When I die I pray you buryMe upon a hill,Where the great steppe’s circles widestMy Ukraine Land fill,That the broad out-spreading meadows,The great river’s shore,And the bright on-rushing DneiperI may see, and hear the roar,When it sweeps the foreign soldiers—The red blood of them we slew—Far away where skies are blandestWhere my dear Ukraine lies blue.
When I die I pray you buryMe upon a hill,Where the great steppe’s circles widestMy Ukraine Land fill,That the broad out-spreading meadows,The great river’s shore,And the bright on-rushing DneiperI may see, and hear the roar,When it sweeps the foreign soldiers—The red blood of them we slew—Far away where skies are blandestWhere my dear Ukraine lies blue.
When I die I pray you bury
Me upon a hill,
Where the great steppe’s circles widest
My Ukraine Land fill,
That the broad out-spreading meadows,
The great river’s shore,
And the bright on-rushing Dneiper
I may see, and hear the roar,
When it sweeps the foreign soldiers—
The red blood of them we slew—
Far away where skies are blandest
Where my dear Ukraine lies blue.
The face has the warm, slightly sensual pallor, we see in painted dreams of proud Italian masters. An eloquent, impassioned brush caresses it to life. Yuri died during The War. Not long after this memorable portrait was made by his father! It stands for an ideal of Cossack youth.
Repin is a portraitist! Russian subtlety combined with forceful line. His portrait of Kerensky is interesting. It shows a blond, youthful figure with indecision in it. He is painted sitting by an open window, through which falls light strangely ruddy; a little wild. The line is sure, quick.
The single portrait of aBlack Sea Pirateis superb. Dramatically poised; brutal. It keeps wise contrast of pale blue and angry red, between which the brown, naked body rises; strong, muscled, slender. There is hint of Greece in this Black Sea body.
Repin has a brownish-yellow that is his. It is a dream of the deserts of his ill-fated Eastern forbears, under some slanting, despairing sun of desert autumn. His otherBlack Sea Piratehas a different face, one ofMongol type, with controlled, still, ill-concealed ferocity of Asia. Past ages speak dazzlingly here.
The Bandoura Playeris gorgeous! A noble bit of color, with strength of some sublime, some savage past. There is red in it which totals the cruel splendor of a century of lost Black Sea sunsets. It fires muscular edge of arms, shoulders. It blazes, a sun which can not set, upon the head. There is something in form of the standing musician that is tantamount to defiance of death, destiny. There is, too, the flash of white teeth in song! The line of youth, and lift of love. Behind, a sky troubled, indeterminate; a sky with something of the sweetsouplesseof sound. A figure of glorious daring, unequalled spontaneity. Proud! Resentful! There is redoubling of rose-hues at end of thebandoura. It is echo of his song. With the brush Repin is a profound historian. History, perhaps, is written most weakly with words.
It is not easy to estimate what the poetry of such a technician, such a powerful virtuoso in words as d’Annunzio, was to me in an isolated village upon the plains, where everything was ugly, cheap, except the magnificent land-levels, and the sunsets. And it is not easy to estimate either how hard it was to get money to buy the books. New Italian writers came high. They were not procurable in the inexpensive outputs of older men. And then the long waiting for books to come. I ordered from Italy. When they did come, I literally wore out the pages ofCanto Novo, Intermezzo.
I went around like a sleep walker for days. I forgot to eat. I sat up at night. I increased, if possible, the disapproval, the ill-concealed hatred of my relatives. It burst upon my thirsty, surprised senses like stars at midnight. The beating beauty of broken worlds was flung about me. It dazzled me. I published in obscure newspapers, the first translations from d’Annunzio to be printed in English.
My money reached only to buy one more verse-book—Isottea, and one novel:Le Vergini della Rocce. To read, where I lived,in the daytime, was one shade less criminal than stealing. I was a convicted culprit of long standing. The neighbors looked at me with untranslatable expressions in depths of their eyes, just as you look at people who have recently served a prison term.
I bought Leopardi (his verse), next. He was an older writer. He did not cost so much. I could procure a copy for a fewlire. I waited all one long hot summer for that book to come. I read his magnificentOde to the Moonby light of a prairie moon no whit less lovely, in a sky no less purple tinged and cloudless, than that of Italy.
