Part 12

Someone accused Byron of imitating _Faust_. His reply was: “I did not follow Goethe, but both Goethe and I followed the Book of Job.” It is about the same resemblance as that which exists between passages of the New Testament and Epictetus. Not personal but merely expressive of the distributed thought of a period, a kind of thought, (in case of Goethe), following in the wake of the French Revolution. It was a fashion people had of wearing minds, in disturbing days of reconstruction. Stillings declared that Goethe’s heart, which few knew, was as great as his mind, which all knew.

The time will come when the insistence of the East, written in the most ancient documents known, that _life is one_, will be proven. The deep heart-dream, the poetic fancy, of one age becomes the fact of another, and the cheap commonplace of a third. We shall find that the despised weed of the garden, the bullfrog in the pool, and Napoleon on the throne of France, are _one_ manifestation of life. The most interesting thing the world has done, or will do, is slow turning of the ponderous pages of science, each leaf of which represents an age. One of my regrets is that I can not watch the turning leaves of all the future.

Sanskrit teaches that in the tree and in man dwell the same spirit. What a thing it was to do, to be able, by abstract thought, to reach that conclusion! An ancient Vedic hymn sings of Aranyani, spirit of the trees. Some of the words I have forgotten. These I recall:

_Desire then at the first arose within it, Desire which is the earliest seed of spirit, The Lord of Being, in non-being ages._

The Rig Veda describes how offerings were made to plants because they were _powers of life_. The plant that has climbed nearest to human life, shown best what possibilities are there, and sometime probably will reward the observations of scientists, is the orchid. The only thing Darwin had interest in, he who was eager to solve the mystery of man, was that other mystery, _life of the orchid_. Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, declared: _The tree is thy brother!_ It was while standing under a palm tree, in the garden of Padua, that the idea of metamorphosis of plants came to Goethe. Perhaps Goethe thought noble palms above his head were exclamation points of wisdom! I am not sure he did not say something like that. Linnæus insisted that _luxuriant flowers are none natural but all monsters_.

Modern scientists tell us that when biologists write of the principle of life, they find illustrations among plants as often as among animals. The germ from which a human being is evolved differs in no wise from germ from which a plant is evolved.

What is life? Schelling, Comte, Lamarck, De Blainville, Spencer, have tried in vain to define it. Is it easy to know the exact difference between animal and vegetable protoplasm? In both are life. Life means progress, change. It is not impossible that the fragile lines marking a flower carry sensation. A nerve is protoplasm.

Nerve sensation is a line of molecules conducting impression. It is contraction and expansion. Evolution is the changing distribution of matter and motion, extending through periods of time.

We ourselves, once, were little more than dull, outspread leaf-surfaces. Sensation is not unthinkable development of plants. From sensation, the step to active mind is not impossible, nor out of range of seeing. Mind may not be anything but some form of matter. Matter is a witch wearing masks. It may be accumulated expression of force, reflected from matter.

The cells of plants focus light like eyes. A scientist in Europe has taken pictures with them. Cell-eyes may know love and hate. Without weariness, for measureless time, what have they not reflected? Poised upon the edge of tremendous heights, they survey chasms of transformation. They survey the circle of created things. Who knows what they have seen which the human eye may not record? There may be an amazing new botany awaiting us some day. It will not be bare mathematical computation. It will not drily number petals, stamens. In unthinkable distances of time, apparently dull, yet sleepless cell-eyes will be photographed. Upon these photographs there will be found the strangest, most astonishing moving-picture, the unfolding history of the world. The triumph, the tragedy, of cell-progress, throughout the measureless black night of time, will become possession of all. There we shall read the past. There we shall read the passions, adventures of the orchid, in its long climb upward, toward more powerfully sentient life.

Thinking does not necessarily wear _one_ fashion of flesh. All things can not be seen from one view point. This is true of planes of life, which are an endless spiral, filling heights of years. There are planes seen only with the brain, when it brings to action high powers of thought-projection.

