If Love could build a place for pure delight’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace,Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower,With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways,And plaintive settles princely lover chose;With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray.Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily,Since centuries alone make gardens rich—Caprices, memories—royal death—and love.Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare goldIs like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
If Love could build a place for pure delight’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace,Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower,With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways,And plaintive settles princely lover chose;With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray.Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily,Since centuries alone make gardens rich—Caprices, memories—royal death—and love.Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare goldIs like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
If Love could build a place for pure delight
’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace,
Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower,
With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways,
And plaintive settles princely lover chose;
With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray.
Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily,Since centuries alone make gardens rich—Caprices, memories—royal death—and love.Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare goldIs like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily,
Since centuries alone make gardens rich—
Caprices, memories—royal death—and love.
Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare gold
Is like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.
As long ago as the Twelfth Century, the brilliant, unfettered mind of the Eighteenth Century was active in Sicily. The Renaissance would have begun earlier, if Europe had been able to comprehend, and then seize the astonishing intellectual development of this little island.
I used to wonder where Wagner drew the impetus, the power, for the sacred music of the close of Parsifal, with its dizzy heights of impassioned vision. Now I know. It was from religious paintings done in gold and gems, by inspired Twelfth Century builders, here in Sicily. He caught fire from a great age of faith.
Goethe, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, knew that this was a land drenched with a kind of power that was passing. He lived here long. And daily he went to write in a lovely garden, calledVilla Giulia, and he, too, had hard work to drag himself away. Hence the fable, perhaps, of the Sirens. The Square of the Great Cathedral (partly Moorish) is perhaps the loveliest thing I ever looked upon, save old Venetian Palaces. And it haunts me still, like the Grand Canal of Venice, under some unforgettable light.
The giant-bodied, blond, Norse sea-kings who came were robbers. But that which was Greece and the Orient touched them mightily. They became followers of the Christ, planned Crusades, married princesses of France, and all the time dwelled in a Moorish Court and spoke both the tongues of the East and the West. Here East and West met, then blended. A superstition was shattered.
We visited the graveyard where sleep Roger of Sicily and his descendant, Manfred, of whom Byron wrote, men who helped make the civilization of Europe. Here again I am on the trail of Loti. He declared this graveyard is the loveliest in the world save one—Eyoub—in Stamboul.
It is a long hot journey by rail to cross Sicily in summer. It is a day spent amid pale yellow fields of ripening grain. They shimmered like canary-hued satin. I recalled that it was to raise grain for the Caesars, and forget his long sad years of service in the East, that Pontius Pilate came here to end his days. A French writer makes him say: “Il me fallut ... sous le coup d’une disgrace immeritée....
I was held by the blow of unmerited disgrace. Swallowing my tears, my heart filled with bitterness, I retired to my Sicilian estates, where I should have died of loneliness, if my daughter Pontia had not come to console me. Here I raised grain, the finest in the land. Today life is over. Let the future judge between me and Vitellius.”
The man who was talking with Pontius Pilate in the French story, says to him after awhile, this man had known him, been a companion, when the older was Prefect of Judea. They are talking together of olddays of youth in Asia. The younger confesses: ... It was harder for me to do without a beautiful woman whom I knew there, than even the wines of Greece. A long time later I learned that this mistress of mine had joined a little band of men and women who followed a Galilean Prophet. They called him Jesus the Nazarene, and for some deed he was put to the cross. Do you happen to remember this man, my friend Pontius?
Pontius Pilate drew his brows together. He frowned. He thought and thought. His reply was simple and sincere. Jesus, you say his name was? Jesus, the Nazarene? No, I can’t seem to recall any such name.
After a time, above the satin-yellow of the grain fields, towered Ætna, white with ice, with snow. I recalled the songs of Greek poets written on this very plain. I recalled the pride and joy in the lines of Theocritus who dwelled just where we were spinning along:—These lines have always thrilled me.
I, Thêtis of Ætna, have come! I, Thêtis of Ætna, will sing!It was in Siracusa that Theocritus was born.Ah!how long ago, and his lines so fresh today. Three hundred B. C.
South of Siracusa, upon this radiantly blue sea, Greece fought some of her greatest battles, and it was here, and on these waters to the south, that the twilight first began to fall upon perhaps the most perfect civilization the world has seen.
The Greek Theatre, in the hillside, where the plays of Æschylus and Aristophanes were produced, is still in good condition. They had just given a play. It seats twenty thousand. The old Roman Theatre is close beside it. It is not so lovely.
Just a step from the theatres, in another of these unforgettable gardens of long ago, theVilla Landolina, the German poet, Count Von Platen, is buried. And in the Museum of Siracusa there is a lovely object, likewise from this same garden, theLandolina Venus. Headless, without arms, she stands upon a pedestal in a dim, pink room in which there is no other object. After you look at it in the twilight, they open a window and fling the day upon it, and the marble is of a texture so unusual it seems upon the moment to palpitate, to breathe, to live again, because beauty never dies. It is form divine. It was made in an age when there were still many people who could appreciate form. It is said to have been oneof the treasures of Heliogabulus who gave it to Siracusa, a city he loved. What heart-fire in the antique world! And in how many ancient tongues we have heard men say they loved cities.
