THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST (continued 4)

Hardy’s books bespeak leisure; leisure to observe, think, live, write. They are to be read, leisurely, with loving attention to small details. They are made to sip like wine whose supply is not great and may not be made again. He does not believe in art written in shorthand.

I like to contemplate his England: England of stately, ordered living, great country homes; of love of forests and fields; and the sustained interest in noble scholarly things, in extensive knowledge of masters of Greek and Latin.

The feeling for caste is strong, reflecting truthfully the England he knew, that feeling for class, which the new civilization will destroy.

Old age comes soon in Hardy’s novels, and lessening of courage. He lacks faith in life through excessive sensitiveness. His men are middle aged at thirty.

Sometimes there is Miltonic ring to a sentence of Hardy’s. This, for instance: “Grimness was in every feature and to its very bowels the universal shape (cliff) was desolation.”

The words Milton used have lost edge in today’s speaking, I notice by observing afresh the above. We do not feel as Milton did, the full, far ring of their meaning. We use a lot of words we partially sense, instead of few we sense in entirety. When I read books of English writers of long ago I have sensation of handling bright, crisp coins. The words of Milton are large, clear, round, beautiful.

The story of the youth of England as Hardy depicts it is story of martyrdom transferred from Rome to Victorian England. It is not easy to believe it could have changed so since Merrie England. This, joy-destroying puritanism is as out of reason as licentiousness.

Fate strikes in the Hardy novels with inexorableness of Greek tragedy. Did he learn this from life? Or did he imbibe it as rule of creation from careful, classical training? The physical world Hardy shows is lovely. The spiritual world is stern and life difficult, where natural right wears garb of wrong.

Hardy believes in fickleness of women. To him they remain Biblical characters, creatures under a curse, workers of woe, whom he has seen at a distance and not well. He lavishes phrases upon them, careful meticulous description, but still he does not paint them understandingly. Only a roué could do that, who had found favor with them, and who knew their hearts. I do not believe he admired women greatly, except those whom he created to suit himself, and only fleetingly then, as one admires, then regrets, beautiful glass which is broken. Hardy has seen life and judged it, in light of the puritan Scriptures.

In conversation among workers on thriving Wessex farms, men of the field, forest, there is something Shakespearian. There again is the tough, dependable fibre of England, England of conquest. And no one has loved better than he its fields, spring-time and harvest; and its brave, mist-covered, protecting sea. How many dawns, how many sweet noons of summer, he has patiently watched it, or observed with critical eyes of connoisseurship, then loved it deeply!

His sense of humor must not be neglected. Not kindly American humor be it said, nor brilliant, crackling Irish humor, like hoar frost on clear, thin crystal, but one that is English, like an English sun, shining persistently (which is the habit of suns), but, never burning with brightness, something, however, we ought to be grateful for, because of reliability, as English people are grateful for niggard, hard-fought living. The happiness, grief, discreet merriment of his stories are framed just as the life of England is framed, against background of ancient churches. They are a series of pictures within eloquent curves of mullioned, Gothic windows.

Human love (with Hardy) got mixed with religion. He expected women to resemble saints. Life did not come to his expectation. He could not love where he could not reverence. So he passed it by. He had puritan inability to make concessions. Puritanism, without his knowledge, ingrained life, until it fashioned dreams. He could not forget and be happy, in the present beauty of a thing as it is, without inquiring minutely into condition of its soul, both before and after. The pagan put in practice this, forget. The puritan never learned the noblest teaching of his faith, forgive.

I have enjoyed vastly traveling with Hardy along fresh, green, sea-bound highways of the land he loved, with the bracing sea breeze in my face, my hair, and lazy, long winged sea-birds wheeling over head. I have enjoyed the peace of old-fashioned country gardens under high heat of noon, and his quaint, careful naming of old time garden-flowers. And I have liked, too, sometimes feared, the tragic lonely blackness of the downs at night, with only the wild, steel-grey flash of the far away sea and above my head dim, forgotten stars. He has flashed moments of sensation upon me which I treasure. He is always sincere, and sometimes great, because he can both think and feel. The keenest memory he has left with me, is of the roads and the forests of Wessex.

In the novel of the mid Nineteenth Century the Jew has been too often exploited as the modern roué. This is injustice. Neither history nor observation justify it. To mention a few books because they are important and led the way, which prove this, I call attention to The Harlot’s Progress, by Balzac, Zola’s Nana, Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis, and many a short story by Maupassant. In each a rich Jewish banker uses wealth to buy women. And in each the character of the Jew is so similar it could be lifted from one book to the other without injury to the mise-en-scène. They are Jews from Germany. They have similar names, Steiner, Hafner. Their methods of procedure, business enterprises, amusements, ambition, home life are the same. This is true likewise of La Garçonne, the book by Victor Margueritte, of which France has expressed disapproval. The Jew in Zola’s Nana, seems lifted over, with this new book.

The blond courtesans in all are alike, too. It is peculiar that courtesans of the world of fiction, women who have been thoroughly bad, have been blonde.

The history of the antique world happens to corroborate this. She has been the type without heart, soul; most lustful, mercenary, cruel, uncaring. What was back of this? Was it borrowed impulse handed on, or was it reason founded upon observation?

The vocabulary of Hugo and Zola is tremendous. No other French writers are comparable. Hugo of course is the greater. Coming from their fluent range to moderns, Duhamel for instance, is like coming to one-syllable words on a baby’s blocks. The range of the two older writers is prodigious. One can not help but be impressed by virtuousity. It is astonishing, the swinging around the head of the dictionary of a race.

Only French and Russians have understood, then portrayed faithfully in fiction, the natures of women. Beside Zola and Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, the best of the English are cold, and a little dull. The bonfire of vision which illuminates is seldom at their command; the thin-edged penetration. Restraint of soul hinders. Some insufficiency hobbles, keeps the writer poised in a safe, less poignant place. In the seeing he is seldom able to forget, then create from the unmeasured which is beyond self. He stands in his shadow. There is a habit not to carry the novel to its logical end as was way with the great Frenchmen. In brittle, new-world atmosphere, the subject crumbles long before the supreme moment. Now our novelists are writing dull imitations of difficult, melancholy, sad-skied Russian novels, trying to make believe they suit our light, bright, lyrically dramatic atmosphere, and our young land, where promise is paramount, and experience and wisdom slight.

In the person of Nana, the courtesan, proud Venus of the modern world, Zola symbolized the ultimate fall, then decay of France through unrestrained living. Powerful prose is here. It is style founded upon plasticity of logically marshalled fact. It is great in reach, conviction, resonance.

The balanced exigencies of life Zola could feel, then express. His exposition resembles the regal unfolding of a rose. It is full, natural, complete. The result is fine, intellectual satisfaction.

Zola, in Nana, speaks of the forties as the dangerous age for women. This may have suggested the novel by that name: Das Gefährliche Alter. (The Dangerous Age.)

Zola’s unfolding an idea, then pushing logical progression on, in sequence after sequence, is remarkable. With security he steps from the individual to the universal. His novel construction resembles an uncoiling spiral; tiny at first, scarcely larger than a dot; at last, huge enough to embrace the universe. Nana is a little outcast of the Parisian gutter. When he finishes the novel she has been lifted to represent not only Paris, then France, but the devouring sin of Latin peoples; passion, debauchery, lust. And still he is not satisfied with sublime expanding of idea. On, on he goes, a god now, marching toward unseen worlds! Before our astonished eyes we see Nana symbolizing the world-force the Greeks named Venus, which the pagan soul of Zola believes still to rule.

In his Rome, too, he shows world forces again, again expanding, magnificently triumphant. Over them, queening it as of yore, stands the glorified Venus of the Greeks, meaning that natural impulses in the heart outlast laws made to subdue them, just as after building, destroying again what is built, the red earth remains, insolent, sullen, but always dominant.

