was commingled the trickster, mountebank. Nothing Whistler etched
had weight. He could not bother with a vulgar thing. Instead it had
witchery. The butterfly in flight!
I like the wet streets of Buhot when restless clouds are reflected
on them, or the fleeting carriage of some Parisian _mondaine_.
They are refreshing. He loves rain as Hiroshige loved it. But he
shows it differently because he is of a different race. He has not
the childlike sincerity of the Japanese. The sad wisdom of the
decadent Latin is in him. Shadows are black which speeding wheels of
Parisian beauties leave. But memory fills distance with magic, with
wistfulness.
In the dim streets, the twilight corners of the Paris of Meryon,
dwells old French romance. Gay, interesting, pathetic figures
of Balzac! Dumas the Elder, Hugo! It is the Paris that inspired
Baudelaire, Gautier.
Etching has humming-bird grace; it has poignancy and intimacy. One
holds it to the heart like a violin. It catches the moment which
vanishes. It holds cruelly, derisively, the flash of sunlight that
caressed some surface we regret but love. Etching is near the soul.
There is a print of an actor by Kiyotsune which shows pink of Watteau
made strange by being seen by the Orient’s black beetle eyes. This
same artist has a red dark, bronzed, brutal, that rings with metal
blare.
Looking at the collection of Japanese prints, large and fine, in the
Boston Museum, I have had a good time. I found browns etherealized to
grey, with vast, uncanny, spacial suggestiveness. This is background
of Horunobu. He has an orange I remember. It has lost its fire, to
be sure, with years; vicissitudes of change. Now it keeps merely
memory of some sun of summer of long ago. He combines this with what
a prosaic person would call green, but which is a Roman olive orchard
in the autumn. He has colors that float with maddening indecision
between pink, yellow, brown, grey, blue, green, to unite the shores
of the unseen, to surprise then delight.
Koriusai has the weary, meditative violet of gay fête-days that fail.
And a red, full of joy as throat of a thrush. I wish they could
sing me back, these music-winged colors, out of the sad, beseiging,
present, through radiant centuries, to some fabulous, gold-lacquered
Palace of Tang!
Kiyonaga made a print where cherry blossoms veil with pink mist the
shores of the Sumida, and women wear plain robes of faded hues while
their faces keep archaic calm.
Kiyonaga is unique for reds. He has widened with them the gamut of
emotion. Some reds are tragic; some terrible. Some are hesitating.
Some are sullen, brooding, regretful. Some weigh heavily with memory
of deeds not forgotten. Some indiscreet, too full of meaning.
I know a print by Shunsho that makes me cool. It is green, black,
grey. There is an old man with twist of coral silk about his waist.
The green, one faint stain, gives refreshing sensation of accumulated
springs. In the grey I have watched the monstrous blackening clouds
of midsummer tempests swing.
I know an Utamaro, which is the loveliest thing in existence! Two
tall women. One wears enchanting faded pink, one of the unforgettable
colors of poet-print-makers; the misty brown that floats above
paper with silken shining threads, only Japan could make. The added
splendor of incomparable accents of black. The pauses in South
American tango dancers, are like these black accents in Eastern art.
If you think black is just black, go to the East. Learn! There are
blacks that surpass in depth, mystery, a thousand nights of Egypt.
Inexplainable, dreadful, has been the fate of the dreamers of
the world who have carried to heights the power of vision. A
curse followed them, because they dared cross boundaries of the
commonplace. To look long upon the sun, is to go blind. I am thinking
of Heine.
Heine liked his place of exile, France. It was a Promised Land for
Children of the Spirit. He hated England, because England did not
possess mental flexibility. Lermontov, the Russian poet, disliked
England too, and for the same reason.
In Heine there was the broad culture of Germany, lightness of the
Latin, and the commanding passion of the Hebrew. The first thing I
did in Paris, was to search out his grave. No one in Paris was more
alive, more real, than he.
He blended the sad, serious, comic, light, in much the same way as
Gogol. This too is trait of Hungarians.
There were many men of stormy revolutionary mind in Heine’s day.
The spirit of Byron was abroad in the world. That which we call
modernism, was breaking through prejudice.
The last time Heine went out of doors, he staggered to the Louvre,
in order to look once more upon his beloved Venus. He burst into
tears at the sight. I wonder if he recalled then his youth’s proud,
boastful words: “I have never had but two loves: _Venus, and the
French Revolution!_” What did he think when worn to a ghost he lay
dying, and they intoned beside him the hoary desert songs of Judea?
