De Hoc—Cubism of the Spirit.
I trust there will not be silence eternal when the Troubadours are no more.
In reading many years in many languages, merely for pleasure, a peculiar unmentioned fact has come to notice. Most creative artists in whom imagination plays predominant part, (writers, musicians, painters), are born in the months of the fall and winter. It is true of all ages and nations. To prove conclusively the statement would be to fill pages with lists of names.
This occurred to me when I was studying Russian, reading Russian poets. There the list born in fall and winter is astonishing: Chemnitzer, Kapnist, Neledinski-Meletzki, Karamsin, Krylov, Schukowski, Ryleiev, Griboiedow, Baratinsky, Kolzow, Lermontov, Countess Rostoptchchin, Tjutchew, Benedikkow, Schevtschenko, Nikitin, Nekrassow, Turgenev, Aksakow, Pleschtschejow, Polonsky, Minajew. To be sure the greatest Russian writers are the exception that prove the rule, Puschkin and Gogol. In other countries I recall just at this moment, Rimbaud, Racine, Heine, Poe, Alexander Petofi, the fluent lyric poet of the Magyar race, Bobby Burns, Cervantes, Milton, André Chenier, Flaubert, Kolomon Mikszáth, the Hungarian of ironical fantastic prose and José Asuncion Silvá and Blanco-Fombona, born in grey November. Unexplored scientific fact underlies this. January and December claim those of maddest mind. And March has been the birth month of the greatest number of murderers.
The more I read Goethe the more conscious I am of the depth of untapped power he held in reserve. He was never written out.
Today the period of a writer’s productivity is brief. Life saps him. Its interests are too complex. Kipling has been written out for years. I could name others. Goethe was last of the great. After him there are no monumental figures.
He worked, off and on, at his Faust for sixty years. The general reading public has no comprehension of what a unique, powerful, creation of the mind that is, nor what unplumbed depth is in it. Byron, in his Manfred, had it in mind. Manfred is a copy. So is the Russian Lermontov’s Demon, which is superior, considered as poetry, to Manfred.
Someone accused Byron of imitating Faust. His reply was: “I did not follow Goethe, but both Goethe and I followed the Book of Job.” It is about the same resemblance as that which exists between passages of the New Testament and Epictetus. Not personal but merely expressive of the distributed thought of a period, a kind of thought, (in case of Goethe), following in the wake of the French Revolution. It was a fashion people had of wearing minds, in disturbing days of reconstruction. Stillings declared that Goethe’s heart, which few knew, was as great as his mind, which all knew.
The time will come when the insistence of the East, written in the most ancient documents known, that life is one, will be proven. The deep heart-dream, the poetic fancy, of one age becomes the fact of another, and the cheap commonplace of a third. We shall find that the despised weed of the garden, the bullfrog in the pool, and Napoleon on the throne of France, are one manifestation of life. The most interesting thing the world has done, or will do, is slow turning of the ponderous pages of science, each leaf of which represents an age. One of my regrets is that I can not watch the turning leaves of all the future.
Sanskrit teaches that in the tree and in man dwell the same spirit. What a thing it was to do, to be able, by abstract thought, to reach that conclusion! An ancient Vedic hymn sings of Aranyani, spirit of the trees. Some of the words I have forgotten. These I recall:
The Rig Veda describes how offerings were made to plants because they were powers of life. The plant that has climbed nearest to human life, shown best what possibilities are there, and sometime probably will reward the observations of scientists, is the orchid. The only thing Darwin had interest in, he who was eager to solve the mystery of man, was that other mystery, life of the orchid. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, declared: The tree is thy brother! It was while standing under a palm tree, in the garden of Padua, that the idea of metamorphosis of plants came to Goethe. Perhaps Goethe thought noble palms above his head were exclamation points of wisdom! I am not sure he did not say something like that. Linnæus insisted that luxuriant flowers are none natural but all monsters.
Modern scientists tell us that when biologists write of the principle of life, they find illustrations among plants as often as among animals. The germ from which a human being is evolved differs in no wise from germ from which a plant is evolved.
What is life? Schelling, Comte, Lamarck, De Blainville, Spencer, have tried in vain to define it. Is it easy to know the exact difference between animal and vegetable protoplasm? In both are life. Life means progress, change. It is not impossible that the fragile lines marking a flower carry sensation. A nerve is protoplasm.
Nerve sensation is a line of molecules conducting impression. It is contraction and expansion. Evolution is the changing distribution of matter and motion, extending through periods of time.
We ourselves, once, were little more than dull, outspread leaf-surfaces. Sensation is not unthinkable development of plants. From sensation, the step to active mind is not impossible, nor out of range of seeing. Mind may not be anything but some form of matter. Matter is a witch wearing masks. It may be accumulated expression of force, reflected from matter.
The cells of plants focus light like eyes. A scientist in Europe has taken pictures with them. Cell-eyes may know love and hate. Without weariness, for measureless time, what have they not reflected? Poised upon the edge of tremendous heights, they survey chasms of transformation. They survey the circle of created things. Who knows what they have seen which the human eye may not record? There may be an amazing new botany awaiting us some day. It will not be bare mathematical computation. It will not drily number petals, stamens. In unthinkable distances of time, apparently dull, yet sleepless cell-eyes will be photographed. Upon these photographs there will be found the strangest, most astonishing moving-picture, the unfolding history of the world. The triumph, the tragedy, of cell-progress, throughout the measureless black night of time, will become possession of all. There we shall read the past. There we shall read the passions, adventures of the orchid, in its long climb upward, toward more powerfully sentient life.
Thinking does not necessarily wear one fashion of flesh. All things can not be seen from one view point. This is true of planes of life, which are an endless spiral, filling heights of years. There are planes seen only with the brain, when it brings to action high powers of thought-projection.