Dove vai silenziosa luna?
Dove vai silenziosa luna?
Dove vai silenziosa luna?
When I read it over again today, and theHymn to an Asiatic Shepherd, I see the superb, languid moons of autumn above the plains, as they looked long ago. I sweep back the years; I become young again, and happy. That is one of the great poems of the world. And written by one of the world’s exquisite artists.
Leopardi was a favorite of Gladstone. I translated then and published, Gladstone’s favorite among his verses,The Infinite.
Gladstone ranked him with masters of antiquity, Greeks of flawless technique. It was from the Greeks he learned his technique, lofty standards, unswerving measure of judgment.
When I finished reading what was inside the book, I read all the advertisements on both covers, over and over. There is no shabby writing done by people who have been thoroughlythrashedthrough their Greek and Latin.
One can sit in reverence before the great soul of Leopardi, as one sits at foot of Attic marbles, dumb, worshipful, dazed with unreachable beauty. Someone should coin a phrase for him as fine as Gautier coined for Tertullian. I wrote to Italian publishers to send me lists of their new books. Out of these lists I got the same pleasure a hungry cat gets out of a canary in a lovely, gold, glittering, swinging cage.
It was months before I could buy another book. When at length the pennies were scraped together, the selection was careful and painstaking, like that of a miner sifting gold. I at length decided upon theOdi Barbareof Carducci, to whom Dante’s words apply without strain:Degli alti poeti ognore e lume.
Reading Carducci gives something the sensation of looking at the etchings which Piranesi made of Rome; noble, imperial, history-freighted, unforgettable.
The only difference is that Piranese made his pictures upon paper, while Carducci chiseled upon resisting stone. I have always liked best the ode to Rome, entitled merelyRoma.
Roma ne l’aer tuo lancio l’anima altira Volante,accogli o Roma e avvolgi l’anima mia di luce,Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo,Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?
Roma ne l’aer tuo lancio l’anima altira Volante,accogli o Roma e avvolgi l’anima mia di luce,Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo,Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?
Roma ne l’aer tuo lancio l’anima altira Volante,
accogli o Roma e avvolgi l’anima mia di luce,
Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo,
Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?
To be sure, who would pause to chase fire-flies under the Arch of Titus? Who would care what one’s neighbors, what one’s relatives thought, when one could stand beneath that same Arch, and look up at the sky of Italy?
Carducci, like poets of the south, such as Apollinaire, (whose real name I believe savored of the north, being Ostrowsky) liked the romantic, serious minded German poets of long ago. He read and translated some of Klopstock, Platen, while a friend of Carducci’s translated him back again into Latin, where he really belongs.
If your pocketbook refuses a ticket to Italy, do not be unhappy. Read Carducci! Read d’Annunzio! There is usually somewhere anErsatz, something to set, without discord, in place of the thing desired.
I wished to read English, American books, but they cost too much. They were seldom procurable at a price less than a dollar. There were almost none in the village. The few who owned books would not lend them. I read Shakespeare and Poe first in German. Admirable, adequate translations they were! The cheaply-priced books of the old world, of Italy, France, Germany, are a blessing. They are the well in the desert to them who are thirsty. I recall buying some plays of Alfieri, put out by Georgio Franz, Monaco, bearing the publishing date of 1846; tiny, tiny books they were, printed on grey newspaper paper with no separate outer cover. They cost about four pennies each. And I bought a large cheap Ariosto, on similar unbleached paper, which was priced at a quarter. TheOrlando Furiosois a charming fable. I can not commend it too highly. It has delighted me just asAlice in Wonderlanddelights a child. It is a gracious, bright-hued, arabesque, that has kept color throughout the centuries.
Then I learned northern tongues from printed advertisements sent by a clothing house, for the purpose of selling men’s clothing. A pile of littlebooks they sent; one in English, the others, literal translations into various northern tongues, to sell to untamed Westerners, whom New York’s more untamed imagination had evidently given wild tongues, civilized, conventional clothes. It was of course an incomparable piece of humor. But it was useful to me. It is a poor sail-boat indeed that can not take advantage of an opposing wind or any wind that happens to blow.
