Part 1
# The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguist ### By Underwood, Edna Worthley
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
BY EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD
[Illustration]
PORTLAND MAINE THE MOSHER PRESS MDCCCCXXX
COPYRIGHT EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD 1930
Manufactured in the United States of America
TO THREE PROSATEURS
LOTI, BLANCO-FOMBONA, D’ANNUNZIO
_FOREWORD_
The Taste of Honey _is a genuine diary, of somewhat the same kind as_ De Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète, _or_ Diary of a Kentish Gentleman, _in that it was not written for public approval, but for personal pleasure. It is not dated nor arranged in order, partly because it was jotted down upon loose leaves which were threaded upon a string;
## partly because of the period of years covered and the vicissitudes
that befall perishable substances such as paper._
_Part was written at the age of sixteen, eighteen; part recently. Many pages have been lost; indeed as recently as the spring of 1928 a manuscript of over three hundred pages disappeared from the office of a New York magazine. Some notes from this are included however._
_Selections from the Note Book have been published, in both French and English_, Le Disque Vert _of Belgium carried pages, when Hellens was director. American papers have carried other pages._
_It has not been edited nor changed for publication. It is the unreserved expression of what was in the reader’s mind, set down with malice toward none and always with sincerity._
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST
Goethe wrote: _Was ich litt und was ich lebte, sind hier Blumen nur im Strausz._ I paraphrase: _Was ich lese und was ich denke, hab ich hier bewahrt für mich._ (What I read and what I think I have stored up here for myself.)
This sentence from one of Concha Espina’s novels pleased me: _Acaso han huido para siempre en el mundo las aves altarnaras de la Humanidad._ (Perhaps vanished forever from the earth are the heavenly wings of humanity.) That is what Spanish thinkers declare that we lack more than anything else, human values.
Byron and Shelley created merely to console themselves for the fact that they could not learn how to live. To them a man of action was something strange, something enviable.
Maurois’s _Ariel_ (Shelley) is satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. I feel some of it might be better. It lacks substance, and yet it is pleasant reading enough. The book is semi-fiction; it was not meant to be yard-wide fact. But I keep the feeling of being forced to look at a water-color when I am longing for a rich, deep-pigmented oil. There is something I want and can not find. It is bad form however to look a fact too firmly in the face.
What was really wrong with the lives of Shelley and Byron, and some of their delightful friends, was the influence in cold, Saxon England, with its peculiar ability to cling to a straight line and ignore the nimble necessity of corners, of the French Eighteenth Century. It made the duller English mad. They did not put on well the mental clothes of French thought and philosophy. As a race they have never been too successful in putting on any clothes.
They lacked humor and a kind of emotional release in the wearing. The clothes did not fit. But they thundered ahead with desperate earnestness, and neglected the gay occasional dandying trot. British seriousness minus Gallic salt.
An English woman of cultivation and good intent, in America, recently showed the same peculiarity. She started a movement to suppress Mother Goose. She insisted the book would teach children to lie, to distrust their elders. The following is one of her quoted illustrations:
The little dog laughed to see such a farce And the cow jumped over the moon.
The estimable, (and as it happens good looking woman), asserts truthfully, that cows have not the habit of jumping over the moon and that it is wrong to tell it to children.
She writes an article on the subject. She asks intervention of the Press to back her statement that she has never seen a cow jump over the moon. No one doubted her!
It did not occur to her the line is nonsense. Such writing is escape from the prison of fact. Mother Goose is art of its kind. In a subway city, of course, it is not easy to think of such exhibits—nor of anything the other side of wit. It is being witty in good form—which is the good form the polite English have overlooked. It registers by what it is not—_like English wit_. Referring again to Maurois’ book, one can not help being grateful for another glimpse of the bodily beauty of Byron, of Shelley.
That delightful short story writer of Venezuela—Pedro-Emilio Coll, was influenced deeply in boyhood by the sensuous, the finished prose-technique of d’Annunzio. Who would not be, who could both read and appreciate it? Coll could not forget it. It may have helped to the commendable control he holds.
In the Eighteen Eighties, Venezuela had some _cuentistas_, whose style, whose imaginative reach, was above the ordinary. Some of these men could command a prose-surface greater than anyone save Hearne, who was not American, but Irish and Greek. Latin people of the South keep an art-sense, a kind of _finura_, that we of more mixed blood to the north, have not. Spanish blood is having a second, a royal flowering down there.
_Opopomax_, by Coll, is the story of a perfume. Aside from owning an idea, this and his other stories have trained workmanship. It is well done. I sometimes wonder if the novel ever reaches quite the same intensity—the perfect fluidity of dissolving vision, as the short story.
On this pallid, dove-grey morning of winter, I have finished Blanco-Fombona’s _Man of Iron_, (_El Hombre de Hierro_). Fombona was born in Venezuela too, like Coll, but now he is living in Europe. He was in prison in Ciudad, Bolivia—1905, when he wrote this book.
In France they say of him:—“A tender soul whom no emotion leaves indifferent.” Fombona remarks that Herbert Spencer calls us _hybrid beings_, with all the defects of hybridism. Once Rubén Darío wrote a glorious appreciation of Fombona, as Rodo wrote one equally fine of Darío. He declared: “My friend, Rufino, was born only to realize great things.” Darío is dead now; when he was writing so eloquently about his friend he was in Mallorca—and happy. _Alas!_
There is a Portuguese critic in South America—in Rio—by name José Verissimo, who remarks that America was colonized at one of the most powerful moments of European mind, and that this nature of explorers, _conquistadores_, the something epic that makes poets, still lives in Blanco-Fombona.
His novels have conquered two worlds; the Old and the New. Spain was enthusiastic. Like Columbus, Fombona set her dreaming of a New World. A young Spaniard says: “... When I think of Fombona I connect his name with the charm of the city where he lived, Caracas ... the name of that city remains a mythological place to me—remote, perfumed, mysterious, a city which Fate will have it, that I shall sometime see. How I have lingered over Fombona’s pages, when they picture the sun of gold in that sky of azure; dawn-fresh, mountain mornings that are chill; the romantic song of old bells in old towers; the iced-water Americans drink ... lots and lots of things that suit my dream-city, city made for adventure and love, and ill luck....”
Hear Blanco-Fombona for a moment himself: (I am translating from memory)—... “and more important than everything else, more important than people, than events, that brilliant sun of America, toward which the breath of our lives ascends continually, like prayer....”
It is not true that the characters of _Man of Iron_ are commonplace as the critics keep calling them. It is because Fombona has looked down upon them from a great height. From such height, perhaps, all the little figures in the game—_life_—are small and commonplace.
I can not forget his sentences. They sing on and on in my mind. They have the charm of smooth satin. They feel good upon my tongue. _La luna—de esas claras lunas_.... The moon—one of those clear moons of tropic nights—was laughing down upon the water. Here is another:
_In the sky the little stars were twinkling, while afar I could hear the night-thunder of the Carib Sea._
Fombona’s life has been worth while; poetic, enriched with vision, with conscious power—in Caracas, the city of his delight. It is something I like to think about. I can measure its invigorating pulse in his prose. I have esteem for the artist, and admiration for the man and brave fighter, who has never been a coward.
In _Man of Iron_, Fombona makes the character which is both pitiful and noble, a man, just as Manuel Galvez does in one of his latest novels—_La Pasión de la Pampa_. And Fombona like Manuel Galvez registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea.
South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else. One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a sentence that shakes me with its splendor.
I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. He sought literatures which could inspire him, which held the contagion of heat, Saxon races are colder, weaker perhaps in art-sense. They peg along diligently—more pedantically—with the consuming of many words like a faulty engine giving out smoke. I am carrying along as I say this, an undercurrent of memory of the stories of the English Buchan, which are so deadly dull; uninspired; devoid of artistry, of life. To me his books are sediment ... after sometime, somewhere, the pure, the sparkling wine has been withdrawn. Only rare humorless Americans could read them.
The great earthquake in Caracas as Blanco-Fombona shows it to us, is masterly. And over it, the calm of night, and the yellow, resplendent moon of the tropics. I had a thrill from this chapter.
Fombona was fascinated by the racial problem of the Americas, just as I have been. He insists the great problem here is racial. To quote him: “There is no racial unity, and consequently no national ideal.... We may not depend upon them of mixed blood, because now one element predominates, and now another, which education breaks up and still more confuses. Out of three Venezuelans—white, negro, and Indian, who could tell what could blend their energies into one? In each case the ideals are different; they have different tastes, different political impulses. We have no national soul.”
One of Fombona’s friends in old Spain, tells us how greatly Fombona is repelled by a commercial, highly mechanized civilization, because such things go against the grain of his exalted subjectivity, his belief in the spiritual elite. He says Fombona hates equally what he calls _Teutonic force_ and prosaic, Yankee-loving money-grubbing. And especially he hates democracies, because they are arbitrary, leveling, destructive of the aristocrat—_and North Americans_. _La Lámpara de Aladino_ might be termed the breviary of his prejudices.
Somehow it makes me think—_The Man of Iron_—of youthful books by Turgéniev, such as _Father and Sons_, _Spring Floods_ ... all show drawing without obtruding outline. There is some similar spiritual quality in the minds that were creating. In his two novels, he is the equal of the great Russian. I like the sheer power of the man! His steel-sharp delineations are memorable. And it has some of the same kind of power as Balzac.
The companion novel—_Man of Gold_, (_El Hombre de Oro_).
The chapter in which the three old ladies take pitiful farewell of the grand home of their ancestors, the rich, many-roomed, ancient colonial mansion, with its courts, with its flowers, is a fine piece of writing. It moved me deeply. Not many see the world we are forced to live in as clearly as Fombona, with all the different parts in reasonable and logical relation, not to mention the fine flashing forth to others, the lifting power of vision, that dazzles, then creates. There is both grandeur and fury in the soul of Fombona.
There was a short story writer in Venezuela-Caracas, in the late Eighties, whom I liked. Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. I am still on the watch for the short story of power. Hear this description of music from a story by Garcia. (Again I am translating and quoting from memory.)
“They played a _joropo_. From the rough, coarse, toil-worn fingers there spread out across the sensitive chords of the instrument, the flower of Venezuelan music. A flower made of race-blood, old age and its dreams; music that had come from very far away, from the inexplainable melancholy of our Carib Fathers—music, indolent and brutal, love-lustful, and cruel; music dripping through the clear nights of tropic moons like tears down the black faces of fugitive women ... plaintive, filled with rebellion and energy, like flame of hatred across the fragile cane, then again thunderous, a fitting call of bronze for war across the spaces.... In the _joropo_ dwells the soul of our fatherland.... It is a sepulchre to guard the ashes of our dead.”
Again Garcia, enamored of music, writes: “Listen I tell you! Here comes a Creole waltz-song. _Ah_—how many times I have heard this song float languid and ardent like our Creole women on the sad and indifferent arms of lovers, heard it float on like a sparkling diamond-gas, across the surface of sleeping night-water ... seen it take on life and glow in the deep eyes of ranchmen at the _rodeo_ ... in the dimming twilights of the solemn pampa.”
Passion, emotion, such as this is what I seek in story art. Cheap work does not know it. Garcia has written two books I commend. They are _Búcares en Flor_ and _Oro de Alquimia_. These books hold the prose, great poets make sometimes in youth ... but seldom twice. Never in the twilight of years, because regret, although it may own a light all its own, can not gild like joy.
De Cela writes interestingly of Lima:
“_Lima!_ Your legends and your women are beautiful. Your palaces romance-freighted and imposing; your cathedrals mysterious and solemn. In your streets dwell the Middle Age, and the age-old soul of Spain.”
The New World seems to embrace Old Spain. In _Humos de Rey_, by León, an old nobleman soliloquizes:
“... No one understands me. Everyone speaks an unknown tongue, and people look at me as if I were a fossil. It is not easy to find a single individual who thinks, feels, or judges as I do....
“Another age has come, with other men; there is a new world which is more than strange and inimical; more than indifferent.
“I do not need to go to cities to feel the winds of change strike me. Right here in this poor, little, old, Castilian village, dozing in shade of the tall cathedrals, where eternities have dreamed the same dream, the strangeness of a New World begins to play about me—a world that is materialistic, _speed-dizzy_; a peculiar life lived all on the outside; of bestial appetites of the flesh; sterile; filled with foolish emotions, plebeian ideals; and an alarming and useless scattering of spiritual energy.”
León belongs to the Royal Academy of Spain. I have read him long, but I did not expect just this of him.
When I take Italian, Spanish, or Russian books from the Public Library in New York, they show by their worn, marked pages, their general appearance of hard usage, that they have been read more intimately, more emotionally, than English books by English readers. It is evident that the passion on the pages has met and blended with a corresponding passion, with a new kind of level of comprehension, in the readers.
Books by other races (than American) still talk once in a while of honor, nobility. They acknowledge that such things have been. They accept the lofty realm of the spirit; bravery, sacrifice, virtues of the soul. American books have neither time nor inclination to mention such things which few seem to know anything about. Our books show existence, dry, exterior, concerned with money, mechanics, rapid physical movement from place to place, restlessness; cheapened pleasures. With the Latins there is heat of utterance. There is eloquence too. And rich native ability.
This novel by León, _Humos de Rey_, is well made. It commands respect like honest work by a person who knows how to work. He wrote it because he had something to say, and not for applause nor an itch for limelight. As a piece of portraiture it is exceptional. And there is the contrast between the Spain of great centuries dead, and the Spain being standardized, commercialized, mechanized—in short _Americanized_. This is going forward too speedily at the moment, and other writers besides León are taking careful note of it. It is the tragic motive in several books from Madrid and Barcelona which I have bought recently.
León creates in a higher key than colder Saxon races of the North can keep. There is intensely centered light. There is a different _tempo_—and selection of portrayal. And he writes of course, for a different public.
