BY
Earl Underwood
Then the little place resembled any cow-town at time of the county fair or the reunion of the Veterans of the Civil War, except that the crowd did not have a carnival spirit. The crowd was made up of cattle-men driven from their former pasture land, old adventurers still looking for a fortune, wanderers of all kinds, professional gamblers who resembled human buzzards, homeless stragglers from everywhere. There were old men with weather beaten faces from the Klondike, from the gold fieldsof Arizona, and old Mexico. There were poor, honest, but unsuccessful farmers from other states looking for new homes and considering this a kind of Promised Land for inability of all kinds. They came inboomer wagons. They came from every point of the compass. There were some successful Middle West farmers who had just sold their own land for a large price and brought their family here, hoping to get a new start for their sons. The crowd slept inboomer wagons; they slept on the ground; they slept on cots along the streets; they slept on the floors of empty buildings. Seventy-five thousand people were poured into a little village that had barely accommodations for ten thousand.
It was hot. Everyone suffered. The ground was sun-baked until it cracked open in wide fissures. There had been no rain for four months. Daily the south wind blew until the atmosphere kept the hue of a twilight that did not change. The corn was burned and sere. The leaves withered; all the vegetation was colorless and dry. The intense heat was unchanging. The day was followed by a night without dew. The continued milling of horses, wagons, people on foot, ground up the dirt until it became an impalpable powder that penetrated everywhere, even the sides of the houses. And through all this dry, parching heat there was an agonizing lack of water. There were poor families here who had waited, in wagons, for years for the gift of this free land. There were legitimate people who really wanted homes and were willing to work for them. There was a large class too of shiftless, chronic boomers from the entire West, whose lives had been spent in looking for something for nothing. There were chronic wanderers seeking sensation. After this Strip Opening was over, they would sadly turn away, hoping for similar, fresh excitement somewhere else.
It was a prohibition country, but saloons and gambling houses and houses of prostitution were open day and night. Everyone went armed. A man who did not have a gun upon his hip was something to remark about.
The scarcity of water increased from day to day. Horses, dogs, and mules went about sadly with their swollen tongues hanging out. The entire prairie was parched like another Sahara. Over it bent a sky that was just as blue, just as cloudless, just as brazen and wind beaten.
Along with the gamblers came the prostitutes, the Three Card Monte men, from the deserts of Arizona, from the deserts of New Mexico, fromArkansas, and Texas. The prostitutes were not segregated nor isolated. They occupied the second story, front, of the business houses along the one Main Street. Among them were two Cherokee Indian girls, sisters; Violet and May. May was built like the Venus. She was her little sister in the flesh, as far as beauty went. She had thin, fine lined features, coal black hair that reached her ankles, and a complexion the color of a cape-jessamine. The only marks of the Indian were her silence and suppleness; and the grace of her body. Both had been convent bred. After these years of forced and disagreeable restraint in the convent, they turned to the easiest way, or else some law of atavism asserted itself, and swept upon them the insistent instincts of their Indian past.
The streets looked like a scene from a comic opera. Red blanketed Indians mixed freely with the whites, and Mexicans, wearing a fortune in a silver hat band that glittered like a coiled snake around their pointed-crowned, broad-brimmed, white hats. Notwithstanding the fact that the Indian is a stoic and seldom gets excited himself, he gravitates toward a crowd like a fly toward a bowl of sugar, instinctively rebelling against the accumulated loneliness of the past. He does not take any part to be sure, nor does he join in the fun and the noise, but he has his own, ancient, silent, devious ways of pleasure. He did not know of course, the silent watchful Indian, that he was helping to celebrate his own funeral. All these tens of thousands of white men congregated here, were at a given signal, going to leap over the line of the Indian Territory and cut up, into the checker-board squares of little farms, the old, happy hunting ground of his ancestors.
The line-up was on the southern Kansas line. For weeks, for months, they had been getting ready for this race; Texans on their long winded cow-ponies, Kentuckians on their thoroughbreds, Illinois farmers on their fat, overfed, pot-bellied horses, and Missouri farmers driving wagons with mules. It was just like getting ready for a world Marathon, which had fifty thousand entries, and no rules and no judges. They trained hundreds of horses here for weeks; for endurance, for speed, for that first great leap forward. Some had picked out the land they wanted in advance and had a definite objective. The rich paid fabulous sums for horses; tall, gaunt, clean limbed Kentucky racers, or Virginia thoroughbreds, thin and nimble bodied. There were fat mule teams that could not make twenty miles in a day. But everyone was eager for a little square of that rich land.
On the morning of the big day, this entire mass moved to the State Line which was only four miles away, where each one tried for first place. From then until noon it surpassed Pandemonium itself or any congregation of the lost in Purgatory. For a hundred miles this great crowd was held back only by a little group of cavalry-men spread out at intervals that were too great. High noon was the opening hour. It was announced by a cannon. The announcement was passed down the line by the echoing firing of troopers.
By noon the red, sun-baked plain was veiled with a blue haze of heat. There was almost no vegetation. The great drought had killed it. There was no grass, no weeds, no trees that were green, because of months of wind and rainlessness. Nowhere was there a sign of water. All the littlecrickswere dry. Clouds of sand kicked up by the wind curled derisively over all the former trickling water courses. The thirst was terrible. It all but made men mad.
When at length the signal came, when the cannon roared, instantly that long, black, wavering line became alive, leaped forward like a long supple serpent, then separated into individual units that spread out across the plain. Men on thoroughbreds who knew horses, and even the riders of the humble cow-ponies, husbanded their strength wisely and held their horses down to the long swinging lope of the prairies, which the trained cow-pony can keep up all day. Less experienced riders, senseless with haste and greed, many with expensive horses which they had bought for the occasion, lashed into top speed at the outset, and before two miles were covered they were down and out. Prairie schooners, thousands of them, broke like a huge covey of awkward quail, set out at speed over the levels, and then dropped back to their old lumbering gait. Some had strong horses that pulled vigorously, some, horses that were weary and old and harnessed with ropes. There were even teams of oxen in this long, mad race. One man went in on a thousand dollar Kentucky thoroughbred, and when he reached the land he had picked out, he found asoonercalmly ploughing with his oxen. It occurred to no one that land just over the line was as good as land twenty miles ahead. It was a woman on foot who realized this. When the cannon boomed and the long black line dashed away, she took one step forward, and stuck down in the ground a stake on which she had whittled her name. She sat down on the ground under a large black cotton umbrella and drank her bottled lemonade,while the rest rushed away in the heat, for a claim or a town lot. Cities were built in six hours.
Then came night in these cities of a few hours. What had been bare, red ground at noon, was at night well ordered cities of tents. The next day they elected a mayor and municipal officers and formed a government. In a week there were hundreds of lumber buildings. The second week they had electric lights. And the second day they had a daily paper.
The first census showed people from every state in the Union and from far away Australia. There were petty aristocrats from Europe. There was an Hungarian nobleman whose name it is not best to give, because there is just one chance in a thousand that it might have been his own name. Too bad, for it was an imposing name, made up of a title, five given names and a double-deck family name. He resembled a captain of cuirassiers. He was a hero of romance in real life; tall, spare, dark; pointed mustache, snappy black eyes, and a very distinguished manner; the cosmopolitan manner. He was an accomplished linguist, who had disembarked at every great port of the world. He knew Shanghai, Frisco, Rio, and the Straits Settlements. He came as a respectable adventurer, because being an adventurer was a profession here. He probably had no definite aim. Because however, collectively, among such a crowd of people there must be money it was an opportunity for him. And if they had money, his wits were keen enough to get some of it, because that was his objective in life. He lived lightly and easily upon the money which other people worked to earn. He waited patiently and happily until they earned it. And then he took it away from them. He used to relate to circles of open-mouthed listeners, under the round white moon of those first warm nights, when the dewless air was glittering and clear, how once he had circled the world with a prince of the blood royal. The prince had incurred his father’s displeasure so his father had decreed to punish him by temporary banishment. By way of banishment he chartered a yacht for a number of years, gave the boy a fortune in spending money, and sent him away to look the world over.
Here, for a living, this Hungarian nobleman did the people. And he did them successfully. To the German settlers he was a German; to the Hungarian a Hungarian; to the French a Frenchman. To the townspeople in general he was an international lawyer who had never seen the inside of a law book in his life. He sold legal advice for cash. His knowledgeof all trickery was profound and worthy of respect. When business in a legal line was dull, he sold clothing to measure. In addition, he dealt in real estate. He was a broker of everything who never failed to leave the person he dealt with broke. He was royal in one thing, in the generous way he knew how to spend other people’s money. Even in this isolated place he contrived to look like a fashion plate. He had a large and elegantly selected wardrobe. He never knew where the next meal was coming from, but he always got a meal.
The superannuated politician from other states, who had worn out the patience of all his constituents at home, was here. There were Georgia colonels, Kentucky captains, with goatees or huge mustaches, and narrow, down hanging, black, string ties. There were judges, generals, old andpassés, a conglomeration of ambition and proud failure, looking hopefully for another chance from Fate. To dispute with any one of them that his town would not have a hundred thousand inhabitants in a year meant gun play.
Food was from the usual western lunch counter. Here every one swung himself to a tall stool and ate. Food was reduced largely to beefsteak, canned tomatoes, wet, soggy bread, and black creamless coffee.
Night, in the towns, with the electric lights beating down upon dry sand, was hard and cruel and white. The business streets were one frame shack after another, each shack with an enormous front built up high to make it look imposing. One town’s most popular and crowded corner, was Reece Brothers’ Gambling House. Here roulette, faro, craps, stud poker, kept the restless crowd busy throughout the night. Of the Reece Brothers, Bill was what you would call the typical gambler, an ideal movie gambler of today. Grey-eyed, thin-lipped, with a mouth like a steel trap, at the ends of which there dangled a long, pointed, limp, corn-silk, yellow mustache. He wore a poetic Lord Byron collar, a flowing tie, a hugely plaided suit, and the largest and most expensive sombrero in town. This was a dry country because it was still under government control; an Indian country. Notwithstanding this fact, however, enormous amounts of liquor were sold openly over a regular bar.
Sam Reece was of a deeply religious bent. When Sunday morning came, after his night shift at the faro table, as lookout, he put on his long, black Prince Albert, tall, silk-plush hat ten years out of date, worn black kid gloves with fancy stitching along the back, and looking like an undertakerat a dry convention, he took his stately way to church. The church was an oblong tent. It was unbearably hot in summer, and in winter of course there was no heat in it. Sam had various aspirations in life. His greatest aspiration was to sing solos in the choir. It was his one genuine pleasure.
With night fall, the lonely little towns began to get busy. By eight o’clock the unpaved dusty streets were packed with a crowd of men and women milling back and forth, back and forth, from one gambling house to another. Many of these people back home were not gamblers, but church deacons, conservative business men, farmers, whom the loneliness forced to seek excitement or companionship. Any one from a corn doctor to an anarchist, could have a crowd of applauding listeners about him, if he mounted the empty sugar barrel which stood upon the Public Acre, and stood up to make a speech.
Nearly always the wind blew. It blew throughout the night, throughout the day. The air was so dry it was something glittering, sweeping continually past. The arc lights swinging wildly in the boisterous wind, cast strange and grotesque shadows upon the unpainted shacks, and the people who were moving about. The church and the gambling houses and that long, black, restless ribbon which was the incoming Santa Fé train, were the only civilizing forces that welded men together, and helped drive away distance, homesickness, and loneliness.
Each city’s idea of a celebration of any kind was noise. The ideal of noise was guns and tin pans. Every man carried one gun. The greater number carried two. Since there was no law but martial law, the population’s first desire was for territorial government. When Senator ——? of Washington, Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, arose in the Senate, stuck his hand in the lapel of his coat and said: Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, I demand for the future citizens of Oklahoma, those honest, hard-working Americans that they be given self government, and so forth, and so forth. The speech went on the wire to Oklahoma. The telegraph operator, who was likewise ticket agent, depot master, and a half a dozen other things, got it first. By way of letting the town know that good news was coming, he ran out on the platform and fired a round from his six-shooter. The proprietor of First Chance Saloon, a two-gun man from Texas, stepped out of his shack and let go both guns. He did not know the news but he felt that it must be good. And he believed in helping on a good thing. If it were good hevoiced his approval. If, however, it turned out to be bad it meant that he had been voicing his disapproval. When his guns began to bark, the Feed Store Man, next door, began with his, and before another minute had elapsed the entire town was in the street firing up into the sky. It was like magic. Men leaped from shacks. Men leaped from dugouts, and saloons, everywhere. A firing squad began to march up and down the streets, firing by volley, by individuals, by twos and threes. Most of them did not know what for, but when the telegraph operator ran up the hill to deliver his message to the mayor, who, standing on the empty sugar barrel in the Government Acre, read it aloud, the crowd went mad. The celebration lasted all night. If the news happened to prove disappointing on the morrow, no one was vexed, because soon some other news of some kind would come and then they could have another celebration. Occasionally a citizen had an eye knocked out, or a half a dozen teeth, by a spent bullet. Window glass was broken nightly. No one of course minded such trifles. They were merely the by-product of frequent and joyous celebrations.
Mr. Mencken is a pugilist, not an artist. He has always been in the wrong ring. It is safer to take blows, however, which make you blue instead of black.
Mr. William Lyon Phelps is the most art-predatory of non-æsthetic pedants.
It is good to be interested in everything, from the history of pins to the color of pills preferred by potentates, pugilists, or pedagogues.
Coelho Netto, of Rio, is a person. There are not too many! He is peculiarly versatile. He has been physician and surgeon, lawyer, lecturer upon art and letters in great universities, politician, reporter, and writer of many volumes of successful plays which still hold the stage in both Brazil and Portugal. In addition, he is a novelist and prolific short story writer, and one of the first in his tongue, in South America, to gain a livelihood solely by art.
The difficulty of living by the pen, in Rio, in an early day was set down by a Portuguese journalist as follows:
“They say Brazil has thirteen millions of people. Of these twelve millions eight hundred thousand can not read. Of the two hundred thousand that remain, one hundred and fifty thousand read only daily papers; fifty thousand, only French books; thirty thousand, translations. The other fifteen thousand read the Catechism and the Prayer Book; two thousand study Comte. And one thousand read Portuguese books made in Brazil.”
He was one of the earliest artists to show the native life of the land outside the cities, together with man’s effort to contend with the resisting tropic wilderness. He has shown every class of this richly varied life in his extensive country.
Tormentais a novel of a young physician, which perhaps is reminiscent of his own youth.Sertãois a collection of proseacquarellesof Brazil’s colonizing days, with interesting pictures of the vast, the varied interior. Here we see storms so violent, they are almost unbelievable, like a deluge, and which last for days; then the long dry seasons, and the measureless, solitary pastures; the encrusted gold of sunsets unimpeded over disconcerting levels; and the grey and melancholy dawns.
One of his most powerful novels, the one I perhaps admire most, isRei Negro. It shows life on a lonely estate in the interior and the confusing conflict, then blending, of black and white races. It is a pathetic, moving story one is forced to remember, of a beautiful woman of the tropics cursed with double race blood and a Negro who was a hero.
O Capital Federalcontains enchanting sketches of Rio, and likewise detailed descriptions of existence on afazenda, in the country, where the luxury is so great, so unexpected, it sets one dreaming of the pleasure places of Tiberius, in the south of Italy. This novel,O Capital Federal, is dedicated to his uncle as follows: “My Uncle: In this book there are pages that belong to you, because I never should have written them had not my Good Fairy guided me to the ascetic but voluptuous retreat where you live in happy tranquility, following the moral law of Epicurus, and treasuring your flowers.”
This alluring place of residence was isolated in a grave garden of roses. It fronted the green, refreshing foam of the sea, where towered two black rocks. In construction it was a Swisschalet. Steps of marble, polished and rare, led to it. The drawing rooms were ample, luxurious, and filled with objects of art. The bath, in this country home in Brazil, recalls theBaths of Nero. It would have satisfied the sumptuous Ruler of Rome. How he would have enjoyed pushing the buttons which filled the bath room with pink mist of attar of roses or the purple breath of violets! The dining-room, all the other rooms, were equally splendid. There were precious wines in priceless crystal. There was rare and astonishing food. And flowers, dazzling and huge.
InRei Negro, Netto’s descriptions of dawn and sunset, and the blinding yellow midday, are both lovely and unforgettable. I keep this book at hand in order to renew my delight in them. There is freshness and exquisiteness in his paintings of the spaces of this unknown land.
His books are many. All of them are excellent. His is no slight talent.
Esphinge(a novel).Immortalidade, (likewise a novel).Treva, a book of five novelettes;Fabulario(short stories).As Sete Dores De N. Senhora, a noble, uplifting book of faith.Saudades, many very brief stories, all of which are attractive and charm with originality.Scenas e Perfis, short stories, too, andO Paraiso.
I am sorry books are advertised as they are in America today. It both lessens interest in buying and reading. Publishers ought to get together, like nations, and arrange a general disarmament plan. At least we might float, occasionally, the white flag of truce.
Every reader has his peculiarities of taste, touched always with emotion, which is something not amenable to reason. I personally prefer for pleasure, a book on falconry written by some acute and sensual oriental, to the detailed facts, marshalled accurately and dated of, say, the Newgate Calendar.
Ships fascinate me, the beginnings of navigation, Strabo’sGeography, maps, old globes, and the Hakluyt Voyages. When I read about a drawing made of a ship a thousand years old, I shiver as at some line of immortal verse. The great emotion sweeps me. Russel Clark wrote:The most beautiful expression of the hand of man is the sailing ship.Old shipping books interest me. And the adventures of whaling days. The mischances that befell the Whaling Barque,George Henry, kept me awake nights. And the wild-tongued, great Elizabethan Voyagers! I hope pictures have been kept of all the great old ships that ever sailed the seas!
I love gardens. But I do not enjoy reading about them. I hate to see words fade and die. I learn of gardens from painters, etchers. And then I try to remember them without words. In Persian and Indian Miniatures I have loved them best. And the flowers Renoir painted when he was old. Yet that old bookGerard’s Herbalstill gives out some of the spiced sweetness of all gardens.
I doubt if in novel making there is such thing as Romanticism, Classicism. Critics, like creations of God He forgot to call good, may be little men, who see in part only, or else through a glass darkly. The two terms merely classify different degrees of visibility.
It is not strange that Dr. Jozef Muls, born in one of the world’s richest art cities, Antwerp, a city that knew Rubens, Quentin Matsys, and Breughel, should write about art. And he has written well.
HisModern Art, The Twilight of Flemish Art Cities, andFrom Greco to Cubism, (Van El Greco Tot Het Cubisme), give him indisputable rank among the foremost critics of the day. Not only are they penetrating and profound as criticism, but accurately documented, and sensitive, and written in delightful, sympathetic prose. He writes in two languages, French and Flemish; and in speech, he is master of many.
He has not only written books of art but books of travel, short stories, and books of verse. I keep in memory two pleasant booklets about cities. One isRouen, by André Maurois, the other isHet Levende Oud-Antwerpen, by Jozef Muls. The latter has eight etchings by Vaes. Both books have the indescribable charm which love of the thing written about gives to words. He writes again of the city of his birth inDe Val Van Antwerpen.
