Part 10

Horace lacked the commanding power of greatness, its one sidedness. He never compels us. He wins by grace, good temper. He is a charming companion for the rich. I can fancy him an admirable _causeur_, perhaps an ideal talker, whose conversation was greater, imaginatively, more fancifully attractive, than the written word. His temperament needed stimulus of admiration, applause, _the moment_. He needed candles and love and pretty women and music and wine. He could have said of himself with the oriental lyrist: _None know thee, Hafiz, save when candles shine!_

Horace insists on nothing. He has no interest in teaching. He tells us, to be sure, that gold is a false standard, that there are better things. Life and manners were simpler, in an early age, as Dante told his Florentines. But he does not care whether we believe it or not. Life was more beautiful when less complicated; money multiplies bad taste, is the extent of his interest. He did not get far from beauty as standard.

His philosophizing is that of a graceful dilettante. But in knowing, in understanding this, he preserved his Epicurean existence, freedom from work. Perhaps there was another Horace whom his writing _dared not_ show. Perhaps this serene, laughing existence was the price paid for ease. Horace’s age, we must remember, was one when men were busy forgetting the bloody wars of Augustus; they were bowing to a tyrannical demi-god.

Early a note of weariness creeps into his verses, a regretful, late-autumn splendor. It is like light upon rich fields of grain that have been reaped. His life was loveless, given over to men. This was not unusual in his age. Was it this that made his nature cold, and nothing worth while? Love was possible in pagan days and wrought havoc. Catullus knew how to love. So did Propertius, Tibullus. It was not wholly the age. We get impression that he feels old and is weary, even of pleasure, song, when we know he must have been under fifty. Was it because his body was delicate, frail, as we find hint now and then, or were his senses superfine, easily sated? Or had the excessive dissipation of the age made him old before his time?

When he says, somewhere in last of the Epistles, that the only way to be happy is to admire nothing, we know what years have done. Cultivation had enervated him. It had weakened zest for life, or he echoed the age that was growing weary with too much living. That is why Christianity overpowered the pagan world. It was worn out with joy. It had lived too much. It was ready for penitence. It was weakened with luxurious learning.

There is more love, more understanding of home, in Propertius, Tibullus, than in Horace. Each had had his dream. If Horace had, his words give no hint. He hides from us. Persius says of him: _Sly Horace does not give us his heart to sift_. It may have been his dream was too tenderly cherished to unveil for a greedy world. His emotions, his longings are as carefully concealed as the veiled face of Isis.

It is not often we find a poet without enthusiasms. Horace had none. He is the only poet of the world without an ideal. He believed, in his indifferent way, with Goethe, that life is more important than art. He could have said with Wilde: “To my life I have given my genius, to my writing, my talent.” He saw it clearly. He judged sanely. It is true, perhaps, that he had toward it, as was his habit, an air of _de haut en bas_.

His Satires tell his real life. They, strangely enough, are poetry of fact, something which (the poetry of fact) has not been invented again until our day, and Verhaeren. Horace set about making life a work of art in the same calm way Goethe did. With both, the thing to be lived was superior to the thing created.

He is never confidential. With him, the world is present. He wears a charming manner of indifference. He was too worldly to show his heart. The _human interest_ element is lacking. He would scorn the heart-throbs upon which inquisitive modernity insists.

There is a sensuous spirituality in poets of the Augustan Age, in scorn of gold, in clear understanding it can not buy the best, because genuine things belong to all. With them spirituality was striving for the best of earth. There is its sadness, in lack of conception of anything beyond.

But how grateful, how appreciative were they for pleasant things! Having no heaven they had kindlier nearness to earth. They were brothers to the trees, streams. Among them Catullus and Propertius are most modern. In their technique, their emotional view point, there is something that startles. Their heart cry, their rebellion against time and its ravages, shiver with new iridescence, the pagan calm. It plays over their poems like rainbow-shimmer across Murano glass, in contrast to the calm of chiseled marble. Some fretful, wandering wind of modernity touched them, then made them tremble with prophetic wisdom in the comfort of their gay, Greek garden.

Most sonnet writers in America, except George Sterling, overweight the sonnet line, just as in my opinion Brangwyn, delightful draftsman, when he leaves paint brush and colors, overweights the etched line. This crowding of the small, clean room of the sonnet, is the chief fault of that accomplished sonneteer, Mahlon Leonard Fisher. The sonnet line should be noble, clean, and of gracious curve. It should be pure, unvexed, like skies of great etchers, Rembrandt for example.