Pan and the nymphs symbolized Greek belief in the life-spirit of trees. In pagan days the names given to the orchid signified life. They were names of lovely women: Alba, Rosa, Aurea. Within this nomenclature of the ancients, it may be a scientific fact lies hidden. Facts are felt dimly by many before they are stated broadly by one.
The orchid expresses intensity. The modern world has loved it, because it is restless, perplexing, like the modern soul. The pagan world preferred calmer flowers. It was satisfied with the rose. The rose is an early Victorian.
Plants are not different from people. There are plant-villages that lead a busy life. There are plant-colonies that hate the invader. They protect themselves against him. There are vagabond-plants that run away, impelled to wander.
The orchid is an adventuress, reaching out greedily between planes of existence. It has become most superb in strength wherever there have been perished civilizations, wherever an unknown past has been prodigious.
In the land where the Inca ruled they riot. They thrive in Mexico, in steaming valleys the Aztecs knew. In Central America, Guatamala in particular, they mark effectively the disappearing outline of Mayan temples. Where the world was earliest populated, we find them. In Ceylon, on the ruins of Anuradapura, where palaces towered at a date when European man was living in holes in the ground like an hairy animal, they throng like flocked phantoms of delight. The forests of Siam and Cambodia know them, and overflowing rivers which wash dead marble-cities, such as Angor, whose ruins of a perished civilization fascinate me. There, orchids flash like flame. They light the night wherever the dim, sluggish, tropic rivers swing. In deserted, rose-hued, marble cities such as Amber upon the Highlands of India, where man comes no more, where no more there is pageant, peacock, nor king, savage orchids cling. They cling wildly; life, which refuses death. They are lured by lands where memories are many, where there is the dust of millenniums and ruins of the fabulous mansions of men.
It is appropriate that the man who has arisen to prove capability of plants for sensation, to prove they feel fear, suffer agony, should come from India, (Bose), where the idea was projected. And now we are on the threshold of truth that lies ahead.
The romances of the future will be more thrilling than the old commonplace of a man falling in love with a woman, or vice versa. The romances of the future, when the novel as we know it now must disappear, will be written by that sleepless, fiery-eyed Demon, Science. How tame, silly, will the old novels, plays, seem of Priscilla, (say), meeting Paul in the garden! What a ridiculous thing in which to be interested!
In this period of fashion not reason, which is to aim one’s heavy cannons, one’s best made spit balls, at the gods of yesteryear, it is well to read books of criticism for novelty, pleasure of mental exercise, and not trouble about believing what they say. Look upon it as a mental stunt! I have read recently that Flaubert was mediocre, and could not write, that Balzac had no ability of any kind, Maupassant lacked the short-story sense, and Shakespeare should be done over by someone who knows his rich Elizabethan England better than he did.
Very likely the age we are living in is sterile save scientific mind. How can it go on, when it can not see the road? Probably little, or nothing, being written in this feverish period, will last. It is the bridge that leads from one shore to another. We may find pleasure in the shores, but the bridge will be forgotten.
An impulse to besmirch what no one dared to besmirch is not genius. Its fineness, originality, value as attitude of mind, are questionable. Yet I can not dispute the fact that a large spot of black shows on a white surface. It can be observed at a distance. People see it. A thing that is new is not necessarily better, not to mention best.
I am thinking, among other things, of critical discoveries of Croce. Sometimes his discoveries are like the originality of finding how much more comfortable to live in is a house without a roof than one with a roof. Here is hoping Signor Croce always had his umbrella or lived in a land where rain did not fall!
Marsden Hartley is a poet. He is sometimes prosy with his brush, but when he takes to pen and ink, he blossoms. There is the making of a charming stylist in Hartley, which is just what he would like to have us believe he disdains.
Among his pictures, I have liked his tragic New England farms, black with accumulated terrors of puritan winters. I have liked his slender vases of crystal, holding a flower visioned to disappearing outline, where loveliness alone remains. This is gold. But gold circulates, is most useful, with admixture of alloy.
Art is stenographic mind-reading of the trembling soul. It is the truth which living obscures, or makes us unable to see, because we are insensitive. One who has gentleness, sensitiveness, which are other names for fineness, feels and responds. It is not dependent upon intellect, sharpness of wit. It has to do with nobility. It is this critics neglect. It does not need book-learning. It needs the fine human instrument.
This is about what Tolstoi meant when he declared it was for the people. Tolstoi spoke at a good time. It will not be long before all things will be for the people. The future belongs to them. There will no more be walled gardens.
The idea for Rostand’s Chanticleer was inspired largely by The Birds of Aristophanes. Rostand was a borrower. Likewise from the same comedy, Leopardi, incomparable Greek scholar, took the idea for his essay on birds, in which he tries to fancy theirs the ideal life.
The Greeks knew how to set words so they glow. Every time I re-read him I am surer there is nothing new. In The Frogs, in the journey of disguised Bacchus across Land of the Dead, we find initial idea of Dante’s Inferno; to be exact the Pilgrimage Through Purgatory. It is the same only under guise of another religion. There are a few books in which most printed art has its roots. Solomon was right. There is nothing new. There are only a few Homeric laughers.
The exotic grace, the honeyed charm of Swinburne, came from Greek and French poets. No wonder the perfection of Swinburne made would-be poets take to new verse. It was hopeless to contend with him. When you reach the top of the hill there is nothing to do but go down. Swinburne reached the top of the mountain.
The long winged dapple swallows, (Aristophanes), is a Swinburnian phrase. From the choruses of Euripides, he learned music, swift-swinging resonant movement. That breathless on-rushing, which no poet of today has, came from here. They are astonishingly alike in sound-quality. A poet is like what he admires. Love is a magnet in the world of mind.