History tells how poor people of Rome went, for generations, to the crumbling Colosseum for material with which to build humble homes. Just so today lesser novelists go to these massive creative monuments, such as Zola’s Rome, for purpose of a similar quarrying. The tiny germ for little novels, stories, is concealed in these giant accumulations. We find what may have been initial impulse for Imperial Purple, by Saltus. We recall Zola saying, in this book, that the imperial purple of the Caesars has slipped down upon the shoulders of the priests. Here is the ghost of Bourget’s Cosmopolis. In the labyrinths of Zola’s rich, masterful Rome not only these books, but others I might name, float, disembodied shadows.

There are only a few novelists counting all races. They can be counted on fingers of the hand. Other novels are woven out of the floating, uncounted richly wasteful threads of the great. In the little popular story tellers of any day or race, there are few ideas, seldom profound seeing nor anything worth while. There are few originators. The works of Zola marked the death of the old novel. Zola is not using imagination, but the cold observation of the scientist. The scientific mind is dawning.

The fear which was to make Maupassant mad is the hidden, dramatic motif in his stories. It sat in his brain weaving patiently a Penelope-web, which, at last, smothered him. Maupassant was cynic, sensualist, and sumptuous master of the hidden soul. He touches the heart, the intellect, and the senses.

Timon le Magnifique, (Max Daireaux), is a merited satire upon today, its playthings, its vain, but would-be serious toys, a clever synthesis, usually false, of how something may be made out of nothing. It is written in a cold, detached manner. But I should not be surprised if it were aimed at individuals of Paris. Cubist, futurist art, is skillfully enough interpreted. There is sincerity. Often there is perception. And there does not seem to be more malice than necessary. The temper of mind of the central personality is characterized by lukewarmness. The frail story gives opportunity to display reflections about life, which have, as motive persistent disillusion, and no small amount of scorn of that human animal, man. It is the tragic skepticism of a world, once eloquent, at fire heat, now tepid, among men who are weaker, who have fewer moments of grandeur. There were things said brilliantly but without emotion. Fine food, served cold. Take it or leave it, I do not care. If you can think, you will see I am right.

It would have been as well if the author of Timon le Magnifique had hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story. The display room would have been less obstructed.

Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work. To every person his own wheels!

A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction. The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly, with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents.

De Wandelende Jood (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It banished inclination to read anything else.

The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon form alone.

The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind, of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “Hij ging, het hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande in hem de zachte vlam van Christus.” This shadows forth—this story of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the Hebrew race.

It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome: Zola’s Rome. Serao’s Conquista de Roma. Lagerlof’s Rome. Pater’s Rome in Marius, with its memories of the wolves and snow of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he reads Suetonius, the Twelve Caesars. Ricarda Huch’s Rome. Niebuhr’s Rome is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s Cosmopolis, which is Rome again.

Serao shows us Rome in Lettere d’una Viaggiatrice, a splendid piece of the kind of resonant prose, she only knew how to make. Goethe’s pictures in letters to friends in Germany, and in that remarkable verse-sequence, Die Römische Elegien, and Winklemann’s Rome, cold, plastic, devoid of color. I refer to what Winklemann called his little writings of Greek and Roman art, and the majestic, almost too glorious Rome of d’Annunzio. It is interesting to follow reactions of such people of power as these to the call of the Eternal City. In the opening lines of d’Annunzio’s Il Piacere, there are sentences so luxurious, silken, they remind me of rich reflections upon old Venetian velvet.

Loti, accomplished savoureur of all that was exquisite in space or in time, steered carefully from Rome the Mighty. Rome, divine and immortal, lured the immortals. Other superb cities have known and felt the magic of his art. But Rome he left untouched.

Edward Lucas White’s novel of Rome, Andivius Hedulio, is a moving-picture scenario printed in book form. It is a large and attractive skeleton, wearing a little more flesh than skeletons in good society have been in the habit of wearing, even in New York.

The most brilliant author’s introductions I know are those Nietzsche, Poet of Philosophy, has written for books of his epoch-making thinking. No one has been able to throw surer, more far-reaching noose over the problematical future. His Jenseits v. Gut u. Böse he called philosophy of the future. That is daring. It may be true. It is conceivable at least, a world in which good and evil, as we understand them, may not be standardized. Life cast huge shadows for Nietzsche, like childhood’s flickering fireplace-shadows, on the wall. His philosophy is these stalking shadows, terrifying sometimes, astonishing and always superhuman, these shadows of men who live.

Truth does not stand still and let us build clean, white, picket fences around it, and label it Exhibit A. It changes, takes new forms, under new suns. There is nothing fixed, eternal, except the pitiful drama of man, and the hopeless hope in his heart. It may be real; at the same time, it is unstable as the sea.

It would not be easy to be happy, even keep sane, and look upon existence with the scorn with which Nietzsche viewed it. A bitter, laughing tongue with deadly penetrating power, was his. As the French Revolution cleared the air for different social, economical living, the philosophy of Nietzsche (by surprising power to destroy), helps clear the atmosphere for less prejudiced thinking.

Nietzsche is the mischievous boy in school of the old philosophers. He insists upon knocking down with hard, well-made paper balls, the idols they set up. He is brilliant phrase maker. He transforms the heavy, slightly ponderous German tongue to frothiness of French. He stands behind it with up-lifted whip, cruelly lashing it to fresh agilities. His word acrobatics are worth considering. Yet he is seldom pleased with the result. He can not, like little people, rejoice in what he himself has done. The outlines of words as they are do not suit him. He shades them. He sets them differently. He cuts off edges. He insists they no longer falsify his thought. No written statement suits him. He wishes it a little different. The exactitude of his thinking is superb. It is difficult for words, whose sense boundaries are not exact, to express it.

Wonderful, lightening clear, shining, far, problematical glimpses he flashes forth. In certain, to him inconsequential asides, he is Prophet of Hebraic height. It is in words like these, of great thinkers, with prodigious power of self-projection, that living men gain idea of the civilizations that are on the way.

There are few more distinguished literary critics than Nietzsche. His seeing is revealing. He has few superiors in sympathetic appreciation of the printed word in hands of a master. He has fine ear for music of the sentence, too. No subtlety, no fineness, is lost. What he says about Petronius makes me long to read him again after the years. It fills me with zest, with pleasure. “Wer endlich dürfte gar eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen der mehr als irgend ein grosser Musiker bisher der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in Erfindung, Einfallen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sumpfen der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der Alten Welt, wenn man wie er, die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athen, den Befreienden Hohn eines Windes, der alles gesund macht indem er alles laufen macht!” Nietzsche wants to know who would dare make a translation into German of this book by Petronius, who more than any other of the great musicians, was master of the presto! What magnificent things Nietzsche writes about him! He insists he had the swift feet of the wind, and the wind’s breath, which clears and makes clean, with a scorn that sets free, and so forth. Here I found again that Feast of Trimalchion I stumbled through dully in school days, and later read with zest, while glorious visions of Rome brought from Latin poets, likewise from etchings of Piranesi, crowded my memory as I read.

Nietzsche makes the same statement Hardy makes. There is no writing today for the ear. There are no architects of the sonorous sentence, sculptured phrase, hinting at vast resources, wherein a multitude of minds could swarm and find safety; no sentence of mighty curve, powerful sweep. Cicero wrote such sentences. So did Demosthenes. Speech is crumbling. The rock is fretting itself back again to sand. It is no longer strong enough to contend with the forces of creation, chaos, the desolating forces so rapidly destroying the old, it is suitable now for petty writers, the little men, and the wilful winds. A force of disintegration is at work. That is why the little men with swollen ego are able to handle it, then feel proud.