Pan and the nymphs symbolized Greek belief in the life-spirit of trees. In pagan days the names given to the orchid signified life. They were names of lovely women: _Alba_, _Rosa_, _Aurea_. Within this nomenclature of the ancients, it may be a scientific fact lies hidden. Facts are felt dimly by many before they are stated broadly by one.

The orchid expresses intensity. The modern world has loved it, because it is restless, perplexing, like the modern soul. The pagan world preferred calmer flowers. It was satisfied with the rose. The rose is an early Victorian.

Plants are not different from people. There are plant-villages that lead a busy life. There are plant-colonies that hate the invader. They protect themselves against him. There are vagabond-plants that run away, impelled to wander.

The orchid is an adventuress, reaching out greedily between planes of existence. It has become most superb in strength wherever there have been perished civilizations, wherever an unknown past has been prodigious.

In the land where the Inca ruled they riot. They thrive in Mexico, in steaming valleys the Aztecs knew. In Central America, Guatamala in

## particular, they mark effectively the disappearing outline of Mayan

temples. Where the world was earliest populated, we find them. In Ceylon, on the ruins of Anuradapura, where palaces towered at a date when European man was living in holes in the ground like an hairy animal, they throng like flocked phantoms of delight. The forests of Siam and Cambodia know them, and overflowing rivers which wash dead marble-cities, such as Angor, whose ruins of a perished civilization fascinate me. There, orchids flash like flame. They light the night wherever the dim, sluggish, tropic rivers swing. In deserted, rose-hued, marble cities such as Amber upon the Highlands of India, where man comes no more, where no more there is pageant, peacock, nor king, savage orchids cling. They cling wildly; _life_, which refuses death. They are lured by lands where memories are many, where there is the dust of millenniums and ruins of the fabulous mansions of men.

It is appropriate that the man who has arisen to prove capability of plants for sensation, to prove they feel fear, suffer agony, should come from India, (Bose), where the idea was projected. And now we are on the threshold of truth that lies ahead.

The romances of the future will be more thrilling than the old commonplace of a man falling in love with a woman, or _vice versa_. The romances of the future, when the novel as we know it now must disappear, will be written by that sleepless, fiery-eyed Demon, Science. How tame, silly, will the old novels, plays, seem of Priscilla, (say), meeting Paul in the garden! What a ridiculous thing in which to be interested!

In this period of fashion not reason, which is to aim one’s heavy cannons, one’s best made spit balls, at the gods of yesteryear, it is well to read books of criticism for novelty, pleasure of mental exercise, and not trouble about believing what they say. Look upon it as a mental stunt! I have read recently that Flaubert was mediocre, and could not write, that Balzac had no ability of any kind, Maupassant lacked the short-story sense, and Shakespeare should be done over by someone who knows his rich Elizabethan England better than he did.

Very likely the age we are living in is sterile save scientific mind. How can it go on, when it can not see the road? Probably little, or nothing, being written in this feverish period, will last. It is the bridge that leads from one shore to another. We may find pleasure in the shores, but the bridge will be forgotten.

An impulse to besmirch what no one dared to besmirch is not genius. Its fineness, originality, value as attitude of mind, are questionable. Yet I can not dispute the fact that a large spot of black shows on a white surface. It can be observed at a distance. People see it. A thing that is new is not necessarily better, not to mention best.

I am thinking, among other things, of critical discoveries of Croce. Sometimes his discoveries are like the originality of finding how much more comfortable to live in is a house without a roof than one with a roof. Here is hoping Signor Croce always had his umbrella or lived in a land where rain did not fall!

Marsden Hartley is a poet. He is sometimes prosy with his brush, but when he takes to pen and ink, he blossoms. There is the making of a charming stylist in Hartley, which is just what he would like to have us believe he disdains.