Heine and Goethe, when they met repelled each other. How could
two men be more dissimilar! Goethe was Greek; Heine, first of the
moderns. The Hebrew is the only man who is ever able accurately to
estimate the day in which he lives. Not geographical spaces, but
centuries lay between Goethe and Heine. He is the only one who can
focus, with perspective, the present.
Paris was full of commanding figures during Heine’s exile. There
were Ary Scheffer, and Delacroix. Horace Vernet was exhibiting for
the first time. Felix Mendelssohn, an old friend of Heine’s from
Berlin, was here; Malebran, Rossini, Meyerbeer. There was a brilliant
crowd of exiled Poles. Liszt and Chopin were both here. It was an
engaging Paris. It has at no time been greater. And Heine was not
least; slender, handsome, blond, young, reading aloud his verses in
the salons of fashion, the verses whose structure he had learned from
Uhland. He knew Victor Hugo, de Musset, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and
Beranger. Since Heine died, the world has had no great idealist.
As wit, Heine ranks with Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift. Of such superb
ability there can be but one to a race. These four men I have
mentioned represent Judea, France, Spain, and England. Heine reached
two heights; wit and lyric poet. He knew how to take what was best in
artistic France, intellectual Germany, and then blend them.
Brandes compares Goethe with Heine, to detriment of the latter. What
he is really comparing without seeing it, is two ages of time.
Liszt said, in describing rare evenings spent at Chopin’s, when
Chopin consented to play to his friends: “Heine, the saddest of
humorists listened with the interest of a fellow countryman to the
narrations made by Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted
his ethereal fancy, and of which he, too, had explored the beautiful
shores. At a word, at a glance, at a tone, Chopin and Heine could
understand each other: The musician replied to questions murmured in
his ear by the poet, giving in tones the most surprising revelations
from unknown regions, about that glorious goddess, Genius.” Ziem used
to look in upon these evenings at the home of Chopin, whenever he
could tear himself away, for any length of time, from the alluring
City by the Adriatic, he painted again and again.
The enemies who resist us help us more than the friends who flatter
us. They perform the service of unpaid gardeners.
The art madness of Germany was astonishing about the time of Heine.
The young wife of Stieglitz, the poet, killed herself so that grief
might make her husband great. This gives us key to that gloomy,
melancholy north from which a new, a more complex art, was to come,
first to oppose and then to surprise the clean-lined Mediterranean
classicism, with its plasticity, its reasoned assurance.
People of genius are people of intuition. Plodders are the
intellectual. Now scientists rule. They are trying first to isolate
_self_, then exploit it. This is a period of egotism, when man keeps
the importance of the microbe, while he feels like the mountain.
Money has no meaning as a measure of excellence.
In a city of huge size like New York, pressure upon the individual is
great. It equals ocean pressure, upon deep-sea life. It deforms. It
makes shapeless.
Gigantic pieces of engineering shock the senses. People suffer
from surfeit of everything. They can not indulge the luxury of
longing. They are overfed. They have mental indigestion. Satiety
comes. Individuals, in so large a city, become sea sand; uniform,
uninteresting, individually inconsequential. Such center of
prodigious living becomes the wilderness, in spite of law, a place
where savages may roam, the most terrible, civilization’s savages;
men who prey upon men. They have become beasts. They people
solitudes. Heights, depths, touch then blend. Ambition, inspiration,
self-respect, die. No poet can live here, then write poetry. (Only
the painter, the etcher, seem to survive.) Look at Percy McKaye for
example! When he came from his wooded New England hills, he had gifts
of a poet. What does he write now? I would not like to name it. To be
humble I do not think I could. It is bare of poetry. His _Washington_
is not a creditable high school performance. It is almost as bad
as Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_! Success kills too often today. George
Sterling was wise enough to get out of New York, to Carmel, the blue
sea, the mountains. I recall a sonnet-sequence of his, which is the
best of American make.
Consider, too, Tarkington after he wrote _Beaucaire_, and turned to
New York, quick dollars. _Beaucaire_ was writing. Compare it with his
later prose!
When conflict for life is keen, not only is love between man and man
impossible, but kindliness, justice, friendship. Man becomes prey of
man. His emotions are those of the beast that destroys. For the body
to live, the soul dies.
