Part 17

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.

I saw the other day a large, lovely Cazin, kept in higher key than is customary, which is Schumannesque. We do not find the dull, wet grass we know; the grey, sage-green of some sad world’s end he has made his.

This picture shows a blond, sun-dusted field on a hot day. A field whose gold, whose perpendicular light is dulled by its own splendor. The field forms the foreground. The background one end of a low farm house, whose coral roof all but touches the ground. A low, green tree makes out the house-line, with aid of one of his windmills. Above, blue heat of noon; happy, white, harvest clouds.

No. 59—A Schreyer. White Arab horses; mettlesome, fine. Eloquent outline of horsemen. A red bournous that lights the picture. A heavy, heat-smoking Algerian sky.

Diaz and Harpignies are represented. Rousseau has a ruddy-tinted Forest of Fontainbleau.

Ziem is here! This is a charming canvas. _Venice of my dreams_—in the distance! One large building; cream, rose flushed. Foreground—the sea. A bold, lovely, cobalt sea. Sky of gold. The rich effect of enamel, and muted music.

No. 31—An unusual Harpignies. Trees in middle distance. Under them, ripe level grain, with cold, clear light. In foreground little figures; clear cut, in brown, in dull red.

Diaz shows merry grouped women in a wood. They wear rich costumes. The jeweled splendor of Monticelli is here. Ballard Williams looked upon pictures like this.

There are portraits from England. But I am not in the mood for them. I prefer tawny, rolling, desert hills, the blue harbor of Algiers as Fromentin paints them, or rich autumn woodlands of Rousseau.

No. 48—The dull, storm beaten, resentful black-green of Jacque. _Splendid!_

No. 58—Ziem again! Stately old Venetian palaces I love. They border a canal of cool, even flowing water. On the right, a red building, which peculiarly enough brings touch of the exactitude, coldness of Canaletto, and which I do not like. The sky is happy. Sun flecked, dappled ... this sky bends over Venice!

No. 54—Ziem. Again superb. At his best. In distance the long, elegant, aristocratic line of the Sea’s Queen City, Venice, which he knew better than any one else. White buildings flushed rosy. Beyond, violet-blue. High above, a sky, clear, sweet, but touched with quiver of heat. In the foreground a grassy space and there a tree, (superbly painted) whose top is touched with rose-hued light. Beneath the tree, happy figures wearing vivid colors. High, light, lyric note. Love.

The Corots are of his late manner, when he had grown sentimental, and thought retrospectively. I like best the pictures of Italy he did in youth.

No. 5—A small Pasini. It makes me regret my pocket holds doughnuts not dollars. Delightful picture! A Moorish doorway; white, eloquently curved, bordered with mosaics in faded blue. In front, an Arab, whose red upper garment outdazzles the ruby when the sun pierces its heart. A laugh of color! Pure, delicious, lyric.

Quintillian is a fine phrase maker. He speaks of the milky exuberance of Livy. What could be more _juste_! If one could forget the Latin text, one would think it the printed page of some incisive French critic. Writers who come at end of periods that have been æsthetically productive, are alike, just as, perhaps, peaches and pears, in the youth of Nero, or William the Silent. Few make figures of speech more startlingly brilliant, vigorous in casting light, than Quintillian. They are exploding suns.

Quintillian declares the evenly sustained mediocrity of Apollonious is not to be despised. To quote him verbatim: “The old comedy retains alone the pure grace of Attic diction.” He means Aristophanes, Eupolis, Cratinus.

The power to distinguish, differentiate, at command of Quintillian is marvellous. I seldom have greater pleasure than his pages have been giving me. Quintillian knows how to balance meaning. He splits an hair evenly with the thin edge of wit. He possessed calm, dispassionate, critical, penetrating intellect. There are few more reliable judges of men’s minds. He does not become color of the thing he reads, as small worms take color of what they feed upon. Writers of the antique world stimulate mind. Modern writers seldom do this. They are more likely to enervate me, or make me weary. The old are life giving.

That sensitive prose of Loti is expression of a tradition that goes far back in Latin life. It is in Ovid. It is in the early Italians. It is in songs of Provençe. It is in early French _prosateurs_. From Chateaubriand the road to him lies clear. There is no great stylist who leaps up unheralded. The mind must form a chain with some past, to which self-forgetful love has welded him.

Loti has been faithful to the garden of the soul God gave him. He kept out of it things foreign. Nothing ugly grows there. But it sheltered the beauty of the world.

I have not cared a picayune to see the kings, potentates, princes, who have come to America on various successfully disguised errands of selfishness, to visit, and at the same time to gather stray dollars. I did long to see the face of Loti. I wanted to look into eyes that had looked understandingly upon the earth’s loveliness. I wanted, too, to look upon the man who can weave such superb tissue out of words.

