Part 18

I know a print by Shunsho that makes me cool. It is green, black, grey. There is an old man with twist of coral silk about his waist. The green, one faint stain, gives refreshing sensation of accumulated springs. In the grey I have watched the monstrous blackening clouds of midsummer tempests swing.

I know an Utamaro, which is the loveliest thing in existence! Two tall women. One wears enchanting faded pink, one of the unforgettable colors of poet-print-makers; the misty brown that floats above paper with silken shining threads, only Japan could make. The added splendor of incomparable accents of black. The pauses in South American tango dancers, are like these black accents in Eastern art.

If you think black is just black, go to the East. Learn! There are blacks that surpass in depth, mystery, a thousand nights of Egypt.

Inexplainable, dreadful, has been the fate of the dreamers of the world who have carried to heights the power of vision. A curse followed them, because they dared cross boundaries of the commonplace. To look long upon the sun, is to go blind. I am thinking of Heine.

Heine liked his place of exile, France. It was a Promised Land for Children of the Spirit. He hated England, because England did not possess mental flexibility. Lermontov, the Russian poet, disliked England too, and for the same reason.

In Heine there was the broad culture of Germany, lightness of the Latin, and the commanding passion of the Hebrew. The first thing I did in Paris, was to search out his grave. No one in Paris was more alive, more real, than he.

He blended the sad, serious, comic, light, in much the same way as Gogol. This too is trait of Hungarians.

There were many men of stormy revolutionary mind in Heine’s day. The spirit of Byron was abroad in the world. That which we call modernism, was breaking through prejudice.

The last time Heine went out of doors, he staggered to the Louvre, in order to look once more upon his beloved Venus. He burst into tears at the sight. I wonder if he recalled then his youth’s proud, boastful words: “I have never had but two loves: _Venus, and the French Revolution!_” What did he think when worn to a ghost he lay dying, and they intoned beside him the hoary desert songs of Judea?

Heine and Goethe, when they met repelled each other. How could two men be more dissimilar! Goethe was Greek; Heine, first of the moderns. The Hebrew is the only man who is ever able accurately to estimate the day in which he lives. Not geographical spaces, but centuries lay between Goethe and Heine. He is the only one who can focus, with perspective, the present.

Paris was full of commanding figures during Heine’s exile. There were Ary Scheffer, and Delacroix. Horace Vernet was exhibiting for the first time. Felix Mendelssohn, an old friend of Heine’s from Berlin, was here; Malebran, Rossini, Meyerbeer. There was a brilliant crowd of exiled Poles. Liszt and Chopin were both here. It was an engaging Paris. It has at no time been greater. And Heine was not least; slender, handsome, blond, young, reading aloud his verses in the salons of fashion, the verses whose structure he had learned from Uhland. He knew Victor Hugo, de Musset, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and Beranger. Since Heine died, the world has had no great idealist.

As wit, Heine ranks with Voltaire, Cervantes, Swift. Of such superb ability there can be but one to a race. These four men I have mentioned represent Judea, France, Spain, and England. Heine reached two heights; wit and lyric poet. He knew how to take what was best in artistic France, intellectual Germany, and then blend them.

Brandes compares Goethe with Heine, to detriment of the latter. What he is really comparing without seeing it, is two ages of time.

Liszt said, in describing rare evenings spent at Chopin’s, when Chopin consented to play to his friends: “Heine, the saddest of humorists listened with the interest of a fellow countryman to the narrations made by Chopin of the mysterious country which haunted his ethereal fancy, and of which he, too, had explored the beautiful shores. At a word, at a glance, at a tone, Chopin and Heine could understand each other: The musician replied to questions murmured in his ear by the poet, giving in tones the most surprising revelations from unknown regions, about that glorious goddess, Genius.” Ziem used to look in upon these evenings at the home of Chopin, whenever he could tear himself away, for any length of time, from the alluring City by the Adriatic, he painted again and again.