Among his pictures, I have liked his tragic New England farms, black with accumulated terrors of puritan winters. I have liked his slender vases of crystal, holding a flower visioned to disappearing outline, where loveliness alone remains. This is gold. But gold circulates, is most useful, with admixture of alloy.

Art is stenographic mind-reading of the trembling soul. It is the truth which living obscures, or makes us unable to see, because we are insensitive. One who has gentleness, sensitiveness, which are other names for fineness, feels and responds. It is not dependent upon intellect, sharpness of wit. It has to do with nobility. It is this critics neglect. It does not need book-learning. It needs the fine human instrument.

This is about what Tolstoi meant when he declared it was for the people. Tolstoi spoke at a good time. It will not be long before all things will be for the people. The future belongs to them. There will no more be walled gardens.

The idea for Rostand’s _Chanticleer_ was inspired largely by _The Birds_ of Aristophanes. Rostand was a borrower. Likewise from the same comedy, Leopardi, incomparable Greek scholar, took the idea for his essay on birds, in which he tries to fancy theirs the ideal life.

The Greeks knew how to set words so they glow. Every time I re-read him I am surer there is nothing new. In _The Frogs_, in the journey of disguised Bacchus across Land of the Dead, we find initial idea of Dante’s Inferno; to be exact the _Pilgrimage Through Purgatory_. It is the same only under guise of another religion. There are a few books in which most printed art has its roots. Solomon was right. There is nothing new. There are only a few Homeric laughers.

The exotic grace, the honeyed charm of Swinburne, came from Greek and French poets. No wonder the perfection of Swinburne made would-be poets take to new verse. It was hopeless to contend with him. When you reach the top of the hill there is nothing to do but go down. Swinburne reached the top of the mountain.

_The long winged dapple swallows_, (Aristophanes), is a Swinburnian phrase. From the choruses of Euripides, he learned music, swift-swinging resonant movement. That breathless on-rushing, which no poet of today has, came from here. They are astonishingly alike in sound-quality. A poet is like what he admires. Love is a magnet in the world of mind.

Maeterlinck, in his book about bees, borrowed from Fabre. In philosophical articles he has shown indebtedness to India. I recall a series of these articles in which he uses the words, _the unknown guest_, literally translated from Sanskrit. He has been praised for the phrase. It is a fine phrase. But it does not belong to Maeterlinck.

Alfred Noyes, in _Drake_, leaned lightly upon a narrative poem by Spencer, describing South America.

An Arabic poet, on his way to exile in Africa, sang sadly:

_It’s a long white road to Mekinez!_

That was before the days of _Tipperary_.

There are writers, (ideas) whose attraction, influence, has been for people of distant races, who have leaped across national boundaries. Song, like the wind, keeps a way of its own.

English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. There it moulded a race of poets. It set seal upon a movement in letters. Both Puschkin and Lermontov, the two most gifted poets of the country, have been nicknamed _The Russian Byron_. In Germany, on the contrary, Byron’s influence was slight, just as the influence of the French Revolution was slight there, and spread out helplessly, like sea water across marsh-land.

The romantic movement, whatever and whenever may have been its origin, reached height, became rotten, over-ripe, in Poland, in Hungary, in prose and verse. No poets have so gone the limit in creation of romantic verse as Slowacki, Mickiewicz, and Krasinski, in Poland. And no romantic prose, (I mean in realm of the story), can equal that of Paul Gyulai, the Hungarian, as reliable as he was in criticism, and less romantic, although still tainted with it, the novels of Csiky, likewise of Hungary.

The character of Merlin, and the Forest of Broceliande, has had fascination for French mind. French poets refer to it often. They try to re-create its appeal in their tongue.

Apollinaire wrote a book about it, a book magnificently illustrated with wood-cuts by Derain. He called it _L’Enchanteur Pourrissant_. The subject allured that delightful poet, Paul Fort. His book, part of which sings the song of the misty north over again, is called _Les Enchanteurs_.