I used to hope, every New Year’s Day, to be able to subscribe toCentury, orHarper’s, our leading magazines. But I never reached such height of reckless extravagance. I read Dante the oftener instead. I knew pages by heart. Repeating him aloud was all the music there was in the lonely place in which I lived. There was hardly a wheezy asthmatic melodian. Luck, you see, was not wholly absent.
Once an old Italian priest, noble of heart and mind, came to the lonely, white chapel of his faith, that had been erected upon the plains. He used to recite Dante with resonance, and a kind of regretful, tragic fury, in which unuttered homesickness centered. He was very old then. It must have been an half century since he had seen Italy. He could say superbly, too, the sonnets of Petrarch. He said oftenest the one beginning:
La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora,e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate,e le cose presenti e le passatemi danno guerra, e le future ancora:
La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora,e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate,e le cose presenti e le passatemi danno guerra, e le future ancora:
La vita fugge e non s’arresta un’ora,
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate,
e le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora:
I used to wonder what things, in the past, he was remembering when he said it. Because even a priest must remember! If his body dies, his mind does not.
Someone asked me one day why I read so much.
Are you ambitious?
No.
Why then?
For pleasure perhaps! I have no desire to know anything.
Then why?
It may be this. Some one asked the giraffe why his neck was long. He replied: Because the distance from head to body is great. I read because the distance from birth to death is great. Some way, it has to be filled in.
I wish now I knew those beautifully written tongues of the Orient, which scribes of old traced upon vellum, ribbon-books of Persia, the things hidden in alphabets which are lovely to the eye. I have seen pictures of Persian calligraphers as enchanting as paintings. Hand writing, as art, is dead. It belongs to the past. Perhaps sometime printed books will be just as dead, and replaced by something else, some diminutive form of moving-picture, some mechanical device attached to the head which will tell stories aloud for the ear, in the manner of a graphophone, and reflect them in pictures upon a paper fan. When we fly around the world in twenty-four hours, we can not waste time in anything so slow, old-fashioned, as reading. Taste will be perverted until something new is made. Something new will always be made. The possibilities of science are like time, endless. Perhaps nothing lovelier will be made for an older generation. But something new is sure to be. In twenty years there will be few book shops.
Talking about stylists, there are none that surpass the scientists. They have accuracy. They have economical fitting of word to thought, leaving no surplussage, shortage. I read them partly for this.
Changes are near. We are poised on edge of the old. It will not be long before man will live centuries, instead of a few paltry years. Then his brain will change more. It will make discards for the long game ahead. In the length of time I have lived, I can see the human skull is different. Its tendency is to grow higher above the ears, broader in front, shorter in length toward the rear. One of the things being discarded isfear.
Sympathy, many old exquisitenesses, went long ago. Fear would be bad baggage to carry in the prodigious transportation feats of the future, when man sets out to make week-end visits to the stars, look in upon Mars, shake hands with Madam Venus. Imagination, of the artistic kind, a kind of bastard first cousin of fear, will be eliminated. Imagination is practically gone now. Fact will so surpass it, it will be useless. It will be a kindergarten pupil in the school of kings.
There will not be need of fiction, nor fiction writers, when Science gets booted, spurred, ready for conquest. Fiction writers belong to the world’s generously believing childhood. Its mature, reasoning manhood is here. The simplest fact of Science will dim the shabby glamour of romance. It will put out its light, as the sun puts out the stars. Ah—the stories Science will tell! Science will unravel the long adventurous past of the lily, therose, the orchid, the story of which will be unfolded logically from cells. The memories of the rose, the meditations of the lily, the pensive regrets of the violet, in days of the future, will make novels like Jack the Giant Killer, again children’s toys.
People are losing interest in novel-reading. And the stage is dead. I have watched it gradually grow weak year by year. Great novels and great plays are not being written. One of the causes of new writing, both verse and prose, is merely exhibition of disintegration. It is one more dropped stitch in the past. The rock is crumbling to sand. The inescapable alternating progression of the ages is at work visibly.
The speech of primitive peoples was monolithic. They hurled at each other boulders of uncut thought. From crumbling boulders, prepositions, conjunctions, tiny connective sand-like particles out of which we have made what we call speech was born. Even written Latin was blocks of uncompromising marble, in comparison with our written word.