The enemies who resist us help us more than the friends who flatter us. They perform the service of unpaid gardeners.

The art madness of Germany was astonishing about the time of Heine. The young wife of Stieglitz, the poet, killed herself so that grief might make her husband great. This gives us key to that gloomy, melancholy north from which a new, a more complex art, was to come, first to oppose and then to surprise the clean-lined Mediterranean classicism, with its plasticity, its reasoned assurance.

People of genius are people of intuition. Plodders are the intellectual. Now scientists rule. They are trying first to isolate _self_, then exploit it. This is a period of egotism, when man keeps the importance of the microbe, while he feels like the mountain. Money has no meaning as a measure of excellence.

In a city of huge size like New York, pressure upon the individual is great. It equals ocean pressure, upon deep-sea life. It deforms. It makes shapeless.

Gigantic pieces of engineering shock the senses. People suffer from surfeit of everything. They can not indulge the luxury of longing. They are overfed. They have mental indigestion. Satiety comes. Individuals, in so large a city, become sea sand; uniform, uninteresting, individually inconsequential. Such center of prodigious living becomes the wilderness, in spite of law, a place where savages may roam, the most terrible, civilization’s savages; men who prey upon men. They have become beasts. They people solitudes. Heights, depths, touch then blend. Ambition, inspiration, self-respect, die. No poet can live here, then write poetry. (Only the painter, the etcher, seem to survive.) Look at Percy McKaye for example! When he came from his wooded New England hills, he had gifts of a poet. What does he write now? I would not like to name it. To be humble I do not think I could. It is bare of poetry. His _Washington_ is not a creditable high school performance. It is almost as bad as Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_! Success kills too often today. George Sterling was wise enough to get out of New York, to Carmel, the blue sea, the mountains. I recall a sonnet-sequence of his, which is the best of American make.

Consider, too, Tarkington after he wrote _Beaucaire_, and turned to New York, quick dollars. _Beaucaire_ was writing. Compare it with his later prose!

When conflict for life is keen, not only is love between man and man impossible, but kindliness, justice, friendship. Man becomes prey of man. His emotions are those of the beast that destroys. For the body to live, the soul dies.

In well advertised benevolent institutions, the normal feelings of humanity are shut, in order to keep them alive. Soon we shall go to institutions sight-seeing, on Sunday, as we go to the Zoo, to observe queer, useless appendages, that once belonged to man. _À la_ incubator method, they are kept alive. They are as surprising to Twentieth Century eyes as the One Horse Shay. In the future noble feelings, (like exotic flowers) will be kept under glass of hot-houses. In no other way can they survive.

In New York the mean is sacrificed. There is nothing that is good. It is best or else it is worst. The people live, breathe, and have their being in superlatives. We have become a poster art, where everything is black or white. Intermediary shading disappears. Values are not considered. Distinctions are lost. In such a multitude, mind, manners, levels, disappear. Compilation takes place of life.

We pose as the world’s _Wunderkind_. We are looked over, called _l’enfant terrible_, while we throw bouquets, dollars at them and waste champagne we ought to save. The doings of this self-conscious _Wunderkind_ occupy the front elevation of illustrated papers.

Other cities permit you to be yourself. New York does not. It begins to set seal upon you. It makes changes in body, in mind. Its distances, its streets, its miles of gallery floors, exhaust the flesh. Its emotional appeal is great. After weariness has done wrong to body, brain, it dulls with superfluity. Buildings of excessive size stun instead of stimulate. They who endure it, survive, become of a separate race; a highly specialized race. They are deformed like athletes who manned the triremes of Caesar. It is a city without national stamp of any people. It is made, to wonder at.

It is so huge the individual is inconsequential. He feels this. It reacts upon him. He loses hope. A less fine pride envelopes him. Cabbages of course grow largest in gardens. There is no other city where money, its power, is so worshipped. There is no other, where life is discounted, where the young so speedily become the old. There is no other place where life just as life, counts so little. Here labor loses dignity, because it is looked down upon. It becomes ignoble. It slips back too soon to that thing called _servitude_. Visions of useless, unearned wealth breed discontent. Into the port of New York the splendors of the world are poured. Superlatives are standards: highest buildings, the largest shops, greatest park, the most expensive houses. Taste, discrimination, weaken.

Races, religions are poured together like left-overs from a boardinghouse table, to make soup for beggars. Honor is lessened. The premium is so high man cannot buy. Even if man has not honor, he must have meat. Honor is old-fashioned, a rag. Before the eyes that see, minds that judge, merit is nothing; system everything. In his palmiest days Louis the Fourteenth was not acclaimed as New York, city of democratic America, acclaims the dollar, and only what the dollar buys.

I can not read Romain Rolland, Claudel, nor O. Henry. If I had to be punished with one of the three I think I should choose Rolland.

It is too bad that in the letters of Seneca, in which he mentions Pompeii, he does not describe the city. He saw it in its heydey. What a picture he could draw! Not one single glimpse can I get from his letters, however I search. What a Rome it was that had passed in long, glittering pageant before his eyes! He is old, weary of life, as he writes. He tries to prop himself up with stoic mind. Like the majority of thinkers, he learned poverty is best. He declares a life of continued prosperity is a Dead Sea. Lao Tzu on one side of the globe, the Roman thinker on the other declare: _He is not poor who has little, but he who desires much._

Again Seneca writes: _Riches keep you from wisdom. But poverty is free and without care._ The Latin letters of Seneca, and Cicero, have given me a kind of courage I can not procure elsewhere. Cicero is master stylist. There are climaxes in the orations not to be surpassed. I have liked the winged, broad visioned, eagle-mind that contemplated old age in _De Senectute_.

There will be no more essays like _De Amicitia_, because friendship does not exist. It perished with the _toga virilis_, the muscular manhood of Rome. Powerful dramatic anger is gone. And glittering, sword-swinging satire! Where is a Firdusi to write against Sultan Mahmoud? Small, base, worm-like, eating envies crawl in, in place of kings. Not the noble, fearless lion, but the crawling lizard keeps assuredly today the palaces where Mahmoud gloried.

Greek and Latin are out of fashion. However, I do not know of many things of which I should be so proud, as to be called, _Greek Scholar_. And then merit the name.

The finest piece of translating in modern English is Curtin’s translation of the _Polish Trilogy_ of Sienkiewicz. It can not be adequately praised nor the publisher who has issued it worthily again and again.

There are few better judges of weight of words, stretch of margins. Sienkiewicz has merry characters as waggish as Falstaff, as boisterously humorous as Rabelais, and quite as hilarious as Abu-l-Hasan, who delighted in disguising grotesques and the threading of long mysterious alley-ways, in gay _Arabian Nights_, in which famous story collection there are no greater characterizations than Sienkiewicz’ _Zagloba_, Prince of Liars. Almost all literatures that have been great have produced, in art, one immortal liar. We are not great. But we have George Washington and a cherry tree, which I have always considered one of the divinely stupid stories of the world. This has, in America, one parallel in stupidity, Henry Ford’s collection of pumps.

To revert to Sienkiewicz and the Nights of Araby, the Orient is filled with marvels and magic and mystery; with strategy; and beauty that is strange and deadly. The Occident is used to mental food that is colder, and not so highly seasoned. Sienkiewicz has grandeur of conception akin to the East. Only the East with a past that is measureless can be at one and the same moment, bitter and tender, cruel and impassioned. Thousands and thousands of years are necessary to ripen to perfection that rare fruit of Time, _the human mind_. To twist a Russian proverb to the moment’s need. A young race is not strong; a young apple not sweet.

