I
When you find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in
the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,--supposing that you own
the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,--there is apt to
steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever
so long ago,--you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream
you cannot wholly recall might be compared to this feeling. In the
simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,--in the eccentricity
of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,--in the tints of
roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens
and grays,--in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas
lamps, and chimneys,--in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the
splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,--you find
less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something
that was and is not. Slowly this feeling strengthens with your pleasure
in the colorific radiance of costume,--the semi-nudity of passing
figures,--the puissant shapeliness of torsos ruddily swart like statue
metal,--the rounded outline of limbs yellow as tropic fruit,--the grace
of attitudes,--the unconscious harmony of groupings,--the gathering and
folding and falling of light robes that oscillate with swaying of free
hips,--the sculptural symmetry of unshod feet. You look up and down the
lemon-tinted streets,--down to the dazzling azure brightness of meeting
sky and sea; up to the perpetual verdure of mountain woods--wondering at
the mellowness of tones, the sharpness of lines in the light, the
diaphaneity of colored shadows; always asking memory: "When?... where
did I see all this... long ago?"...
Then, perhaps, your gaze is suddenly riveted by the vast and
solemn beauty of the verdant violet-shaded mass of the dead
Volcano,--high-towering above the town, visible from all its ways, and
umbraged, maybe, with thinnest curlings of cloud,--like spectres of its
ancient smoking to heaven. And all at once the secret of your dream is
revealed, with the rising of many a luminous memory,--dreams of the
Idyllists, flowers of old Sicilian song, fancies limned upon Pompeiian
walls. For a moment the illusion is delicious: you comprehend as never
before the charm of a vanished world,--the antique life, the story of
terra-cottas and graven stones and gracious things exhumed: even the sun
is not of to-day, but of twenty centuries gone;--thus, and under such a
light, walked the women of the elder world. You know the fancy
absurd;--that the power of the orb has visibly abated nothing in all the
eras of man,--that millions are the ages of his almighty glory; but for
one instant of reverie he seemeth larger,--even that sun impossible who
coloreth the words, coloreth the works of artist-lovers of the past,
with the gold light of dreams.
Too soon the hallucination is broken by modern sounds, dissipated by
modern sights,--rough trolling of sailors descending to their
boats,--the heavy boom of a packet's signal-gun,--the passing of an
American buggy. Instantly you become aware that the melodious tongue
spoken by the passing throng is neither Hellenic nor Roman: only the
beautiful childish speech of French slaves.