Maeterlinck, in his book about bees, borrowed from Fabre. In philosophical articles he has shown indebtedness to India. I recall a series of these articles in which he uses the words, the unknown guest, literally translated from Sanskrit. He has been praised for the phrase. It is a fine phrase. But it does not belong to Maeterlinck.
Alfred Noyes, in Drake, leaned lightly upon a narrative poem by Spencer, describing South America.
An Arabic poet, on his way to exile in Africa, sang sadly:
That was before the days of Tipperary.
There are writers, (ideas) whose attraction, influence, has been for people of distant races, who have leaped across national boundaries. Song, like the wind, keeps a way of its own.
English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. There it moulded a race of poets. It set seal upon a movement in letters. Both Puschkin and Lermontov, the two most gifted poets of the country, have been nicknamed The Russian Byron. In Germany, on the contrary, Byron’s influence was slight, just as the influence of the French Revolution was slight there, and spread out helplessly, like sea water across marsh-land.
The romantic movement, whatever and whenever may have been its origin, reached height, became rotten, over-ripe, in Poland, in Hungary, in prose and verse. No poets have so gone the limit in creation of romantic verse as Slowacki, Mickiewicz, and Krasinski, in Poland. And no romantic prose, (I mean in realm of the story), can equal that of Paul Gyulai, the Hungarian, as reliable as he was in criticism, and less romantic, although still tainted with it, the novels of Csiky, likewise of Hungary.
The character of Merlin, and the Forest of Broceliande, has had fascination for French mind. French poets refer to it often. They try to re-create its appeal in their tongue.
Apollinaire wrote a book about it, a book magnificently illustrated with wood-cuts by Derain. He called it L’Enchanteur Pourrissant. The subject allured that delightful poet, Paul Fort. His book, part of which sings the song of the misty north over again, is called Les Enchanteurs.
Jaroslav Vrchlicky wrote sonnets to Merlin, who teased his Bohemian fancy. English poets have not cared so greatly, aside from Tennyson. The idea has a sumptuousness a trifle un-English, a twist of mind not usual with the race.
Although the Russians, in the old days, read French prodigiously and spoke it, their mind was influenced by England, by Germany. The philosophy of the latter ploughed furrows through the race which time has not been able to efface. The effect of France over the mind of Russia was greatest in the Eighteenth Century. The educated Russian was always comparatively free to choose mental food, because it was easy for him to read other tongues. Right here is mark of kinship with the Orient, whose subtle thinking fell so easily into different moulds.
Pio Baroja’s Juventud Egolatria (read in Spanish. I have not seen the English version), shows a man who has genius for going wrong. After reading it, one does not have increased respect for his head or his heart. It is too bad to be able to enjoy few things, in any department of art, life. Envy, hatred, have eaten like rust. One might perhaps guess him to be victim of some concealed, incurable physical ill which blasts life.
In addition to individual hatreds, he is generous enough to share those of the rest of the world. He remarks: “Respecto a la hostilidad que Nietzsche siente por la teatrocracia de Wagner, la comparto.” In regard to hostility I fancy Baroja would always be generous enough to say la comparto, I share it.
His mind is peculiar in its reaction to ideas. But his modesty we admit. I noticed a line in which he confesses the opposite of what Loti happens to say in his last book, Prime Jeunesse.
“No la quiero conservar: que corra, que se pierda. Siempre he tenido entusiasmo por lo que huye.” (I do not care to preserve anything: let it hasten away, let it be lost. Always I have felt enthusiasm for that which was fleeting.) Loti declared he had devoted life to preventing anything from perishing, even memory.
In Baroja there is visible joy in destruction. With it, insensibility to beauty. A nature harsh, dry, cold. He is narrow, dogmatic. He steps nimbly in a little circle where everywhere are marks of poverty. He is not grandly gloomy, tragic, like Leopardi, nor can he, like the Italian, create impeccable art. He suffers from lack of sympathy, vision. He has neither the generosity nor expansive spirit that permits him to enjoy, admire, learn. There is something about the book which is crabbed, petty. In addition, words do not come fluently. He is what Germans call wortkarg. His critical ability is slight. He recalls faintly now Leopardi, Dostoievsky, as to constant inclemency of mental weather. They, however, were moved by genius. He hates splendor, the fury of great spirits with which he has little in common. They make him feel small, cold, old.
He accuses Balzac of stupidity, delirium. That very likely is the way the mountain looks to the mouse. Victor Hugo is rhetoric, vulgarity. No wonder he was dazed by Hugo’s vocabulary! He can not admire the prose of Flaubert. He is like a person who having lived in darkness, has dwarfed eyes unable to respond to light. Again he seems a naughty boy who stands in middle of the street for purpose of spattering passers-by with mud, taking account neither of age, infancy, his interest being to bespatter.
What he writes of Dostoievsky is rather brilliant. That is seldom ascribed to Baroja. He says (translating as I quote): “In the spiritual fauna of the Twentieth Century he will be something like the Diplodocus.” He is perhaps an uncatalogueable monster, but a monster of genius not easily to be equalled or imitated.
He could appreciate neither Sainte Beuve nor Taine. He read them like a blind man. When he read Ruskin he had no comprehension that whatever that critic’s opinions as criticism, as stylist he is worth while. Baroja talks something like the conceited fop of an isolated village. He may be scientist gone wrong, who uses a scalpel, where his present profession calls for a pen. He makes attempt to vaccinate his readers with his peculiar virus.
Baroja’s opinion of the Latin historians, Sallust, Tacitus, shows an inclination to baseness. He thinks evil persistently. In these two cases judgment and scholarship are weak. He grudges Tacitus posthumous fame. But it must be admitted he can appreciate Caesar’s Commentaries, and that his word of them is juste. It may be he does not know how to envy them.