A work of his which has given me hours of enjoyment is still another book about cities. This is calledSteden. The chapters on Constantinople and Venice are alluring. He came across from Trieste to Venice one hot August night, over night-black water, to be confronted at dawn with a golden city floating upon a lapis sea. It looked to him like something fabulous from the depths of the ocean. The decaying palaces resembled splendors seen only in a dream. The Bridge of Sighs made him think of melancholy Byron whose heart, he insists, lives on in Venice. He rejoiced in all the eloquent memories of Tintoretto, connoisseur of art that he is, and the past glories of the Republic.
The great canals were merely the mirrors of Venice, Queen of Cities.
Albert Besnard, the distinguished painter, after being for many years director of the school of art in Italy where the covetedPrix de Romeis given, turned to writing after he was an old man. And the book, properly enough, is about Rome:Sous le ciel de Rome. For this he was made anAcadémicien. And he deserves the honor. Only one or two other men, for a single work’s grace, have become members ofL’Académie Française. Books of travel written by sensitive painters like Besnard are things rare and charming. In one place I recall, he exclaims: “I am standing alone at foot of stairway of the Capitol.Rome under the stars—what delight!” I think Besnard is quite as fine in prose as in the bejeweled, gauze-robed, almond-eyed beauties he painted in India.
Besnard remembers Marie Bashkirtseff, as he saw her once in her youth, standing beside a fountain in the gardens of the Villa Medici. She reminded him of a little golden, furred cat. He considered her fine instead of beautiful. His trained eyes found her arms too short. She was exquisite and fashionable, but she was too cold, and in her face there was no joy. Her originality, to him, was in her peculiar physical attractiveness, her elegance, and not in her conversation. He called her a poor, little child whose only pleasure was to design, then wear wonderful gowns, briefly, for the eye-pleasure of the Great Julian. He always remembered her own too cold, sharply expressive blue eyes.
His observations are arresting. He thinks it is the fatality of order and equilibrium with which modern youth can not put up. A balance is lost. Somewhere else he declares that grief is the ransom of genius. Only they who can suffer, arrive. Whenever he returns to Rome, he likes to pause a moment before entering his dwelling, on one of the hills, just for the pleasure of penetrating first with his eyes, the rich, grey, sculptured mass, which is the world’s incomparable wonder,Rome. He savored with pleasure the beauty of the sky that bends over the Deathless City; the grandeur, the severity of outline of Roman horizons; the desertedcampagna; the mystery of magnificent palaces with their murmuring fountains, and above everything else, the peculiar charm of the people, who throughout the centuries have known how to keep vehement passions, the grace of the inspiring gesture, and beauty.
Writing from Rome again, he speaks of the winds of art which blow freshly in one’s face, to renew ideas, then strengthen intelligence. Besnard’s book is so alluring, every page of it, (and his book about India, too), thatI should not like anyone to miss them. He is a great admirer of D’Annunzio. He writes of the splendor of the Italian poet’s soul on a par with the century-reinforced splendor of the Eternal City.
Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held. It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.”
Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains.
Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All things perish after they flower, even the ages.
Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth:O those morning walks in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian!(Rodriguez, the South American novelist, says inIdolos Rotos: “I can not forget the tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence.
Italy!Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world, and all its youth!
A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, isIdolos Rotos(Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological, economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant, subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. Thewriter carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is always good and sometimes great.
Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the book has stable novel architecture.
“Victimas de un sistema.... Victims of an educational system which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,” writes Rodriguez.
It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew in childhood.
Of April in Caracas, he is enthusiastic: “It is a spectacle worthy of admiration, when the acacias flower, and trees wear crowns of purple and robes of flame!”
Sometimes Rodriguez warns against the dangers of democracies in words which remind us of León Daudet or De Tocqueville. There is no national soul, he says. And nothing is done to develop it. In Venezuela there are three ethnic unities which are hostile to any united progress.