In well advertised benevolent institutions, the normal feelings of
humanity are shut, in order to keep them alive. Soon we shall go
to institutions sight-seeing, on Sunday, as we go to the Zoo, to
observe queer, useless appendages, that once belonged to man. _À
la_ incubator method, they are kept alive. They are as surprising
to Twentieth Century eyes as the One Horse Shay. In the future
noble feelings, (like exotic flowers) will be kept under glass of
hot-houses. In no other way can they survive.
In New York the mean is sacrificed. There is nothing that is good.
It is best or else it is worst. The people live, breathe, and have
their being in superlatives. We have become a poster art, where
everything is black or white. Intermediary shading disappears. Values
are not considered. Distinctions are lost. In such a multitude, mind,
manners, levels, disappear. Compilation takes place of life.
We pose as the world’s _Wunderkind_. We are looked over, called
_l’enfant terrible_, while we throw bouquets, dollars at them and
waste champagne we ought to save. The doings of this self-conscious
_Wunderkind_ occupy the front elevation of illustrated papers.
Other cities permit you to be yourself. New York does not. It
begins to set seal upon you. It makes changes in body, in mind. Its
distances, its streets, its miles of gallery floors, exhaust the
flesh. Its emotional appeal is great. After weariness has done wrong
to body, brain, it dulls with superfluity. Buildings of excessive
size stun instead of stimulate. They who endure it, survive, become
of a separate race; a highly specialized race. They are deformed like
athletes who manned the triremes of Caesar. It is a city without
national stamp of any people. It is made, to wonder at.
It is so huge the individual is inconsequential. He feels this. It
reacts upon him. He loses hope. A less fine pride envelopes him.
Cabbages of course grow largest in gardens. There is no other city
where money, its power, is so worshipped. There is no other, where
life is discounted, where the young so speedily become the old.
There is no other place where life just as life, counts so little.
Here labor loses dignity, because it is looked down upon. It becomes
ignoble. It slips back too soon to that thing called _servitude_.
Visions of useless, unearned wealth breed discontent. Into the port
of New York the splendors of the world are poured. Superlatives are
standards: highest buildings, the largest shops, greatest park, the
most expensive houses. Taste, discrimination, weaken.
Races, religions are poured together like left-overs from a
boardinghouse table, to make soup for beggars. Honor is lessened.
The premium is so high man cannot buy. Even if man has not honor, he
must have meat. Honor is old-fashioned, a rag. Before the eyes that
see, minds that judge, merit is nothing; system everything. In his
palmiest days Louis the Fourteenth was not acclaimed as New York,
city of democratic America, acclaims the dollar, and only what the
dollar buys.
I can not read Romain Rolland, Claudel, nor O. Henry. If I had to be
punished with one of the three I think I should choose Rolland.
It is too bad that in the letters of Seneca, in which he mentions
Pompeii, he does not describe the city. He saw it in its heydey.
What a picture he could draw! Not one single glimpse can I get from
his letters, however I search. What a Rome it was that had passed in
long, glittering pageant before his eyes! He is old, weary of life,
as he writes. He tries to prop himself up with stoic mind. Like the
majority of thinkers, he learned poverty is best. He declares a life
of continued prosperity is a Dead Sea. Lao Tzu on one side of the
globe, the Roman thinker on the other declare: _He is not poor who
has little, but he who desires much._
Again Seneca writes: _Riches keep you from wisdom. But poverty is
free and without care._ The Latin letters of Seneca, and Cicero,
have given me a kind of courage I can not procure elsewhere. Cicero
is master stylist. There are climaxes in the orations not to be
surpassed. I have liked the winged, broad visioned, eagle-mind that
contemplated old age in _De Senectute_.
There will be no more essays like _De Amicitia_, because friendship
does not exist. It perished with the _toga virilis_, the muscular
manhood of Rome. Powerful dramatic anger is gone. And glittering,
sword-swinging satire! Where is a Firdusi to write against Sultan
Mahmoud? Small, base, worm-like, eating envies crawl in, in place of
kings. Not the noble, fearless lion, but the crawling lizard keeps
assuredly today the palaces where Mahmoud gloried.
Greek and Latin are out of fashion. However, I do not know of many
things of which I should be so proud, as to be called, _Greek
Scholar_. And then merit the name.