The next morning early I went back again to the Museum. I offered my entrance fee, five lire. The keeper shook his head. Are you not going to let me see it? I gasped. Yes Madame. But you who know beauty may go in always free.
Over Siracusa, in summer, bends a sky of blue enamel as unbroken and changeless in hue as the sky of Africa. And along the streets and country ways are flowering trees, wisteria-blue, gold and white, and hibiscus-pink, which add to the enchantment.
It was to a friend in Sicily, I think his name was Lucillus, that Seneca wrote letters of wisdom. And once in a while he used to mention what he termedthe world renowned mountain, Ætna.
Seneca wrote to him: If you would be free you must be poor, or else you must make yourself like unto the poor. Wisdom is a peculiar treasure, Seneca goes on to explain; you begin to acquire it as you lose everything else.
And Tu Fu, a Chinese poet of the Eighth Century, wrote:
It is only the beggar who sings.
It is only the beggar who sings.
It is only the beggar who sings.
That kind of perception and that freedom of mind is lost. One finds the minds of these great thinkers of old something firm among the shifting ages. In the present flux they are safe to anchor to. As a nation, as a people, we are not old enough to appreciate such statements. Money can not buy anything that is genuinely fine. Only the invisible coin of the soul can purchase the genuine. The age that worships money, measures with money, is an age both base and stupid.
José Maria de Heredia wrote some of his most splendid sonnets about Sicily. He says in one of them, that it is Ætna that ripens best the purple and gold of the wine. We learn that here Greek blood unites in the veins with Saracen fury, and imperial pride of France. But time passes and everything dies. Even marble grows old and worn. Agrigenti (Girgenti) is nothing but a shadowy ruin, and Great Siracusa, (once most populous and powerful city of the Mediterranean world), dozes dully under the too blue sky. But metal lives. And today metal coins keep the rare perfection of profile of Sicilian maids.
Loti has moulded upon Sicily phrases lovely and indestructible as the coins of Siracusa, which preserve the unforgettable beauty of youth. It is surpassing strange that I who was always moved to emotion by the prose of Loti, who tried so many times and failed to look upon his face, should receive almost the last letter he wrote, and that he should sign his name to his calling card to send me, just before he died. Love, perhaps, is a powerful magnet. The avenues of the air are now plotted and mapped, the trackless roads of the sea, the land, but the roads of the spirit are still free, unmarked, and sure-leading. Baedeker, thank God, has neglected to chart them! Loti called this young girl’s diary charming. He said it made him want to read other things.
Ada Negri went to Sicily a few years ago, in a journey she made to Italian places of pleasure. She writes of this journey in a prose book calledLe Strade(Streets). Delightful poet that she is, with lines that flame in memory, her prose is commonplace. Not many have written well both prose and verse.
Calzini was quite mad over Sicily. He tarried longest in Siracusa, to worship at the feet of theLandolina Venus. Somewhere he exclaims, thinking of the statue, “we have come to you across nations and across time; we have come from a civilization which has put so much despair, so much sadness and worry into love. Let us learn to worship again in you the power of creating,generating, profound and eternal as the sun of Sicily.”
Sicily gave birth to two delightful composers, one of whom was Scarlatti. It pleases me to know that Wagner wrote his greatest love music, the music of Isolda, by the canals of Venice, and his music of inspired spiritual vision, when he flashed forth in tone, sublime knowledge of a life that surpasses death, in Sicily.
Hear Andrew Lang:
Ah! Leave the smoke, the wealth, the roarOf London and the bustling street,For still by the Sicilian shoreThe murmur of the Muse is sweet,And shepherds still their songs repeatWhere breaks the blue Sicilian Sea.
Ah! Leave the smoke, the wealth, the roarOf London and the bustling street,For still by the Sicilian shoreThe murmur of the Muse is sweet,And shepherds still their songs repeatWhere breaks the blue Sicilian Sea.
Ah! Leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar
Of London and the bustling street,
For still by the Sicilian shore
The murmur of the Muse is sweet,
And shepherds still their songs repeat
Where breaks the blue Sicilian Sea.
How England has loved lands of sun! There was a young English clergyman, by name Lefroy, who in the Eighties went to Sicily and wrote some memorable verses there. I can recall the first line of one:
On shores of Sicily a shape of Greece!
On shores of Sicily a shape of Greece!
On shores of Sicily a shape of Greece!
That is just what men can find there today, the vivid memory of something perfect.
Few things happened to mar the long hot monotony of the sun-swept plains. Few people of importance came. Dude-ranching was of the future.