The American sonnet writer, again excepting Sterling, who to my mind has written the best sonnets in our country, (see his _Sequence to Oblivion_), is like a pretty debutante, a very pretty debutante, who, in addition to being pretty, insists upon being brilliant, insists upon using a mouth so lovely that is evidently what God made it for, to say clever things. This is worse than mixing metaphors. It is like insisting upon putting furniture that belongs by right to a large house into one small room, one very small room, _the sonnet-room_.

The world is mad about information, about knowing everything there is to know, and it insists upon displaying it. No one has courage to admit ignorance. Everyone pretends wisdom that surpasses Solomon. One should learn to wear learning lightly, as a jester his bells. And for the same good reason, to mark the ways of joy.

Modern sonnet writing is becoming an exhibition of acrobatics, of how to put the greatest possible number of objects dangling, pirouetting, balancing, upon one little line until its loveliness, its clean, clear profile is obscured. Art is not made to astonish. It is not an acrobat who performs feats upon lines either long or short. It is made to charm, to ennoble, bring refreshment to the spirit. It is divine play. It is cream-skimming joy. It is plucking the invisible flower of the heart, for a moment’s showing. Assuredly an unvexed thing, from which imperfections have been taken!

England did not do any too well by the sonnet in the early days when she took it from Italy. She roughened it. She coarsened it. She made it a trifle pot-bellied. She taught it to drink ale, instead of wine. She took the classic, Latin profile and gave it two round eyes and a turn-up nose.

And yet I know English sonnets that are lovely. Milton wrote one. Keats wrote one. Mrs. Browning wrote more than one. George Pellew wrote three, three great ones, on Greek subjects, I seem to remember. To do it he made himself, in spirit, un-English. He slipped upon his shoulder the graceful garment of another race and turned back, for rare creative moments, toward the red, wine-making south. Mrs. Browning did something similar, although she only went as far as Italy. She was prodigiously instructed, however, in both Greek and Latin.

The calm spaces between words in Italian sonnet writers is vastly more difficult of realizing than people think. It is harder to sit perfectly still than to stand upon your head at stated intervals, wearing bells and motley. You can not catch Art, (with either a large or a small letter) by running after her and sprinkling salt upon her tail. Genuine Success is something besides a large noise and a yellow electric light.

The calm gliding into the first line of an accomplished sonnet writer of old Italy, gives me the same sensation as, after noise, discomfort of a storm, the calm gliding into a harbor, blue, safe, sheltered, smiling, serene. I have felt this strongly in opening lines of Dante’s _Vita Nuova_. They recur to me again and again.

_Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore_

Consider the jeweled setting of vowels, their wise interlining, the grace, consider, the beginning, that does not disturb the poise of silence, nor invade harshly its suave secrecy.

Or

_Tutti li miei penser parlare d’Amore_

_Donne ch’avete intellette d’Amore, i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire._

Italy is almost as rich in dignified, nobly chiseled sonnets as in chiseled marbles. Today we are trying to belittle the sonnet. Frequently we make it tawdry. The sonnet is akin to the eye which is one of the windows of the soul. It is not an up-heaped bargain-counter, for a noisy bargain sale.

Heredia, despite his varied story-telling in sonnet form, did not overcrowd the line. He was too reliable an artist. He knew what a frame is silence. Nor did d’Annunzio! Both were too sensitive for this indelicate wrong.

Very likely the chief difficulty lies in the fact that the sonnet does not suit the life of the present. New art-form must be invented for our restless, changing existence. The old bottles are not strong enough for the heavy, strange effervescences, from grapes, of this crowded, disconcerting, wild Garden of Time.

Goethe expatriated the soul of him astonishingly in that war-vexed Germany that knew the wild ways of Napoleon, when he wrote _The Roman Elegies_. (_Die Römische Elegien._) They are calm. They are chiseled like marbles of Attica. They are sincere, noble, firm, truly visioned; the kind of art we shall not see soon again. They have given me unvarying pleasure throughout the years because of the perfection they keep. Their wholeness is source of strength. I read them over and over.

And yet it is the same as reading Tibullus, Propertius, or the _Amores_. It is the same art, happening merely to be written in a northern tongue.

Goethe was a unique, powerful figure in history of letters for one whose manhood saw the French Revolution. One of the strangest things in literature is that it did not move him. When it was sweeping grandly on, for freeing man from trammels of the past, Goethe wrote a scholarly friend in Paris about the good news. The friend supposed of course he meant the Revolution. Goethe, however, had no such thought. He was merely referring to praise the French Academy had given his scientific discoveries.

I have read Brandes’ book about Goethe, and with interest, because practically every idea projected was given long ago by the late Professor Calvin Thomas, who very likely is the most trustworthy authority on the _Man of Weimar_. A comparison of the two books about the German writer is interesting. There has seldom been, perhaps, so much rehashing of projected thought of the past as now, so many evidences that limitation has come, and that reconstructed mental clothes are considered good enough.