Jaroslav Vrchlicky wrote sonnets to Merlin, who teased his Bohemian fancy. English poets have not cared so greatly, aside from Tennyson. The idea has a sumptuousness a trifle un-English, a twist of mind not usual with the race.

Although the Russians, in the old days, read French prodigiously and spoke it, their mind was influenced by England, by Germany. The philosophy of the latter ploughed furrows through the race which time has not been able to efface. The effect of France over the mind of Russia was greatest in the Eighteenth Century. The educated Russian was always comparatively free to choose mental food, because it was easy for him to read other tongues. Right here is mark of kinship with the Orient, whose subtle thinking fell so easily into different moulds.

Pio Baroja’s _Juventud Egolatria_ (read in Spanish. I have not seen the English version), shows a man who has genius for going wrong. After reading it, one does not have increased respect for his head or his heart. It is too bad to be able to enjoy few things, in any department of art, life. Envy, hatred, have eaten like rust. One might perhaps guess him to be victim of some concealed, incurable physical ill which blasts life.

In addition to individual hatreds, he is generous enough to share those of the rest of the world. He remarks: “_Respecto a la hostilidad que Nietzsche siente por la teatrocracia de Wagner, la comparto._” In regard to _hostility_ I fancy Baroja would always be generous enough to say _la comparto_, I share it.

His mind is peculiar in its reaction to ideas. But his modesty we admit. I noticed a line in which he confesses the opposite of what Loti happens to say in his last book, _Prime Jeunesse_.

“_No la quiero conservar: que corra, que se pierda. Siempre he tenido entusiasmo por lo que huye._” (I do not care to preserve anything: let it hasten away, let it be lost. Always I have felt enthusiasm for that which was fleeting.) Loti declared he had devoted life to preventing anything from perishing, _even memory_.

In Baroja there is visible joy in destruction. With it, insensibility to beauty. A nature harsh, dry, cold. He is narrow, dogmatic. He steps nimbly in a little circle where everywhere are marks of poverty. He is not grandly gloomy, tragic, like Leopardi, nor can he, like the Italian, create impeccable art. He suffers from lack of sympathy, vision. He has neither the generosity nor expansive spirit that permits him to enjoy, admire, learn. There is something about the book which is crabbed, petty. In addition, words do not come fluently. He is what Germans call _wortkarg_. His critical ability is slight. He recalls faintly now Leopardi, Dostoievsky, as to constant inclemency of mental weather. They, however, were moved by genius. He hates splendor, the fury of great spirits with which he has little in common. They make him feel small, cold, old.

He accuses Balzac of stupidity, delirium. That very likely is the way the mountain looks to the mouse. Victor Hugo is rhetoric, vulgarity. No wonder he was dazed by Hugo’s vocabulary! He can not admire the prose of Flaubert. He is like a person who having lived in darkness, has dwarfed eyes unable to respond to light. Again he seems a naughty boy who stands in middle of the street for purpose of spattering passers-by with mud, taking account neither of age, infancy, his interest being to bespatter.

What he writes of Dostoievsky is rather brilliant. That is seldom ascribed to Baroja. He says (translating as I quote): “In the spiritual fauna of the Twentieth Century he will be something like the Diplodocus.” He is perhaps an uncatalogueable monster, but a monster of genius not easily to be equalled or imitated.

He could appreciate neither Sainte Beuve nor Taine. He read them like a blind man. When he read Ruskin he had no comprehension that whatever that critic’s opinions as criticism, as stylist he is worth while. Baroja talks something like the conceited fop of an isolated village. He may be scientist gone wrong, who uses a scalpel, where his present profession calls for a pen. He makes attempt to vaccinate his readers with his peculiar virus.