He has written glowingly of the days of tropic summer. Again I translate from memory: “The cicadas sang. From every tree, every bush, rang their shrill announcement of summer. Near and far, every spot of green, every twig, leaf, was a strident trill, inescapable, like the high, glorious notes of crystal chords vibrating with frenzy until they snap. From the scanty vegetation on the edge of gorges, which, toward the north, divide capriciously the city ... swelled monotonous, sharp song.... From all points of the compass it came. And in Caracas, from everypatio, surged the deafening song of the penetrating choir.”
Albert, idle in his studio, thought it was the tortured cry of a land sick with fever, praying the implacable blue for rain. The land was burned. This heat of fever quivered everywhere like a thirst. The fever leaped with violent color-cry to top boughs of thebúcares. It leaped in blinding bloom to talltolu-trees, to the acacias, which were breaking with blossoms. Nowhere in the city nor the forests could one see trees that were notcovered with flowers, purple, red, and the hues of flame. From his window he confrontedtolu-treescompletely enveloped like armor in purple petals.
Both Loti and Barrés suffered from a consuming fear of death, says Daudet. They were constantly preoccupied with the thought that some-time life for them would be no more. Loti fought the fear with change of place, traveling; Barrés, with political affairs. Both were fêted and flattered while they suffered continual boredom. That accomplished Portuguese, Fidelino de Figueiredo, declares that it was boredom which caused the death of Louis Cotter, historian, who wroteSplendor and Decay of the House of Austria.
He died of mental weariness because he could not adapt himself to the mediocrity of a provincial town, its petty quarrels, its local injustice, its horror and hatred of any kind of superiority.
The brilliant Portuguese goes on to say that it was this attitude of mind which caused the French Revolution, and which is now beginning to afflict the minds of men again, with close of a period of time. People sense dumbly that the treasures of emotion, treasures stored by rich soul life (being rapidly destroyed) can never be reassembled. The result means death of culture. Marie Henrietta once wrote thatto livedoes not mean to be upon the Earth either a brief time or a long time, but to be ableto feel, to register a great range of sensations.
Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming.
A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard, Ballesteros de Martos. HisArtistas Españoles Contemporaneosis a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels isLuz en el Camino. He was one of the editors of that brilliant Spanish review,Cervantes.
I like this from Bacon’sAdvancement of Learning: “The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly tobe called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding ages.”
Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born, however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay William Hudson, inAbbé Pierre’s People, owns that graceful, alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts, the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but distinguished philosopher, thinker.
Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illuminetædiam vitæwe have gain, efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place to place,physical restlessness. Monkeys in tropic forests move swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they have no mind and can notlive. The people whose physical movements are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great Confusion!
There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice.
I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing from tall tropic trees.
Ellis Parker Butler declarespigs is pigs. Then monkeys must be monkeys, tails long or short.
I used to know a little shop in Paris where they kept only books about imaginary travels, travels that never existed. This kind of writing seems to have been done for a little while in the Eighteenth Century. One is about an imaginary trip to the pole and published in Amsterdam in 1723. Abbé Bordelon published a little earlier, a book about a hypochondriac who was forced to travel all the time whether he wanted to or not. Defoe’sRobinson Crusoebelongs to this period. Louis Holberg wrote, about themiddle of the Eighteenth Century, describing a strange journey to the interior of the earth. There was an Arab philosopher, by name Ibn Tophail, earlier by a century, in the late Seventeenth Century, who wrote one of the most fascinating travel books in the world. It tells about a boy shipwrecked on a desert island south of Asia, who by means of travel and contemplation, trained his mind to comprehension of the verities, and scientific knowledge. The writer himself had an amazing life spent partly in Africa and partly as Secretary to the Governor of Granada.
