of noise was guns and tin pans. Every man carried one gun. The
greater number carried two. Since there was no law but martial law,
the population’s first desire was for territorial government. When
Senator ——? of Washington, Chairman of the Committee on Public
Lands, arose in the Senate, stuck his hand in the lapel of his
coat and said: Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Committee on Public
Lands, I demand for the future citizens of Oklahoma, those honest,
hard-working Americans that they be given self government, and so
forth, and so forth. The speech went on the wire to Oklahoma. The
telegraph operator, who was likewise ticket agent, depot master, and
a half a dozen other things, got it first. By way of letting the town
know that good news was coming, he ran out on the platform and fired
a round from his six-shooter. The proprietor of First Chance Saloon,
a two-gun man from Texas, stepped out of his shack and let go both
guns. He did not know the news but he felt that it must be good. And
he believed in helping on a good thing. If it were good he voiced
his approval. If, however, it turned out to be bad it meant that
he had been voicing his disapproval. When his guns began to bark,
the Feed Store Man, next door, began with his, and before another
minute had elapsed the entire town was in the street firing up into
the sky. It was like magic. Men leaped from shacks. Men leaped from
dugouts, and saloons, everywhere. A firing squad began to march up
and down the streets, firing by volley, by individuals, by twos and
threes. Most of them did not know what for, but when the telegraph
operator ran up the hill to deliver his message to the mayor, who,
standing on the empty sugar barrel in the Government Acre, read it
aloud, the crowd went mad. The celebration lasted all night. If the
news happened to prove disappointing on the morrow, no one was vexed,
because soon some other news of some kind would come and then they
could have another celebration. Occasionally a citizen had an eye
knocked out, or a half a dozen teeth, by a spent bullet. Window glass
was broken nightly. No one of course minded such trifles. They were
merely the by-product of frequent and joyous celebrations.
Mr. Mencken is a pugilist, not an artist. He has always been in the
wrong ring. It is safer to take blows, however, which make you blue
instead of black.
Mr. William Lyon Phelps is the most art-predatory of non-æsthetic
pedants.
It is good to be interested in everything, from the history of
pins to the color of pills preferred by potentates, pugilists, or
pedagogues.
Coelho Netto, of Rio, is a person. There are not too many! He is
peculiarly versatile. He has been physician and surgeon, lawyer,
lecturer upon art and letters in great universities, politician,
reporter, and writer of many volumes of successful plays which still
hold the stage in both Brazil and Portugal. In addition, he is a
novelist and prolific short story writer, and one of the first in his
tongue, in South America, to gain a livelihood solely by art.
The difficulty of living by the pen, in Rio, in an early day was set
down by a Portuguese journalist as follows:
“They say Brazil has thirteen millions of people. Of these twelve
millions eight hundred thousand can not read. Of the two hundred
thousand that remain, one hundred and fifty thousand read only
daily papers; fifty thousand, only French books; thirty thousand,
translations. The other fifteen thousand read the Catechism and
the Prayer Book; two thousand study Comte. And one thousand read
Portuguese books made in Brazil.”
He was one of the earliest artists to show the native life of the
land outside the cities, together with man’s effort to contend with
the resisting tropic wilderness. He has shown every class of this
richly varied life in his extensive country.
_Tormenta_ is a novel of a young physician, which perhaps is
reminiscent of his own youth. _Sertão_ is a collection of prose
_acquarelles_ of Brazil’s colonizing days, with interesting pictures
of the vast, the varied interior. Here we see storms so violent, they
are almost unbelievable, like a deluge, and which last for days; then
the long dry seasons, and the measureless, solitary pastures; the
encrusted gold of sunsets unimpeded over disconcerting levels; and
the grey and melancholy dawns.
One of his most powerful novels, the one I perhaps admire most, is
_Rei Negro_. It shows life on a lonely estate in the interior and the
confusing conflict, then blending, of black and white races. It is
a pathetic, moving story one is forced to remember, of a beautiful
woman of the tropics cursed with double race blood and a Negro who
was a hero.
_O Capital Federal_ contains enchanting sketches of Rio, and likewise
detailed descriptions of existence on a _fazenda_, in the country,
where the luxury is so great, so unexpected, it sets one dreaming of
the pleasure places of Tiberius, in the south of Italy. This novel,
_O Capital Federal_, is dedicated to his uncle as follows: “My Uncle:
In this book there are pages that belong to you, because I never
should have written them had not my Good Fairy guided me to the
ascetic but voluptuous retreat where you live in happy tranquility,
following the moral law of Epicurus, and treasuring your flowers.”
This alluring place of residence was isolated in a grave garden
of roses. It fronted the green, refreshing foam of the sea, where
towered two black rocks. In construction it was a Swiss _chalet_.
