Titus? Who would care what one’s neighbors, what one’s relatives
thought, when one could stand beneath that same Arch, and look up at
the sky of Italy?
Carducci, like poets of the south, such as Apollinaire, (whose
real name I believe savored of the north, being Ostrowsky) liked
the romantic, serious minded German poets of long ago. He read and
translated some of Klopstock, Platen, while a friend of Carducci’s
translated him back again into Latin, where he really belongs.
If your pocketbook refuses a ticket to Italy, do not be unhappy. Read
Carducci! Read d’Annunzio! There is usually somewhere an _Ersatz_,
something to set, without discord, in place of the thing desired.
I wished to read English, American books, but they cost too much.
They were seldom procurable at a price less than a dollar. There
were almost none in the village. The few who owned books would not
lend them. I read Shakespeare and Poe first in German. Admirable,
adequate translations they were! The cheaply-priced books of the old
world, of Italy, France, Germany, are a blessing. They are the well
in the desert to them who are thirsty. I recall buying some plays of
Alfieri, put out by Georgio Franz, Monaco, bearing the publishing
date of 1846; tiny, tiny books they were, printed on grey newspaper
paper with no separate outer cover. They cost about four pennies
each. And I bought a large cheap Ariosto, on similar unbleached
paper, which was priced at a quarter. The _Orlando Furioso_ is a
charming fable. I can not commend it too highly. It has delighted me
just as _Alice in Wonderland_ delights a child. It is a gracious,
bright-hued, arabesque, that has kept color throughout the centuries.
Then I learned northern tongues from printed advertisements sent
by a clothing house, for the purpose of selling men’s clothing. A
pile of little books they sent; one in English, the others, literal
translations into various northern tongues, to sell to untamed
Westerners, whom New York’s more untamed imagination had evidently
given wild tongues, civilized, conventional clothes. It was of course
an incomparable piece of humor. But it was useful to me. It is a poor
sail-boat indeed that can not take advantage of an opposing wind or
any wind that happens to blow.
I used to hope, every New Year’s Day, to be able to subscribe to
_Century_, or _Harper’s_, our leading magazines. But I never reached
such height of reckless extravagance. I read Dante the oftener
instead. I knew pages by heart. Repeating him aloud was all the music
there was in the lonely place in which I lived. There was hardly a
wheezy asthmatic melodian. Luck, you see, was not wholly absent.
Once an old Italian priest, noble of heart and mind, came to the
lonely, white chapel of his faith, that had been erected upon the
plains. He used to recite Dante with resonance, and a kind of
regretful, tragic fury, in which unuttered homesickness centered. He
was very old then. It must have been an half century since he had
seen Italy. He could say superbly, too, the sonnets of Petrarch. He
said oftenest the one beginning:
_La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora,
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate,
e le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora:_
I used to wonder what things, in the past, he was remembering when he
said it. Because even a priest must remember! If his body dies, his
mind does not.
Someone asked me one day why I read so much.
Are you ambitious?
No.
Why then?
For pleasure perhaps! I have no desire to know anything.
Then why?
It may be this. Some one asked the giraffe why his neck was long.
He replied: Because the distance from head to body is great. I read
because the distance from birth to death is great. Some way, it has
to be filled in.
I wish now I knew those beautifully written tongues of the Orient,
which scribes of old traced upon vellum, ribbon-books of Persia, the
things hidden in alphabets which are lovely to the eye. I have seen
pictures of Persian calligraphers as enchanting as paintings. Hand
writing, as art, is dead. It belongs to the past. Perhaps sometime
printed books will be just as dead, and replaced by something else,
some diminutive form of moving-picture, some mechanical device
attached to the head which will tell stories aloud for the ear, in
the manner of a graphophone, and reflect them in pictures upon a
paper fan. When we fly around the world in twenty-four hours, we can
not waste time in anything so slow, old-fashioned, as reading. Taste
will be perverted until something new is made. Something new will
always be made. The possibilities of science are like time, endless.
Perhaps nothing lovelier will be made for an older generation. But
something new is sure to be. In twenty years there will be few book
shops.
Talking about stylists, there are none that surpass the scientists.
They have accuracy. They have economical fitting of word to thought,
leaving no surplussage, shortage. I read them partly for this.
Changes are near. We are poised on edge of the old. It will not be
long before man will live centuries, instead of a few paltry years.
Then his brain will change more. It will make discards for the long
game ahead. In the length of time I have lived, I can see the human
skull is different. Its tendency is to grow higher above the ears,
broader in front, shorter in length toward the rear. One of the
things being discarded is _fear_.
Sympathy, many old exquisitenesses, went long ago. Fear would be
bad baggage to carry in the prodigious transportation feats of the
future, when man sets out to make week-end visits to the stars,
look in upon Mars, shake hands with Madam Venus. Imagination, of
the artistic kind, a kind of bastard first cousin of fear, will be
eliminated. Imagination is practically gone now. Fact will so surpass
it, it will be useless. It will be a kindergarten pupil in the school
of kings.
There will not be need of fiction, nor fiction writers, when Science
gets booted, spurred, ready for conquest. Fiction writers belong to
the world’s generously believing childhood. Its mature, reasoning
manhood is here. The simplest fact of Science will dim the shabby
glamour of romance. It will put out its light, as the sun puts out
the stars. Ah—the stories Science will tell! Science will unravel the
long adventurous past of the lily, the rose, the orchid, the story
of which will be unfolded logically from cells. The memories of the
rose, the meditations of the lily, the pensive regrets of the violet,
in days of the future, will make novels like Jack the Giant Killer,
again children’s toys.
People are losing interest in novel-reading. And the stage is dead.
I have watched it gradually grow weak year by year. Great novels and
great plays are not being written. One of the causes of new writing,
both verse and prose, is merely exhibition of disintegration. It
is one more dropped stitch in the past. The rock is crumbling to
sand. The inescapable alternating progression of the ages is at work
visibly.
The speech of primitive peoples was monolithic. They hurled at
each other boulders of uncut thought. From crumbling boulders,
prepositions, conjunctions, tiny connective sand-like particles out
of which we have made what we call speech was born. Even written
Latin was blocks of uncompromising marble, in comparison with our
written word.
Science will give power to look down vistas of time. It will poise
us upon unthinkable heights. Perhaps too we shall learn to unchain
the soul, then make it obedient messenger until it flies, Mercury
like, through dead, forgotten days. Each human being will be his own
novel. There can be nothing superior. There will be neither great nor
little. We shall see, then talk at the same time, with friends on
the other side of the globe, sitting comfortably in an easy chair.
And perhaps upon other globes, across space! We shall live lonely
lives of terrific cerebral power, which will change even shape of the
skull, until to man of today we would look stranger than Martians.
We are near that surprising future. In Metchnikow’s _Prolongation
of Life_ we glimpse this romance quality. It is time for novelists
to stop sharpening goosequills and join the scientists. Science is
rose of a million petals, in whose unfolding the future lies. In
that future the novelist, professional story teller, playwright,
will be as useful as a bootjack to an old maid. Upon the outspread
shop-counter of the mind will be found goods never seen, nor dreamed.
Art is dying. Something else must be made to light the heart. Only
people with the wonder, the love of little children within them, can
create it now, or understand it. They will perforce join the discards.
There are three pictures by Manet I saw in Paris which I have thought
about too much. One, a woman in grey skirt, loose coat of the same
color, her hand to her lips. She wears a small dark toque upon
dark hair. A strange puritan grey for Manet to love, dominates the
picture; a grey sensitive, fastidious, his somewhat English tempered
soul created in midst of orgies of pagan Paris—Paris of unrestraint,
aesthetic sensuality, intellectual freedom. It is an ascetic color
that recalls old Spanish masters. It has the chill, the sternness
of Cathedral cloisters. Spanish masters used similar grey, but from
dissimilar impulse.
Manet was exquisite. He was the conversationally charming. But into
depths of his soul no friend was permitted to peep. There is hint of
this sensitive secretiveness in these three pictures, I remember.
The gossiping, disclosing shorthand of self is in colors he chose.
The picture of the woman is what one might call _artistically wise_.
