_Nom qui sonne comme un fracas d’armes
Qu’un roi barbare aurait laissé choir dans la nuit._
Albert Samain gives me something the sensation of those warmly lucid,
those golden, early evenings of Lorraine which hold out life’s
pitiful false promise of perfection. The same distilled imagined
richness of the past! The picture of the pagan world snared his
heart. His verse keeps the sensations of _un beau soir d’Italie_. It
is a magnificent antique world he saw, and knows how to show.
_Chariot d’Or_, by Samain, presents a way to journey with the mind,
a little while, delightfully. Imagine if you can that this book of
his went through eighteen editions, with speed, in France. What kind
of verse-book could do that in America? Not one of _this_ class! You
can not serve your soul and an editor’s taste, at the same time. _And
greed!_ In America gold must be served. And then _family_!
Of his sonnet sequences I enjoy the _Versailles Sequence_ best.
He learned how to make it from Heredia. But a good thing is good,
bastard or honest-born. Lines cling to memory. Such for instance as:
_Ce mépris de la mort, comme une fleur aux levres!_
But it should not have closed with an exclamation point. Perhaps it
did not! My memory is at fault. There is no need of blowing a trumpet
after such a line.
Silvá, like Venice, is a phantom of delight, I can never forget. He
was _an exquisite_, on a level with Petronius, and he lived in a city
to which patrician memories and the royal pride, of that royal race,
the Spanish, had been transplanted, Bogotá.
He loved butterflies and childhood and the first early nights of May;
fleeting things, light lovelinesses which pause only long enough to
die. He loved the flight of swallows which he liked to call the wings
of Spring.
I have read verses of his which give me exactly the same sensation as
verses of the Greek Anthology.
Old windows were another passion of his. Very frequently occur the
words, _vieja ventana_.
_En la estrecha calle una muy vieja ventana colonial_
_Penetrando al traves de los rejas
de antigua ventana_
_El cantor ...
de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra_
_Per la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—_
... _del espacio la negra sombre
flitran por la ventana rayos de luna_ ...
I think of him as the _poet of windows_. I wonder why they fascinated
him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas
for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening,
unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a
speechless, but willing prisoner.
His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems
together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost
in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his
days, _alas! so few_. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we
find fact.
A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases
with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over
us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells.
There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like
the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among
verse-forms, the sonnet is king.
He can give perfectly the aroma of the season of the year. _A few
words_.... I smell the winds of autumn in a high mountain-land and
taste the purpling grape. All from three chained words of Silvá!
Then I see white mist distort the meadows and feel the frost. He
witches back the spirit of what has vanished, and with a lordly
gesture. The past, perhaps, perfumed his dreams. The trembling
fragility of his sensations is something almost beyond comprehension.
I have received tremendous emotion from the haunting beauty of old
windows, in old grey, stone-stucco, tinted, crumbling palaces of the
_conquistadores_—after Silvá has taught me to see.
Silvá’s _Nocturns_ are as rich as the twilights of Chopin. I wish I
knew how to hand on his charm to others, in my colder English tongue!
But no one will ever do it. Behind each word lie layer after layer
of emotion, vision, all the hauntingly sweet, indefinite horizons of
great poets, who have suffered.
No one could snare twice (I am thinking of the work of the
translator) the suggestive charm of all these unseen landscapes of
the soul, of space, of time, and over them the perfume of divine,
unspeakable regret. The _Nocturns_ are windows, the windows of
his soul, open upon forlorn and fanciful worlds, which allure too
greatly, with some sad, not sufficiently forbidden fatality. The
greater the poet, the richer his evocativeness.
He loved the faint blue light of tardy twilights; and white luminous
August, with its restless clouds. He kept always a lingering backward
glance toward the magic valleys of childhood.
In many languages I have read the poets of the world, but none have
touched me quicker to the keen emotion which blasts the present,
and whirls on toward the deeps. Like Goya in painting, he was one
of the first to take the important step from the old to the new. In
verse-forms, he was one of the path makers. Coll said he had built
Silvá an altar in his heart.
I do not understand how a man could write such a charming book as
Jacques Blanche wrote in _De David à Degas_, and follow it with such
inane useless things as the _Cahiers d’un Artiste_. I regret I wasted
money on a copy of the last set. I haven’t money to waste.
He wrote the art criticisms for love. He knew what he was talking
about. He talked well.
He wrote the last for money, bolstered up by a questionable sense of
duty to say something about war. He said it. His friends regret it.