Science will give power to look down vistas of time. It will poise us upon unthinkable heights. Perhaps too we shall learn to unchain the soul, then make it obedient messenger until it flies, Mercury like, through dead, forgotten days. Each human being will be his own novel. There can be nothing superior. There will be neither great nor little. We shall see, then talk at the same time, with friends on the other side of the globe, sitting comfortably in an easy chair. And perhaps upon other globes, across space! We shall live lonely lives of terrific cerebral power, which will change even shape of the skull, until to man of today we would look stranger than Martians. We are near that surprising future. In Metchnikow’sProlongation of Lifewe glimpse this romance quality. It is time for novelists to stop sharpening goosequills and join the scientists. Science is rose of a million petals, in whose unfolding the future lies. In that future the novelist, professional story teller, playwright, will be as useful as a bootjack to an old maid. Upon the outspread shop-counter of the mind will be found goods never seen, nor dreamed.
Art is dying. Something else must be made to light the heart. Only people with the wonder, the love of little children within them, can create it now, or understand it. They will perforce join the discards.
There are three pictures by Manet I saw in Paris which I have thought about too much. One, a woman in grey skirt, loose coat of the same color,her hand to her lips. She wears a small dark toque upon dark hair. A strange puritan grey for Manet to love, dominates the picture; a grey sensitive, fastidious, his somewhat English tempered soul created in midst of orgies of pagan Paris—Paris of unrestraint, aesthetic sensuality, intellectual freedom. It is an ascetic color that recalls old Spanish masters. It has the chill, the sternness of Cathedral cloisters. Spanish masters used similar grey, but from dissimilar impulse.
Manet was exquisite. He was the conversationally charming. But into depths of his soul no friend was permitted to peep. There is hint of this sensitive secretiveness in these three pictures, I remember. The gossiping, disclosing shorthand of self is in colors he chose. The picture of the woman is what one might callartistically wise. It keeps a reticence of brush which the maker’s facile, dissembling tongue did not have. Likewise it has something in common with Chinese portraits, whose distinguished personages wore woven robes of sad metallic hues. More than is grasped at a glance! Here is the direct transcribing! The same dignity. Here are sober colors Chinese noblemen wore. The picture is notable for absence of what is meretricious. Nothing for show. Nothing for compromise. It has the reliability of faith.
Soap Bubbles, by Manet. The same grey, but paler for youth; slightly sun-enriched. A truthful piece a Hollander might have signed. A boy by a table. He is blowing bubbles, whose airy grace delighted the maker. Dark, unrelieved background. Hues in the foreground that recall preciousness of ivory.
Still Life—Manet. Apples, pears; one dull, grey-green; one yellow rose; a black bottle; a tall white glass. Sober, against a dull background. Painted in low key, a key chosen for grey-yellow he loved.
How far removed from the blue-grey of Whistler! It is founded upon gift for reality of the Latin, his basic vision for things as they are.
Manet was gloomy beneath the flowering of his moods. An interesting article could be written on thegreysof great masters; upon colors that are coefficients of mind. I see difference between those used by Velasquez, Greco, Goya, and those used in France, in the period of 1830, or in Holland, in the Seventeenth Century. Or the grey created by Manet.
I saw the other day a large, lovely Cazin, kept in higher key than is customary, which is Schumannesque. We do not find the dull, wet grass we know; the grey, sage-green of some sad world’s end he has made his.
This picture shows a blond, sun-dusted field on a hot day. A field whose gold, whose perpendicular light is dulled by its own splendor. The field forms the foreground. The background one end of a low farm house, whose coral roof all but touches the ground. A low, green tree makes out the house-line, with aid of one of his windmills. Above, blue heat of noon; happy, white, harvest clouds.
No. 59—A Schreyer. White Arab horses; mettlesome, fine. Eloquent outline of horsemen. A red bournous that lights the picture. A heavy, heat-smoking Algerian sky.
Diaz and Harpignies are represented. Rousseau has a ruddy-tinted Forest of Fontainbleau.
Ziem is here! This is a charming canvas.Venice of my dreams—in the distance! One large building; cream, rose flushed. Foreground—the sea. A bold, lovely, cobalt sea. Sky of gold. The rich effect of enamel, and muted music.
No. 31—An unusual Harpignies. Trees in middle distance. Under them, ripe level grain, with cold, clear light. In foreground little figures; clear cut, in brown, in dull red.
Diaz shows merry grouped women in a wood. They wear rich costumes. The jeweled splendor of Monticelli is here. Ballard Williams looked upon pictures like this.
There are portraits from England. But I am not in the mood for them. I prefer tawny, rolling, desert hills, the blue harbor of Algiers as Fromentin paints them, or rich autumn woodlands of Rousseau.
No. 48—The dull, storm beaten, resentful black-green of Jacque.Splendid!
No. 58—Ziem again! Stately old Venetian palaces I love. They border a canal of cool, even flowing water. On the right, a red building, which peculiarly enough brings touch of the exactitude, coldness of Canaletto, and which I do not like. The sky is happy. Sun flecked, dappled ... this sky bends over Venice!
No. 54—Ziem. Again superb. At his best. In distance the long, elegant, aristocratic line of the Sea’s Queen City, Venice, which he knew better than any one else. White buildings flushed rosy. Beyond, violet-blue. High above, a sky, clear, sweet, but touched with quiver of heat. In the foreground a grassy space and there a tree, (superbly painted) whose top is touched with rose-hued light. Beneath the tree, happy figures wearing vivid colors. High, light, lyric note. Love.
The Corots are of his late manner, when he had grown sentimental, and thought retrospectively. I like best the pictures of Italy he did in youth.
No. 5—A small Pasini. It makes me regret my pocket holds doughnuts not dollars. Delightful picture! A Moorish doorway; white, eloquently curved, bordered with mosaics in faded blue. In front, an Arab, whose red upper garment outdazzles the ruby when the sun pierces its heart. A laugh of color! Pure, delicious, lyric.
Quintillian is a fine phrase maker. He speaks of the milky exuberance of Livy. What could be morejuste! If one could forget the Latin text, one would think it the printed page of some incisive French critic. Writers who come at end of periods that have been æsthetically productive, are alike, just as, perhaps, peaches and pears, in the youth of Nero, or William the Silent. Few make figures of speech more startlingly brilliant, vigorous in casting light, than Quintillian. They are exploding suns.
Quintillian declares the evenly sustained mediocrity of Apollonious is not to be despised. To quote him verbatim: “The old comedy retains alone the pure grace of Attic diction.” He means Aristophanes, Eupolis, Cratinus.
The power to distinguish, differentiate, at command of Quintillian is marvellous. I seldom have greater pleasure than his pages have been giving me. Quintillian knows how to balance meaning. He splits an hair evenly with the thin edge of wit. He possessed calm, dispassionate, critical, penetrating intellect. There are few more reliable judges of men’s minds. He does not become color of the thing he reads, as small worms take color of what they feed upon. Writers of the antique world stimulate mind. Modern writers seldom do this. They are more likely to enervate me, or make me weary. The old are life giving.
That sensitive prose of Loti is expression of a tradition that goes far back in Latin life. It is in Ovid. It is in the early Italians. It is in songs of Provençe. It is in early Frenchprosateurs. From Chateaubriand the road to him lies clear. There is no great stylist who leaps up unheralded. The mind must form a chain with some past, to which self-forgetful love has welded him.
Loti has been faithful to the garden of the soul God gave him. He kept out of it things foreign. Nothing ugly grows there. But it sheltered the beauty of the world.
I have not cared a picayune to see the kings, potentates, princes, who have come to America on various successfully disguised errands of selfishness, to visit, and at the same time to gather stray dollars. I did long to see the face of Loti. I wanted to look into eyes that had looked understandingly upon the earth’s loveliness. I wanted, too, to look upon the man who can weave such superb tissue out of words.
I stood gladly outside the Waldorf in the rain. I waited for hours. I watched across the street from the public school he was going to visit. But I did not see him. My consolation had to be what I read in the papers when I reached home that night, his farewell to America:All the winds of winter cry me home to Turkestan!Such a sentence ought to be consolation enough for any one.
Loti has seen the world. Its poets, princes, have entertained him. His eyes have rested upon the fallen glory of the monarchies of the past. Now, like Alexander, he sighs for new ones.
What a delight in the long ago, upon the burnt, barren plains, where Presbyterianism thrived like a green bay tree in Purgatory, were the early books of Loti:Pécheur d’Island,Pasquala Ivanovich,Madame Chrysanthème,Fleurs d’Ennui, and an earlier one about an adventure in the South Seas, the name of which I can not recall. It was Loti’s first published book.
I was always vexed that Presbyterianism thrived upon sand. It was connected, in my mind, with unloveliness, both of matter and spirit. There was never a surface that refracted so bitterly the light, as the white front of that church. It had three sharp points, in a row, that stuck up ready and willing to impale sinners. The priests of Presbyterianism are stormy and iron hearted.
Once Lily Langtry came here, to the plains, in a private car, with Frederick Gebhardt. They remained a number of days, to go hunting in the Indian Territory. I used to follow her around upon the street, for the joy of looking up at her face. I lived in the desert you know! Her face looked, in those days, like blue-eyed flowers that grow upon the fields of England, where rain falls without stress, and mists come.
Salvini, the younger, came likewise to go hunting. I was overjoyed to meet him. He was hero ofLes Trois Mousquetaires, come to life. Brown, supple, gay, and young! Nothing ever came again after that, except the wind, sand....
But hope grew astonishingly. The less soil there is, the better hope grows. Hope is what you might call the indestructible mushroom of the soul. If I were a poet, instead of faultfinder, it might impel me to an ode to courage. But here’s the rub! I might find difficulty in distinguishing between courage and folly.
Everyone was a prospective millionaire, in good old days of wind and sand. The strangest thing was that the entire state was drunk. What was it drunk upon? You see Kansas was like the Isle of Champagne, in the story by that name, where each individual was intoxicated. Only here they were drunk on air instead of champagne. Air came cheap and did not have to be bottled. Champagne cost money, and a bottle. The State was drunk on glittering, mirage-making air. It enfolded the minds with rosy glamour just as it enfolded the landscape. Prohibiting fact lost power. The penniless wanderer in his prairie schooner, felt magic of it, as readily as the dweller in the village. It inflamed the brain through the eye. It wrapped the mind in rosy vision. Just beyond the next land-fold, lay prosperity, the culmination of dreams.
That is the reason Kansas grew wild political fads, long-haired and long-legged, soap-box orators. It was upon air like this, upon which oratory could thrive. No one could see realities. Corn, cabbages, and cranks grew to monstrous size. Being poor today did not matter, because tomorrow we were going to tickle Caesar under the chin.
There was unworn power in the untilled earth that gave vigor. It keeps some of it still. Today there is something there of youth that can not grow old, joy that does not become tinsel, or cheap, an unfading fire in the heart. What can humanity do without youth?
It leaked out through the post office, which was one small unpainted room with a hole in the wall, for things to go into or come out of, that I was buying packages of wicked books from Europe. The neighbors called to investigate. They carried away the startling report that it was packages ofyellow-back novels.Probably, highly immoral!One of these books disappeared. It happened to be a volume of Bossuet’sFuneral Orations. It did not come back. They burned it for safety’s sake. The town, however, was saved.
Bossuet, whose silenced voice helped mark the decline of the great age of Louis XIV, had been confessor, in court circles, to fair ladies of France. But I will wager that even he would have been surprised at human inventiveness in the fields of sin, at what happened to his orations for the dead bodies of these same ladies. They felt the red rag of revolution was as evident in these books they could not read, as the red flannel around the lantern the old, bent, fat Santa Fé night-watchman carried, which spotted the long, lonely streets with round dots of light. After that I became a dangerous person. The eyes that were in the habit of glancing at me sideways were bright and shining with disapproval.
But I was deliriously happy through it all, as long as pennies held out with which to buy books, and those magnificent, low, yellow moons of summer swung majestically out of the unknown to poise above the plains. I have never forgotten the feel of the warm winds of those nights of summer so long ago, upon my arms, upon my shoulders. It is one of the things I would like to know again.
The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking. The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges, until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s trained seeing.
The more we enjoy a picture, the more, for that fleeting moment, we are in harmony with the mind that produced it. Pictures flash us out of our dull selves into clear, unvexed dominance. There is healing, health, in beauty. It represents that from which imperfections have been taken. Pictures are temperamental tuning forks.
Small, paper-bound, cheaply-priced books containing prints should be as common upon reading tables as papers. It is not easy to measure the good of contact with the silent things of art.
I like prints. I have something that resembles affection for them. That is why I regret that the skies of Piranesi are troubled. I wanted them to be glowing, clear.
The simply treated skies of Le Père please me. They are barely marked.
The etched line of Pennell is feminine. When he etched the Panama Series he forced it to Brangwyn bravoura, for which it is not suited. They are not art, these plates, whether the initial be large or small.
The etchings of Piranesi resemble the musical compositions of Handel. Both made temples stern, lofty, with mystery in the depths.
The etchings of Daubigny recall Virgil, in theBucolics. The lovely, Latin land where cities are not near, fields are cultivated, and little rivers draw water birds! The line of Daubigny is gentle, loving. It is of the unforced rhythm of Virgil.
The line of Haden is cold, pure.
The line of Whistler is fretful, nervous, capricious. But marvellously sensitive! If he is not big, genial, he is exquisite. For one fretful moment Whistler could love gleam of a surface. He never at any time cared what was beneath. He could not hold calmness long enough to love anything into serenity. He possessed audacity, as much as skill. There floated before his keen, sensitive mind, memory of mighty Japanese, Chinese craftsmen, who outdistanced him by force of love, that self-sacrificing humility, which makes men great. He liked to startle. He liked to shock by technical surprises. He liked to lash observers with virtuosity.
He was a Czar bent upon forcing submission. With his genius there 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 Parisianmondaine. 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 isolateself, 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. HisWashingtonis not a creditable high school performance. It is almost as bad as Drinkwater’sLincoln! 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 wroteBeaucaire, and turned to New York, quick dollars.Beaucairewas 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 laincubator 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’sWunderkind. We are looked over, calledl’enfant terrible, while we throw bouquets, dollars at them and waste champagne we ought to save. The doings of this self-consciousWunderkindoccupy 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 otherplace 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 calledservitude. 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 inDe Senectute.
There will be no more essays likeDe Amicitia, because friendship does not exist. It perished with thetoga 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 thePolish Trilogyof 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 gayArabian 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 hisOcean 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 anOceanat all; it is greater: It is a world.
Probably the bestVoyagesare 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 sayhe 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’sPersian 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 theSatires 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’sLife of Voltaireis 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 asMachiavelli. 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.
When José Asuncion Silvá, poet of Bogotá, who wrote a poem that recalls Poe’sRaven, was in Paris sight-seeing with friends, he happened to pause, by accident, one day in the Louvre, beside the marble bust of Lucius Verus. To their amazement, his friends found that the head of Silvá and that of the dissolute Roman lover of Faustine, were identical. A photograph of Silvá with hair and beard dressed like the statue, was made the next day, and the result is something that no one can explain. They are as alike as two peas. I have the pictures.
Years ago theMercure de Francesent its representative all the way to South America, and then on to Bogotá, city no railroad has succeeded approaching, to secure information aboutThe Nocturnwhich critics call the greatest poem written in the Americas. The only notice of him in the U. S. was my translation of the poem of which the dead poet’s publishers approved.
If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano, who laughingly calls himselfthe spirit of the Andes. He has pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering through vast gardens filled withflaming orchids, curious in shape, amazing in color. Just so evocative is he, varied. Just so seemingly inexhaustible.
Another poet, but in the Portuguese tongue, to the south, is Machado de Assis, of the celebrated poems which all Brazilians know:Uma Creatura,Suave Mare Magno,No Alto. The sonnet which he wrote to his wife is one of the noblest in the Portuguese tongue.
Machado de Assis was telling South America of Chinese poets, translating and publishing versions of them, an half century ago. We are just getting around to it. They have kept over us of the north, the æsthetic superiority of Mediterranean peoples among whom they originated.
We are forced to admit that the outlook of Germany is vast. It is not easy to comprehend how vast. In it, individual welfare has been sacrificed as ruthlessly as the Samurai Creed sacrificed it, centuries ago, in Japan. We call thisbarbarism. Germany has been cut latest of the European nations by the disease,civilization. As smallpox, other ills of flesh, are more fatal in a young, fresh race, not before visited by it, so young Germany fresh from the forests, the fens, felt the disease,civilization. For her it has been most deadly.
I recall the school on the plains. School is probably too important a word. It was a few bare rooms over a business block. No building for the purpose had been put up. From the windows we could look across the Main Street into upper rooms of other buildings. These rooms had been rented to houses of ill fame. Any time we could turn from our lessons and see the painted creatures lolling in the rooms, with their lovers. They were fat, greasy, disheveled, and clad in gay, cottonMother Hubbards.
Beneath one of these houses there was a saloon. From the windows we could look over tops of screens that cut the too plain view from the sidewalk, and see Greasers, Indians, the stragglers of the plains, drinking, gambling. They quarreled frequently. Occasionally they fought with knives, with pistols. But the thrust of a knife that killed, in the lonely silence of the circling prairie was unimportant.
It was as if I saw it all far off through sheets of crystal. There was nothing I wanted. It represented the forces from which I longed to get away. As I walked about the streets of this settlement on the plains, drenched with sun and breeze-swept, I was conscious of an unknownworld of art. I used to say to myself: I can not know the heights of life, wealth, power. I can not have things that do not depend upon myself. But, with my brain, I can know the heights of art. I can know all men have dreamed. I learned languages as other women learn to sew. For me they kept few difficulties. My foreign tutor, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, who knew many tongues, was introducing me to books of the Old World. He had a library of his own, of which he was good enough to give me use. His name was Arnold Jeannerett.
I was dazed at first, breathless, at this introduction to the sumptuous Palaces of Thought. Less and less I saw the world about me. It faded away with its crudity, harsh, noisy contrasts; discomforts; its persistent attempt to make life miserable for me. Nothing remained but a place of enchantment where there were no imperfections, and everything was as I wished.
I read Ariosto. I learned to know Petrarch, and the classics of Italy. I read the splendid prose of France; Bossuet, Fenelon, Chateaubriand, Rousseau. I read the lyric poets of Germany. Hidden upon my person somewhere, either in a pocket in my calico petticoat, or else within the lining of my hat, was some tiny book of the Old World.
But an unexpected complication arose. It made the women of the village angry. And in no slight degree. What right had I to amuse myself in ways not theirs? There was nothing left undone within their inventive range, which I soon learned to my sorrow was considerable, to make me understand their displeasure.
Sweeping past my eyes there was the picturesque panorama of the plains. Interesting things peculiar to isolation were happening.
Chief Joseph, with the warriors who murdered Custer, with their squaws and children, were being removed to a northern Reservation. They stopped in our village. Chief Joseph made a speech which one of the tribal interpreters put into English. The old chief described the massacre. He did it with relish. I sat in front of him, on a board upheld by two nail kegs. When he came to the horrors of it, over his dull eyes, which years had given singular expressionlessness, grey mists floated like spring across black winter. The memory was sweet.
The Main Street with its ugly, flat-topped buildings stretched from north to south. Through this artificial canal swept the wind, having come across desolate plains. Drifting through this street until midnight,moved a strangely assorted crowd, laughing, talking, drinking, quarreling. There were buck Indians in beaded moccasins, a striped calico about their loins, and tin bracelets upon thin, muscled arms. They walked with dignity. Sleek squaws, who toed in, toddled after them. Tin rings were in their ears. There were Mexicans with black, wide faces and white hats; Greasers, whom on-rushing civilization would soon annihilate; cowboys with fringed leggings and high heels, and gamblers with angular, prairie faces. There were soldiers from nearby forts and a few great-hearted pioneers who loved lonely places and who lived their adventures instead of writing them.
The thing I loved best was the clouds that rose high above the levels. They painted pictures. They satisfied my longing to get away.
I loved them when they were white, glittering mountains looking down upon some fairy land.
I used to ride out upon the levels, stop my horse, observe them, feeling happily upon face and arms, the warm, rollicking wind of the south, from unknown spaces where perhaps flowers grew. One longed sometimes here for the lonely comfort of long rains.
Then I would turn my horse and ride home through the twilight, when the little stars first began to prick the day. I like to think of it all again. And the moons of my youth, which poised so superbly above the plains.
I said nothing ever came again. I was wrong. The Strip Opening came.