It keeps a reticence of brush which the maker’s facile, dissembling
tongue did not have. Likewise it has something in common with
Chinese portraits, whose distinguished personages wore woven robes
of sad metallic hues. More than is grasped at a glance! Here is
the direct transcribing! The same dignity. Here are sober colors
Chinese noblemen wore. The picture is notable for absence of what is
meretricious. Nothing for show. Nothing for compromise. It has the
reliability of faith.
_Soap Bubbles_, by Manet. The same grey, but paler for youth;
slightly sun-enriched. A truthful piece a Hollander might have
signed. A boy by a table. He is blowing bubbles, whose airy grace
delighted the maker. Dark, unrelieved background. Hues in the
foreground that recall preciousness of ivory.
_Still Life_—Manet. Apples, pears; one dull, grey-green; one yellow
rose; a black bottle; a tall white glass. Sober, against a dull
background. Painted in low key, a key chosen for grey-yellow he loved.
How far removed from the blue-grey of Whistler! It is founded upon
gift for reality of the Latin, his basic vision for things as they
are.
Manet was gloomy beneath the flowering of his moods. An interesting
article could be written on the _greys_ of great masters; upon colors
that are coefficients of mind. I see difference between those used by
Velasquez, Greco, Goya, and those used in France, in the period of
1830, or in Holland, in the Seventeenth Century. Or the grey created
by Manet.
I saw the other day a large, lovely Cazin, kept in higher key than is
customary, which is Schumannesque. We do not find the dull, wet grass
we know; the grey, sage-green of some sad world’s end he has made
his.
This picture shows a blond, sun-dusted field on a hot day. A field
whose gold, whose perpendicular light is dulled by its own splendor.
The field forms the foreground. The background one end of a low farm
house, whose coral roof all but touches the ground. A low, green tree
makes out the house-line, with aid of one of his windmills. Above,
blue heat of noon; happy, white, harvest clouds.
No. 59—A Schreyer. White Arab horses; mettlesome, fine. Eloquent
outline of horsemen. A red bournous that lights the picture. A heavy,
heat-smoking Algerian sky.
Diaz and Harpignies are represented. Rousseau has a ruddy-tinted
Forest of Fontainbleau.
Ziem is here! This is a charming canvas. _Venice of my dreams_—in the
distance! One large building; cream, rose flushed. Foreground—the
sea. A bold, lovely, cobalt sea. Sky of gold. The rich effect of
enamel, and muted music.
No. 31—An unusual Harpignies. Trees in middle distance. Under them,
ripe level grain, with cold, clear light. In foreground little
figures; clear cut, in brown, in dull red.
Diaz shows merry grouped women in a wood. They wear rich costumes.
The jeweled splendor of Monticelli is here. Ballard Williams looked
upon pictures like this.
There are portraits from England. But I am not in the mood for them.
I prefer tawny, rolling, desert hills, the blue harbor of Algiers as
Fromentin paints them, or rich autumn woodlands of Rousseau.
No. 48—The dull, storm beaten, resentful black-green of Jacque.
_Splendid!_
No. 58—Ziem again! Stately old Venetian palaces I love. They border
a canal of cool, even flowing water. On the right, a red building,
which peculiarly enough brings touch of the exactitude, coldness of
Canaletto, and which I do not like. The sky is happy. Sun flecked,
dappled ... this sky bends over Venice!
No. 54—Ziem. Again superb. At his best. In distance the long,
elegant, aristocratic line of the Sea’s Queen City, Venice, which he
knew better than any one else. White buildings flushed rosy. Beyond,
violet-blue. High above, a sky, clear, sweet, but touched with quiver
of heat. In the foreground a grassy space and there a tree, (superbly
painted) whose top is touched with rose-hued light. Beneath the tree,
happy figures wearing vivid colors. High, light, lyric note. Love.
The Corots are of his late manner, when he had grown sentimental, and
thought retrospectively. I like best the pictures of Italy he did in
youth.
No. 5—A small Pasini. It makes me regret my pocket holds doughnuts
not dollars. Delightful picture! A Moorish doorway; white, eloquently
curved, bordered with mosaics in faded blue. In front, an Arab, whose
red upper garment outdazzles the ruby when the sun pierces its heart.
A laugh of color! Pure, delicious, lyric.