I stood gladly outside the Waldorf in the rain. I waited for hours. I watched across the street from the public school he was going to visit. But I did not see him. My consolation had to be what I read in the papers when I reached home that night, his farewell to America: _All the winds of winter cry me home to Turkestan!_ Such a sentence ought to be consolation enough for any one.

Loti has seen the world. Its poets, princes, have entertained him. His eyes have rested upon the fallen glory of the monarchies of the past. Now, like Alexander, he sighs for new ones.

What a delight in the long ago, upon the burnt, barren plains, where Presbyterianism thrived like a green bay tree in Purgatory, were the early books of Loti: _Pécheur d’Island_, _Pasquala Ivanovich_, _Madame Chrysanthème_, _Fleurs d’Ennui_, and an earlier one about an adventure in the South Seas, the name of which I can not recall. It was Loti’s first published book.

I was always vexed that Presbyterianism thrived upon sand. It was connected, in my mind, with unloveliness, both of matter and spirit. There was never a surface that refracted so bitterly the light, as the white front of that church. It had three sharp points, in a row, that stuck up ready and willing to impale sinners. The priests of Presbyterianism are stormy and iron hearted.

Once Lily Langtry came here, to the plains, in a private car, with Frederick Gebhardt. They remained a number of days, to go hunting in the Indian Territory. I used to follow her around upon the street, for the joy of looking up at her face. I lived in the desert you know! Her face looked, in those days, like blue-eyed flowers that grow upon the fields of England, where rain falls without stress, and mists come.

Salvini, the younger, came likewise to go hunting. I was overjoyed to meet him. He was hero of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, come to life. Brown, supple, gay, and young! Nothing ever came again after that, except the wind, sand....

But hope grew astonishingly. The less soil there is, the better hope grows. Hope is what you might call the indestructible mushroom of the soul. If I were a poet, instead of faultfinder, it might impel me to an ode to courage. But here’s the rub! I might find difficulty in distinguishing between courage and folly.

Everyone was a prospective millionaire, in good old days of wind and sand. The strangest thing was that the entire state was drunk. What was it drunk upon? You see Kansas was like the Isle of Champagne, in the story by that name, where each individual was intoxicated. Only here they were drunk on air instead of champagne. Air came cheap and did not have to be bottled. Champagne cost money, and a bottle. The State was drunk on glittering, mirage-making air. It enfolded the minds with rosy glamour just as it enfolded the landscape. Prohibiting fact lost power. The penniless wanderer in his prairie schooner, felt magic of it, as readily as the dweller in the village. It inflamed the brain through the eye. It wrapped the mind in rosy vision. Just beyond the next land-fold, lay prosperity, the culmination of dreams.

That is the reason Kansas grew wild political fads, long-haired and long-legged, soap-box orators. It was upon air like this, upon which oratory could thrive. No one could see realities. Corn, cabbages, and cranks grew to monstrous size. Being poor today did not matter, because tomorrow we were going to tickle Caesar under the chin.

There was unworn power in the untilled earth that gave vigor. It keeps some of it still. Today there is something there of youth that can not grow old, joy that does not become tinsel, or cheap, an unfading fire in the heart. What can humanity do without youth?

It leaked out through the post office, which was one small unpainted room with a hole in the wall, for things to go into or come out of, that I was buying packages of wicked books from Europe. The neighbors called to investigate. They carried away the startling report that it was packages of _yellow-back novels_. _Probably, highly immoral!_ One of these books disappeared. It happened to be a volume of Bossuet’s _Funeral Orations_. It did not come back. They burned it for safety’s sake. The town, however, was saved.

Bossuet, whose silenced voice helped mark the decline of the great age of Louis XIV, had been confessor, in court circles, to fair ladies of France. But I will wager that even he would have been surprised at human inventiveness in the fields of sin, at what happened to his orations for the dead bodies of these same ladies. They felt the red rag of revolution was as evident in these books they could not read, as the red flannel around the lantern the old, bent, fat Santa Fé night-watchman carried, which spotted the long, lonely streets with round dots of light. After that I became a dangerous person. The eyes that were in the habit of glancing at me sideways were bright and shining with disapproval.

But I was deliriously happy through it all, as long as pennies held out with which to buy books, and those magnificent, low, yellow moons of summer swung majestically out of the unknown to poise above the plains. I have never forgotten the feel of the warm winds of those nights of summer so long ago, upon my arms, upon my shoulders. It is one of the things I would like to know again.