What an amazing piece of mental architecture Somadeva built long ago, in India in his _Ocean of Story_. To measure exactly just how petty the art-creative mind of today is, read it! The entire Human Comedy of Balzac would be one little drop to the ocean. It is not properly speaking an _Ocean_ at all; it is greater: It is a world.

Probably the best _Voyages_ are the purely imaginary. Gulliver wrote one, Cyrano de Bergerac another, and Xavier de Maistre a third. One went to the rim of the mind’s nimble making, the second to the moon, and the third merely journeyed around his chamber. But the distances were all equal, and enchanting.

I am heartbroken that I could not have seen the palaces of Nineveh. It is eye-delight that keeps me alive.

Fancy lofty walled interiors completely covered, (or built rather), of a substance resembling precious porcelain, with the blazing surface of a gem. But pictured, colored! Esarhaddon declared that his palace interiors surpassed the rainbow. These glazed fragments are found today in Assyria. Why could I not have seen it? Thêbes, too! And Babylon! I have always hated economy, petty things, and cold hearts. Shabbiness. Not my kingdom for a horse—but all boasted Fifth Avenue for Babylon. And the gardens of Asia!

Petofi was a lonely, but a good deal madder, a more impetuous, Heine, who lived in Hungary, but he was of Slav descent and his original family name was Petrovich. Like Heine, he felt out of harmony with Goethe. In one of his letters to Friedrich Kerenyi he declares: “... I say it right out. I do not like Goethe. I can not stand him! His head is a diamond, his heart a pebble.”

Petofi’s days suffered from lack of that which Goethe had in abundance, _wise guidance_. There may be envy mixed with hatred. He goes on to exclaim in this letter: “Bury me in the north. Plant an orange tree upon my grave and you will see how my heart will warm it into bloom.”

“Goethe is one of the great poets. A giant, but a giant made of stone.”

He declares impetuously: “When I read George Sand, I am mad to think she could write like that! She was a man, not a woman.”

He adored Dumas. Poor Petofi had only twenty-six years in which to conquer life and art. In addition, the wars claimed him. A pitiful measure, truly! That was the length of life of Lermontov, the Russian poet. The natures of both were stormy, unreasoning, impassioned. They made foes as rapidly as other men make friends. Every brilliant word they uttered made an enemy. And they did not care. Both wrote prose and verse with high, fine rhythm.

Petofi exclaims gayly, carelessly: “If there were no critics, there is nothing in this world I should hate like horse-radish with cream.”

“Hortobagy—Blessed Plain! You are the brow of God. I stand in the center and look about me with delight, a delight the Swiss can not have upon his Alps. Only the Bedouin in heart of the Arabian desert can feel as I feel. Only he knows how my heart expands.”

“My poor Hungary, which the Turks, the Tartars, the grasshoppers, and the politicians have helped destroy! Perhaps, however, a bad poet is the last drop of Vermouth in the bottle—And then one can hope for a better future.”

“For years almost my only reading, my morning, evening prayer, was the French Revolution. It is daily bread. It is the world’s new Bible.”

“We people like to celebrate—we Hungarians. When there aren’t individuals left to celebrate, we shall set about giving festivals for the moon. That is why we are poor, ragged, because we insist upon shining.”

“It has always hurt my feelings to think Shakespeare was an Englishman.” (I think Heine said these words too.)

“Oh divine Art, why is it your priests are devils?”

“In the dark night of my Hungarian Fatherland I am a little flickering flame. But I am flame just the same! By my light, the future Hungary will be forced to read the Book of Fate. Hope is written there.”

“What is a rule? A crutch for feeble, limping, commonplace people.”

Poor, pitiful, proud, impassioned Petofi! He disappeared from the world like Bestushev-Marlinski, as if by magic. No one knows what became of him. As adjutant to the commanding officer he accompanied his general into battle. After the battle was over, he was not seen. His body was never found. About his tragic end there are stories, and romantic stories. Some say he died a prisoner in the mines of Siberia. Some say he became a Russian subject, learned the Russian tongue, and that one of Russia’s famous writers, is Petofi grown old. He was born in 1823.

Hungary has had other spirited story tellers, but none perhaps informed with such peculiarly tragic fire, surely none with such unspoiled lyric gift. Her short story tellers, as a rule possess grace, irony, gaiety. These are qualities that belong to the race. There is a whimsical imagination found among story writers of Hungary, no other nation I know of has. Mikszáth had it richly; and Molnar illustrates the same kind of mind and writing. Other Hungarian story writers are Herczeg, Rakosi, Arpad von Derczik, Jokai, to mention a few, at random, whom I happen to recall.

I found something interesting in Montesquieu’s _Persian Letters_. He writes: _C’est la sagesse des Orientaux, de chercher des remèdes contre la tristesse avec autant de soin que contre les maladies le plus dangereuses._ Orientals seek medicaments for sadness as frequently as for ills of the body. This is indicative of the fact that in the Orient they still believe in things of the spirit, of which the West has lost sight. And also that they are older and wiser. Riper. Montesquieu goes on to say: We ought to weep for a man when he is born, not when he dies. What could be more characteristic of Gallic mind? French wit is Oriental philosophy turned inside out.

One of the sayings of La Rochefoucauld which delighted me is: “The evil we do can not begin to draw upon us the persecution our superiorities draw.” How many personal disillusions, how many sad, surprising visions into man’s heart, went to make that!

I enjoy the _Satires of Boileau_. They play generous part in building that penetrating, discriminating French mind. Especially do I enjoy the prose introduction to the satires, where he speaks of Horace living at a period when it was most dangerous for man to laugh. A strange thing, that, to observe! A dangerous time to laugh! Did something similar occur to Boileau in his own life? Did he learn to know what is the arrogant power, then the selfish pride, of a king?

Condorcet’s _Life of Voltaire_ is fine writing of history. To me it is enthralling romance. In it the same mind is visible, in

## action, that we find in Taine, Quintillian, Saint Beuve. Taine was

novelist and story teller. But his merits as an original creator are overshadowed by that vast, amazing critical writing, which is his work on the literature of England. When I read it I marvel why no Englishman knew himself as this Frenchman, Taine, knew him.

I read Lamennais: _Paroles d’un Croyant_. He writes like an inspired prophet, to stir masses to unrest, rebellion. His sentences ring like clarions. Magnificently curses fall. It is peculiar how he gives words the quality of metal. Other people use the same words. They are nothing at all.

It has been said that there has been no name so execrated as _Machiavelli_. He is the supremely hated. An Italian critic writing of him declares: “Voltaire hated him, and Frederick the Great; the Jesuits, and Cardinal Polo. He could only be right in a world in which there are no spiritual truths.” It is a strange thing that living in Italy, at a period when the Church dominated it, he should have written just that book.

There is not necessarily anything important in a likeness. There are resemblances in the world for which in our present condition of knowledge we are unable to account.

When José Asuncion Silvá, poet of Bogotá, who wrote a poem that recalls Poe’s _Raven_, was in Paris sight-seeing with friends, he happened to pause, by accident, one day in the Louvre, beside the marble bust of Lucius Verus. To their amazement, his friends found that the head of Silvá and that of the dissolute Roman lover of Faustine, were identical. A photograph of Silvá with hair and beard dressed like the statue, was made the next day, and the result is something that no one can explain. They are as alike as two peas. I have the pictures.

Years ago the _Mercure de France_ sent its representative all the way to South America, and then on to Bogotá, city no railroad has succeeded approaching, to secure information about _The Nocturn_ which critics call the greatest poem written in the Americas. The only notice of him in the U. S. was my translation of the poem of which the dead poet’s publishers approved.

If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano, who laughingly calls himself _the spirit of the Andes_. He has pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering through vast gardens filled with flaming orchids, curious in shape, amazing in color. Just so evocative is he, varied. Just so seemingly inexhaustible.