Baroja is not even pleased with the place where he was born, something regarded with affection by people in general. He wishes, plaintively, peevishly, it had been elsewhere. He wishes it had been among the mountains or else beside the sea. He is displeased it was a city where foreign people come. He treats his fellow townsmen, Sarasate, with disdain.
Stylists have been men of charm, kindliness. The lack of these qualities, suavity of surface, is marked in Baroja. There is seldom a sentence that gives pleasure.
Yet if he disavows ability of other men we must give him credit of disavowing his own ability as frankly. That points to crabbed honor. He does not forget to say a good word about Azorin, the critic. A Yankee eye to business! But heaven forbid me from accusing him! None could have the heart to wish him a disagreeable trait with which he is not endowed.
Baroja boasts he is modern. This is something of which he is proud. With him it has a local, countrified application, meaning that he is not emotional, that he reserves accelerated motion for his feet. He has a limited outlook. An unchanging view point.
The Spaniard, no matter what his condition in life, worships the aristocratic idea, and is more or less guided by it. No race cherishes more deeply ideal of class.
Baroja does have disconcerting directness. The result perhaps of constitutional disillusion, motived by dislike for what charms others. Steel-edged seeing, however, is his! It may be he is disgusted with the sham men call life.
I would like to believe something akin to the pity of Dostoievsky is mainspring of his hatreds, or a sense of justice which he sees violated. And perhaps he regrets that life is becoming scientific, collective, and must suppress the individual.
War we know has lost dramatic beauty. It is merely scientific slaughter. We can not guess what science will do to transform life.
La Busca (novel), by Pio Baroja. In the novel I find the same sad, gloomy mind, with no sense of structure, of reasoned novel-building. Once in a while, in this book, he has forgotten himself and written a resonant sentence, (page 30, the top), which I feel sure if he knew, he would pluck out, to throw away.
The novel shows that Baroja, in his mediæval Spain, has felt urge of new forms, new bottles for wine of the spirit, but which he himself is unable to procure because of imperfect technique. He has, too, affiliation for filth. But he does not paint it well. He should read Rachilde. La Busca is a saving in too permanent print, of trivialities.
I have read two novels for which it is not easy to find justification. One is La Busca, the other Duhamel’s Confession de Minuit. The latter shows, however, the miracle of writing three hundred pages about nothing. That takes skill. You can not find a better example. It is an attempt in abnormal psychology, providing mind magnified sufficiently to find the idea.
The Tour, by Louis Couperus, is another disappointing book. But the advertising agent of the House that published it is not disappointing. I commend him. He deserves increase in salary. I bought it upon his recommendation. I rose to the bait.
The book is full of missed opportunities. This may be fault of the translation. I have read many translations, however, by De Mattos, a veteran translator, which were splendid. I regret I did not read Couperus in the original! I looked forward to glorious renewal of joy in the rich past of Egypt, its astonishing architecture. What an opportunity Couperus missed in describing that pilgrimage of people to roof of the Temple of Serapis, where, under witchery of an African moon, they were to sleep, royally robed, in honor of the god, then garner dreams! I, myself, then began to dream hungrily of Africa, amazing land which man has never conquered any more than the ocean; of Tunis, in the barren wastes behind which, the Colossus of Thêbes used to burst into radiant song when the sun came up and the burning rays touched it. The book possesses neither beauty of portrayal nor scholarly exposition, to lure the weary, discriminating epicure of things of the mind.
There is a poised, a praiseworthy calm about René Bazin. There is something that comes from nobility of nature that I like. He has observed the good brown earth, the humble trees with happy little leaves, in an intimate, loving, painstaking way that recalls Hardy’s forests of Wessex.
I recall an autumn in the forests of Wessex, where the importance of each gold-brown leaf that fell was lifted to power of romance. Most subtly, delicately felt, then adequately reported. When I read the early tales of Hardy, I regret that in America we have lost so many rich Anglo-Saxon word-forms, that American English has become anæmic. It has grown thin, showy. The novels of Hardy are England, the fibre of England, while American novels are not of any land. They might have been written in comfortable ingrain, or Brussels carpeted places, where there is noise and a phonograph, in Fez or Ispahan. It is a pity to miss savor of the soil. It is a pity to be flowers grown in dry, movable, windowpots, instead of in the Earth’s brown, wrinkled breast.
The soul of René Bazin is preeminently Christian, with seal of the Christian ages. He can not conceive beauty for itself. For him it must become morality. He speaks of the grand refroidissement de l’art national, which has been called The Renaissance.
The soul of him belongs to the world in which pity was born, and this, if I mistake not, is trait of his nature. Even in objective seeing it threatens to become paramount.
In Redemption, Le Blé qui Lève, Bazin belongs to the group of Millet, Rousseau, and Breton, only he happens to use words instead of oil and brush.
The overflowing Loire in spring, (Redemption), the broad mist-dim meadows it feeds, are magnificent. The great landscape art of France is there. I felt a thrill of pleasure, sense of thirst for beauty satisfied, as when I look upon a canvas. In this canvas, it seemed to me the light was finely managed; balanced massing of shadow with sun. The effect was ennobling. There was something that made one believe again in one’s fellow men. It is good for the heart of the world to read books like his.
I fancy Hardy regrets poetry was going out of fashion when he began to write, or he would have been a poet. Like two other novelists, Paul Bourget and Anatole France, he was born with gift for it. The delicately woven texture of his thoughts belongs more to poetry than prose. His brush is a poet’s brush, his are a poet’s observations. And he has read them prodigiously, great and little. English and Latin poetry few know better. He is too sensitive for the broad blare of prose.