But when I was in my first teens the Great Salvini came, and with him a son. They playedThe Three Musketeers, in what popular pride, somewhat feeble in fact, called the Opera House. The dramatic production here was of slight importance to them. What they really came for was to go quail hunting in the Indian Territory. My father, as it happened, was the best wing-shot in the State. I had inherited a little of his ability; I was permitted to go along.
The two Italians were impressed with the eloquence, the space-surprise of the unmarked land-levels, where roads were just anywhere you wished to go, and the sweep of light unimpeded. I was impressed with the beauty, the charm of the young Italian. In addition to genius, there was upon him the seal of an ancient rich, finely tempered living.
The winter that followed I was in a university in the north, lonely and homesick for the sun, for the south. Then I saw that Salvini was billed.
After the first performance I went behind the scenes to renew acquaintance with my gay hunting companion of the autumn. This was the beginning of a week of delight such as my child’s soul had not known, a week when I saw daily this engaging Italian youth, so unlike the young men of the plains whom I had known. I, who even then, was peculiarly sensitive to beauty, was all but stricken dumb by this alluring personality. I sensed the splendid things he had known which were unknown to me.
When at length he had to go away, I wept. He was beauty and youth and love and charm. He was all the things I liked and dumbly wanted. What remained was the snow-bound, duty-filled Michigan winter, where day was too short, too quickly black-rimmed with dusk and night. As in the case of Adonis of old, beauty was dead and my heart was lamenting.
Years passed. Life like an uncontrollable tidal-wave swept in, bearing the things I hated or had no interest in. In short, I grew old with the years.
Then, one night in New York, in a little moving-picture theatre on a cheap side street, one night of winter, when the snow outside was deeply white, just as it used to be by black forest edges, in those long forgotten Michigan winters, I saw laughing down upon me from the silver screen, in a luxurious Roman garden-scene fromQuo Vadis, a face I seemed to have known. What dimly remembered delight was there! In the eyes, mouth, the careless gesture of the head, the trained grace of hands! It was the face of a man no longer in his first youth, but keeping still youth’s slenderness, youth’s lines. A face more eloquent, made more impassioned and moving by the years, and crowned with the flowers I always loved, the fragile flowers of an Italian spring. The background was an old, rich garden of the south, and beyond—the Immortal City,Rome. Into the eyes as they looked upon me crept a look I seemed to remember.Salvini!
The years rolled back. I was sixteen again. I was mounting my mustang under swaying trees, in a windy dawn of early autumn. Shining and resplendent was the outspread circle of the plains, and beside me, moving along at speed, over the gold-hued grasses of dying summer, a youth I liked, with the face of Italy; a dark impassioned face; eloquent; and a voice speaking in my ear, with luscious, singing phrase I never forgot. The young Salvini!
There is only one other thing I remember with equal delight, equal vividness. It is night. And likewise a night of long ago. It is near a Latin land, by the Mexican Gulf; a sultry night of summer; a silent, outspread, sullen water, with faint, far stars winking down into it, and the white gleam, and the drunken, too heavy scent of magnolia blossoms. These two memories sway my senses.
Now I know that the reason is because they keep securely the same emotional height.
I have found something in a French writer I like:Only Cezanne knew the color of Provençe.I have been fluttering, mentally, long, around that idea, searching for it, trying to seize it like a bird its nest, at night.
Why was Margaret of Navarre the helpless sport of fate and accident? Whenever I re-readThe HeptameronI wonder more. She had beauty,youth, health, intelligence above the ordinary, something that resembled the gift of genius, and in her old French world none were more highly placed. She was born and lived beside a throne. Yet she had no power of direction over days. She was as helpless on the current of years as driftwood. What was lacking? Was it the saving grain of salt of the commonplace? Or are human beings sport of deep tides of time, and the so-calledlucky ones, who get what they want the way they want it, grow conceited, and cry out like the little fat boy in Mother Goose:See what a plum I found!The fact is, they had nothing to do with it.
A delusion is not a bad thing to grow. It is superior to reality because it is out of range of attack and can not wear out. It transcends time and accelerates action.
When one is young one wants happiness to last. When one grows old one finds it was made to taste of, never to keep. Happiness is merely the wholesale price of wisdom.
The mind that is perfectly clear, if such a thing were conceivable, would not be the mind to succeed. A certain amount of prejudice (little wrongs for alloy with pure gold) is necessary. It guides.
To one deprived of it, whose crystal-clear, dispassionate intelligence sees all sides at once, whose brain is weakened in its progress toward choice by weighing infinitesimal differences, selections, resolute action, would not be easy. We keep many unpaid debts to wrong. That is where right gets its crown. As brevity is the soul of wit, delusion is the fiber of life.
A curiosity in America today is the insistent effort to make the dollar rule ideas and ideals.
Keeping house resembles a clock. You wind it up on Saturday night and it puts in the rest of the week in running down.
Life is about as satisfactory in its attempts as the thrusts of swordsmen fencing with blindfolded eyes.
One of my greatest regrets has been that life has no back door.