Quintillian is a fine phrase maker. He speaks of the milky exuberance
of Livy. What could be more _juste_! If one could forget the
Latin text, one would think it the printed page of some incisive
French critic. Writers who come at end of periods that have been
æsthetically productive, are alike, just as, perhaps, peaches and
pears, in the youth of Nero, or William the Silent. Few make figures
of speech more startlingly brilliant, vigorous in casting light, than
Quintillian. They are exploding suns.
Quintillian declares the evenly sustained mediocrity of Apollonious
is not to be despised. To quote him verbatim: “The old comedy retains
alone the pure grace of Attic diction.” He means Aristophanes,
Eupolis, Cratinus.
The power to distinguish, differentiate, at command of Quintillian
is marvellous. I seldom have greater pleasure than his pages have
been giving me. Quintillian knows how to balance meaning. He splits
an hair evenly with the thin edge of wit. He possessed calm,
dispassionate, critical, penetrating intellect. There are few more
reliable judges of men’s minds. He does not become color of the thing
he reads, as small worms take color of what they feed upon. Writers
of the antique world stimulate mind. Modern writers seldom do this.
They are more likely to enervate me, or make me weary. The old are
life giving.
That sensitive prose of Loti is expression of a tradition that goes
far back in Latin life. It is in Ovid. It is in the early Italians.
It is in songs of Provençe. It is in early French _prosateurs_. From
Chateaubriand the road to him lies clear. There is no great stylist
who leaps up unheralded. The mind must form a chain with some past,
to which self-forgetful love has welded him.
Loti has been faithful to the garden of the soul God gave him. He
kept out of it things foreign. Nothing ugly grows there. But it
sheltered the beauty of the world.
I have not cared a picayune to see the kings, potentates, princes,
who have come to America on various successfully disguised errands of
selfishness, to visit, and at the same time to gather stray dollars.
I did long to see the face of Loti. I wanted to look into eyes that
had looked understandingly upon the earth’s loveliness. I wanted,
too, to look upon the man who can weave such superb tissue out of
words.
I stood gladly outside the Waldorf in the rain. I waited for hours.
I watched across the street from the public school he was going to
visit. But I did not see him. My consolation had to be what I read in
the papers when I reached home that night, his farewell to America:
_All the winds of winter cry me home to Turkestan!_ Such a sentence
ought to be consolation enough for any one.
Loti has seen the world. Its poets, princes, have entertained him.
His eyes have rested upon the fallen glory of the monarchies of the
past. Now, like Alexander, he sighs for new ones.
What a delight in the long ago, upon the burnt, barren plains, where
Presbyterianism thrived like a green bay tree in Purgatory, were
the early books of Loti: _Pécheur d’Island_, _Pasquala Ivanovich_,
_Madame Chrysanthème_, _Fleurs d’Ennui_, and an earlier one about an
adventure in the South Seas, the name of which I can not recall. It
was Loti’s first published book.
I was always vexed that Presbyterianism thrived upon sand. It was
connected, in my mind, with unloveliness, both of matter and spirit.
There was never a surface that refracted so bitterly the light, as
the white front of that church. It had three sharp points, in a row,
that stuck up ready and willing to impale sinners. The priests of
Presbyterianism are stormy and iron hearted.
Once Lily Langtry came here, to the plains, in a private car, with
Frederick Gebhardt. They remained a number of days, to go hunting in
the Indian Territory. I used to follow her around upon the street,
for the joy of looking up at her face. I lived in the desert you
know! Her face looked, in those days, like blue-eyed flowers that
grow upon the fields of England, where rain falls without stress, and
mists come.
Salvini, the younger, came likewise to go hunting. I was overjoyed
to meet him. He was hero of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, come to life.
Brown, supple, gay, and young! Nothing ever came again after that,
except the wind, sand....
But hope grew astonishingly. The less soil there is, the better hope
grows. Hope is what you might call the indestructible mushroom of the
soul. If I were a poet, instead of faultfinder, it might impel me to
an ode to courage. But here’s the rub! I might find difficulty in
distinguishing between courage and folly.
Everyone was a prospective millionaire, in good old days of wind and
sand. The strangest thing was that the entire state was drunk. What
was it drunk upon? You see Kansas was like the Isle of Champagne,
in the story by that name, where each individual was intoxicated.