Nietzsche impresses me as an artist gone wrong rather than philosopher sang pur. He makes reasoning conform to eye-delight in noble line, distinguished color. He feels, he enjoys first, thinks afterward. Sometimes he impresses me as an artist who did not have courage to try his artist’s wings, who felt, feared, perhaps, they were feeble. So he fell back upon brilliant, learned, fault-finding. He became the distinguished spier-out of men’s weaknesses. It is not easy for Nietzsche to see without passion. To see with passion is not of the philosopher. His seeing is bound too closely to the emotions of self. His hatreds, his envies, play commanding part. His hatred, for example, for Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Spencer, Locke, Carlyle, and so forth, and so forth. And his envy of Wagner and the Songs of Schumann. A strange combination of opposites for a man of his gifts!

But it is a powerful, outreaching comprehension such as is not given to two of one race in a generation. In Nietzsche I think sometimes I found what the word comprehension means, (namely), a wide reaching out, then a skillful pulling together of many far powers, with the quick, firm, magic welding into one; the swift, clean focus.

However important Nietzsche may be as philosopher, I am sure his greatest merit is as master of words. In the German tongue, his is virtuosity. He recreates the language, as a Pope once said d’Annunzio had done with Italian. He has made possible a new, a different tempo. He has increased too its flexibility. Ruskin has not written with greater joy of art of Turner, than Nietzsche of music that charmed him. Nietzsche can do such things with words as Wagner with tone. The power of the two has kinships broader than racial, the kinship of men who had climbed patiently to heights.

Nietzsche declares that the appearance of Napoleon in the world made Goethe change his opinion of man. Evidently Napoleon demonstrated something that not even the imagination of a Goethe could reach. The Little Grandson of the Great Revolution made men of genius open their eyes. In few has there been such will to power.

Wagner in music, and Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra, were among originators of modern art. Zarathustra was perhaps the first new verse. The movement has been carried on by other nations. I am not sure that Germany did not discover the modern world. England seldom originates.

Nietzsche speaks of loving the south as a school of healing. There we hear the poet. He thinks music in the north grows pale, yellow, sick for the sun. There his longing burst forth. There was something resplendent, tropical, luxurious, in Nietzsche, which the north could not let flower. The soul of Nietzsche resembled glowing canvasses of Turner. It was filled with the same bursts of light. He needed, to be happy, effective, some equatorial land of the soul, lighted by greater suns of forthcoming strange civilizations, whose boundaries are non-geographical, where his superhuman dreams could find encouragement. While his body was bounded by Germany, his mind lived anywhere, at will.

In modern art, even France is borrower, like England. France habituated to lead the way, because her new art came from Wagner, and the north. It was in the glowing, resplendent mirror of his music, that brilliant, receptive France, surprised at first and not a little vexed, caught the thought, vision, of strange, revolutionary, æsthetic ways, which later she tried to persuade herself she found first, then pursued alone. Wagner, in short, taught expression, something different. He was first to fit closely, and with skill, another garment to the soul, the soul that had changed after the Great Revolution, and was no more capable of holding proudly the princely toga.

The range of emotions, expressions, is greater in modern art than in classic art. And certainly more richly, subtly shaded. Modern art does not let a fragment slip away. It takes account of the ugly, brutal, disgusting, obscene. Classical art preserved only beauty. It skimmed the cream, then threw the milk away. The ages have made us poor. Now we must take care of the milk beneath. Now we must set about making cheese. Now we must not disdain peasant work.

Among early ones to take firm stand against the classic order, were Wagner with tone, Nietzsche with words, Delacroix with color. Classic art was a straight line. Modern art is a line infinitely curved. But fresh complexities were creeping into life, with gradual rise to power of the masses of voracious appetite, multiple mood. Art is not now for aristocrats of superb culture. It is not made for a lonely Petronius in the silence, the secrecy of a violet-perfumed palace.

I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans. I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth. The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual aristocrats, the people of trained taste.

The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome. It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad, mist-covered north.

That which is finest of the old civilization that is passing, of the culture, wisdom, faith, love, of two thousand years, is stored in the prose, the verse of France.

There slips into the best prose of French writers of great periods, phrases, sentences, from deeps of the subconscious, the world-soul, dwelling, in the powerful, seldom seen, creative places, that other races have neither been able to see, seize, nor make visible; a superb letting go of the ego. This is something we do not find. Our land is too new, young, too devoted to the fleeting thing self, which has progressed no further than today, than that reasoning mind with which as children we used to learn the multiplication table. The creating of art has no little in common with teaching of Eastern philosophies, the death of self. It, too, is an effect of time. It is proof of rich ripening, under multiple suns. Old World nations possess this in some degree. The sorrows of much living and contending faiths have taught them. In addition, Good wears many faces. Deeper spiritual revelation is theirs, enveloping, then penetrating the subject under discussion, with something sweeter, more eloquent, than the sumptuous sunsets of Lorraine, something to be sought among masters, as wild honey is sought in the forest. To the mind, indeed, that is what it resembles, The Taste of Honey. It is something that all but shatters with delight, blinds with unshakable truth. It is a lightning flash from the racial soul.

Among Greek writers I have thought of this. It has occurred to me most often perhaps when reading Aristophanes, a joy whose memory remains. Again it is in the superb, cumulative, spendthrift, piling of adjectives of Homer. It is in that on-rushing, resistless, cataract of verbal music of Æschylus.

I recall it in Quintillian. I recall it in Tertullian. And occasionally, but rarer, in Latin historians. It was in Catullus. And Virgil, the Eclogues, Georgics. It was something in solution in the world of that day, honey from the heart of man. Horace was too modern. Art was becoming fashionable, facile. He wrote with eye to what people would think, later say. But Virgil kept the seasoned sweetness of the past.

In writers of modern Spain I have seen it. In Galdós, the Episodios Nacionales, and its springing up again in the Spanish tongue, in South America.

In Italy, Italy of the great ages, it has been rich; d’Annunzio has been too proud perhaps to suffer, to learn with the patient anguish of the soul.

It has flowered best in France, the wild thyme, which goes to the making of honey. Consider Maurice de Guerin. Recall lines of Verlaine, Heredia! The great Balzac, Bazin, Bertrand, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Baudelaire, Flaubert the Magnificent, letters of peasant Millet, the diary of Fromentin in Africa, Huysman, Mallarmé, and the Little Grandson of the Great Renan, Ernest Psichari, in the book about Africa, The Centurion.

I recall an occasional line Rimbaud wrote before he was twenty, which gleams in my mind today like cut steel; hard, perfect, indestructible, cruel. The great poetry of France is prose, which is the world’s best.

When this rare quality is found in English writers, it is usually in those who have loved Greece, and expatriated their souls, except in case of early writers such as Chaucer, Swift, Spencer. Then there was another, a different England from that of today. As examples Pater, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Hewlett, the Brownings, Keats, Dowson, and so forth. England has written prose. In the calm, the repose, of her fields, her lovely, flower-girdled villages, her sea-sweet mornings, where she was able to order life as she wished, she should have written better. But we must admit her prose has been monumental. Today haste, (imported), a not well digested modernism, which does not become her, are working their will.

The distillation of living, wisdom learned from suffering, is in Russia, youngest of the European political family. Here emotion enriched the soul. Suffering has given it the ripened ivory of centuries. In Russia it is prose writers instead of poets, who have seized it.

I recall certain of Russia’s stern revealers of national life, in the prose novel, before whose pages I have sat spell-bound, shaken, tortured, by undeviating vision, while the Russian landscape swept swiftly before my eyes. As stylist no one surpasses Gogol. Poor, half mad, peasant Gogol of the magnificent phrase! The surface of the verse of Puschkin is words’ lightest fabric. It is moonlight enfolding thought. To touch it is to destroy it. Translating at best is doing the impossible.