Necessity is quite as often the mother of goodness as invention.
In the old wars recorded eloquently in tapestries, marbles, canvasses, men died and kept their faith. The coming wars will be wars of science. They will be fought largely by the brain, in lonely rooms. Men will die just the same, but they will not keep their faith. Sacrifices will be heaped to a new God—Super-Mechanics.
Yet the Greeks used to write songs to Apollo in which they called him bothDestroyerandHealer. If circles of time are vast, still they are circles.
Republics have been the world’s dream of justice. Now Science is shaking them sadly. What is there Science is not shaking? Is there a field of mind not attacked?
The thinking of France, the philosophical dreaming of Germany, the peculiarly destructive quality in the brain of the Hebrew, have together been helpful in hastening change. There is no value not suffering transformation.
Hear what De Tocqueville writes about democracy in America. He had one of the most dangerously penetrating minds the world has known:I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before ... men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence.
The gentle, the humanity loving philosophizing of the painter, Redon, in his notes, is good to know. It tells us, too, how great his heart was. He insists continually upon something I have always believed, that, in supreme creating, the heart, nobility of nature, play a not yet credited part.
As the Bhagavad Gita is a breviary for the soul, some of the notes of Redon are a breviary for art and its making. Few can read him without feeling an impulse to be better, loftier visioned. His brief notes, his diary jottings, are a kind of New Testament of Beauty.
A Biblical soul, flinging forth proud, powerful phrases! A prophet painting super-terrestrial flowers, too ripe in color, too wise, graceful, lovely, but weighted with divine regret!
Redon could see and feel. Sometimes his words are poetry, especially when he addresses the sea. In words he snares amazing, unexpected revelations. In his unselfconscious hours of meditation, sometimes he is a thinker. Again I am impressed with the fact that they who are great, keep within untapped deeps of good. He declares that that which comes from the heart can not die. Goethe said something similar. And that was the teaching of Faust. The last resolve of its united modern and mediæval wisdom was the heart’s supremacy. Beethoven asserted it. Redon, as it happened, adored Beethoven. As I recall the musician’s words they were these: “Man’s title to nobility is his heart.” Now I recall Goethe’s words:Nur was vom Herzen kommt, zum Herzen geht.This completing of logic in word-phrase is a characteristic, I think, of the great German.
Redon goes on to say that if on some centenary of Michael Angelo he were chosen to make the address, he would speak only of the great soul of the man.
There were long periods when Michael Angelo neither painted nor modeled. In these between spaces his sonnets were written. I recall at this moment a sonnet in that old Italian tongue I have loved so long, which tells how he likes sleep and the substance of stone:
Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso.
Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso.
Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso.
The woman whom Michael Angelo loved declared she wrote only to give vent to inner grief:—
Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.
Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.
Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.
He was greater. He wrote selflessly.
It was in Bordeaux, a letter informs me, that Redon was born, instead of Marseilles.... He seems to have possessed a noble nature, with a peculiarly personal quality of penetration. He stood face to face with basic emotions.
He declares the dilettante amuses himself, while the artist, going through agony, produces grain for broader sowing. Mixed with his love, his knowledge of art, there was reverence.
He explains how memories of what his father used to tell him in childhood helped him. Of his father, he remarks: “He loved the outdoor world. He talked often about the pleasure the great spaces of America gave him, and forests, where once he was lost for days. He liked to recallthe wild life of his youth, this daring follower of luck and liberty.” His father was in New Orleans at time of the Wars of the First Empire.
In his sensitive childhood, Brittany made him sad. He explains that in Celtic lands the human soul has accumulated too much emotion. The passion of days, of years, is piled there, until material things become uncannily imbued. Hence the wealth of legends. Legends and poetry become the permanent safety vault of the agony, of the desires, of a race.
Once he pauses to praise the wines of France. He blesses men who grow the grape, who make precious liquid to dilute bitter fate with a little optimism. He calls itliquid of dreams. He rejoices that there is something that can exalt mind.
He tells of his first art teacher who did not try to teach. He kept still and rejoiced when the boy went mad over the canvasses of Delacroix. From that man, he declares, I learned the essentials of creation.
I have found another reason for his devotion to flowers. In his impressionable boyhood he became companion of a famous botanist, Clavand. This man was fascinated by the imperceptible, unsteady boundary line which separates flower-life from human-life. In the plastic arts, Clavand could appreciate both the serenity of Greece and the riotous Middle Age. He loved Delacroix just as Redon did. He kept telling Redon, the boy, of the intensity of life, the vital irradiation of the canvasses of Delacroix. He compared them to the plays of Shakespeare, because they held the same quality. In stored up depth of life they were Elizabethan.
Redon expresses belief that there is no such thing as art until pressure of idea, vision, force then form speech.
Remy de Gourmont applies the wordmetaphoreto the paintings of Redon. They live by logic of imagination.
His reflections are always illuminating. Speechless nature, (plants, flowers), have normal, secret life-laws which landscape painters must feel to express. There is an art of design freed from burden of details.