The finest piece of translating in modern English is Curtin’s
translation of the _Polish Trilogy_ of Sienkiewicz. It can not be
adequately praised nor the publisher who has issued it worthily again
and again.
There are few better judges of weight of words, stretch of
margins. Sienkiewicz has merry characters as waggish as Falstaff,
as boisterously humorous as Rabelais, and quite as hilarious as
Abu-l-Hasan, who delighted in disguising grotesques and the threading
of long mysterious alley-ways, in gay _Arabian Nights_, in which
famous story collection there are no greater characterizations than
Sienkiewicz’ _Zagloba_, Prince of Liars. Almost all literatures that
have been great have produced, in art, one immortal liar. We are
not great. But we have George Washington and a cherry tree, which
I have always considered one of the divinely stupid stories of the
world. This has, in America, one parallel in stupidity, Henry Ford’s
collection of pumps.
To revert to Sienkiewicz and the Nights of Araby, the Orient is
filled with marvels and magic and mystery; with strategy; and beauty
that is strange and deadly. The Occident is used to mental food that
is colder, and not so highly seasoned. Sienkiewicz has grandeur
of conception akin to the East. Only the East with a past that is
measureless can be at one and the same moment, bitter and tender,
cruel and impassioned. Thousands and thousands of years are necessary
to ripen to perfection that rare fruit of Time, _the human mind_. To
twist a Russian proverb to the moment’s need. A young race is not
strong; a young apple not sweet.
What an amazing piece of mental architecture Somadeva built long ago,
in India in his _Ocean of Story_. To measure exactly just how petty
the art-creative mind of today is, read it! The entire Human Comedy
of Balzac would be one little drop to the ocean. It is not properly
speaking an _Ocean_ at all; it is greater: It is a world.
Probably the best _Voyages_ are the purely imaginary. Gulliver wrote
one, Cyrano de Bergerac another, and Xavier de Maistre a third. One
went to the rim of the mind’s nimble making, the second to the moon,
and the third merely journeyed around his chamber. But the distances
were all equal, and enchanting.
I am heartbroken that I could not have seen the palaces of Nineveh.
It is eye-delight that keeps me alive.
Fancy lofty walled interiors completely covered, (or built rather),
of a substance resembling precious porcelain, with the blazing
surface of a gem. But pictured, colored! Esarhaddon declared that
his palace interiors surpassed the rainbow. These glazed fragments
are found today in Assyria. Why could I not have seen it? Thêbes,
too! And Babylon! I have always hated economy, petty things, and cold
hearts. Shabbiness. Not my kingdom for a horse—but all boasted Fifth
Avenue for Babylon. And the gardens of Asia!
Petofi was a lonely, but a good deal madder, a more impetuous, Heine,
who lived in Hungary, but he was of Slav descent and his original
family name was Petrovich. Like Heine, he felt out of harmony with
Goethe. In one of his letters to Friedrich Kerenyi he declares: “...
I say it right out. I do not like Goethe. I can not stand him! His
head is a diamond, his heart a pebble.”
Petofi’s days suffered from lack of that which Goethe had in
abundance, _wise guidance_. There may be envy mixed with hatred. He
goes on to exclaim in this letter: “Bury me in the north. Plant an
orange tree upon my grave and you will see how my heart will warm it
into bloom.”
“Goethe is one of the great poets. A giant, but a giant made of
stone.”
He declares impetuously: “When I read George Sand, I am mad to think
she could write like that! She was a man, not a woman.”
He adored Dumas. Poor Petofi had only twenty-six years in which to
conquer life and art. In addition, the wars claimed him. A pitiful
measure, truly! That was the length of life of Lermontov, the Russian
poet. The natures of both were stormy, unreasoning, impassioned. They
made foes as rapidly as other men make friends. Every brilliant word
they uttered made an enemy. And they did not care. Both wrote prose
and verse with high, fine rhythm.
Petofi exclaims gayly, carelessly: “If there were no critics, there
is nothing in this world I should hate like horse-radish with cream.”
“Hortobagy—Blessed Plain! You are the brow of God. I stand in the
center and look about me with delight, a delight the Swiss can not
have upon his Alps. Only the Bedouin in heart of the Arabian desert
can feel as I feel. Only he knows how my heart expands.”