I recall reading long ago, in a German translation, Die Familie Golowlef, by Scheschedrin, a novel whose strength lay in its monotony. It conquered, it became grand, terrifying, by the same power by which the African desert grows grand, monotony, a level unenlivened by hill, tree. It is a masterpiece. I remembered it vividly for years.

I have read them all, the novelists of Russia. They have saddened me. They have made me hopeless. They have made me, I trust, a little wiser. I am not big enough, to be sure, to face truth, their terrific revelations, I flee away to the glamour of the south, weakly I know, to songs born by shore of the blue Mediterranean, to light of a yellower sun, a land of white sculptured marble.

In Russia the human soul has been stripped, left naked, to ride the blast. The reading of Dostoievsky all but made me ill. The blinding light of that tortured, violent, revealing brain! The terrors he found in hearts of men. The added terror of cold, filth, disease, hunger! The sure, unswerving seeing that made no compromises.

Truth comes out of Russia. One must have suffered to face fact. Most people are brave because they ignore what they do not wish to see. People tell me they have never been the same, talked nor felt the same, after reading Dostoievsky. I, too, pagan that I am, have been sadder. I have glimpsed spaces of which I am afraid. I know now that the deserts of the mind are vast and terrifying. I have kept oftener, in pleasure, the arrière pensée. Before that, the Merrie England, gay France, (Italy), of Latin ancestors dwelled within me. I thought at least that peace might be, such peace as one finds amid the fairy fields, the flowers of England.

If any one should ask me to name my greatest pleasures, the things that give me unvarying joy, I should say immediately one is French prose. Then I should feel false and a traitor to symphonic music, rare textiles (for which I have a veritable passion), and old weaving, ancient Chinese drawing, made in ink of India, (Sumiye), and the sea.

But when I am ill, when I am sad, there are lines of French prose I repeat for sheer delight, with the dumb instinct of bringing joy back. Only once in a while down the ages can a man breathe such delight into words as Alphonse Daudet. The supremely great sentence can only be written through the great forgetting. One slight touch of the proud moment’s foolish consciousness destroys it.

In Daudet’s Contes du Lundi I usually begin with the words: Cette nuit le mistral était en colère. What a charmeur was Daudet! Vigorous, animated, lovable, and brilliant. The light and power of divine creative energy touches me, makes me clean, whole. Art like his has the life-giving power of God. The weak, the false, the broken, fade beside it, disappear. Then I go on to the description of the boats on the sunny Loire in Spring in Le Pape est Morte, the morning he ran away from school, and told his mother a lie about the Pope’s being dead, to escape a thrashing. I have always been glad he ran away! Next, Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale. The opening lines of short stories by Maupassant, where words have the fine, evocative precision of etching, with that beauty beyond no one can name: “Down there across the bay, that is Corsica you see fading away into the mist.” Maupassant’s story of love in the Eighteenth Century, that eloquent piece of unmoral scorn. I read Chateaubriand, whom Prince Metternich declared was in the habit of saying foolish things in noble prose. Passages from de Guerin, the one beginning. My old age regrets the rivers. Loti’s descriptions of the Orient.

Passages from the monumental Balzac, who, by the way, was not made for the ear, but for the mind. Sentences of André Gide, and the essays of Nicolas Ségur, the verses of Verlaine which I love:

Certain frail, pitiful phrases of forgotten love, from Mme. de Sévigné, dead long ago, but whose heart still beats. Mme. de Stael, whom Napoleon hated, never achieved the supreme phrase. She was logical, clear cut, sure, a problem in geometry. And plaintive, poignant Villon. Some of Manuel Galvez’ descriptions of the Argentine, in his novels about South America which are so fine, and Coelho Netto’s word-paintings of Brazil, and the fabulously luxurious life led on vast estates there.

The greatness of art of a race, is dependent upon the amount of joy, sweetness, heat stored in its heart by happiness. It can give only what is there. The joy of the ringing, triumphant clarions of the Roman legions, and the passion of Christ, echo in grand creative souls of France.

Perhaps great editors, competent critics, had something to do with making word-artists of France. If we have not had great writers in our country, neither have we great editors, at this moment, to sponsor them, great, judging from the power of perceiving, (the artist in the editor), not considering regularity of incoming dollars. Here an editor seldom passes judgment upon the thing per se. There must be an appetizer, so to speak, to lure him. More or less violent usually. And then there are his personal feelings toward the writer. The writing, itself, counts little.

One editor, for instance, finds a convict in a prison who can scribble. There is glory in discovery. He proclaims him. Commercialized publicity begins. He is likened to Dante in exile, and Ugo Foscolo. Country papers, having no opinions, copy abundantly, then praise. Soon it falls flat, because considered as poetry, its value was nil. The editor was not interested in poetry, but only in himself. The writing good or bad was not of the slightest importance, in his judging.

If a girl broncho buster on an Arizona plain is good at broncho busting, she is asked to write her opinion of the Apollo Belvedere. This is excellent illustration of what is meant; the thing per se does not count. In France it is the thing that does count.

I once knew a plaintive, romantic lady whose ambition was to be heir to something or somebody. Editors in America have the same romantic itch, only in their case, it is itch to be a discoverer.

I am interested in Conrad in criticism. He is troubled by Balzac, penetrated by the perfection of Maupassant, haunted by the heights of Flaubert. He could not accommodate himself to looking upon his own work in the furious emotions they create. But why should he wish to drag Conrad into such company? Only the Latin mind, I suppose, and Bielinsky, have achieved impersonal criticism.

I had a wonderful time reading Heine! In my cheap edition the books cost three cents, or five. I wish I could have it over again!

My mother knew that I was good-for-nothing, so she did not try to make anything out of me. It was good sense on her part. She let me idle and read. In reading I was out of the way, quiet, and as usual, useless. At the same time I was the scandal of a reasonable, hard-headed family who liked to work, and who knew without doubt in which direction to go. When I was learning Russian minus a teacher, at eighteen, they, my aunts, cousins, used to peer at me through windows, door cracks, then whisper tragically to each other: “She has looked at one page an hour! No one but a fool would do that!”

To them I have remained a fool. My grandmothers loved me too much to call me that. I have since wondered if in love there be not wisdom, distilled genius of perception. Love always dwells somewhere in the realms of light. What was reading Russian at eighteen, in comparison with making buttonholes that were not round like hogs’ eyes at both corners, or cream puffs that did not split? When the women could not think of any fresh gossip, they fabricated a new story about me, my laziness. To them work was hand-work.

Happy days of life, however, were spent in a lonely, ugly, sun-and-wind-beaten, prairie village, reading in a dozen or more languages, the word-masters of the world, while the neighbors invented hair-raising tales of my laziness. I was scandal of the village! Sense of justice, very likely, is rare!

There I read Heine, all of him, every word. And over and over! I wish I could have the joy of it back. Those were memorable years in Europe when Heine, Goethe, Chopin, were in their prime.

Germany helped enlarge boundaries of the human mind, when she began putting out cheap editions of the world’s printed art. Here, for a few pennies, one can procure in scholarly renderings, classic writers of India. Kausika’s Zorn, (a play) by Kschemisvara; Savîtri, a dramatic story of the supremacy of love from the Mahabharata, Mudrarakschasa (The Chancellor’s Seal Ring), a play of the ancient Indian Drama, Malati u. Madhava, Urvasi, a dramatic piece by popular Kalidasa.