Hardy does not know women. His women are monotonous, undeveloped. They are little more than sketches. To be sure it may be objected that the peasant type he prefers does not lend itself to shading, to differences. But I will venture to assert, without definite knowledge of any kind on the subject, that he himself did not know women. If there had been anything of Burns in his nature it would have come to the surface, either in life or in books.
But no one has described inanimate, humble life of the fields as he has; the lonely downs, grass, furze, the forsaken sea’s edge; the desertion and chill of winter or early autumn, on lonely settlements and isolated homesteads. To read him is good as taking a vacation, he gives so truly the freshness of open spaces. He paints in words the same type in England that Millet painted with brush in France. In both is reverence, sincerity. Like Millet he lived among the people he pictured.
His observation of the fields, the folds is loving, fine. The total effect is that his novels are rooted somewhere; they have definite place. They are homely, solid, instead of brilliant, detached. Now almost everything is superficially observed. I enjoy contact with a mind that knows basic things of the land written about, and I like his scholarly respect for old English and Latin masters. I like all that dissevers from cheap, showy, tinsel, blatant novelty.
Hardy said once that the speaking age is passing for the writing age. Now the writing age is passing for the seeing (Movie) Age. It is too bad suns insist upon shining singly! As for me I shall remain, perhaps all my time, in the first two ages, finding in them, as I do, pleasure.
In the world of Hardy, the amusements of his characters are things that are no more. Imagine, if you can, a novelist of today having characters play chess. It seems a thousand years ago! It relegates them to the Romans. And the puritan manners, outlook, of his women are something inconceivable, even in strait-laced little-town places. This narrowness, puritan prejudice, which covers the lives of his characters, seems old. It gives us means by which to measure changes which have swept life of English speaking peoples since he wrote. And years have been few. We have been going at cyclonic speed. We are on the down-hill spin of civilization.
Hardy’s books bespeak leisure; leisure to observe, think, live, write. They are to be read, leisurely, with loving attention to small details. They are made to sip like wine whose supply is not great and may not be made again. He does not believe in art written in shorthand.
I like to contemplate his England: England of stately, ordered living, great country homes; of love of forests and fields; and the sustained interest in noble scholarly things, in extensive knowledge of masters of Greek and Latin.
The feeling for caste is strong, reflecting truthfully the England he knew, that feeling for class, which the new civilization will destroy.
Old age comes soon in Hardy’s novels, and lessening of courage. He lacks faith in life through excessive sensitiveness. His men are middle aged at thirty.
Sometimes there is Miltonic ring to a sentence of Hardy’s. This, for instance: “Grimness was in every feature and to its very bowels the universal shape (cliff) was desolation.”
The words Milton used have lost edge in today’s speaking, I notice by observing afresh the above. We do not feel as Milton did, the full, far ring of their meaning. We use a lot of words we partially sense, instead of few we sense in entirety. When I read books of English writers of long ago I have sensation of handling bright, crisp coins. The words of Milton are large, clear, round, beautiful.
The story of the youth of England as Hardy depicts it is story of martyrdom transferred from Rome to Victorian England. It is not easy to believe it could have changed so since Merrie England. This, joy-destroying puritanism is as out of reason as licentiousness.
Fate strikes in the Hardy novels with inexorableness of Greek tragedy. Did he learn this from life? Or did he imbibe it as rule of creation from careful, classical training? The physical world Hardy shows is lovely. The spiritual world is stern and life difficult, where natural right wears garb of wrong.
Hardy believes in fickleness of women. To him they remain Biblical characters, creatures under a curse, workers of woe, whom he has seen at a distance and not well. He lavishes phrases upon them, careful meticulous description, but still he does not paint them understandingly. Only a roué could do that, who had found favor with them, and who knew their hearts. I do not believe he admired women greatly, except those whom he created to suit himself, and only fleetingly then, as one admires, then regrets, beautiful glass which is broken. Hardy has seen life and judged it, in light of the puritan Scriptures.
In conversation among workers on thriving Wessex farms, men of the field, forest, there is something Shakespearian. There again is the tough, dependable fibre of England, England of conquest. And no one has loved better than he its fields, spring-time and harvest; and its brave, mist-covered, protecting sea. How many dawns, how many sweet noons of summer, he has patiently watched it, or observed with critical eyes of connoisseurship, then loved it deeply!
His sense of humor must not be neglected. Not kindly American humor be it said, nor brilliant, crackling Irish humor, like hoar frost on clear, thin crystal, but one that is English, like an English sun, shining persistently (which is the habit of suns), but, never burning with brightness, something, however, we ought to be grateful for, because of reliability, as English people are grateful for niggard, hard-fought living. The happiness, grief, discreet merriment of his stories are framed just as the life of England is framed, against background of ancient churches. They are a series of pictures within eloquent curves of mullioned, Gothic windows.
Human love (with Hardy) got mixed with religion. He expected women to resemble saints. Life did not come to his expectation. He could not love where he could not reverence. So he passed it by. He had puritan inability to make concessions. Puritanism, without his knowledge, ingrained life, until it fashioned dreams. He could not forget and be happy, in the present beauty of a thing as it is, without inquiring minutely into condition of its soul, both before and after. The pagan put in practice this, forget. The puritan never learned the noblest teaching of his faith, forgive.
I have enjoyed vastly traveling with Hardy along fresh, green, sea-bound highways of the land he loved, with the bracing sea breeze in my face, my hair, and lazy, long winged sea-birds wheeling over head. I have enjoyed the peace of old-fashioned country gardens under high heat of noon, and his quaint, careful naming of old time garden-flowers. And I have liked, too, sometimes feared, the tragic lonely blackness of the downs at night, with only the wild, steel-grey flash of the far away sea and above my head dim, forgotten stars. He has flashed moments of sensation upon me which I treasure. He is always sincere, and sometimes great, because he can both think and feel. The keenest memory he has left with me, is of the roads and the forests of Wessex.