The etched line of Whistler, especially in the first Italian series, is peculiarly like the sentence-line of Loti in his earlier books on the East. There is the same rare distinguished attack, of which not two in a generation are capable. The same wistful, intensified, highly personal beauty, flashed upon the dazzled senses by a moment of tremendous seeing. The same tremulous sensitiveness, that only the exquisitely dowered possess. Mingled with all, _witchcraft_, the vanishing essential of art, which none may seize easily with words.

I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for me.

I have heard Kubelik! He is young, boyish. When he came upon the platform he was a timid little boy, parading his grandfather’s long black coat. A melancholy boy, buttoned to the chin in black. Beside me sat an old man, who at sight of him exclaimed: To think he is father of twins! Every once in a while, as the concert progressed, he gave expression to the exclamation.

While his body is graceful, aristocratic, in his head, expression of face, there is good deal of the peasant. The face is sombre, gloomy, with touch of the pure Slav, in the modelling. That Slav land is unique because genius has been pleased to illumine it. No race have so understood tragedy of the soul, tyranny of material things. What other literature can show such revealing wisdom as stories of Potapenko, the short sketches of the two Tolstoy’s? Such tales as Nemirovitch Dankschenko wrote, in _Under the Earth_! The criminal pictures of Dostoievsky, the stories Chekov made with the surgeon’s scalpel, the work of Kuprin, or Garshin!

When Kubelik made his appearance he received tremendous welcome. No trace of pleasure, sympathetic response, showed upon his face. Bohemian Paganini is a good name for him, only he is an intellectual player, not an emotional one. He is great, exact.

I should like to know the history of his violin. It set me dreaming of rare Cremona’s, for wood of which master-makers roamed forests of Tuscany, tapping trees, testing resonance, on the south side, listening subtly to song of sap. A marvelous instrument for depth, richness!

Music is an independent world, whose diameter no scientist can measure. A vast world of delight, placed conveniently near.

I do not imagine it was insupportable to Beethoven to be deaf. He merely lived more fully in that other world. It was superior. He could not hear other men’s music to be sure. But there were none so great as he.

As the physical organ which reproduced sound became frailer, more perfect, because undisturbed, was the inner sound-vision. It was purified. The world of music is filled with astonishing buildings, towers of tone, buildings such as Painter Turner, dreamed when centuries after they vanished, he tried to realize with his brush, for us of slighter vision, the _Palaces of Caesar_.

The architecture of Handel was religious, of Hebraic sternness; while Mozart built fairy palaces of delight, gleaming, white-sugar fantasies of form, palaces of _Zucker und Zauber_. We can not see these buildings on our own initiative, we of little faith. We are forced to wait for masters to fling open gates. They alone possess the key.

Those little sound-arabesques in Beethoven, of superb decorative beauty, I like to fancy, are the condensed sweetness, in memory, of days of youth, spent in the merry Rhineland. The happy heart of harvesters is there, the subdued joy of laughter. The desire for money, fame, the world’s applause, can never be mainspring of such rare arabesques.

I know a little old Jewish gentleman. Little indeed! Not larger than a Brownie, which he resembles. He has pale, grey, colorless eyes, so crossed they spend their time looking into each other. He has a huge, bristling, up-standing mustache, which looks as if it were futilely engaged in pulling his poor, hump-backed figure up to height, straightness.

After lunch he starts for a walk, wearing a tall hat, coquettishly tip-tilted over his nose. On one of his home-comings I met him. He told me he had been to the grave of his wife, that during the twenty years since her death he had seldom missed a day. He told me this in such dignified tone, and one withal sad, earnest, that his shriveled figure took on the importance, the size of a hero.

Who but member of the race, with indelible blood of centuries of persecution in its veins, would be capable of such devotion! To the Jew, family, home, mean more than to the Gentile. (But free, easy, get-rich-quick America is not good for him. It is breeding out, rapidly, the fine qualities of the race.) The Jew has been helpful, in various ways, to America. He has helped destroy provincialism. He makes for enlightened cosmopolitanism, because the cultivation of the world has touched the race-mind.

This old man regaled me with stories of youth spent in Austria, Bavaria. He was a beau, he declared, in old Bavarian days. But of all the women he saw, Viennese are the prettiest, most spirited. They have figures of sylphs. They are never twice alike.

In childhood, he explained, I lived in sight of Munich. A beautiful city! I remember when Mad Louis was King. He tried to make it another Athens, center of art. The dream was delusive. As delusive as the name he chose for his fairy palace, _Wahnfried_.

But he taught Germans music. He was patron of Wagner.