Only here they were drunk on air instead of champagne. Air came
cheap and did not have to be bottled. Champagne cost money, and
a bottle. The State was drunk on glittering, mirage-making air.
It enfolded the minds with rosy glamour just as it enfolded the
landscape. Prohibiting fact lost power. The penniless wanderer in his
prairie schooner, felt magic of it, as readily as the dweller in the
village. It inflamed the brain through the eye. It wrapped the mind
in rosy vision. Just beyond the next land-fold, lay prosperity, the
culmination of dreams.
That is the reason Kansas grew wild political fads, long-haired and
long-legged, soap-box orators. It was upon air like this, upon which
oratory could thrive. No one could see realities. Corn, cabbages,
and cranks grew to monstrous size. Being poor today did not matter,
because tomorrow we were going to tickle Caesar under the chin.
There was unworn power in the untilled earth that gave vigor. It
keeps some of it still. Today there is something there of youth that
can not grow old, joy that does not become tinsel, or cheap, an
unfading fire in the heart. What can humanity do without youth?
It leaked out through the post office, which was one small unpainted
room with a hole in the wall, for things to go into or come out of,
that I was buying packages of wicked books from Europe. The neighbors
called to investigate. They carried away the startling report that it
was packages of _yellow-back novels_. _Probably, highly immoral!_ One
of these books disappeared. It happened to be a volume of Bossuet’s
_Funeral Orations_. It did not come back. They burned it for safety’s
sake. The town, however, was saved.
Bossuet, whose silenced voice helped mark the decline of the great
age of Louis XIV, had been confessor, in court circles, to fair
ladies of France. But I will wager that even he would have been
surprised at human inventiveness in the fields of sin, at what
happened to his orations for the dead bodies of these same ladies.
They felt the red rag of revolution was as evident in these books
they could not read, as the red flannel around the lantern the old,
bent, fat Santa Fé night-watchman carried, which spotted the long,
lonely streets with round dots of light. After that I became a
dangerous person. The eyes that were in the habit of glancing at me
sideways were bright and shining with disapproval.
But I was deliriously happy through it all, as long as pennies held
out with which to buy books, and those magnificent, low, yellow moons
of summer swung majestically out of the unknown to poise above the
plains. I have never forgotten the feel of the warm winds of those
nights of summer so long ago, upon my arms, upon my shoulders. It is
one of the things I would like to know again.
The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know
history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking.
The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains
itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges,
until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making
no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere
we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without
command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s
trained seeing.
The more we enjoy a picture, the more, for that fleeting moment, we
are in harmony with the mind that produced it. Pictures flash us out
of our dull selves into clear, unvexed dominance. There is healing,
health, in beauty. It represents that from which imperfections have
been taken. Pictures are temperamental tuning forks.
Small, paper-bound, cheaply-priced books containing prints should be
as common upon reading tables as papers. It is not easy to measure
the good of contact with the silent things of art.
I like prints. I have something that resembles affection for them.
That is why I regret that the skies of Piranesi are troubled. I
wanted them to be glowing, clear.
The simply treated skies of Le Père please me. They are barely marked.
The etched line of Pennell is feminine. When he etched the Panama
Series he forced it to Brangwyn bravoura, for which it is not suited.
They are not art, these plates, whether the initial be large or small.
The etchings of Piranesi resemble the musical compositions of Handel.
Both made temples stern, lofty, with mystery in the depths.
The etchings of Daubigny recall Virgil, in the _Bucolics_. The
lovely, Latin land where cities are not near, fields are cultivated,
and little rivers draw water birds! The line of Daubigny is gentle,
loving. It is of the unforced rhythm of Virgil.
The line of Haden is cold, pure.
The line of Whistler is fretful, nervous, capricious. But
marvellously sensitive! If he is not big, genial, he is exquisite.
For one fretful moment Whistler could love gleam of a surface. He
never at any time cared what was beneath. He could not hold calmness
long enough to love anything into serenity. He possessed audacity, as
much as skill. There floated before his keen, sensitive mind, memory
of mighty Japanese, Chinese craftsmen, who outdistanced him by force
of love, that self-sacrificing humility, which makes men great. He
liked to startle. He liked to shock by technical surprises. He liked
to lash observers with virtuosity.