Baroja’s opinion of the Latin historians, Sallust, Tacitus, shows an inclination to baseness. He thinks evil persistently. In these two cases judgment and scholarship are weak. He grudges Tacitus posthumous fame. But it must be admitted he can appreciate Caesar’s _Commentaries_, and that his word of them is _juste_. It may be he does not know how to envy them.

Baroja is not even pleased with the place where he was born, something regarded with affection by people in general. He wishes, plaintively, peevishly, it had been elsewhere. He wishes it had been among the mountains or else beside the sea. He is displeased it was a city where _foreign people_ come. He treats his fellow townsmen, Sarasate, with disdain.

Stylists have been men of charm, kindliness. The lack of these qualities, suavity of surface, is marked in Baroja. There is seldom a sentence that gives pleasure.

Yet if he disavows ability of other men we must give him credit of disavowing his own ability as frankly. That points to crabbed honor. He does not forget to say a good word about Azorin, the critic. A Yankee eye to business! But heaven forbid me from accusing him! None could have the heart to wish him a disagreeable trait with which he is not endowed.

Baroja boasts he is _modern_. This is something of which he is proud. With him it has a local, countrified application, meaning that he is not emotional, that he reserves accelerated motion for his feet. He has a limited outlook. An unchanging view point.

The Spaniard, no matter what his condition in life, worships the aristocratic idea, and is more or less guided by it. No race cherishes more deeply ideal of class.

Baroja does have disconcerting directness. The result perhaps of constitutional disillusion, motived by dislike for what charms others. Steel-edged seeing, however, is his! It may be he is disgusted with the sham men call life.

I would like to believe something akin to the pity of Dostoievsky is mainspring of his hatreds, or a sense of justice which he sees violated. And perhaps he regrets that life is becoming scientific, collective, and must suppress the individual.

War we know has lost dramatic beauty. It is merely scientific slaughter. We can not guess what science will do to transform life.

_La Busca_ (novel), by Pio Baroja. In the novel I find the same sad, gloomy mind, with no sense of structure, of reasoned novel-building. Once in a while, in this book, he has forgotten himself and written a resonant sentence, (page 30, the top), which I feel sure if he knew, he would pluck out, to throw away.

The novel shows that Baroja, in his mediæval Spain, has felt urge of new forms, new bottles for wine of the spirit, but which he himself is unable to procure because of imperfect technique. He has, too, affiliation for filth. But he does not paint it well. He should read Rachilde. _La Busca_ is a saving in too permanent print, of trivialities.

I have read two novels for which it is not easy to find justification. One is _La Busca_, the other Duhamel’s _Confession de Minuit_. The latter shows, however, the miracle of writing three hundred pages about nothing. That takes skill. You can not find a better example. It is an attempt in abnormal psychology, providing mind magnified sufficiently to find the idea.

_The Tour_, by Louis Couperus, is another disappointing book. But the advertising agent of the House that published it is not disappointing. I commend him. He deserves increase in salary. I bought it upon his recommendation. I rose to the bait.

The book is full of missed opportunities. This may be fault of the translation. I have read many translations, however, by De Mattos, a veteran translator, which were splendid. I regret I did not read Couperus in the original! I looked forward to glorious renewal of joy in the rich past of Egypt, its astonishing architecture. What an opportunity Couperus missed in describing that pilgrimage of people to roof of the Temple of Serapis, where, under witchery of an African moon, they were to sleep, royally robed, in honor of the god, then garner dreams! I, myself, then began to dream hungrily of Africa, amazing land which man has never conquered any more than the ocean; of Tunis, in the barren wastes behind which, the Colossus of Thêbes used to burst into radiant song when the sun came up and the burning rays touched it. The book possesses neither beauty of portrayal nor scholarly exposition, to lure the weary, discriminating epicure of things of the mind.

There is a poised, a praiseworthy calm about René Bazin. There is something that comes from nobility of nature that I like. He has observed the good brown earth, the humble trees with happy little leaves, in an intimate, loving, painstaking way that recalls Hardy’s forests of Wessex.