In the foreign books I am reading continually, the idea has been creeping in more and more in the last few years, that ideals are dying. In periodicals in North America, to one who reads many other literatures, one is impressed, by the overstressing of two things: _money_, _efficiency_. It is stupid, the recurring and recurring, of the words. Next comes _speed_. León’s book is far away, in inception, from such things. Faith breathes from it; bravery, and endurance. It upholds the nobler banner of the past, before the present decadence had set in, which is evident in printed art.
Don Carlos de Araoz, the nobleman in León’s novel, is a person. Collective living has not touched him. He has made no compromise with ideals. He is erect, fine, free. And brave. When he fights, he fights openly, face to face. He does not strike, like the coward in the night, in the back. Zurburan might well have painted him. The book should have been called _The Last of the Caballeros_. There are not many finer portraits than his.
“_Padecia Don Carlos la decadencia_.... Don Carlos suffered because of the falling away of power in his family, whose minds and energies were turned toward base things, shabby results. The men of his family were taking to wild and futile paths. They no longer had ideals nor robust faith; nor in the heart the power of creative goodness. They had no objective that was worth while; they were neither noble nor generous, but dull, mentally blind, and lukewarm toward the things of tradition. They could neither comprehend great things nor face bravely the future....”
It seems that Spain, just as in Columbus’ day can still show _New Worlds_ to us.
Zorilla has flung forth this sketch of Toledo: “A place black, ruined, sad, and forgotten amid the sands—_Great Toledo_. Abandoned now, at mercy of the winds, _Toledo_, and not sufficiently protected by the mantle of royalty. Broken down, furrowed with sorrow and care, a slave, without soldiers to protect it, nor laws, it sleeps wrapped in its glory.
“All it owns is the great name of old, a kind of parody, with which it attempts to wrap then cover its shame—_Toledo_, once the sumptuous, the free. It has a great temple hid in a hollow, two bridges, and between the ruins and the marble of old armorial blazons, a stupid little village that sleeps on and on....”
_Venice pleases me infinitely._ I might have written this instead of De Regnier—I, who love Venice.
Like De Regnier, I love its climate, its color, its light. The kind of life men live there is the life that suits my taste.
There I have a happiness I never know elsewhere, a peculiar physical well-being, and in the midst of a great variety of objects that take up pleasantly the space of days. Both my eyes and my thoughts are busy. Even the old history of commerce of Venice is a thing of delight. Not many romances can equal it.
Nowhere else do days drop away so delightedly. Nowhere else is loneliness wholly without bitterness. There is no other spot in the world where I am myself—where neither years nor place, nor people can touch me. There is no other city where I can so happily support the necessary boredom of living.
My first sight of Venice gave me the greatest emotion, I think I have ever felt. I was tired. I had just journeyed through the Austrian Alps, the Bavarian Alps, and a corner of Switzerland. The train into Venice was late. It was cold. It was threatening rain.
We got in at exactly twelve o’clock, at night. It took long to get traveling bags through the customs. We left the trunks for the next day’s struggle.
Long ago the little steamers and the noisy water boats had gone to bed. We signalled a gondola with two oarsmen.
Then began the most amazing ride. We swung suddenly into the black, mirroring water of the Grand Canal, which Napoleon called the finest street in the world.
I saw a wide space of silent water. It was tideless, motionless, with a strange scent of decay hanging over it. On either side, seeming to slip farther and farther away—great, dim, tinted palaces that kept memories of the architecture of the East, rich India, radiant Arabia. And the grave Goth.
No glare of electric lights. There were dim little lamps swinging in front of fabulous façades, sometimes painted. There was no sound save the hiss of our long black oars against blacker water. I all but lost my senses at the beauty and the strangeness of it—this divine, dead city which seemed dropping away, on the point of disappearing forever, beneath the water of the Adriatic.
For hours in the heart of the night, we swung noiselessly along cold, black, shining canals. We slipped under the Bridge of the Rialto. We slipped under the Bridge of Sighs. We saw dim ghosts of loveliness of every conceivable color and form, tower above us in the darkness, and the majesty of it and the beauty, combined with silence, kept a kind of terror. Not a sound anywhere. Not a sign of life.
For a little while we lived in one of the old yellow, faded palaces. And in the daylight again we drifted down this unrivaled street, whose pictured palaces represent every period of Venetian history; on some were placards telling who had lived there; such men as Wagner, Byron, Murger, Maupassant.
Then we moved to the Royal Daniele, the famous hostelry of Venice, once the home of a great family. It was built about the year 800. Any of these renowned mansions are worth a trip across the Atlantic to see. I remembered Ruskin said, that beauty began to die in the world after the Eleventh Century. And I was pleased to think I had discovered that fact myself.