In reading these books, I found where Goethe procured short, surprising meters that do not belong to Germany, (despite the Stab-Reim), which he uses in Faust. They were a borrowing from Indian Drama. Goethe borrowed from Persian writers too. He was enchanted with this newly presented art of the East, this world of beauty and blazing light. And so was Heine! Heine was akin to it. The Orient was in his blood. The soul of him dwelled under its mighty sun. I fancy his dream of the Orient was more superb than realization could have been, had he had health and money at the same time, to make the journey. Blessed be poverty! Poverty is still the nobile donna, of the divine dream of Dante. Her road is straight. Her road is narrow. But it leads far.

Occasionally pages of Indian literature are richly studded with color, like their white lace-work marbles. The Peacock Throne, for example, with gems! The same lavishness! The same piling of richness upon richness, that not even their astounding sun could destroy, and which their black eyes, deep and disconcerting as pools of ebony, knew how to love.

Compare this, (to return to Goethe’s borrowing), from the Hitopadesa, with Faust:

Would you not think you were reading Faust? Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan is merely a divine way, a proud impenitent poet’s way, of translating Firdusi, Hafiz, Saadi. He declared that in reading life-giving books of the East, he had cast off years, grown young. Somewhere in The Divan he cries: Once more I will be young! I will mingle with the herdsmen on the plains. I will travel with the caravan!

I expected a revel of delight from Verhaeren’s Helen. I did not get it. At the same time I admired its reason, logical unfolding, keeping in key; few lines of color and great passion, wisely distributed. Verhaeren is best in lyrics, occasional poems, which picture Flanders. In this, if I mistake not, he is great. Les Flamands is a masterpiece. And so is Villes Tentaculaires. What can equal those portraits of the monks! He paints with words as Flemish artists painted, The van Ostade, (Adrian and Isaac), the Brothers Maris, later, for example. Nothing too humble.

He has given me pleasure. For forty years Flanders has had an increasingly talented company of men, in the novel, short story, verse, and in the history of art and art criticism, they have such commanding and accomplished figures as Dr. Josef Muls, whose books are available in most of the countries of the Continent in adequate translations. They are too little known, on this side the Atlantic. No one can count, it seems, the vagaries of editors who accept translations. Couperus, the Hollander, and Ibañez, the Spaniard, are not representative of the races to which they belong. Both, however, have been heralded as that by American editors.

As an editor Mr. Kreymborg is not a success. But I admire his individual work. It is genuine. It is original. It is unblushingly itself. I think Mr. Kreymborg a man of power in a new field. He has a strange, queer, colorless daintiness. He fine-foots it, with muffled vowels like a learned fugue of long ago. He is as afraid of their bold, gay, brass blatancy, as a small boy of a scare-crow, in a cherry garden. A quaint, low-voiced, dull-hued, crotchety, somewhat ill-tempered little figure, dreaming of conjuring worlds into vision, with dim, small gestures. May he multiply and grow fat!

Stuart Merrill dedicates a volume of poems to Verhaeren, whom I admire, with two lines so noble they should not be forgotten. He speaks of him as a

Albert Samain gives me something the sensation of those warmly lucid, those golden, early evenings of Lorraine which hold out life’s pitiful false promise of perfection. The same distilled imagined richness of the past! The picture of the pagan world snared his heart. His verse keeps the sensations of un beau soir d’Italie. It is a magnificent antique world he saw, and knows how to show.

Chariot d’Or, by Samain, presents a way to journey with the mind, a little while, delightfully. Imagine if you can that this book of his went through eighteen editions, with speed, in France. What kind of verse-book could do that in America? Not one of this class! You can not serve your soul and an editor’s taste, at the same time. And greed! In America gold must be served. And then family!

Of his sonnet sequences I enjoy the Versailles Sequence best. He learned how to make it from Heredia. But a good thing is good, bastard or honest-born. Lines cling to memory. Such for instance as:

But it should not have closed with an exclamation point. Perhaps it did not! My memory is at fault. There is no need of blowing a trumpet after such a line.

Silvá, like Venice, is a phantom of delight, I can never forget. He was an exquisite, on a level with Petronius, and he lived in a city to which patrician memories and the royal pride, of that royal race, the Spanish, had been transplanted, Bogotá.

He loved butterflies and childhood and the first early nights of May; fleeting things, light lovelinesses which pause only long enough to die. He loved the flight of swallows which he liked to call the wings of Spring.

I have read verses of his which give me exactly the same sensation as verses of the Greek Anthology.

Old windows were another passion of his. Very frequently occur the words, vieja ventana.

I think of him as the poet of windows. I wonder why they fascinated him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening, unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a speechless, but willing prisoner.

His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his days, alas! so few. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we find fact.

A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells.

There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among verse-forms, the sonnet is king.

He can give perfectly the aroma of the season of the year. A few words.... I smell the winds of autumn in a high mountain-land and taste the purpling grape. All from three chained words of Silvá! Then I see white mist distort the meadows and feel the frost. He witches back the spirit of what has vanished, and with a lordly gesture. The past, perhaps, perfumed his dreams. The trembling fragility of his sensations is something almost beyond comprehension. I have received tremendous emotion from the haunting beauty of old windows, in old grey, stone-stucco, tinted, crumbling palaces of the conquistadores—after Silvá has taught me to see.

Silvá’s Nocturns are as rich as the twilights of Chopin. I wish I knew how to hand on his charm to others, in my colder English tongue! But no one will ever do it. Behind each word lie layer after layer of emotion, vision, all the hauntingly sweet, indefinite horizons of great poets, who have suffered.

No one could snare twice (I am thinking of the work of the translator) the suggestive charm of all these unseen landscapes of the soul, of space, of time, and over them the perfume of divine, unspeakable regret. The Nocturns are windows, the windows of his soul, open upon forlorn and fanciful worlds, which allure too greatly, with some sad, not sufficiently forbidden fatality. The greater the poet, the richer his evocativeness.

He loved the faint blue light of tardy twilights; and white luminous August, with its restless clouds. He kept always a lingering backward glance toward the magic valleys of childhood.

In many languages I have read the poets of the world, but none have touched me quicker to the keen emotion which blasts the present, and whirls on toward the deeps. Like Goya in painting, he was one of the first to take the important step from the old to the new. In verse-forms, he was one of the path makers. Coll said he had built Silvá an altar in his heart.

I do not understand how a man could write such a charming book as Jacques Blanche wrote in De David à Degas, and follow it with such inane useless things as the Cahiers d’un Artiste. I regret I wasted money on a copy of the last set. I haven’t money to waste.

He wrote the art criticisms for love. He knew what he was talking about. He talked well.

He wrote the last for money, bolstered up by a questionable sense of duty to say something about war. He said it. His friends regret it.

The introduction to the book on art, is by Marcel Proust. It is delightful; fresh, spontaneous, joyous. I read it three times.

De David à Degas is a book of perceptions, just appreciations, knowledge. I was surprised, however, in his article on Whistler that he should omit the influence of incomparable Chinese and Japanese draftsmen. He can see but one influence, of course, France. He does not relish the genius of Whistler; he gives us to understand he was not so much, in Paris. He feels about Whistler as Conrad feels when he thinks of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant. Conrad was never really great. He merely coquetted with greatness. No page of Conrad ever satisfied my thirst for beauty! Perhaps English was not the proper garment with which to dress his soul!

Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an unacknowledged point de départ for modernism. There is some unexplained law operative why a man of such genius as Condor can not grasp what is his during life. Is it envy of the base? Is it envy of the little ones? The little are always so greatly in the voting majority.

The portraits by Jacques Blanche in oil, are not more alluring than some he draws with pen. For instance, listen to this about Manet: ... ce joli homme blond, gracieux, elegant, à la cravate Lavalière bleue, à pois blancs. Does not that make you feel as if a friend said hello over the telephone, or a speckled trout nibbled your bait, on a bright blond morning of May? He makes delightful Fantin live again. He declares that after Courbet, Manet was the last painter of tradition.