The introduction to the book on art, is by Marcel Proust. It is
delightful; fresh, spontaneous, joyous. I read it three times.
_De David à Degas_ is a book of perceptions, just appreciations,
knowledge. I was surprised, however, in his article on Whistler that
he should omit the influence of incomparable Chinese and Japanese
draftsmen. He can see but one influence, of course, _France_. He does
not relish the genius of Whistler; he gives us to understand he was
not so much, _in Paris_. He feels about Whistler as Conrad feels when
he thinks of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant. Conrad was never
really great. He merely coquetted with greatness. No page of Conrad
ever satisfied my thirst for beauty! Perhaps English was not the
proper garment with which to dress his soul!
Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley
and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an
unacknowledged _point de départ_ for modernism. There is some
unexplained law operative why a man of such genius as Condor can not
grasp what is his during life. Is it envy of the base? Is it envy
of the little ones? The little are always so greatly in the voting
majority.
The portraits by Jacques Blanche in oil, are not more alluring than
some he draws with pen. For instance, listen to this about Manet:
... _ce joli homme blond, gracieux, elegant, à la cravate Lavalière
bleue, à pois blancs_. Does not that make you feel as if a friend
said hello over the telephone, or a speckled trout nibbled your bait,
on a bright blond morning of May? He makes delightful Fantin live
again. He declares that after Courbet, Manet was the last painter of
tradition.
Papini, wild-eyed Italian youth, with surprised up-standing hair, who
edited _Lionardo_ in Florence is, in my opinion of slight consequence
as poet, prose writer, philosopher. To put the cart before the horse,
his philosophising is acute indigestion from too much Nietzsche,
Kant, Jungs-Stilling, Hegel, _et cetera ad infinitum_. In this
melange of German mind and northern morals, he was unable to see
his surprised way, or anybody’s way. He read. He suffered. He
vomited words. His philosophy is account of the peregrenations of a
nostalgic, young and ambitious mind. His early verse might be called
pretty, puerile, powerless. Lines like these are not great poetry:
_Quaderno bianco, principio di giorno,
Conto vergine pagina prima—
non si parli di ritorno
che in cima all’ultima cima._
His verse is weak. His twenty little reasonings about verse are no
better. There does not seem to be reason for being. They possess
neither logic of art nor life, nor discrimination for the dull.
However, in South America, in Buenos Aires (or as they say down
there, B. A.), and in Rio, they prize him. I respect their opinion,
those Spanish and Portuguese _literati_. It may be _mea culpa_! They
are ahead of us in appreciation of arts of the Old World.
I enjoy André Gide. And he lacks sense of form which belongs to
Frenchmen. Few have written better of Verlaine. His _Les Nourritures
Terrestres_ contained lines I liked. Once in a while there flashes
from his pages, a touch of the fine prose of France.
_Nene_ which won a _Prix Goncourt_, is finely simple, without pose.
It is sincere. The rejuvenating breath of fields is in this story of
peasant life. Perhaps that is what French prose must do, like the
giant in the fable of antiquity, go back to the soil, in order to
leap up renewed, strengthened. The descriptions of nature have an
unsought charm: _Le soir tombait, un soir d’octobre_....
Evening fell, an evening of October, lovely as an evening of summer,
but holding keener, more grievous beauty, something more intimate
that makes the soul shiver.
It has the poignancy, poetry I recall in early peasant scenes by
Cazin, the same glory of yellowing fields; the same sadly serene
peace of the sky.
_El Encanto de Buenos Aires_, by Gomez Carillo, is attractive. He is
the Spanish Loti. Not so wonderful as master of words, of course, but
worth consideration. He was one of that band of brilliant Spaniards
who helped Rubén Darío edit _Mundial_, in Paris, the lamented Amado
Nervo being of the number.
The book is well printed, pleasing typographically. Carillo, like
Loti, loves the souls of far cities. He says in the introduction:
... _mi alma siente la gracia de ciertas ciudades con una intensidad
que los grandes ministros y los grandes periodistos desdeñan_.
Like Loti, he is a stylist, if not such a commanding one. I have
followed him in various quarters of the globe. One I recall happily,
is Egypt. He says he likes to watch resplendent stars he has never
seen, rise from the lonely depths of oceans. Sometimes he forgets and
becomes sentimental. It is easy to forgive, because so many times he
forgets and then becomes artist. He has more than a little of Loti’s
distinguished manner. He has sympathy, too!