“My poor Hungary, which the Turks, the Tartars, the grasshoppers, and
the politicians have helped destroy! Perhaps, however, a bad poet is
the last drop of Vermouth in the bottle—And then one can hope for a
better future.”
“For years almost my only reading, my morning, evening prayer, was
the French Revolution. It is daily bread. It is the world’s new
Bible.”
“We people like to celebrate—we Hungarians. When there aren’t
individuals left to celebrate, we shall set about giving festivals
for the moon. That is why we are poor, ragged, because we insist upon
shining.”
“It has always hurt my feelings to think Shakespeare was an
Englishman.” (I think Heine said these words too.)
“Oh divine Art, why is it your priests are devils?”
“In the dark night of my Hungarian Fatherland I am a little
flickering flame. But I am flame just the same! By my light, the
future Hungary will be forced to read the Book of Fate. Hope is
written there.”
“What is a rule? A crutch for feeble, limping, commonplace people.”
Poor, pitiful, proud, impassioned Petofi! He disappeared from the
world like Bestushev-Marlinski, as if by magic. No one knows what
became of him. As adjutant to the commanding officer he accompanied
his general into battle. After the battle was over, he was not seen.
His body was never found. About his tragic end there are stories,
and romantic stories. Some say he died a prisoner in the mines of
Siberia. Some say he became a Russian subject, learned the Russian
tongue, and that one of Russia’s famous writers, is Petofi grown old.
He was born in 1823.
Hungary has had other spirited story tellers, but none perhaps
informed with such peculiarly tragic fire, surely none with such
unspoiled lyric gift. Her short story tellers, as a rule possess
grace, irony, gaiety. These are qualities that belong to the race.
There is a whimsical imagination found among story writers of
Hungary, no other nation I know of has. Mikszáth had it richly; and
Molnar illustrates the same kind of mind and writing. Other Hungarian
story writers are Herczeg, Rakosi, Arpad von Derczik, Jokai, to
mention a few, at random, whom I happen to recall.
I found something interesting in Montesquieu’s _Persian Letters_.
He writes: _C’est la sagesse des Orientaux, de chercher des remèdes
contre la tristesse avec autant de soin que contre les maladies
le plus dangereuses._ Orientals seek medicaments for sadness as
frequently as for ills of the body. This is indicative of the fact
that in the Orient they still believe in things of the spirit, of
which the West has lost sight. And also that they are older and
wiser. Riper. Montesquieu goes on to say: We ought to weep for a man
when he is born, not when he dies. What could be more characteristic
of Gallic mind? French wit is Oriental philosophy turned inside out.
One of the sayings of La Rochefoucauld which delighted me is:
“The evil we do can not begin to draw upon us the persecution our
superiorities draw.” How many personal disillusions, how many sad,
surprising visions into man’s heart, went to make that!
I enjoy the _Satires of Boileau_. They play generous part in building
that penetrating, discriminating French mind. Especially do I enjoy
the prose introduction to the satires, where he speaks of Horace
living at a period when it was most dangerous for man to laugh. A
strange thing, that, to observe! A dangerous time to laugh! Did
something similar occur to Boileau in his own life? Did he learn to
know what is the arrogant power, then the selfish pride, of a king?
Condorcet’s _Life of Voltaire_ is fine writing of history. To me
it is enthralling romance. In it the same mind is visible, in
action, that we find in Taine, Quintillian, Saint Beuve. Taine was
novelist and story teller. But his merits as an original creator are
overshadowed by that vast, amazing critical writing, which is his
work on the literature of England. When I read it I marvel why no
Englishman knew himself as this Frenchman, Taine, knew him.
I read Lamennais: _Paroles d’un Croyant_. He writes like an inspired
prophet, to stir masses to unrest, rebellion. His sentences ring like
clarions. Magnificently curses fall. It is peculiar how he gives
words the quality of metal. Other people use the same words. They are
nothing at all.
It has been said that there has been no name so execrated as
_Machiavelli_. He is the supremely hated. An Italian critic writing
of him declares: “Voltaire hated him, and Frederick the Great; the
Jesuits, and Cardinal Polo. He could only be right in a world in
which there are no spiritual truths.” It is a strange thing that
living in Italy, at a period when the Church dominated it, he should
have written just that book.
There is not necessarily anything important in a likeness. There
are resemblances in the world for which in our present condition of
knowledge we are unable to account.