Papini, wild-eyed Italian youth, with surprised up-standing hair, who edited Lionardo in Florence is, in my opinion of slight consequence as poet, prose writer, philosopher. To put the cart before the horse, his philosophising is acute indigestion from too much Nietzsche, Kant, Jungs-Stilling, Hegel, et cetera ad infinitum. In this melange of German mind and northern morals, he was unable to see his surprised way, or anybody’s way. He read. He suffered. He vomited words. His philosophy is account of the peregrenations of a nostalgic, young and ambitious mind. His early verse might be called pretty, puerile, powerless. Lines like these are not great poetry:

His verse is weak. His twenty little reasonings about verse are no better. There does not seem to be reason for being. They possess neither logic of art nor life, nor discrimination for the dull. However, in South America, in Buenos Aires (or as they say down there, B. A.), and in Rio, they prize him. I respect their opinion, those Spanish and Portuguese literati. It may be mea culpa! They are ahead of us in appreciation of arts of the Old World.

I enjoy André Gide. And he lacks sense of form which belongs to Frenchmen. Few have written better of Verlaine. His Les Nourritures Terrestres contained lines I liked. Once in a while there flashes from his pages, a touch of the fine prose of France.

Nene which won a Prix Goncourt, is finely simple, without pose. It is sincere. The rejuvenating breath of fields is in this story of peasant life. Perhaps that is what French prose must do, like the giant in the fable of antiquity, go back to the soil, in order to leap up renewed, strengthened. The descriptions of nature have an unsought charm: Le soir tombait, un soir d’octobre....

Evening fell, an evening of October, lovely as an evening of summer, but holding keener, more grievous beauty, something more intimate that makes the soul shiver.

It has the poignancy, poetry I recall in early peasant scenes by Cazin, the same glory of yellowing fields; the same sadly serene peace of the sky.

El Encanto de Buenos Aires, by Gomez Carillo, is attractive. He is the Spanish Loti. Not so wonderful as master of words, of course, but worth consideration. He was one of that band of brilliant Spaniards who helped Rubén Darío edit Mundial, in Paris, the lamented Amado Nervo being of the number.

The book is well printed, pleasing typographically. Carillo, like Loti, loves the souls of far cities. He says in the introduction: ... mi alma siente la gracia de ciertas ciudades con una intensidad que los grandes ministros y los grandes periodistos desdeñan. Like Loti, he is a stylist, if not such a commanding one. I have followed him in various quarters of the globe. One I recall happily, is Egypt. He says he likes to watch resplendent stars he has never seen, rise from the lonely depths of oceans. Sometimes he forgets and becomes sentimental. It is easy to forgive, because so many times he forgets and then becomes artist. He has more than a little of Loti’s distinguished manner. He has sympathy, too!

His impression of New York pleases me. By New York I suppose he means America in general. The educated Spaniard, as a rule, keeps fine disdain of us, what he terms those new uncultivated people, up north, known as Americans. Hear him: La vida ahi es un vertigo, y el hombre un iluminado o un automata, una maquina, o un delirio. De arte, de gusto, de armonia, de medida, de distincion, ni siquiera una idea tiene la metropoli norte americana en su existio callejero. There is some truth in this!

What makes this more interesting is that nowhere is there more what he calls vertigo, than in B. A., Rio. I read all their magazines. They are brilliant, just as aggregated diamonds are brilliant. This, what he has just been saying, is what Spanish and Portuguese neighbors think of us. I could not count the number who have said something similar to me. In it there is unconscious aristocratic disdain of king-lovers for a young, ill-bred, free, and too noisy people who boast of democracy when they do not boast of dollars. We bow our heads to the superiority of Latin culture. They swung a long time from Caesar’s coat-tail. We did not. In fact, we are just beginning to swing. And not from Caesar’s. The Spanish-Americans write noble, flexible prose. Carillo’s prose has rhythms both ample and fine.

He sends stinging arrows, some of which hit, at New York, Chicago, America. He is of the opinion that cities that are beautiful, (meaning those of the Old World), are dirty and uncomfortable. Our comfortable clean cities, on the other hand, are ugly. They are something with which he does not like to profane fine, sensitive eyes. He hates Broadway. His sensuous, sumptuous soul loves the lasting summer of rich hued tropic lands, their languid, their sapphire seas, and perfected luxury of living.

His description of what he calls Oxford of the Argentine, makes me wish I were a boy, young, so I could go there. It is a magnificent idea, which the Spaniards have put into execution in this school, an idea worthy the dramatic genius of Latin peoples.

He becomes lyric over the avenues, parks, of Buenos Aires, in one of which he remembers to tell us he found Rodin’s Thinker.

Carillo is learned. He possesses charm with power of distinguished seeing. I have read him for years. He is seldom disappointing, unless he writes a story. In the story he lacks architectural sense-structure.

La Lampara Maravillosa, by Valle-Inclán is a charming piece of book-making; richly illustrated, printed in two colors, red and black, and from the Sociedad General Española de Libreria, Madrid. I have seen lovely books from there! I wish I could buy them all. Even if one could not read them, they are pleasant to look at, like objects of art.

Valle-Inclán is a dreamer, a maker of poetic prose. I recall a merry caricature of his long, thin, black, owl-eyed, glasses-berimmed Spanish face in a magazine of Mexico. Probably the magazine was Tricolor.

The Magic Lamp, in this book, renews memory, a memory rich with the accumulation of a thousand years. It has charm, inventive grace. There is a touch to be sure here and there in the prose of the Spanish church-fathers; something monastic, shadowed, hieratic, a trifle pedantic. The gesture of a priest, in short, a lingering, regretful, graceful gesture, for beauty of a world which is passing, and which he should not pause too often to see. His prose is great enough to serve as a model for writers.

He visited Mexico. I read his articles. His reactions to the new country interested me. This dreaming scholar sees best with eyes of the mind. The eyes of his body have weakened. In his heart he loves the beauty of Greece, Rome, the pagan world. At the same time, by birth, he is a priest of the Inquisition. He has their face, too; long, thin, pale ascetic. A long list of books, sensitive, delicately and powerfully written, stand to his credit. He is one of the most accomplished stylists.

Villaespesa, of El Espejo Encantado, was in Mexico at about the same time. His fancy was touched to furious flame by pre-historic, Toltec Mexico; the Indian past. He wrote sonnets about it. He reconstructed the romantic twilights of long ago, by fanciful, flower-burdened lakes in that land of fabulous forgotten wealth, and prodigious palaces where, from ears of stone statues, scattered carelessly in gardens, pink pearls hung the size of pecans; and emeralds, gold, gems, had no value. He seemed especially able to savor its sumptuousness, then to pass on the sensation to others. He has written well, too, of the African desert. He writes novels, plays, verse. Villaespesa is poet of old Spain, España vieja. He might be great. I do not know why he is not. He has power over words, and vision.

L’Atlantide, whose originality or non-originality they have quarreled over happily in French journals, is a peculiar novel for a Frenchman to write, because it is excellent example of what is known as Teutonic imagination. As to originality, referring to his idea of injecting something into bodies of living people which would turn them to stone, this was subject of a story by myself, called The Painter of Dead Women. It was first printed in the Smart Set many years ago and later made one of a book of short stories called Dear Dead Women, published by Little, Brown & Company. It is the same thing, even in details, in which it is carried out. And my book, of course, never came to notice of the Frenchman. It is a case of two people having the same idea, which is not impossible. Many of us bend at the same moment over the great grey, shining, reflecting pool which is universal mind across which, in time, all pageants pass.