In the novel of the mid Nineteenth Century the Jew has been too often exploited as the modern roué. This is injustice. Neither history nor observation justify it. To mention a few books because they are important and led the way, which prove this, I call attention to The Harlot’s Progress, by Balzac, Zola’s Nana, Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis, and many a short story by Maupassant. In each a rich Jewish banker uses wealth to buy women. And in each the character of the Jew is so similar it could be lifted from one book to the other without injury to the mise-en-scène. They are Jews from Germany. They have similar names, Steiner, Hafner. Their methods of procedure, business enterprises, amusements, ambition, home life are the same. This is true likewise of La Garçonne, the book by Victor Margueritte, of which France has expressed disapproval. The Jew in Zola’s Nana, seems lifted over, with this new book.
The blond courtesans in all are alike, too. It is peculiar that courtesans of the world of fiction, women who have been thoroughly bad, have been blonde.
The history of the antique world happens to corroborate this. She has been the type without heart, soul; most lustful, mercenary, cruel, uncaring. What was back of this? Was it borrowed impulse handed on, or was it reason founded upon observation?
The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the dictionary of a race.
Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy, sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light, bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight.
In the person of Nana, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in reach, conviction, resonance.
The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full, natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction.
Zola, in Nana, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: Das Gefährliche Alter. (The Dangerous Age.)
Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at last, huge enough to embrace the universe. Nana is a little outcast of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now, marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see Nana symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.
In his Rome, too, he shows world forces again, again expanding, magnificently triumphant. Over them, queening it as of yore, stands the glorified Venus of the Greeks, meaning that natural impulses in the heart outlast laws made to subdue them, just as after building, destroying again what is built, the red earth remains, insolent, sullen, but always dominant.
History tells how poor people of Rome went, for generations, to the crumbling Colosseum for material with which to build humble homes. Just so today lesser novelists go to these massive creative monuments, such as Zola’s Rome, for purpose of a similar quarrying. The tiny germ for little novels, stories, is concealed in these giant accumulations. We find what may have been initial impulse for Imperial Purple, by Saltus. We recall Zola saying, in this book, that the imperial purple of the Caesars has slipped down upon the shoulders of the priests. Here is the ghost of Bourget’s Cosmopolis. In the labyrinths of Zola’s rich, masterful Rome not only these books, but others I might name, float, disembodied shadows.
There are only a few novelists counting all races. They can be counted on fingers of the hand. Other novels are woven out of the floating, uncounted richly wasteful threads of the great. In the little popular story tellers of any day or race, there are few ideas, seldom profound seeing nor anything worth while. There are few originators. The works of Zola marked the death of the old novel. Zola is not using imagination, but the cold observation of the scientist. The scientific mind is dawning.
The fear which was to make Maupassant mad is the hidden, dramatic motif in his stories. It sat in his brain weaving patiently a Penelope-web, which, at last, smothered him. Maupassant was cynic, sensualist, and sumptuous master of the hidden soul. He touches the heart, the intellect, and the senses.
Timon le Magnifique, (Max Daireaux), is a merited satire upon today, its playthings, its vain, but would-be serious toys, a clever synthesis, usually false, of how something may be made out of nothing. It is written in a cold, detached manner. But I should not be surprised if it were aimed at individuals of Paris. Cubist, futurist art, is skillfully enough interpreted. There is sincerity. Often there is perception. And there does not seem to be more malice than necessary. The temper of mind of the central personality is characterized by lukewarmness. The frail story gives opportunity to display reflections about life, which have, as motive persistent disillusion, and no small amount of scorn of that human animal, man. It is the tragic skepticism of a world, once eloquent, at fire heat, now tepid, among men who are weaker, who have fewer moments of grandeur. There were things said brilliantly but without emotion. Fine food, served cold. Take it or leave it, I do not care. If you can think, you will see I am right.
It would have been as well if the author of Timon le Magnifique had hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story. The display room would have been less obstructed.
Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work. To every person his own wheels!
A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction. The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly, with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents.
De Wandelende Jood (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It banished inclination to read anything else.
The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon form alone.
The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind, of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “Hij ging, het hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande in hem de zachte vlam van Christus.” This shadows forth—this story of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the Hebrew race.
It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome: Zola’s Rome. Serao’s Conquista de Roma. Lagerlof’s Rome. Pater’s Rome in Marius, with its memories of the wolves and snow of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he reads Suetonius, the Twelve Caesars. Ricarda Huch’s Rome. Niebuhr’s Rome is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s Cosmopolis, which is Rome again.
Serao shows us Rome in Lettere d’una Viaggiatrice, a splendid piece of the kind of resonant prose, she only knew how to make. Goethe’s pictures in letters to friends in Germany, and in that remarkable verse-sequence, Die Römische Elegien, and Winklemann’s Rome, cold, plastic, devoid of color. I refer to what Winklemann called his little writings of Greek and Roman art, and the majestic, almost too glorious Rome of d’Annunzio. It is interesting to follow reactions of such people of power as these to the call of the Eternal City. In the opening lines of d’Annunzio’s Il Piacere, there are sentences so luxurious, silken, they remind me of rich reflections upon old Venetian velvet.
Loti, accomplished savoureur of all that was exquisite in space or in time, steered carefully from Rome the Mighty. Rome, divine and immortal, lured the immortals. Other superb cities have known and felt the magic of his art. But Rome he left untouched.
Edward Lucas White’s novel of Rome, Andivius Hedulio, is a moving-picture scenario printed in book form. It is a large and attractive skeleton, wearing a little more flesh than skeletons in good society have been in the habit of wearing, even in New York.