The way to study pictures is not to study them, not to try to know history, nor making, but just to look at them, then keep on looking. The beginning of joy is the beginning of wisdom. The eye trains itself. Like an independent organism, it searches, chooses, judges, until it has distinguished good from bad. Looking at pictures, making no attempt to interpret, to explain, trains vision, until everywhere we turn our heads, we make pictures for ourselves. The eye, without command, instruction, selects, adjusts, keys itself to the artist’s trained seeing.

The more we enjoy a picture, the more, for that fleeting moment, we are in harmony with the mind that produced it. Pictures flash us out of our dull selves into clear, unvexed dominance. There is healing, health, in beauty. It represents that from which imperfections have been taken. Pictures are temperamental tuning forks.

Small, paper-bound, cheaply-priced books containing prints should be as common upon reading tables as papers. It is not easy to measure the good of contact with the silent things of art.

I like prints. I have something that resembles affection for them. That is why I regret that the skies of Piranesi are troubled. I wanted them to be glowing, clear.

The simply treated skies of Le Père please me. They are barely marked.

The etched line of Pennell is feminine. When he etched the Panama Series he forced it to Brangwyn bravoura, for which it is not suited. They are not art, these plates, whether the initial be large or small.

The etchings of Piranesi resemble the musical compositions of Handel. Both made temples stern, lofty, with mystery in the depths.

The etchings of Daubigny recall Virgil, in the _Bucolics_. The lovely, Latin land where cities are not near, fields are cultivated, and little rivers draw water birds! The line of Daubigny is gentle, loving. It is of the unforced rhythm of Virgil.

The line of Haden is cold, pure.

The line of Whistler is fretful, nervous, capricious. But marvellously sensitive! If he is not big, genial, he is exquisite. For one fretful moment Whistler could love gleam of a surface. He never at any time cared what was beneath. He could not hold calmness long enough to love anything into serenity. He possessed audacity, as much as skill. There floated before his keen, sensitive mind, memory of mighty Japanese, Chinese craftsmen, who outdistanced him by force of love, that self-sacrificing humility, which makes men great. He liked to startle. He liked to shock by technical surprises. He liked to lash observers with virtuosity.

He was a Czar bent upon forcing submission. With his genius there was commingled the trickster, mountebank. Nothing Whistler etched had weight. He could not bother with a vulgar thing. Instead it had witchery. The butterfly in flight!

I like the wet streets of Buhot when restless clouds are reflected on them, or the fleeting carriage of some Parisian _mondaine_. They are refreshing. He loves rain as Hiroshige loved it. But he shows it differently because he is of a different race. He has not the childlike sincerity of the Japanese. The sad wisdom of the decadent Latin is in him. Shadows are black which speeding wheels of Parisian beauties leave. But memory fills distance with magic, with wistfulness.

In the dim streets, the twilight corners of the Paris of Meryon, dwells old French romance. Gay, interesting, pathetic figures of Balzac! Dumas the Elder, Hugo! It is the Paris that inspired Baudelaire, Gautier.

Etching has humming-bird grace; it has poignancy and intimacy. One holds it to the heart like a violin. It catches the moment which vanishes. It holds cruelly, derisively, the flash of sunlight that caressed some surface we regret but love. Etching is near the soul.

There is a print of an actor by Kiyotsune which shows pink of Watteau made strange by being seen by the Orient’s black beetle eyes. This same artist has a red dark, bronzed, brutal, that rings with metal blare.

Looking at the collection of Japanese prints, large and fine, in the Boston Museum, I have had a good time. I found browns etherealized to grey, with vast, uncanny, spacial suggestiveness. This is background of Horunobu. He has an orange I remember. It has lost its fire, to be sure, with years; vicissitudes of change. Now it keeps merely memory of some sun of summer of long ago. He combines this with what a prosaic person would call green, but which is a Roman olive orchard in the autumn. He has colors that float with maddening indecision between pink, yellow, brown, grey, blue, green, to unite the shores of the unseen, to surprise then delight.

Koriusai has the weary, meditative violet of gay fête-days that fail. And a red, full of joy as throat of a thrush. I wish they could sing me back, these music-winged colors, out of the sad, beseiging, present, through radiant centuries, to some fabulous, gold-lacquered Palace of Tang!

Kiyonaga made a print where cherry blossoms veil with pink mist the shores of the Sumida, and women wear plain robes of faded hues while their faces keep archaic calm.

Kiyonaga is unique for reds. He has widened with them the gamut of emotion. Some reds are tragic; some terrible. Some are hesitating. Some are sullen, brooding, regretful. Some weigh heavily with memory of deeds not forgotten. Some indiscreet, too full of meaning.