When summer comes to the plains, air is hot, dry, and I can not breathe comfortably, nor sleep, I dream of the air I used to smell in Bavaria, as it blew across snowy Alps, sweet with spruce, with fir. I like America! It has been good to my people. My old friend is like March weather; upon the surface snow, chill, while underneath, unseen, the warmth of spring.

Members of the old man’s race have stood at head of art, letters and every science. In the Middle Age, at dawn of the Renaissance, it was Jewish wanderers, traveling from country to country on multifarious business errands, whose linguistic nimbleness formed links between Greece and Rome, between Spaniard and Moor, between Occident and Orient. They had no little to do in dissemination of Greek culture, a culture which in its essence is antagonistic to them.

They were translators for the ancient world. They were numbered among scholars of mediæval days. It was they who helped unlock treasures of Moorish culture for the ungrateful Spaniard.

In the realm of medicine their sway was undisputed. In this profession they held positions of honor in Italian, in Spanish Courts.

They carried songs of Italy to France, to Provençe, inspiring the Troubadours. They had powerful poets, originators of their own, too. Most talented perhaps of whom, in mediæval days, was Jehuda ben Halevy, whose mistress and lady of sorrows, (to whom he dedicated his heart in song), was Jerusalem the Fallen, just as in a later day, Italy, the discrowned, dismantled Queen, was the mistress of inspiration of Poggio.

During Moorish rule, in Spain, before the Inquisition, there was no position of honor, influence, where intellectual worth counted, where the Jew was not found. He was held in like esteem at Court of Robert of Naples, at time gay Boccacio was there paying poetical _devoir_, at the same time, both to Queen Joanna and Fiammetta.

The world’s great wit and lyric poet, Heine, was a Jew. So were the philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza. Of the same race were the composers, Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn. And there may have been Jewish blood in Wagner. No one can prove there was not. Of this race were Auerbach, Heyse, Marcel Schwob, Daudet, Halevy, Mendes, Beaconsfield, Nordau, Brandes, Bernhardt, Rachel, and Jorge Isaacs, who wrote _Maria_, a South American classic, mentioning a few at random. And once, so the story goes, a Jew was king of Poland for a night. Perhaps the most remarkable feat, however, recorded of this race, is that when the Christian religion, like a tidal-wave, swept over Europe, destroying civilizations, the pagan world, where joy was king, they were the one race that did not succumb. Every other race has borne the imprint of its ideals. Who could dream an humble shepherd band from Judea could set at naught the tides of the world!

The Renaissance does not equal the pagan world in beauty. Its madonnas, its units of architectural design, its saints of noble bodies, are but borrowings from the past. They are not original creation. The old beauty which was poignant because it was unselfconscious, because it kept the heart of man, its canary-throated joy, its hours of song, went out of the world then like a candle that is snuffed by a wind that is chill.

_Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief._

Perhaps wisdom of perception is in this line. We who work today, work crippled, sad, limping, in comparison with them of long ago. Worst of all, confused! Dust covered, perhaps, but still taking space in the room of the mind, are too many irrelevant, accumulating objects. Too many foolish and cheap amusements. The free, yellow, sunlighted clean space of the whispering winds is not there.

How ancient are words! When we play with them carelessly, we do not realize how freighted they are with history. They are queer unsteady little sail boats carrying all kinds of baggage of the soul. They fly merrily, briskly, down interminable rivers of Time.

They have come from remotest periods. They have come from the night of history. There is nothing else in the world man has contact with that is so old, except the red earth beneath his feet, or so much part of his life. How they originated we know little more than of the beginning to be of the same red earth. Theories have been put forward. None have been agreed upon.

We know primitive tongues were monolithic. They were built in gigantic squares, like the stone buildings of primitive peoples, the temples upon the Andes, in Peru, in Honduras for example, Yucatan, the pre-historic buildings of Guatamala, India, Egypt. Primitive men hurled at each other blocks of unhewn thought. The change that was in progress from that day to this was one of _making little_, disintegration. The rocks were wearing slowly away to sand. Now speech is broken. It is filled with tiny paste-like particles, inconsequential connectives, the worn, floating, detritus of years.

In everyday speech we make use of sounds which our Aryan ancestors used at foot of the Himalayan Mountains in the childhood of man. Sanskrit _vritta_ (turn); Latin _vertire_; English _verse_. Sanskrit _Deva_ (God); Latin _deus_; English _divine_.

These are very near the forms we use. As I explained before, I, of course, have no right to the word linguist. I read too few tongues. It has been used merely to explain interest in foreign literature, and because we have no intermediate word for exchange.

Sir John Bowring boasted he could speak one hundred tongues and read fluently still another hundred. With it all he was a poor translator. To translate well there must be generous admixture of artist and native writer in the scholar.