The most brilliant author’s introductions I know are those Nietzsche, Poet of Philosophy, has written for books of his epoch-making thinking. No one has been able to throw surer, more far-reaching noose over the problematical future. His Jenseits v. Gut u. Böse he called philosophy of the future. That is daring. It may be true. It is conceivable at least, a world in which good and evil, as we understand them, may not be standardized. Life cast huge shadows for Nietzsche, like childhood’s flickering fireplace-shadows, on the wall. His philosophy is these stalking shadows, terrifying sometimes, astonishing and always superhuman, these shadows of men who live.
Truth does not stand still and let us build clean, white, picket fences around it, and label it Exhibit A. It changes, takes new forms, under new suns. There is nothing fixed, eternal, except the pitiful drama of man, and the hopeless hope in his heart. It may be real; at the same time, it is unstable as the sea.
It would not be easy to be happy, even keep sane, and look upon existence with the scorn with which Nietzsche viewed it. A bitter, laughing tongue with deadly penetrating power, was his. As the French Revolution cleared the air for different social, economical living, the philosophy of Nietzsche (by surprising power to destroy), helps clear the atmosphere for less prejudiced thinking.
Nietzsche is the mischievous boy in school of the old philosophers. He insists upon knocking down with hard, well-made paper balls, the idols they set up. He is brilliant phrase maker. He transforms the heavy, slightly ponderous German tongue to frothiness of French. He stands behind it with up-lifted whip, cruelly lashing it to fresh agilities. His word acrobatics are worth considering. Yet he is seldom pleased with the result. He can not, like little people, rejoice in what he himself has done. The outlines of words as they are do not suit him. He shades them. He sets them differently. He cuts off edges. He insists they no longer falsify his thought. No written statement suits him. He wishes it a little different. The exactitude of his thinking is superb. It is difficult for words, whose sense boundaries are not exact, to express it.
Wonderful, lightening clear, shining, far, problematical glimpses he flashes forth. In certain, to him inconsequential asides, he is Prophet of Hebraic height. It is in words like these, of great thinkers, with prodigious power of self-projection, that living men gain idea of the civilizations that are on the way.
There are few more distinguished literary critics than Nietzsche. His seeing is revealing. He has few superiors in sympathetic appreciation of the printed word in hands of a master. He has fine ear for music of the sentence, too. No subtlety, no fineness, is lost. What he says about Petronius makes me long to read him again after the years. It fills me with zest, with pleasure. “Wer endlich dürfte gar eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen der mehr als irgend ein grosser Musiker bisher der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in Erfindung, Einfallen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sumpfen der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der Alten Welt, wenn man wie er, die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athen, den Befreienden Hohn eines Windes, der alles gesund macht indem er alles laufen macht!” Nietzsche wants to know who would dare make a translation into German of this book by Petronius, who more than any other of the great musicians, was master of the presto! What magnificent things Nietzsche writes about him! He insists he had the swift feet of the wind, and the wind’s breath, which clears and makes clean, with a scorn that sets free, and so forth. Here I found again that Feast of Trimalchion I stumbled through dully in school days, and later read with zest, while glorious visions of Rome brought from Latin poets, likewise from etchings of Piranesi, crowded my memory as I read.
Nietzsche makes the same statement Hardy makes. There is no writing today for the ear. There are no architects of the sonorous sentence, sculptured phrase, hinting at vast resources, wherein a multitude of minds could swarm and find safety; no sentence of mighty curve, powerful sweep. Cicero wrote such sentences. So did Demosthenes. Speech is crumbling. The rock is fretting itself back again to sand. It is no longer strong enough to contend with the forces of creation, chaos, the desolating forces so rapidly destroying the old, it is suitable now for petty writers, the little men, and the wilful winds. A force of disintegration is at work. That is why the little men with swollen ego are able to handle it, then feel proud.
Nietzsche impresses me as an artist gone wrong rather than philosopher sang pur. He makes reasoning conform to eye-delight in noble line, distinguished color. He feels, he enjoys first, thinks afterward. Sometimes he impresses me as an artist who did not have courage to try his artist’s wings, who felt, feared, perhaps, they were feeble. So he fell back upon brilliant, learned, fault-finding. He became the distinguished spier-out of men’s weaknesses. It is not easy for Nietzsche to see without passion. To see with passion is not of the philosopher. His seeing is bound too closely to the emotions of self. His hatreds, his envies, play commanding part. His hatred, for example, for Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Locke, Carlyle, and so forth, and so forth. And his envy of Wagner and the Songs of Schumann. A strange combination of opposites for a man of his gifts!
But it is a powerful, outreaching comprehension such as is not given to two of one race in a generation. In Nietzsche I think sometimes I found what the word comprehension means, (namely), a wide reaching out, then a skillful pulling together of many far powers, with the quick, firm, magic welding into one; the swift, clean focus.
However important Nietzsche may be as philosopher, I am sure his greatest merit is as master of words. In the German tongue, his is virtuosity. He recreates the language, as a Pope once said d’Annunzio had done with Italian. He has made possible a new, a different tempo. He has increased too its flexibility. Ruskin has not written with greater joy of art of Turner, than Nietzsche of music that charmed him. Nietzsche can do such things with words as Wagner with tone. The power of the two has kinships broader than racial, the kinship of men who had climbed patiently to heights.
Nietzsche declares that the appearance of Napoleon in the world made Goethe change his opinion of man. Evidently Napoleon demonstrated something that not even the imagination of a Goethe could reach. The Little Grandson of the Great Revolution made men of genius open their eyes. In few has there been such will to power.
Wagner in music, and Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra, were among originators of modern art. Zarathustra was perhaps the first new verse. The movement has been carried on by other nations. I am not sure that Germany did not discover the modern world. England seldom originates.