Steps of marble, polished and rare, led to it. The drawing rooms were
ample, luxurious, and filled with objects of art. The bath, in this
country home in Brazil, recalls the Baths of Nero. It would have
satisfied the sumptuous Ruler of Rome. How he would have enjoyed
pushing the buttons which filled the bath room with pink mist of
attar of roses or the purple breath of violets! The dining-room, all
the other rooms, were equally splendid. There were precious wines in
priceless crystal. There was rare and astonishing food. And flowers,
dazzling and huge.
In _Rei Negro_, Netto’s descriptions of dawn and sunset, and the
blinding yellow midday, are both lovely and unforgettable. I keep
this book at hand in order to renew my delight in them. There is
freshness and exquisiteness in his paintings of the spaces of this
unknown land.
His books are many. All of them are excellent. His is no slight
talent.
_Esphinge_ (a novel). _Immortalidade_, (likewise a novel). _Treva_,
a book of five novelettes; _Fabulario_ (short stories). _As Sete
Dores De N. Senhora_, a noble, uplifting book of faith. _Saudades_,
many very brief stories, all of which are attractive and charm with
originality. _Scenas e Perfis_, short stories, too, and _O Paraiso_.
I am sorry books are advertised as they are in America today. It
both lessens interest in buying and reading. Publishers ought to get
together, like nations, and arrange a general disarmament plan. At
least we might float, occasionally, the white flag of truce.
Every reader has his peculiarities of taste, touched always with
emotion, which is something not amenable to reason. I personally
prefer for pleasure, a book on falconry written by some acute and
sensual oriental, to the detailed facts, marshalled accurately and
dated of, say, the Newgate Calendar.
Ships fascinate me, the beginnings of navigation, Strabo’s
_Geography_, maps, old globes, and the Hakluyt Voyages. When I read
about a drawing made of a ship a thousand years old, I shiver as at
some line of immortal verse. The great emotion sweeps me. Russel
Clark wrote: _The most beautiful expression of the hand of man is the
sailing ship._ Old shipping books interest me. And the adventures of
whaling days. The mischances that befell the Whaling Barque, _George
Henry_, kept me awake nights. And the wild-tongued, great Elizabethan
Voyagers! I hope pictures have been kept of all the great old ships
that ever sailed the seas!
I love gardens. But I do not enjoy reading about them. I hate to see
words fade and die. I learn of gardens from painters, etchers. And
then I try to remember them without words. In Persian and Indian
Miniatures I have loved them best. And the flowers Renoir painted
when he was old. Yet that old book _Gerard’s Herbal_ still gives out
some of the spiced sweetness of all gardens.
I doubt if in novel making there is such thing as Romanticism,
Classicism. Critics, like creations of God He forgot to call good,
may be little men, who see in part only, or else through a glass
darkly. The two terms merely classify different degrees of visibility.
It is not strange that Dr. Jozef Muls, born in one of the world’s
richest art cities, Antwerp, a city that knew Rubens, Quentin Matsys,
and Breughel, should write about art. And he has written well.
His _Modern Art, The Twilight of Flemish Art Cities_, and _From Greco
to Cubism_, (_Van El Greco Tot Het Cubisme_), give him indisputable
rank among the foremost critics of the day. Not only are they
penetrating and profound as criticism, but accurately documented, and
sensitive, and written in delightful, sympathetic prose. He writes
in two languages, French and Flemish; and in speech, he is master of
many.
He has not only written books of art but books of travel, short
stories, and books of verse. I keep in memory two pleasant booklets
about cities. One is _Rouen_, by André Maurois, the other is _Het
Levende Oud-Antwerpen_, by Jozef Muls. The latter has eight etchings
by Vaes. Both books have the indescribable charm which love of the
thing written about gives to words. He writes again of the city of
his birth in _De Val Van Antwerpen_.
A work of his which has given me hours of enjoyment is still
another book about cities. This is called _Steden_. The chapters on
Constantinople and Venice are alluring. He came across from Trieste
to Venice one hot August night, over night-black water, to be
confronted at dawn with a golden city floating upon a lapis sea. It
looked to him like something fabulous from the depths of the ocean.
The decaying palaces resembled splendors seen only in a dream. The
Bridge of Sighs made him think of melancholy Byron whose heart, he
insists, lives on in Venice. He rejoiced in all the eloquent memories
of Tintoretto, connoisseur of art that he is, and the past glories of
the Republic.
The great canals were merely the mirrors of Venice, Queen of Cities.
Albert Besnard, the distinguished painter, after being for many years
director of the school of art in Italy where the coveted _Prix de
Rome_ is given, turned to writing after he was an old man. And the
book, properly enough, is about Rome: _Sous le ciel de Rome_. For
this he was made an _Académicien_. And he deserves the honor. Only
one or two other men, for a single work’s grace, have become members
of _L’Académie Française_. Books of travel written by sensitive
painters like Besnard are things rare and charming. In one place I
recall, he exclaims: “I am standing alone at foot of stairway of the
Capitol. _Rome under the stars—what delight!_” I think Besnard is
quite as fine in prose as in the bejeweled, gauze-robed, almond-eyed
beauties he painted in India.
Besnard remembers Marie Bashkirtseff, as he saw her once in her
youth, standing beside a fountain in the gardens of the Villa Medici.
She reminded him of a little golden, furred cat. He considered her
fine instead of beautiful. His trained eyes found her arms too short.
She was exquisite and fashionable, but she was too cold, and in her
face there was no joy. Her originality, to him, was in her peculiar
physical attractiveness, her elegance, and not in her conversation.
He called her a poor, little child whose only pleasure was to design,
then wear wonderful gowns, briefly, for the eye-pleasure of the Great
Julian. He always remembered her own too cold, sharply expressive
blue eyes.
His observations are arresting. He thinks it is the fatality of order
and equilibrium with which modern youth can not put up. A balance is
lost. Somewhere else he declares that grief is the ransom of genius.
Only they who can suffer, arrive. Whenever he returns to Rome, he
likes to pause a moment before entering his dwelling, on one of the
hills, just for the pleasure of penetrating first with his eyes,
the rich, grey, sculptured mass, which is the world’s incomparable
wonder, _Rome_. He savored with pleasure the beauty of the sky
that bends over the Deathless City; the grandeur, the severity of
outline of Roman horizons; the deserted _campagna_; the mystery
of magnificent palaces with their murmuring fountains, and above
everything else, the peculiar charm of the people, who throughout the
centuries have known how to keep vehement passions, the grace of the
inspiring gesture, and beauty.
Writing from Rome again, he speaks of the winds of art which blow
freshly in one’s face, to renew ideas, then strengthen intelligence.
Besnard’s book is so alluring, every page of it, (and his book about
India, too), that I should not like anyone to miss them. He is a
great admirer of D’Annunzio. He writes of the splendor of the Italian
poet’s soul on a par with the century-reinforced splendor of the
Eternal City.
Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded
sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of
his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of
Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal
regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held.
It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as
wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted
themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a
pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.”
Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the
rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains.
Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example
in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age
of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All
things perish after they flower, even the ages.
Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after
seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth: _O those morning walks
in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian!_ (Rodriguez, the South
American novelist, says in _Idolos Rotos_: “I can not forget the
tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that
even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence.
_Italy!_ Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world,
and all its youth!
A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, is
_Idolos Rotos_ (Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published
long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological,
economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction
of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle
reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the
changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new
material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure
of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance
of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant,
subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. The writer
carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is
always good and sometimes great.
Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with
mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with
clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the
book has stable novel architecture.
“_Victimas de un sistema_.... Victims of an educational system
which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains
and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by
electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,”
writes Rodriguez.
It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years
in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew
in childhood.
Of April in Caracas, he is enthusiastic: “It is a spectacle worthy of
admiration, when the acacias flower, and trees wear crowns of purple
and robes of flame!”
Sometimes Rodriguez warns against the dangers of democracies in
words which remind us of León Daudet or De Tocqueville. There is
no national soul, he says. And nothing is done to develop it. In
Venezuela there are three ethnic unities which are hostile to any
united progress.
He has written glowingly of the days of tropic summer. Again I
translate from memory: “The cicadas sang. From every tree, every
bush, rang their shrill announcement of summer. Near and far, every
spot of green, every twig, leaf, was a strident trill, inescapable,
like the high, glorious notes of crystal chords vibrating with frenzy
until they snap. From the scanty vegetation on the edge of gorges,
which, toward the north, divide capriciously the city ... swelled
monotonous, sharp song.... From all points of the compass it came.
And in Caracas, from every _patio_, surged the deafening song of the
penetrating choir.”
Albert, idle in his studio, thought it was the tortured cry of a land
sick with fever, praying the implacable blue for rain. The land was
burned. This heat of fever quivered everywhere like a thirst. The
fever leaped with violent color-cry to top boughs of the _búcares_.
It leaped in blinding bloom to tall _tolu-trees_, to the acacias,
which were breaking with blossoms. Nowhere in the city nor the
forests could one see trees that were not covered with flowers,
purple, red, and the hues of flame. From his window he confronted
_tolu-trees_ completely enveloped like armor in purple petals.
Both Loti and Barrés suffered from a consuming fear of death, says
Daudet. They were constantly preoccupied with the thought that
some-time life for them would be no more. Loti fought the fear with
change of place, traveling; Barrés, with political affairs. Both
were fêted and flattered while they suffered continual boredom. That
accomplished Portuguese, Fidelino de Figueiredo, declares that it was
boredom which caused the death of Louis Cotter, historian, who wrote
_Splendor and Decay of the House of Austria_.
He died of mental weariness because he could not adapt himself to
the mediocrity of a provincial town, its petty quarrels, its local
injustice, its horror and hatred of any kind of superiority.
The brilliant Portuguese goes on to say that it was this attitude of
mind which caused the French Revolution, and which is now beginning
to afflict the minds of men again, with close of a period of time.
People sense dumbly that the treasures of emotion, treasures stored
by rich soul life (being rapidly destroyed) can never be reassembled.
The result means death of culture. Marie Henrietta once wrote that
_to live_ does not mean to be upon the Earth either a brief time or
a long time, but to be able _to feel_, to register a great range of
sensations.
Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the
long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming.
A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard,
Ballesteros de Martos. His _Artistas Españoles Contemporaneos_ is
a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some
quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great
sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It
is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is
not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels
is _Luz en el Camino_. He was one of the editors of that brilliant
Spanish review, _Cervantes_.
I like this from Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_: “The images of
men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of
time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to
be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds
in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding
ages.”
Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born,
however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay
William Hudson, in _Abbé Pierre’s People_, owns that graceful,
alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson
taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts,
the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French
Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief
spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but
distinguished philosopher, thinker.
Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illumine _tædiam vitæ_ we have gain,
efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place
to place, _physical restlessness_. Monkeys in tropic forests move
swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they
have no mind and can not _live_. The people whose physical movements
are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize
for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great
Confusion!
There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of
mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice.
I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a
money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing
from tall tropic trees.
Ellis Parker Butler declares _pigs is pigs_. Then monkeys must be
monkeys, tails long or short.
I used to know a little shop in Paris where they kept only books
about imaginary travels, travels that never existed. This kind of
writing seems to have been done for a little while in the Eighteenth
Century. One is about an imaginary trip to the pole and published
in Amsterdam in 1723. Abbé Bordelon published a little earlier, a
book about a hypochondriac who was forced to travel all the time
whether he wanted to or not. Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_ belongs to
this period. Louis Holberg wrote, about the middle of the Eighteenth
Century, describing a strange journey to the interior of the earth.
There was an Arab philosopher, by name Ibn Tophail, earlier by a
century, in the late Seventeenth Century, who wrote one of the
most fascinating travel books in the world. It tells about a boy
shipwrecked on a desert island south of Asia, who by means of travel
and contemplation, trained his mind to comprehension of the verities,
and scientific knowledge. The writer himself had an amazing life
spent partly in Africa and partly as Secretary to the Governor of
Granada.
Novels which give us the souls of races and the ancient historical
progression of peoples such as: Reymont’s _Peasants_, Hamsun’s
_Growth of the Soil_, are precious, powerful things. In no other way
can we know thoroughly other lands and them who dwell there. A series
of novels is being published in South America by that accomplished
artist and man of letters, Manuel Galvez, which does just that. He
is writing a series of fascinating historical novels of the wars in
Paraguay, and of life in that great rich country Argentina. At this
moment the Paraguay Trilogy is ready. The books are _Los caminos de
la muerte_, _Humaitá_ and _Tierra de espectos_. One of his earlier
books, _El solar de la raza_, won the Argentine Prize. It is a
travel book of old Spain. There are eloquent pages about Castile,
strong, proud, noble, profound, whose glories Galvez says he has
faith to believe will be duplicated again in Argentina. In this,
Galvez has written as eloquently of time-stained, tragic Toledo as
Zorilla, or Blanco-Fombona. As prelude to his description of the old
stronghold of Spanish cities he says: “Now we are living in an epoch
of transition; it is the imperialism of energy under two expressions,
namely, will and muscle, while the older civilization of Spain was
founded upon imperialism of the spirit. There the soul dominated. In
modern cities of the New World people live preoccupied exclusively
with material things; sensual pleasures, health, fashion, the
acquiring of wealth. In the old days, in old cities such as Toledo,
people were preoccupied with questions of the soul, God. Today we
have the combative man, the pioneer, the self-made. We have epics of
multitudes, whose interests are wholly material.”
“Toledo affirms for us the indelible quality of grief. It is one
more illustration of the sudden end of things human. Even the stones
of Toledo keep telling that life is continuous death. Cities,
philosophies, glories of empire, books—everything—die. In time
the civilization of Europe will pass into oblivion too. Later,
American civilization will disappear, and with it the civilization
of Argentina. Then some writer a thousand years hence will make a
soulful and elegiac description of the end. He will find in the
abandoned streets of my beloved Buenos Aires the same lofty sorrow,
the same memories of the past, which, in nights I can now never
forget, the stones of Great Toledo have revealed to me.”