There are good sentences in Benoit’s novel, pleasant pictures of Africa. The old story of Lost Atlantis continues to fascinate like the faces of blond women. It is a dream of vanished delight which has floated over the world. In both that novel and Pour Don Carlos, Benoit proves he knew better than almost any Frenchman today, how to handle the gripping moment.

I have had happiness with André Salmon’s L’Art Vivante. It is not a great book. Instead it is a satisfying one. I commend it to people who care to know painters of the new school.

He knows how to characterize. Please listen to this about Van Dongen, the Hollander who paints women so luxuriously: Anacreon venu de pays des Kermesses, petit-neveu de Ruben’s, ignorant des mythologies, matelot ivre fournissant une pacotille galant aux sirènes, Van Dongen est un peu tout cela.

I hope I shall never by accident, as I know I shall not by intention, wander into sad village streets of Vlaminck! They are things of astonishing power. The first one I saw made me suffer like a nightmare. Some stern, grief-tempered soul I trust I shall be spared the misery of meeting, looks out of his canvasses. The vision of Vlaminck is hard, cruel, tears the world to pieces. The tragedies that have been written can not equal the imagined terrors of what must go on within those shabby dwellings whose sad exteriors, he doubles, then redoubles, by hard reflection in cold, clear surfaces of ill-kept canals, or lonely rivers.

The water is deep, clean, magnificently reflecting. The sky is angry, threatening, or else profoundly sad, as if from many tears. But the colors are fresh, insistent, ringing, proud. The brushing is joyous. It is sure and powerful. The structural similarity of his pictures is unusual. But his range is slight, and limited. His blues, greens, have primitive simplicity that contrasts with the too sophisticated structure. The inelasticity of melancholy, of depressing winters by sullen unhappy seas of the north that wearily await spring is here.

I found, the other day, a Gauguin, that is magnificently savage. Two standing women; fine, bare, brown bodies, wearing twisted about the waist, one dark blue, the other high, haunting red that keep the key of their flesh. An acrid yellow-green background with a dark, gum-pink hill. Splendid color pattern! There is something about it that renews the senses. I can drink of it with my eyes then feel good. In this same collection there was a luscious autumn by Guillamin. It reminded me of delicate flesh of tropic melons which I have seen but could not name, in lonely islands, by the Carib Sea. A level foreground, delicately tufted; dry, dull orange-yellow; faint, red-touched violet. A line of plaintive trees; one or two green, round, fat, the others faint; fragile ghosts of gold. A sky that balances daintily but deliberately both green and blue; with trailing, regretful clouds of autumn; grey, yellow, violet.

The harsh, quick assertiveness of Matisse was here; large-patterned, aggressive in hue; but strong, resonant.

Toulouse Lautrec has four portraits which are infinitely sophisticated of line, quick of touch, crisp. Memorable work; too disillusioned, but kept carefully in a low key.

Salmon, writing usually in the grand manner of French prose of the past, about men in paint of the present, who do not believe in the grand manner (stage sweat and swagger), nor the great gesture, says startling things. Hear! Hear! Et dans sa demi-retraite André Derain achevant les œuvres peut-être les plus vastes de son temps and so forth. (André Derain putting the finishing touches to works which perhaps are the most vast of the age.) Derain’s figure paintings are unlike his landscapes. The figure paintings are of the past; the landscapes of today.

I recall a canvas by Derain I saw in Paris: A road in the south of France somewhere, magic in simplicity; not easily disentangled charm. I carry it in my memory. It is massive, with God-like mastery of some vast disturbing chaos. Troubling! The world’s new eyes are sometimes things to consider. And with care.

I quote Greek song in honor of Apollinaire, to whose pen-magic moderns in the plastic arts owe introduction first to fame, secondly, to dollars, then dinners, in regular, non-dwindling succession.

Ah, Apollinaire! delightful vagabond of art. Apollo’s second son and namesake! I regret you! My consolation must be to buy as many of your earlier writings as I can. Nineveh I long for as the hungry for food. Please page Nineveh, Apollinaire, for me in your bright Paradise! I am sure Nineveh is there. And you too!

Strangest of contrasts in Apollinaire, is that he, leader of the moderns, should have liked old-fashioned, sentimental, romantic writers of Germany such as Chamisso.... The longing for something afar....

Maurice Barrés’ Greco, Le Secret de Tolède, has firm, accurate upbuilding; architectural drawing. It gives surety, poise, reliability. Finely done, clear, precise, nobly visioned, with no yawning gaps to be filled futilely. He writes delightfully. He is an old friend, he who tried to establish le culte du moi, something old as the hills, because it is what all artists set out to do, but which he succeeded in doing better perhaps than the rest.

The prose of Barrés resembles mural paintings by de Chavannes: bleu de ciel, against which white intellectualized figures move. There is an occasional shred of gleaming gold.

The golden age of the colored race is right ahead of us. The concept, superiority, is something strange. That joy which civilization has been for centuries draining out of the white race, is stored in them; civilization has killed. If we are to continue to create, something will have to come to light our hearts, and then later on to warm them.

We shall soon have good writing from them, the colored race, painting, music, art, in every department of creative accomplishment. The work is begun.

When the colored mind flowered in the past, the result has been something original, or of rare quality. Stored within them is supply of that joy without which no one can create. In joy, art is rooted.

Two fluent writers had negro blood, Puschkin and Dumas. There may have been negro blood in Heredia, of The Sonnets. There may have been a trace of it in the ancestry of Hearne, whose mother was born on one of the islands south of Greece, across which tides of conquest for centuries drifted. The contrary indeed can not be proved. Negro blood influenced the brush of some of Spain’s greatest painters, and it may have been mingled in its Moorish poets. Is it not more than probable that it formed part of the racial inheritance of Matisse, Gauguin? There may have been a trace of negro blood in El Poeta de America, Darío, who is not so much poet of America as of the world, because of cosmopolitan training. An astonishing example of receptivity, he, who came from South America to France, and at one gulp swallowed, digested, the cultivation of Europe. In this receptivity I can think of but one parallel: Russian minds of the Eighteenth Century, like Lomonosov’s.

It is too bad there is no good translation of Darío! Could square-toed Saxon reproduce such a poem as his Aire Suave with its fluted, fairy-like fine-stepping?

It was a quarter of a century ago, I believe, that the part-negro poet of Venezuela, Mata, put out Pentelicas. Since, his output has been considerable, Grito Bohemio, Idilio Tragico. The last is called Arias Sentimentales. From this volume I quote a verse of the Nocturn:

The years have made him gloomy. He is tragic, sad. He is a man of cultivation.

At end of the Third and beginning of the Fourth Century of our era, there was a scholar, a Rhetorician, of Negro blood, living in Africa, who was a man of power. His name was Arnobe. He wrote the Latin tongue from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains. It is from him we know best how far south from the Mediterranean, the prodigious cultivation of Rome penetrated. He had the instincts, some of the training, of a scholar. He made attempt to classify dialects of the people among whom he lived, to show in what condition Latin, as spoken language, survived. His contribution to linguistic knowledge has not been slight. There was a man called Leo the African, who about 1511, traveled extensively in the Black Continent, and wrote in Arabic descriptions of Fez, Timbuctoo, the great rivers, and his experiences in crossing the Sahara. Early in the Seventeenth Century he was translated into French and I seem to remember the Elzevir Press published his books. I recall another interesting book (Seventeenth Century) about the Great Black Merchant, Buchor Sano, who declared there were still houses in his country with roofs of gold.

Olandah Egniano was an African; his moving story of how he was kidnapped, then brought to America in a slave ship, is more than interesting. The date was 1793. One of the earliest dramatic voyages to the African West Coast was made long before the discovery of America, by that indefatigable Portuguese explorer, Gomes Azurara, who was born in 1434. Other valiant Portuguese adventurers, such as Filippo Pigafetta, made many charming maps, some of them heightened with color, of Africa, in the early days. The first Hollander to describe the coast of the Great Black Continent was Marees, in 1617.

As long ago as 1808 a History of the Literature of the Negro was published, somewhat lavishly, in France. The book adds a rather long list of Negroes who have written upon science and art.

Stored in the Negro, there is an unexpanded race-soul, which will be one of the future’s gifts. Whatever art in the U. S. of North America happens to be, in that the Negro will have part credit as originator.

I have visited a collection of works of Degas. Marvellous, luscious color, clothing bodies that are ugly, drawn with scorn, rage; contempt for that which is women. The walls flashed colors that make the heart ache; masterly drawing, drawing that contains the skill of surgeon and observer.

No. 64—A green we dream in English springs. Fresh, impatient brushing in! The usual daring, unplanned arrangement. The intrepidity of individual vision united with quaint, appealing ugliness of costume.

No. 59—An interior with two women. Neither is young nor beautiful. Both are soberly clad. They wear black bonnets. Superb assurance of brush lends interest. The white of a curtained window back of them, rich with faint shadow-modeling, tones in which one feels jade, sad pink. A dull rose on front of a bonnet gleams derisively. Painted in high, fine rhythm.

No. 1—Masterly drawing in black of an ugly woman, whose hair keeps royal shades of red-amber. In the line that shows it there is the joy of great Chinese masters. But it does not equal them because nothing can do that.

No. 14—A small picture of three women. Drawn sharply, crisply; and with black. Marvellous brushing in of yellow fluted ballet skirts. It gives sensation of a chrysanthemum torn in a too cold wind of autumn. Behind the body of the standing woman, a wash of red, dramatic, splendid. It has effect of one of the prolonged, prodigious notes of Caruso. A fine, angry, dominant note, like an outflung cloud of storm. There is one touch of green; subtle, wondrous.

No. 63—A woman seated, combing red hair. She wears a yellow robe. Behind her a dash of blue of unequalled depth. The general effect upon the senses is of luscious, tropical fruit one may not name. Over all superb, dry surface light.

No. 39—Large canvas. Two dancers. Drawn in black against vague green. Upon the skirt of the first dancer, a dash of magenta, of orange, so splendid it recalls wild audacities of South American orchids. Something to dream over forever! Intensities, that could have been born only in the mind of a solitary genius like Degas.

No. 60—Long picture of two seated dancers. They wear skirts of pink that make one commit sudden infidelity to the memory of Watteau. This, against a yellow, rare, too lovely.

The color-key of each picture catches, then holds you with emotion, as music does. Imperative, inescapable things, made so seldom we can afford to take time to consider them.

Brushing in as beautiful, blond, unforgettable, as summer over northern seas.

No. 4—Figures of three dancers. They make a striking ensemble. They have the firm totality of carved jade. Blue of a haunting but slightly acid tint. The daring emphasis of ugly things.

No. 26—The picture keeps the effect of blown flame in some boisterous wind of spring, or neglected nasturtiums in a burnished, overturned British garden. With beauty, one somehow remembers England! A group of ballet girls; gay spirits.

No. 40—Again ballet girls. Sober. Restrained. Distinguished. A wall of sullen, silken yellow. A yellow that only Arabian or Indian textiles know. Gauguin would have loved it.

Degas sometimes shows pale, regretful blue that attunes the mind like a melody of Schumann, heard when November snows begin to fall, then filter flower-bought sunlight. Like chalcedony! Colors personal, that expressed the lonely soul that could find no pleasure in people. His pleasure, his companionship, was in tone the rainbow knows in unreachable heavens.

He knew purples, pinks, that quickened his heart. He knew talkative, loquacious yellows that were like sensations. He knew savage, slashing reds, hues of crime and temptation, that gave him the feeling of languorous liaisons, flattered, foolish gayety with women; love; delightful debauchery. He knew greys that kept the self-commendatory feeling of discipline and restraint.

This was the way he was active and energetic. In imagination he dashed across lush, green hunting fields, with the wet, warm wind on his mouth, hounds at his heels, and gay companions, and grew dizzy at the scent of the grasses. This was life. This was society for him. He never allowed anything to divert him from his one joy, painting.

Never for a moment was he unfaithful. There was nothing that could tempt him. Therefore his reward was great. He spilled the gold coin of his heart like a dazzled spendthrift. His buying was commensurate. Only the generous, the self-forgetful, can buy as he did.

Art critics have given scant attention, and measured scantily, their courtesy to Tami Koume, Japanese extremist in painting. But sometimes there are more things concealed in painting than even in the philosophy of critics, good in concealing or great in ignorance.

Here modernism is manipulated by a wizard Eastern hand, and seen, then estimated through the ancient trained mind of the Orient. He expresses what he thinks by line, color, without confusing form, without complexity of object; telltale, indiscreet fact. In this way it is art purified.

He gives his brush, sensations music gives. He has done well. He has a spiritual subtlety that did not belong to French and Italians who did the same thing, something of a more exquisite, older race. Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter. Koume has brought unheard melodies.

Essentials of sensation, line, color, have become revolutionists, forsworn allegiance to fact. They have started independent existence. Like lost ships on uncharted oceans, they are careening toward the unknown.

No. 7—Only the deep sea when it weaves pearls can equal the dumb loveliness of this, by Koume. This spirit was working in painting on silk, made in China, centuries ago. It would not have astonished Sung Masters. They knew rhythms like these, they understood weight, and unweighable excellences of structure, felt subtly by ancient people, who have known Loveliness long enough not to be vexed with her, in any mood. And always at least, on friendly terms.

At last I have seen paintings by Ilya Repin! I thought the time would never come when I could. To see them means a trip to Russia. They are full of enjoyment and feeling. They are vehement, passionate, proud; and pagan in beauty; rich in firm characterization. His famous Black Sea Pirates (large canvas) does not need a frame. Curiously enough the pale green foam of the pictured sea frames it. It is as important as the boat, or its occupants.

The portrait of his son, Yuri, likewise a painter whose canvasses of the Finnish Sea I have seen, is eloquent. Picture to yourself a face pale, dark, expressive, impassioned. It might symbolize Russia’s poet of tragic days, in youth, Puschkin. I could with difficulty look away.

The head is slightly turned to the left, a pose frequently chosen by Repin. He wears a coffee-colored caftan, bordered dully with white. He has dark brown eyes; large, beautiful, soulful. He has brown, dark, wavy hair; thick, a trifle long. The gesture of the folded arm and shoulder-line is arresting, peculiarly noble. The poetry of the Don Cossack country, the songs Schevschenko wrote in youth by the shores of rivers great as seas, are in the face. I recalled a song I translated years ago, from this Cossack poet, while I was looking at it:

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 a Black Sea Pirate is 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 other Black Sea Pirate has a different face, one of Mongol type, with controlled, still, ill-concealed ferocity of Asia. Past ages speak dazzlingly here.

The Bandoura Player is 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 sweet souplesse of sound. A figure of glorious daring, unequalled spontaneity. Proud! Resentful! There is redoubling of rose-hues at end of the bandoura. 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 of Canto 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 few lire. I waited all one long hot summer for that book to come. I read his magnificent Ode to the Moon by light of a prairie moon no whit less lovely, in a sky no less purple tinged and cloudless, than that of Italy.

When I read it over again today, and the Hymn 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 thoroughly thrashed through 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 the Odi Barbare of 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 merely Roma.

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 an Ersatz, 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. The Orlando Furioso is a charming fable. I can not commend it too highly. It has delighted me just as Alice in Wonderland delights 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 little books 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 to Century, or Harper’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:

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 is fear.

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, the rose, 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’s Prolongation of Life we 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 call artistically 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 the greys of 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.