Nietzsche speaks of loving the south as a school of healing. There we hear the poet. He thinks music in the north grows pale, yellow, sick for the sun. There his longing burst forth. There was something resplendent, tropical, luxurious, in Nietzsche, which the north could not let flower. The soul of Nietzsche resembled glowing canvasses of Turner. It was filled with the same bursts of light. He needed, to be happy, effective, some equatorial land of the soul, lighted by greater suns of forthcoming strange civilizations, whose boundaries are non-geographical, where his superhuman dreams could find encouragement. While his body was bounded by Germany, his mind lived anywhere, at will.
In modern art, even France is borrower, like England. France habituated to lead the way, because her new art came from Wagner, and the north. It was in the glowing, resplendent mirror of his music, that brilliant, receptive France, surprised at first and not a little vexed, caught the thought, vision, of strange, revolutionary, æsthetic ways, which later she tried to persuade herself she found first, then pursued alone. Wagner, in short, taught expression, something different. He was first to fit closely, and with skill, another garment to the soul, the soul that had changed after the Great Revolution, and was no more capable of holding proudly the princely toga.
The range of emotions, expressions, is greater in modern art than in classic art. And certainly more richly, subtly shaded. Modern art does not let a fragment slip away. It takes account of the ugly, brutal, disgusting, obscene. Classical art preserved only beauty. It skimmed the cream, then threw the milk away. The ages have made us poor. Now we must take care of the milk beneath. Now we must set about making cheese. Now we must not disdain peasant work.
Among early ones to take firm stand against the classic order, were Wagner with tone, Nietzsche with words, Delacroix with color. Classic art was a straight line. Modern art is a line infinitely curved. But fresh complexities were creeping into life, with gradual rise to power of the masses of voracious appetite, multiple mood. Art is not now for aristocrats of superb culture. It is not made for a lonely Petronius in the silence, the secrecy of a violet-perfumed palace.
I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans. I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth. The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual aristocrats, the people of trained taste.
The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome. It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad, mist-covered north.
That which is finest of the old civilization that is passing, of the culture, wisdom, faith, love, of two thousand years, is stored in the prose, the verse of France.
There slips into the best prose of French writers of great periods, phrases, sentences, from deeps of the subconscious, the world-soul, dwelling, in the powerful, seldom seen, creative places, that other races have neither been able to see, seize, nor make visible; a superb letting go of the ego. This is something we do not find. Our land is too new, young, too devoted to the fleeting thing self, which has progressed no further than today, than that reasoning mind with which as children we used to learn the multiplication table. The creating of art has no little in common with teaching of Eastern philosophies, the death of self. It, too, is an effect of time. It is proof of rich ripening, under multiple suns. Old World nations possess this in some degree. The sorrows of much living and contending faiths have taught them. In addition, Good wears many faces. Deeper spiritual revelation is theirs, enveloping, then penetrating the subject under discussion, with something sweeter, more eloquent, than the sumptuous sunsets of Lorraine, something to be sought among masters, as wild honey is sought in the forest. To the mind, indeed, that is what it resembles, The Taste of Honey. It is something that all but shatters with delight, blinds with unshakable truth. It is a lightning flash from the racial soul.
Among Greek writers I have thought of this. It has occurred to me most often perhaps when reading Aristophanes, a joy whose memory remains. Again it is in the superb, cumulative, spendthrift, piling of adjectives of Homer. It is in that on-rushing, resistless, cataract of verbal music of Æschylus.
I recall it in Quintillian. I recall it in Tertullian. And occasionally, but rarer, in Latin historians. It was in Catullus. And Virgil, the Eclogues, Georgics. It was something in solution in the world of that day, honey from the heart of man. Horace was too modern. Art was becoming fashionable, facile. He wrote with eye to what people would think, later say. But Virgil kept the seasoned sweetness of the past.
In writers of modern Spain I have seen it. In Galdós, the Episodios Nacionales, and its springing up again in the Spanish tongue, in South America.
In Italy, Italy of the great ages, it has been rich; d’Annunzio has been too proud perhaps to suffer, to learn with the patient anguish of the soul.
It has flowered best in France, the wild thyme, which goes to the making of honey. Consider Maurice de Guerin. Recall lines of Verlaine, Heredia! The great Balzac, Bazin, Bertrand, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Flaubert the Magnificent, letters of peasant Millet, the diary of Fromentin in Africa, Huysman, Mallarmé, and the Little Grandson of the Great Renan, Ernest Psichari, in the book about Africa, The Centurion.
I recall an occasional line Rimbaud wrote before he was twenty, which gleams in my mind today like cut steel; hard, perfect, indestructible, cruel. The great poetry of France is prose, which is the world’s best.
When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there was another, a different England from that of today. As examples Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings, Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm, the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished, she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested modernism, which does not become her, are working their will.
The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it.
I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best is doing the impossible.
I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, Die Familie Golowlef, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same power by which the African desert grows grand, monotony, a level unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it vividly for years.
I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know, to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble.
In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease, hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises.
Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see. People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener, in pleasure, the arrière pensée. Before that, the Merrie England, gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy fields, the flowers of England.
If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music, rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and the sea.
But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence can only be written through the great forgetting. One slight touch of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.
In Daudet’s Contes du Lundi I usually begin with the words: Cette nuit le mistral était en colère. What a charmeur was Daudet! Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in Le Pape est Morte, the morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he ran away! Next, Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale. The opening lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine, evocative precision of etching, with that beauty beyond no one can name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century, that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. My old age regrets the rivers. Loti’s descriptions of the Orient.
Passages from the monumental Balzac, who, by the way, was not made for the ear, but for the mind. Sentences of André Gide, and the essays of Nicolas Ségur, the verses of Verlaine which I love: