Part 2

Here again I was following the trail of Loti. Just before Carmen Sylva, Queen of Rumania, died, she came to the Royal Daniele to stay for a time. And she invited Loti to be her guest.

Its list of patrons down the ages is a rosary of great names. George Sand has been here, Chopin, D’Annunzio; and Duse exclaimed over its charm.

In an old Venetian garden, one day, I saw a dignified patrician woman taking tea, with her servants bringing the food, while she stood plucking those great, white ghostly roses which I have seen only in Venice, and dreaming over the green water of the Grand Canal.

Everywhere delight for the eye! Such comprehension of the possibilities of perfected living. Prince Metternich used to say when he visited Italy: _God—what men it was who built these palaces!_ No one today would know how to live in them, because the great life is gone forever.

Democracies, plus money, can not make beautiful cities. It takes something altogether different. It takes the pride, the petulance of kings, slow centuries, and the caprice, the unreasoning love of poets and men. As examples—Mad Louis of Bavaria, the Great Builder of India, and the Pharaohs with their pyramids.

I dined at _Florian’s_ whose fêtes such artists as Guardi and Canalletto painted; the center once of _la vielle finesse venitienne_. What a place was Venice in the old days with its love of elegant and impassioned life, and the ripeness and perfection of its senses!

I have read _The Mandarin_ by Eça de Queiroz. It brought back to memory charming old restaurants of Lisbon, such as _Martinho_, in the Largo de Camões, not far from the national theatre, and Campo de Santa Clara, which reminds me of the Thieves Market in Mexico City, the _Volador_.

Latin mind is substantially different from Saxon mind. The Saxon mind flowers at contact with older, more impassioned races. The spark must be struck by something of greater power. But Mediterranean mind flowers richly all alone.

De Queiroz knows how to say charming things. He speaks of—the penetrating peace of old monastery gardens of Portugal, in some deep valley at the sweet, sad end of evening, when one can listen to a river’s voice.

There is a merriment, a lifting joy of the moment in speech, the same kind of joy in life, in the gay, more facile Portuguese, the stately, graver Spaniard does not have. And the Portuguese have racial humor not unlike the Irish, which differentiates them again. This quality is evident in their city, Lisbon; something there that ensnares the heart of even the careless traveler. Only gay-spirited, friendly people could have built it and then known how to keep its care-free atmosphere complete. There is a rhythm of mental release, a power outside command of will, in Portuguese poets and prosateurs I do not find in many races. This novel, _The Mandarin_, by De Queiroz, seems to be about the same story as _Brewster’s Millions_, peculiarly enough.

I first heard the ancient, singing speech in the Azores, one day in late spring. But the Azores were cold and drenched with rain, which was as sad as if they had been drenched with tears. The gardens were spacious and numerous, but minus that astounding, glad greenness one thinks of in the tropics.

Along the black and water-soaked garden paths were quaint, old wooden settles, romantic in shape, painted green, streaked with plaintive, faded violet, beside which tall lilies tried to hold their petals in the rough, cold wind, old settles which looked as if they might have been made for the romantic lovers of Julia Romano.

There are two ancient churches, one the _Matriz_, which touched my heart, keeping perfectly some loving tenderness in line of long ago, churches built in the great age of conquest. The word Azore (_açor_) means falcon. They are the Islands of the Falcons—warlike birds hovering above lonely seas.

As we sailed away the wind brought to me that strange odor I have noticed in island towns before. How can I name it? Spices, perishing vegetation mingled with wetness, and the odors of many things that are dying.

Then the old cathedral bells rang out. But the sea muffled them with velvet. Night began to come. And the splendor of the sea grew grey. The mountain tops looked black and lonely as I said good-bye to them, and veiled with the long floating ribbons of the rain. Three days later I was in Portugal.

The weather had been rough and stormy. There was rain, mist, and continued cold. Then suddenly there blossomed out of the mist and the sea a rich, vari-tinted city—_Lisbon_. The sun began to shine.