His impression of New York pleases me. By New York I suppose he means
America in general. The educated Spaniard, as a rule, keeps fine
disdain of us, what he terms _those new uncultivated people_, up
north, _known as Americans_. Hear him: _La vida ahi es un vertigo,
y el hombre un iluminado o un automata, una maquina, o un delirio.
De arte, de gusto, de armonia, de medida, de distincion, ni siquiera
una idea tiene la metropoli norte americana en su existio callejero._
There is some truth in this!
What makes this more interesting is that nowhere is there more what
he calls _vertigo_, than in B. A., Rio. I read all their magazines.
They are brilliant, just as aggregated diamonds are brilliant.
This, what he has just been saying, is what Spanish and Portuguese
neighbors think of us. I could not count the number who have said
something similar to me. In it there is unconscious aristocratic
disdain of king-lovers for a young, ill-bred, free, and too noisy
people who boast of democracy when they do not boast of dollars.
We bow our heads to the superiority of Latin culture. They swung a
long time from Caesar’s coat-tail. We did not. In fact, we are just
beginning to swing. And not from Caesar’s. The Spanish-Americans
write noble, flexible prose. Carillo’s prose has rhythms both ample
and fine.
He sends stinging arrows, some of which hit, at New York, Chicago,
America. He is of the opinion that cities that are beautiful,
(meaning those of the Old World), are dirty and uncomfortable. Our
_comfortable_ clean cities, on the other hand, are ugly. They are
something with which he does not like to profane fine, sensitive
eyes. He hates Broadway. His sensuous, sumptuous soul loves the
lasting summer of rich hued tropic lands, their languid, their
sapphire seas, and perfected luxury of living.
His description of what he calls _Oxford of the Argentine_, makes me
wish I were a boy, young, so I could go there. It is a magnificent
idea, which the Spaniards have put into execution in this school, an
idea worthy the dramatic genius of Latin peoples.
He becomes lyric over the avenues, parks, of Buenos Aires, in one of
which he remembers to tell us he found Rodin’s _Thinker_.
Carillo is learned. He possesses charm with power of distinguished
seeing. I have read him for years. He is seldom disappointing,
unless he writes a story. In the story he lacks architectural
sense-structure.
_La Lampara Maravillosa_, by Valle-Inclán is a charming piece of
book-making; richly illustrated, printed in two colors, red and
black, and from the Sociedad General Española de Libreria, Madrid.
I have seen lovely books from there! I wish I could buy them all.
Even if one could not read them, they are pleasant to look at, like
objects of art.
Valle-Inclán is a dreamer, a maker of poetic prose. I recall a merry
caricature of his long, thin, black, owl-eyed, glasses-berimmed
Spanish face in a magazine of Mexico. Probably the magazine was
_Tricolor_.
_The Magic Lamp_, in this book, renews memory, a memory rich with
the accumulation of a thousand years. It has charm, inventive grace.
There is a touch to be sure here and there in the prose of the
Spanish church-fathers; something monastic, shadowed, hieratic, a
trifle pedantic. The gesture of a priest, in short, a lingering,
regretful, graceful gesture, for beauty of a world which is passing,
and which he should not pause too often to see. His prose is great
enough to serve as a model for writers.
He visited Mexico. I read his articles. His reactions to the new
country interested me. This dreaming scholar sees best with eyes of
the mind. The eyes of his body have weakened. In his heart he loves
the beauty of Greece, Rome, the pagan world. At the same time, by
birth, he is a priest of the Inquisition. He has their face, too;
long, thin, pale ascetic. A long list of books, sensitive, delicately
and powerfully written, stand to his credit. He is one of the most
accomplished stylists.
Villaespesa, of _El Espejo Encantado_, was in Mexico at about the
same time. His fancy was touched to furious flame by pre-historic,
Toltec Mexico; the Indian past. He wrote sonnets about it. He
reconstructed the romantic twilights of long ago, by fanciful,
flower-burdened lakes in that land of fabulous forgotten wealth,
and prodigious palaces where, from ears of stone statues, scattered
carelessly in gardens, pink pearls hung the size of pecans; and
emeralds, gold, gems, had no value. He seemed especially able _to
savor_ its sumptuousness, then to pass on the sensation to others.
He has written well, too, of the African desert. He writes novels,
plays, verse. Villaespesa is poet of old Spain, _España vieja_. He
might be great. I do not know why he is not. He has power over words,
and vision.