In life there is suffering. Art is made to console. He insists Rembrandt createdclair-obscurjust as Phidias createdline. New art, outside law and vision of pagan Greece, must derive from Rembrandt.
He thinks that the power to put into a work of art more significance than the creator suspects is done by them whose hearts are perfectly true, they who hold in the soul something greater than art. This means it is the rich heritage of them who have lived.
Redon remarked: “When I am alone I can love the highways.” Tu Fu, a poet of Eighth Century China, sang:
“I find that I like to walk alone.”
“I find that I like to walk alone.”
“I find that I like to walk alone.”
Thinking, evidently, is a thing outside of time. Redon says that with God, he can enjoy natural things. I prefer rough ways, uncultivated spaces, untouched by the human hand. I even love black woods when they are sad. I love wild storms, abundant rain, cold, snow and the frost. I love these harsh things men grumble over. They even keep a language which enchants me.
Long ago Redon felt sensitively the coming of the dangerous, scientifically minded New World; an age dry of emotion. He exclaimed in words touched with both grief and fear: “Plastic art is dead, because the wind of the infinite has blown upon it.” That is exactly what science will prove to be;the wind of the infinite.
Somewhere else I recall, he declares that the superiority of the Christ is the fact that all loved Him without argument. Over the memory of man there floated the candor of His smile, and the fact that He could love every one who approached Him.
This makes me remember a poet’s portrait of Christ, drawn by Leconte de Lisle. It is too lovely ever to forget:
“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée,Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu,Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scelléeO jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!
“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée,Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu,Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scelléeO jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!
“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée,Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu,Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scelléeO jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!
“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée,
Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu,
Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scellée
O jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!
The boyish Christ, a halo of flame about His head, wandering along the shores of Galilee. Humanities last God.”
The dilettante plays. The great artist learns to suffer; creating is the pendant of unselfish anguish.
“How good it is to read in a quiet room!” Redon exclaims—“with a window upon a forest.” He could say that, because he had not permitted the tumult of the world to touch his heart. That was a finer thing to do than to collect dollars. Success, what is popularly called so, is more or less vulgar, and a little too noisy now-a-days.
Redon is a poet in words without suspecting it. Hear him!
Painters—go look upon the sea!There you will find color, find light;And a deep sky that lives.There you will catch song of the sands,Countless imperceptible shadowings,You will come strengthened back from the sea,Until the great word will be yours.
Painters—go look upon the sea!There you will find color, find light;And a deep sky that lives.There you will catch song of the sands,Countless imperceptible shadowings,You will come strengthened back from the sea,Until the great word will be yours.
Painters—go look upon the sea!There you will find color, find light;And a deep sky that lives.
Painters—go look upon the sea!
There you will find color, find light;
And a deep sky that lives.
There you will catch song of the sands,Countless imperceptible shadowings,You will come strengthened back from the sea,Until the great word will be yours.
There you will catch song of the sands,
Countless imperceptible shadowings,
You will come strengthened back from the sea,
Until the great word will be yours.
It is under the charm of autumn evenings that I resume my memories. There is something in this season that turns my thoughts toward the past. It is sad, a little. It helps recall that which is gone. In my soul it makes silence; sweet and discreet, like autumn leaves that drop.
Once Redon met a man named Chenavard who had known Delacroix. This was in 1878. The man’s memories of the great painter gave him impulse to paint, he states. Delacroix always stood at his easel, or else he walked rapidly back and forth, whistling an opera of Rossini’s. The man could not forget the abandon, fertility, power of invention,the fury, of Delacroix.
Redon insists that success can destroy and then pervert an artist’s sense of beauty. And he was of the opinion that it is in winter when music has its greatest influence. It belongs to the skies of the evenings of winter, with their silence. Music is art of night and its dreams. But painting belongs to day and the sun!
Exactitude, truth, action, are of the domain of words. Therefore not native to Germany, land of music, abstract thought, visions. It is most at home in France, in England. He dislikes the music of England.
He loved the Basque Country. The soil seemed an ancient fatherland where he must have lived, loved, suffered. There the wandering winds of summer, the slightest motion of water, sound of the human voice, awoke imperious memories. Everything touched his heart.
In life we may be always stumbling upon our ancient and forgotten dwelling places, where in some other dress of flesh we played. One life for the manifold mind is inconceivable, for its uselessness, its injustice. Lives are multiple. Science will teach us how,some day, to remember.
In Holland he was unhappy. He felt fear like a child, in that melancholy country, filled with the inexplainable silences of water; strange, too dim shadow-lighting; and a sky where rain clouds shift.
The brush of Franz Hals won him. He says that if genius ever proved itself nature’s outlaw, it is in the paintings Hals made after eighty. Then to Hals came fresh fluency, supreme disdain of details. Then genius deluged him with the power to fling forth reality.
He refuses to worship Rubens, because Rubens never suffered. He who has not suffered can not attain excellence. But Rubens touched his painter’s sense to emotion. Rubens has all greatnesses, all richnesses. But he has not suffered! Therefore I refuse to place him among the few. Masters are always alone, bowed beneath weight of lofty power.
He dwells upon the prolific exuberance of the few who take no account of creative energy. At length they sweep beyond human, beyond material limits. Dürer was one of these, when, to illustrate little books, he made designs too grandiose for walls of antique palaces, vainly dreaming there would be at least a few who could comprehend him.
Redon lived the life worth while. What a vulgar stupidity is money beside it! It can give neither ideas, emotions, nor even comprehension or appreciation of what money can buy. The pure joy of the heart is honey. It dwells hidden in deep centers of flower-gold. It is not easy to find nor procure. God has to send his winged messengers to collect the honey of the heart.
Seeing is supposed to be something of general possession. The fact is, it is unusual. It is not eyes which keep men from being blind. Once some savages from Tierra del Fuego came to France. Redon looked at them. He called them proud, haughty, cruel, powerful, grotesque. They made him vision the perished primitive world. He found in them grandeur. He saw all the other grandeurs of civilization, too, shine in their eyes. He enjoyed their uncorrupted, plastic beauty. They were rare bronzes; fine, firm. They had not learned the error of decoration.
He found nudity sublime. He compared them with luxurious, motionless, royally expanded, radiant flowers of tropic India. He longed to see their bronzed and splendid flesh encircled with monstrous forest growths, or stretched out on sand that is hard and smooth.
Chamfort thought that people with cold, reasoning minds exist, but only the impassioned know how to live; I too am most grateful for the rare times I have had strength to leap petty, picket fences which shut in the too safe, the usually relied upon; when I have dared, kept to faith of self.
They do wrong who mock the testimony of the saints, the seers, such as Saint Teresa of Avila. There must be facts beyond the registering of commonplace faculties. Just as there are musicians and painters, with their special endowments, there are people great insoul-power, possessing, perhaps, extra-terrestrial vision.
Goethe’s mind was clear and fine. He always wished he could have had more details about the statements of St. John, which allured then troubled him. But Goethe was too great to deny the unknown or mock the unmeasured genuine. He could guess what wonders might dwell there. They who go ahead, go guided by something greater than man’s reason.
Redon speaks of his art as a little door opening upon mystery. He insists thinking people are crushed by the grandeur of problems they try to solve. Sometimes such people possess heart, however, then they begin to comprehend.
Redon admired Degas. But he declared that the admiration of Degas for Ingres was of the head not of the heart. He thinks Degas marks the first halt in the journey to New World art. He calls him free, joyous, exultant artist.
Once Redon exclaims fretfully: “I can’t speculate about Alsace-Lorraine. How could I? Art is the refuge of the peace-loving, where can be no disputed frontiers. Wars are made by dull, imperfect, fragmentary minds, minds incapable of lofty logic, where suddenly a part assumes the false significance of a whole. In short, merely a loss of mental perspective.”
I do not often procure pleasure from reading Proust. His thoughts, the meat of the matter, are substantial, satisfying enough, if not alluring. But I do not like stumbling through so many twisting, cluttered alleys. His prose is dowdy. I do not call Proust a neglected genius. In the human realm (in word art) he is a plant which did not possess that which permits to flower. Proust’sSwanhelps date the death of creative art.
Among the things I regret, such as not looking upon the face of Loti, is not having had the opportunity to listen to the conversation of Anatole France, or rather, his monologues. They who had that opportunity tell me he was even greater there than in his writing, whose finished, scornful, scholarly paganism, gives me little, shining gold grains of joy. Nicholas Ségur writes enchantingly of the conversation of France.
Great artists, perhaps, possess the power to live always on the crest of emotions, which create or transform worlds for them at will. That is an element of genius. Other people rise to it under pressure of something extraordinary.
I have found pleasure in looking upon the backs of athletes, in bronze, marble, flesh, and the bodies of great beasts, such as tigers, lions, panthers. I have loved them partly for their beauty, and partly for their intensity. They are proud, powerful moments made tangible. They are highly perfected things where power focusses. Sometimes they are terrible. Then they possess the too keen beauty of bewilderment.
The sculptor Bourdelle has caught this fascinating something which fascinates, by blending beauty with terror. Then the two are elevated to uncontested power.
I saw some prose of Bourdelle, just a few lines, which charmed me more than the work of his chisel. He was holidaying in happiness. I surprised him.
Sometimes Millet’s letters are finer than his paintings or etchings. And I know Fromentin’s work with the pen surpassed the brush.
Another person I longed to look upon in the flesh was Vivekânanda, who left a princely life of mediæval splendor in the Orient to come to America to teachThe Way.
In his young manhood, in India, when the insensitive, dazzled crowd caught sight of him in the street, they thought that he must be a God, because no human being could be at once so superb and so beautiful. And with one acclaim they shouted:SIVA!
All gifts had been lavished upon him, both physical and mental. He danced the sacred dances of his magic and ancient land like a master. His singing voice was glorious and trained, and beyond normal in range and power. His stature and strength were unusual. He was brilliant and learned. And he renounced everything to become a priest.
I took long journeys and went to far places, where he was announced to lecture, only to find that that day some one else lectured in his stead. For me to look upon him was not to be. He was example of a kind of mind the West has not produced.
He admired the Christ. It chanced to be upon Christmas Eve when he determined to renounce the world. During his early preaching days he used to say to his followers:Go ye and become Christs!Around camp fires, at night, in remote, lonely, Indian settlements, he related the story of The Crucified.
I did see Duse, however, whom I had longed to see, although it was when she was old. Like Vivekânanda she was great of soul. To her and her power, years were inconsequential.
I did not admire Bernhardt. Deep in her nature there was too much that was vulgar, coarse—not fine. She had a too keen eye for the box office. She was, of course, an accomplished technician. Duse possessed that which made the art of primitive people supreme, the pleasure-and-pain-distilled honey of the heart.
Flaubert insists that art is to speculation what heroism is to morality—something useless.
Of Flaubert’s books, of which I am a reader, I likeL’Education Sentimentalebest. Flaubert was in the Orient two years. What must he not have seen, he who owned amazing color sense! From oriental mind he gained new splendors, fresh conceptions, all of which we can sense in his salon-piece,Salammbô, and inHerodias. Palaces and ruins he saw in India aided him in building those tremendous architectural backgrounds of his Carthage. His eyes had seen, in the marvelous East, such things realized.
It is only in case of weak, inconsequential books that men can argue about realism, romanticism,schools. Great things are above mind-mapping distinctions. They are all things at once. God has touched them. He has said:Let there be life!
Chateaubriand declared that we paint well only our hearts, and genius is merely assembled memory. Of course he meant memory distributed through many different lives, in æons of time. In his haste he condensed explanation.
I wonder in how many other lives I saw some such city as Venice drifting with magic eloquence upon an opal sea! Venice, like Venus, is a God and sea-born.
It is passing strange, this combination of memory and allurement from which I can not get free. It is peril. It is unsealing a too deep past, and then stealing the forgotten.
I even love summer in Venice. I love the hot Italian nights and the glamour, the strangely irritating scent of the green lagoons. I love the consciousness of all the glowing, unseen paintings in its closed, vast palaces, and the beauty of its people made to paint, and the giant magnolias which light dark, windless nights like mimic moons. I never before measured accurately the torture of something one can not forget.
What a background was Venice for such men as Titian, Marco Polo, Aretino, and Casanova who made a profession of love and delight, not to mention all the patricians of the 16th Century whom Yriarte reproduced in words for us! Pompeo Molmenti has written gloriously of Venice; all its grandeur he has shown; its gilt, dramatic decadence. Albert Dürer was in Venice once. Think what his eyes could see there! Dürer loved the sumptuous just as Rembrandt did. Dürer was one of the first Europeans to try to learn about, then exploit, the loveliness of great Indian palaces. A soul as rich as his always spends lavishly for poorer fellow men. It maddened De Regnier just the same as it maddens me. And for quarter of a century he wrote about it.
The sight of night falling upon Venice shakes me. It keeps the eloquence of dim fatality. Night should not fall there!
I wish I could have seen Goldoni’s Venice! That was the rich, the marvelously expanding Eighteenth Century. Or the Byzantine Venice of the earlier Middle Age! And then there was Renaissance Venice, violent and splendid, purple and dramatic, and Roccoco Venice which Emma Ciardi has painted with languorous, emotional light, and much lavish, clown-white satin.
La Rosalba painted there. Gabriel Soulages wrote this of La Rosalba:
La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushesTook up a drop of gold.One single drop of gold:With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine.
La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushesTook up a drop of gold.One single drop of gold:With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine.
La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushesTook up a drop of gold.One single drop of gold:With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine.
La Rosalba disdaining for a day his paints and brushes
Took up a drop of gold.
One single drop of gold:
With it he drew upon the flank of this great antique vase the Muses Nine.
Venice where men painted with gold and dreamed with gems. Sumptuous, dead Capital City of an Old World that now too is dying! A symbol of loveliness! When the Spanish Conquerors first caught sight of what is now Mexico City they exclaimed:The Venice of the Aztecs!
As soon as time began to be considered something that could be measured, controlled, then sold for counted pieces of silver, the property of man in short, the making of things fine began to come to an end. Books were rare possessions in days care-free of time, when there was but one objective,quality.
I recall aCICEROmade in Venice in 1495, with a cover design by Julien des Jardins, which for sheer loveliness is something to linger over. In the center of the cover there is a panel of St. Yves, surrounded by a border of mingled roses and lilies. One could sit and hold it for days, to gain comprehension of the soul of design.
There is aTHUCYDIDESprinted in Italy in 1483, in a Neapolitan gilt binding, that holds in middle of the cover something that simulates a gold expanding sun—superb and surprising, with its rich seeming of dazzling, scattered light. This was made as gift for an Aragon King.
There were printing presses in an early day in Sicily, Messina, where now, since Ætna’s repeated earth shakings, America is busy in building rows of useful and remarkably ugly dwellings.
How arts sprang up and then flowered in early Sicily! The soil seemed to suit them. When Cardinal Bembo was Secretary to Pope Leo X, he wrote a little book about Ætna, which fascinated him, and which the Aldine Press was pleased to dress lavishly in print.
From Sicily,Girgenti(now a dim poignantly lovely ruin), there came, in the old days, a monk, by name Nicolas Valla, who rewrote in resonant, heroic, Latin verse theLittle Flowers of St. Francis. Then he printed them with adorable wood-cuts, in Florence, in 1498. I vaguely remember, too, that there was a vagabond mediæval printer, from Sicily, by that name, Valla, who did a few rare books on his little press, in old Italian cities, through which he wandered.
Rare books of Germany, rich in variety and number of their wood-cuts, all bear about the same date.Hrotsvitha, printed in Nuremburg in 1501, with cuts by Albrecht Dürer.Saint Brigitta, Nuremburg, 1481. A book by Jornandes, a kind of history of Gothic people, was made in Augsburgin 1515. The wood-cuts are remarkable, by several hands, and some of them signed. Many German cities put out these exquisite things before time began to be considered. Anyone of them can fill even an humble dwelling with beauty, like the sun the fields.
But what is significant in the fact, is that the making of things supremely fine reached height and then began to decline at time of discovery of the Americas. As soon as the Twin Continents were flung so suddenly upon the Markets of Time, when gold, emeralds, pearls, silver of a New World, began to distend European pockets, with means to measure then buy the unbuyable,Time, the making of objects of beauty slowly ceased. Even Venice and Genoa began to lose prestige, to shrink to small subsidiary ports. A new, a surprisingly different turn was given to the human mind.
The Americas are the fateful Continents. Slowly they have destroyed the great living that existed before. And now they are forming the background for the New World, the dangerous scientific world, when values will be made over, and nothing will be as it was before, not even gods. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the death of beauty.
Some of the new and extreme schools of writing, of art in general, are merely expressions of weakness. The mind is registering wonder, uncertainty, and fear, at tremendous change. A close-up that is too sudden has caused temporary loss of mental poise. And with it has come the slower comprehension, that the old arts are dying, that they can not live on, because they will not be needed nor able to interest anyone, nor even amuse, in a scientific world.
I have read novels in German all my life and now I am asking myself why I do not have the impulse to write about them. There must be a reason. But I can not find it. I do not think that the English tongue carries German printed art any too well, when it is translated.
It is silly to say that people love different things. But sometimes it is necessary. Our friends love us only when we are foolish and they can look down upon us. A dangerous gesture always.
Some women when they are young love kittens, dogs, dolls or men, and always themselves, because they can not see themselves. As for me, I have loved words. Only words could give me the supreme emotion,because they were suffering strange and inexplainable change, which enchanted then puzzled me; transformations of sound, sense, down long alley-ways of time and living; and calling with voices changefully beautiful and broken, keeping always beyond the magic of perfect realization, and in addition, like a false love, prodigal of promises, infinite and unkept. The emotion of words, with their different rhythmic passions, in many races, in many lands, lured me. Following etymological laws, I have watched them, like gay actors on a stage in a play that never ends, put swiftly on varying vowel and consonant raiment. I have held my breath at the capricious orders of change. I have felt delight at their fresh grotesqueness.
Words are our oldest playmates. There is nothing else save the air we breathe with which so long we have been in contact.
At this moment, as a civilization changes, a period of time comes to an end, (and all else is useless and time-stained), women who play Bridge, patronize Beauty Parlors, fly in aeroplanes, use the root-words their Ayrian ancestors used, upon Indian highlands, at time of the dispersal of races, when they saysew—Indiansiv. Since then the physical body has been made over in some degree, gods and religions have come and gone, the human voice has circled the globe and man learned to fly like the birds, but the little, helpless, drifting word with which we cry remains the same.
InEl Modernismo, Poetas Modernistas, R. Blanco-Fombona has written an interesting, comprehensive, and necessary book about South American poets, and poets of old Spain.
He has related some facts which explain the discussed mystery of the meaning of theGreat Nocturnof Silvá. He says that where the poet speaks of their shadows (Silvá and his sister, Elvira) meeting, he is relating, in his grief, a memory of their childhood. Once they went, in summer, to a dwelling, high in the Andes, for cooler air. At night upon a balcony, with the house lights behind them, Silvá and Elvira were standing, while the flickering lamp’s flame painted their gigantic, grotesque shadows across the night-black mountains.
My translation was made long ago, the first translation of Silvá into any language.