It is a city of glowing gardens, narrow streets, whose painted, stucco dwellings are more than charming—gem-pink, sulphur-yellow, weary violet. They jostle each other in little square places of flowers.

Barefoot women go from door to door to sell fish, carried in baskets upon their heads; slim seminary students in long black, eloquent capes, move about, statues in ivory and jet. And children and girls have the charm of Latin youth.

The _Avenida de la Liberdad_—wide, tree and flower bordered, paved in black and white stone (from which Rio de Janeiro copied Rio Branco), lined with fanciful, sugar-frosted, gay palaces, is a street of which all Portuguese are proud. It ranks among the lovely thoroughfares of the world.

Because cities possess personality, I say that Lisbon is lovable. It strikes the senses like some forgotten melody of delight. I found an old buff-colored hotel, with black iron-grilled windows and tall green doors, set far back in a quaintly old-world garden, facing a tiny _Praça_, where I wish I could have lingered—and then been forgotten, and so stayed on forever.

Architecturally speaking, the two loveliest things in Lisbon are the Tower of Belem and the Convent of San Jerónimo, both tributes to the great explorer, Vasco da Gama. The pallid, ivory carven surface of the Convent is not less lovely than the Taj Mahal. It has minarets, too, from which muezzins might have called. The entire building owns a kind of perfection.

In one of its little interior chapels, sleep side by side, Vasco da Gama and the proud poet of Portugal, who wrote in Homeric verse his history—Camoens. And Camoens was not only poet, but warrior, explorer and one of the world’s bravest adventurers. Camoens lived many lives, and all of them were great. The world was his playground. His fiery spirit, which none own today, longed to give his Emperor continents for gifts. He is still Portugal’s great poet; the years have not permitted him to be surpassed.

To refer again to our novelist, De Queiroz, he was a memorable figure in Lisbon in his youth. He was tall, very thin, with an eagle-beak for a nose. He was immaculate in dress. He had his clothes made in London and he always wore a monocle. He was likewise a figure on the Boulevards of Paris. He had unusually fine eyes, with an expression of kindness, quick comprehension, and deep intelligence. His two commanding traits were an Irish sense of humor and the imagination of a poet; this last kept him from joining the ranks of Zola as novelist. This was in 1880.

It was from Lisbon that Madame de Stael’s last famous lover came, when she was trying to console herself for the death of Benjamin Constant. I refer to the Duke of Palmella—one of the men who had most influence over this woman whom Napoleon hated. The Duke of Palmella was at the Congress of Vienna; he was companion of Metternich. Who knows what this too intelligent French woman inspired him to think—_and then to say_—that had influence upon the now dwindling good-luck of the Man of Destiny. But he forgot her easily; brilliant as she was, to him she was just a pleasant toy—something to fling aside when days of idleness or loneliness were over.

The Portuguese insist that he was the hero of Madame de Stael’s _Corinne_, and that in that book, the portrait of him is true, and very carefully drawn from life—once when they were happy together and free, away from war-torn France.

Delightful short stories are written in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, but almost never in America. The reason is not that Americans can not write them or are less talented. The fault lies with the editors. The good short story, as its creator made it, and God, can not get through to the reading public. First it has to be changed to suit the policy of the magazine. It may be a magazine which prints square purple stories with pink corners; or, round green stories with yellow dots. Secondly, it has to be changed to suit the personal inclination of the editor. He may like only oblong white stories with crimson points. Thirdly, the editor must change it a little to comply with his dignity, and carry out what he considers duty. What is the result? A kind of ruin for which there is no name. Then the story has to suit the season of the year, and religious, social, and political conditions of the community.

All this _à propos_ of many books of short stories from old Spain, and the Spanish lands to the south, which I have had recently. Calderon shows an enticing geographical background, in remote South American places, especially interior Peru. But he does not write so well as Coll, and some of the older Venezuelans.

Down there not so many people who can not write, but who want to, are able to get past Spanish editors, who sometimes love art for its own sake. They do not so often try to put off upon cultivated readers astonishingly advertised books of short stories, written by prize fighters, long-distance swimmers, bronco-busters, aviators, prize-winning high-jumpers, telling you gravely at the same time, that if they do these things well, it follows logically, they write short stories well, which is part of America’s original procedure in destroying genuine ability.

Calderon has some sentence-pictures which I have remembered, showing savage mountain land and lonely jungle.

“... _aquel poblado solitario_ ... that lonely little settlement, where life kept the golden color of autumn mornings—in some barbarous land.” What side-glancing, plaintive light he has shivered across the words!

I am changing my opinion of Baroja. I have been hasty. In his later books many of which I read at one time, I stumble upon something that makes me think of nuggets of unknown metal, which scientists have neither named nor been able to classify, rolled up perhaps by clear water of streams in lonely mountains, in some lonely land. But still I feel that just as his life may lack some combined joy and interest to weld it firmly into use and unity, effect the miracle of—_Let there be life!_—his written art lacks the same thing, some fiercer flame of love, to let it hold together, resist the forces that crumble. It lacks the _glue_ of art’s practiced and perfected, surface-logic.

Just as the mother of Redon—painter of exotic, super-terrestrial flowers—was born in Martinique, and then moved to Marseilles where the painter first saw the light, and began to feel force of her baffled homesick dreams of unseen—but too vividly remembered—tropic nights, tropic days, over seas that are hauntingly lovely, so the grandfather of Francis Jammes—poet and short story writer—lived in the Antilles, Guadalupe, in the village of Point-à-Pitre, and here the poet’s father was born, heir to certain antique memories and haunting comprehensions.

As for Francis Jammes himself, he lived always in France, between the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, or as he expresses it, between a grain of sand and a drop of water. It is a tiny Pyrenean village—_Orthez_.

Yet in the soul of Jammes there were inherited moments of homesickness for something he had never seen, for that glamourous giddy sun that gilds the seas of the south.

The word-craft of Jammes, in prose, is lovely. His stories are delicate and delightful. There is one called _Manzana de Onis_, which gives me exactly the same emotion as the canvasses (_flower-pieces_) of Redon. In both prose writer and painter, the tendrils of living had struck deep, gone far. Unconscious flesh-memory, uncoiling and uncoiling. I have seen French water-colors by masters, or flower gardens by that engaging Spaniard, Rusiñol ... corners of blonde gardens of summers of long ago, which gave the same emotion. It is something I would not like to lose.

This story aroused, too, the nerves of taste, of scent. There were charming passages of writing. There were evocations of luxurious, of finished living—such as only old races know.

I happened to be reading these stories of Jammes in a Spanish translation—the translation of a man (Canedo), who can press both grief and beauty into words. Sometimes he makes words weep like the superfine strings of old violins, as for example, in the opening lines of this story—_Almaida de Etremont_. When I finished the first paragraph I felt overwhelmed by some gold-hued, guilty, sudden grief.

I wonder if this Spaniard writes better prose than the original French? I can not recall Jammes being (before) so lusciously phrased. Perhaps Spanish, however, is the proper dress for his soul. As I progress, I think how many are writing in America today without the slightest natural ability to write.

These three short stories are exquisite. They have a delicately graded, _shaded_ surface. They are permeated with beauty. They are buried in richness, and a kind of soul-splendor. I am glad that there is such writing somewhere in the world.

I can not help but regret the short stories of my land. But editors, we must remember, have this in common with cats; a pulse of free life maddens them. It impels them to pounce down, destroy.

Since the Great War everything is out of place. This naturally, with no malice intended, includes the editor. He has outgrown the limits of his chair. He resembles Longfellow’s first poem of _Mr. Phinney’s Turnip_—which grew and grew until it could grow no taller. Then Mr. Phinney took it up and put it in the cellar. Here is hoping that the number of black, freezing, and never-again-to-be-opened cellars increase!

There are too many writers. There are too many poor, anæmic books. Paper could be put to better use. Every round dot you see upon the ground and might mistake for something else, is a stone, under which sits a too energetic would-be writer, who tells you work, experience, and native ability are not necessary.

_Alas!_ I can say nothing. Cicero’s invectives have given out. And Shakespeare cursed satisfactorily only for the English. An English curse upon American lips would resemble the British matron’s earnest disapproval of moon-jumping cows.

Amy Lowell was never really a writer. She wanted to write. She had leisure and money. She put words upon paper. But she never projected the powerful phrase, produced ideas, nor kept in key. As a scholar she was slipshod, of slight importance. She was merely another rich wholly American problem in addition. And the bloodless, numbing sun of New England summers had shone too long, too coldly upon her.

Catullus was beauty, youth, joy, and the delight of a lovely city of long ago, and my enduring outpost of pleasure. I read him daily. He helps correct for me the barren, fleeting years, which are sweeping me away from all the things for which I have ever cared.

To me the greatest love-poem in existence is that pitiful one:

_Si qua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas._

To procure pleasure from reading, I must have some of the perfection pitiful Catullus kept. I must have passion and word-craft, and penetration, power, and the deep, quick sensing of truths. In these days of art-predatory pedants, jazz-extras, circus-advertising, and writing-schools, I turn to the Roman; I turn to the Greek Anthology; the old dreaming masters of the East. Beauty belonged to the elder world, story-telling wisdom, and the careless phrase of completeness. The antique world ... that understood _form_. The scientific world upon whose threshold we stand will not need the old arts. It will have new ones all its own. That is why they are dying. And so when I say anything derogatory, it is not I who speak, but the age, through me.

What a tragic, bitter love was that which ate up the heart of Catullus! His cry pierced the centuries. It has even silenced the multiple voice of mighty cities.

_You took away from me all my joy!_

But when he ceased to love and suffer, he ceased to write. He was most brilliant and compelling when he was lifted upon the brutal edge of great emotion. To me he has cut words with keener lament than Sappho. When he reached the height of the fury of youth, the poet died. Or did the sadness of the Christian centuries—now swinging near—shadow his sensitiveness? But how every little broken fragment of his days still shines! Only the sincere, the unforced, has vitality.

What a delightful maker of the mind’s gay moments, was Pliny the Younger! As I read along, the comprehension is forced upon me, that in my day the human mind is not so fine, or I am living at a period of time when something vastly different is being projected. I am conscious of a process of deterioration going forward rapidly in the present. Leaving the firmness and the power of his thinking out of the question, in grace of letter-writing, he equals Madame de Sévigné, whose genius was born of her heart.

That letter to Canino Rufo makes me happy, with its freshness of emotion, its ease, its carefreeness. And that gay beginning! _Quid agit Comum, tuae meaequae deliciae?_

What are you doing at Como, lovely village we both like so well? Right away with the words a bright butterfly wing brushes me. And yet that letter gives me a kind of grief, too, something resembling homesickness for something I never could have seen (as in his day), and always wanted to.

And there is the letter to Tacitus, in which he explains to him how good are hunting, physical exercise—the outdoor world—for the mind. Listen to the beginning:

_Ridebis et licet rideas_—Laugh all you want to! I give you lief!

Then he proceeds to tell Tacitus, how, when he goes hunting, he takes his writing material along. This letter has peculiar freedom from blemishes, which almost nothing under the sun can escape. It has richly that something which keeps me reading Latin masters throughout the years. It gratifies and helps keep alive a submerging passion for perfection.

How near in time he seems to us—Pliny! Here is a letter which might have been written from New York today. It is to Fundanus. _Mirum est quamvis singulis diebus_.... It is amazing how swiftly time passes here in our Rome. And how we waste our days over trifles.... Here in the country I amuse myself only with my books. O delightful existence that injures no one! Run away from the city, Fundanus! Break all the foolish, frivolous chains which bind you! It is infinitely better to be idle, than to work so hard at doing nothing.

Pliny speaks reverently of the vast genius of Plato. _Platonicam illam sublimitatem et latitudinem._ This old Latin mind originated the art of the critic.

And there is a brief note of a few words to a friend, which keeps airy grace, while yet preserving precision and fact. _You say you have nothing to write to me?_ Very well, then write me that! At least you can jot down what our ancestors placed at opening of their letters. _Si vales, bene est; ego valeo._

This year—Pliny goes on to explain—we have a surfeit of poets. There has not been a day of the month of April, without its new poem, new poet. But he feels forced to complain that people no longer like to hear the poets recite.

Pliny believes it is better to love honest laziness than distinguished place and embarrassment. The Roman had his appreciation of virtues. And the cultivated Roman could appreciate all the exquisiteness of words. He tells us how he loves Catullus.

Of a good book, Pliny declares: The longer it is, the better! When only a few, as in his day, were educated, had leisure, money, idleness, luxurious living, they surpassed the men of my day, in range of pleasure, in mental power, in _completeness_.

Speaking of Suetonius wishing to buy a house, he writes: These writers and students need only a little place, because they are so mentally absorbed. They need a place to walk, a little scenery to refresh their eyes, a grape-vine or two, and some trees to count.

All the great prose to come, of Latin races, is in Pliny _in little_. Here is something fascinating. He says that a man of Cadiz, touched to such deep emotion by the glory of Livy, traveled from the ends of the earth just once to look upon his face. And then—content—he turned right around and traveled back again. What books today fire the blood like that! And where is the blood to be fired?

England made better use of Latin, of Greek mind, than other races, by incorporating them into daily life. She made of them an integral part of the nation. Wide-spread mental contact, with such great races, which were both old and enriched with much experience, ripened her ahead of time, strengthened her, gave her most of what she has best. England set about forming life and mind upon some of the finest thinkers the world has seen. That was her master-stroke of diplomacy. She transposed geniuses into living, breathing ideals. She claimed them as her own realities. England was first attracted, not by their mental power, but by gravity, their dignity; their very genuine _weight_.

One can see in Pliny just how lovely Roman homes looked, both in city and country. He owned several, he built. He describes them with engaging zest and frank detail.

Among the poorest books—most inadequate translations—printed in the United States, is _The Wanderer_, by Fournier, delightful, satisfying worker in his own tongue. And I must add to this, Mrs. Ayscough’s verses from the Chinese, in collaboration with Amy Lowell. (This last is the judgment of Chinese-reading poetry-scholars and Chinese themselves who know the originals by heart.) Mrs. Ayscough has no natural gift for words. She ought to play with something else.

Fournier’s _Wanderer_—in translation—is a masterpiece of wrong doing. It reminds me of this passage from the Prayer Book: We have done those things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things we ought to have done. And there is no health in us.

It is amazing how loveliness and charm have evaporated! I wonder why it is so bad? I suppose there are publishers’ readers and editors-in-chief, once in a while, who are word-deaf; insensitive; dull; not to be reached by genuine fineness. Not to mention beauty! To sense beauty surely, a certain amount of nobility of nature is necessary. The translation suggests to the mind what a picture would be painted by a person who was color-blind. I can not recall who published the books, merely memory of awkward writing remains.

Tarascon, Nicaragua, fantastic name of fancy and fable, is where Rubén Darío was born. Once, in Paris, Darío, with another delightful South American poet—Leopoldo Lugones—were together in the house of a doctor. They both declare solemnly that they saw there the spirit of a dead man walking about. Darío asserts, that two or three times during his life, he saw beyond the boundaries of the ordinary—beyond our materialism—and confronted existences upon another plane.