Novels which give us the souls of races and the ancient historical progression of peoples such as: Reymont’sPeasants, Hamsun’sGrowth of the Soil, are precious, powerful things. In no other way can we know thoroughly other lands and them who dwell there. A series of novels is being published in South America by that accomplished artist and man of letters, Manuel Galvez, which does just that. He is writing a series of fascinating historical novels of the wars in Paraguay, and of life in that great rich country Argentina. At this moment the Paraguay Trilogy is ready. The books areLos caminos de la muerte,HumaitáandTierra de espectos. One of his earlier books,El solar de la raza, won the Argentine Prize. It is a travel book of old Spain. There are eloquent pages about Castile, strong, proud, noble, profound, whose glories Galvez says he has faith to believe will be duplicated again in Argentina. In this, Galvez has written as eloquently of time-stained, tragic Toledo as Zorilla, or Blanco-Fombona. As prelude to his description of the old stronghold of Spanish cities he says: “Now we are living in an epoch of transition; it is the imperialism of energy under two expressions, namely, will and muscle, while the older civilization of Spain was founded upon imperialism of the spirit. There the soul dominated. In modern cities of the New World people live preoccupied exclusively with material things; sensual pleasures, health, fashion, the acquiring of wealth. In the old days, in old cities such as Toledo, people were preoccupied with questions of the soul, God. Today we have the combative man, the pioneer, the self-made. We have epics of multitudes, whose interests are wholly material.”
“Toledo affirms for us the indelible quality of grief. It is one more illustration of the sudden end of things human. Even the stones of Toledo keep telling that life is continuous death. Cities, philosophies, glories of empire, books—everything—die. In time the civilization of Europe willpass into oblivion too. Later, American civilization will disappear, and with it the civilization of Argentina. Then some writer a thousand years hence will make a soulful and elegiac description of the end. He will find in the abandoned streets of my beloved Buenos Aires the same lofty sorrow, the same memories of the past, which, in nights I can now never forget, the stones of Great Toledo have revealed to me.”
Galvez is the author of many powerful novels of Argentina of today. Among themEl mal metafísico,La vida multiple,La sombra del convento,La tragedia de un hombre fuerte,Nacha Regules. To me his most powerful book isEl cántico espiritual. A book that has qualities which permit it to rank with the great novels of the world. It is the story of a young South American artist who goes to Paris to live, to continue his profession. There he falls in love with a rich, beautiful, but married woman from his own Argentina. For many years this love dominates his life. He pays court to her. He tries to make her his mistress, but without success. There are pages and pages of noble and inspired writing, rich revelations into the depths of an impassioned heart. After the years they both go back to Argentina again, to Buenos Aires, and here he finds out that she is ready to yield to his pleas and become his mistress. Then he finds his love for her is a thing of the spirit not of the flesh. He finds that she was merely the protective star that watched over his ambitions, his art. These years of sorrow had without his knowing it become years of progression for him, in which he had left behind forever his longing for the inferior beauty and had passed on to a nobler thing. Beauty Absolute, which is divine. InEl cántico espiritual, Galvez writes (the close of the novel) the triumph of the spirit over the material, the triumph of an ideal world over a world of reality. It is the long pilgrimage of the soul toward the Absolute, the love of Dante for Beatrice, the philosophy of Socrates in the Banquet. It should be the hymn of a love that was pure, love eternal, a thing of comprehension of the soul, powerful enough to disdain the flesh. At their last meeting when he takes farewell of her, Suzanna, in his studio in Buenos Aires, he says: (This is the close of the novel.) I quote: “For this work which I wish to create, Suzanna, we must be pure. We must forget the flesh and the body. We must be able to life up our souls to the Great Beauty.”
“The darkness was drawing closer about them. They did not light the light. After Morris touched her brow fleetingly with his lips, his faceagain wore its noble ecstatic expression, his eyes too were strangely revealing of some richer happiness that seemed foreign, far.... With the eyes of the spirit he had confronted the Beauty which is Absolute. He had progressed from the love of one woman toward love of all human things, and from old art which was limited, to a comprehension of the essence of all art, the Divine.”
This book is nobly felt, nobly executed.