Part 13

I recall an autumn in the forests of Wessex, where the importance of each gold-brown leaf that fell was lifted to power of romance. Most subtly, delicately felt, then adequately reported. When I read the early tales of Hardy, I regret that in America we have lost so many rich Anglo-Saxon word-forms, that American English has become anæmic. It has grown thin, showy. The novels of Hardy are England, the fibre of England, while American novels are not of any land. They might have been written in comfortable ingrain, or Brussels carpeted places, where there is noise and a phonograph, in Fez or Ispahan. It is a pity to miss savor of the soil. It is a pity to be flowers grown in dry, movable, windowpots, instead of in the Earth’s brown, wrinkled breast.

The soul of René Bazin is preeminently Christian, with seal of the Christian ages. He can not conceive beauty for itself. For him it must become morality. He speaks of the _grand refroidissement de l’art national_, which has been called _The Renaissance_.

The soul of him belongs to the world in which pity was born, and this, if I mistake not, is trait of his nature. Even in objective seeing it threatens to become paramount.

In _Redemption, Le Blé qui Lève_, Bazin belongs to the group of Millet, Rousseau, and Breton, only he happens to use words instead of oil and brush.

The overflowing Loire in spring, (_Redemption_), the broad mist-dim meadows it feeds, are magnificent. The great landscape art of France is there. I felt a thrill of pleasure, sense of thirst for beauty satisfied, as when I look upon a canvas. In this canvas, it seemed to me the light was finely managed; balanced massing of shadow with sun. The effect was ennobling. There was something that made one believe again in one’s fellow men. It is good for the heart of the world to read books like his.

I fancy Hardy regrets poetry was going out of fashion when he began to write, or he would have been a poet. Like two other novelists, Paul Bourget and Anatole France, he was born with gift for it. The delicately woven texture of his thoughts belongs more to poetry than prose. His brush is a poet’s brush, his are a poet’s observations. And he has read them prodigiously, great and little. English and Latin poetry few know better. He is too sensitive for the broad blare of prose.

Hardy does not know women. His women are monotonous, undeveloped. They are little more than sketches. To be sure it may be objected that the peasant type he prefers does not lend itself to shading, to differences. But I will venture to assert, without definite knowledge of any kind on the subject, that he himself did not know women. If there had been anything of Burns in his nature it would have come to the surface, either in life or in books.

But no one has described inanimate, humble life of the fields as he has; the lonely downs, grass, furze, the forsaken sea’s edge; the desertion and chill of winter or early autumn, on lonely settlements and isolated homesteads. To read him is good as taking a vacation, he gives so truly the freshness of open spaces. He paints in words the same type in England that Millet painted with brush in France. In both is reverence, sincerity. Like Millet he lived among the people he pictured.

His observation of the fields, the folds is loving, fine. The total effect is that his novels are _rooted_ somewhere; they have definite place. They are homely, solid, instead of brilliant, detached. Now almost everything is superficially observed. I enjoy contact with a mind that knows basic things of the land written about, and I like his scholarly respect for old English and Latin masters. I like all that dissevers from cheap, showy, tinsel, blatant novelty.

Hardy said once that the speaking age is passing for the writing age. Now the writing age is passing for the _seeing_ (Movie) Age. It is too bad suns insist upon shining singly! As for me I shall remain, perhaps all my time, in the first two ages, finding in them, as I do, pleasure.

In the world of Hardy, the amusements of his characters are things that are no more. Imagine, if you can, a novelist of today having characters play _chess_. It seems a thousand years ago! It relegates them to the Romans. And the puritan manners, outlook, of his women are something inconceivable, even in strait-laced little-town places. This narrowness, puritan prejudice, which covers the lives of his characters, seems old. It gives us means by which to measure changes which have swept life of English speaking peoples since he wrote. And years have been few. We have been going at cyclonic speed. We are on the down-hill spin of civilization.

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.