Part 20

Each city’s idea of a celebration of any kind was noise. The ideal of noise was guns and tin pans. Every man carried one gun. The greater number carried two. Since there was no law but martial law, the population’s first desire was for territorial government. When Senator ——? of Washington, Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, arose in the Senate, stuck his hand in the lapel of his coat and said: Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Committee on Public Lands, I demand for the future citizens of Oklahoma, those honest, hard-working Americans that they be given self government, and so forth, and so forth. The speech went on the wire to Oklahoma. The telegraph operator, who was likewise ticket agent, depot master, and a half a dozen other things, got it first. By way of letting the town know that good news was coming, he ran out on the platform and fired a round from his six-shooter. The proprietor of First Chance Saloon, a two-gun man from Texas, stepped out of his shack and let go both guns. He did not know the news but he felt that it must be good. And he believed in helping on a good thing. If it were good he voiced his approval. If, however, it turned out to be bad it meant that he had been voicing his disapproval. When his guns began to bark, the Feed Store Man, next door, began with his, and before another minute had elapsed the entire town was in the street firing up into the sky. It was like magic. Men leaped from shacks. Men leaped from dugouts, and saloons, everywhere. A firing squad began to march up and down the streets, firing by volley, by individuals, by twos and threes. Most of them did not know what for, but when the telegraph operator ran up the hill to deliver his message to the mayor, who, standing on the empty sugar barrel in the Government Acre, read it aloud, the crowd went mad. The celebration lasted all night. If the news happened to prove disappointing on the morrow, no one was vexed, because soon some other news of some kind would come and then they could have another celebration. Occasionally a citizen had an eye knocked out, or a half a dozen teeth, by a spent bullet. Window glass was broken nightly. No one of course minded such trifles. They were merely the by-product of frequent and joyous celebrations.

Mr. Mencken is a pugilist, not an artist. He has always been in the wrong ring. It is safer to take blows, however, which make you blue instead of black.

Mr. William Lyon Phelps is the most art-predatory of non-æsthetic pedants.

It is good to be interested in everything, from the history of pins to the color of pills preferred by potentates, pugilists, or pedagogues.

Coelho Netto, of Rio, is a person. There are not too many! He is peculiarly versatile. He has been physician and surgeon, lawyer, lecturer upon art and letters in great universities, politician, reporter, and writer of many volumes of successful plays which still hold the stage in both Brazil and Portugal. In addition, he is a novelist and prolific short story writer, and one of the first in his tongue, in South America, to gain a livelihood solely by art.

The difficulty of living by the pen, in Rio, in an early day was set down by a Portuguese journalist as follows:

“They say Brazil has thirteen millions of people. Of these twelve millions eight hundred thousand can not read. Of the two hundred thousand that remain, one hundred and fifty thousand read only daily papers; fifty thousand, only French books; thirty thousand, translations. The other fifteen thousand read the Catechism and the Prayer Book; two thousand study Comte. And one thousand read Portuguese books made in Brazil.”

He was one of the earliest artists to show the native life of the land outside the cities, together with man’s effort to contend with the resisting tropic wilderness. He has shown every class of this richly varied life in his extensive country.

_Tormenta_ is a novel of a young physician, which perhaps is reminiscent of his own youth. _Sertão_ is a collection of prose _acquarelles_ of Brazil’s colonizing days, with interesting pictures of the vast, the varied interior. Here we see storms so violent, they are almost unbelievable, like a deluge, and which last for days; then the long dry seasons, and the measureless, solitary pastures; the encrusted gold of sunsets unimpeded over disconcerting levels; and the grey and melancholy dawns.

One of his most powerful novels, the one I perhaps admire most, is _Rei Negro_. It shows life on a lonely estate in the interior and the confusing conflict, then blending, of black and white races. It is a pathetic, moving story one is forced to remember, of a beautiful woman of the tropics cursed with double race blood and a Negro who was a hero.

_O Capital Federal_ contains enchanting sketches of Rio, and likewise detailed descriptions of existence on a _fazenda_, in the country, where the luxury is so great, so unexpected, it sets one dreaming of the pleasure places of Tiberius, in the south of Italy. This novel, _O Capital Federal_, is dedicated to his uncle as follows: “My Uncle: In this book there are pages that belong to you, because I never should have written them had not my Good Fairy guided me to the ascetic but voluptuous retreat where you live in happy tranquility, following the moral law of Epicurus, and treasuring your flowers.”

This alluring place of residence was isolated in a grave garden of roses. It fronted the green, refreshing foam of the sea, where towered two black rocks. In construction it was a Swiss _chalet_. Steps of marble, polished and rare, led to it. The drawing rooms were ample, luxurious, and filled with objects of art. The bath, in this country home in Brazil, recalls the Baths of Nero. It would have satisfied the sumptuous Ruler of Rome. How he would have enjoyed pushing the buttons which filled the bath room with pink mist of attar of roses or the purple breath of violets! The dining-room, all the other rooms, were equally splendid. There were precious wines in priceless crystal. There was rare and astonishing food. And flowers, dazzling and huge.

In _Rei Negro_, Netto’s descriptions of dawn and sunset, and the blinding yellow midday, are both lovely and unforgettable. I keep this book at hand in order to renew my delight in them. There is freshness and exquisiteness in his paintings of the spaces of this unknown land.

His books are many. All of them are excellent. His is no slight talent.

_Esphinge_ (a novel). _Immortalidade_, (likewise a novel). _Treva_, a book of five novelettes; _Fabulario_ (short stories). _As Sete Dores De N. Senhora_, a noble, uplifting book of faith. _Saudades_, many very brief stories, all of which are attractive and charm with originality. _Scenas e Perfis_, short stories, too, and _O Paraiso_.

I am sorry books are advertised as they are in America today. It both lessens interest in buying and reading. Publishers ought to get together, like nations, and arrange a general disarmament plan. At least we might float, occasionally, the white flag of truce.

Every reader has his peculiarities of taste, touched always with emotion, which is something not amenable to reason. I personally prefer for pleasure, a book on falconry written by some acute and sensual oriental, to the detailed facts, marshalled accurately and dated of, say, the Newgate Calendar.

Ships fascinate me, the beginnings of navigation, Strabo’s _Geography_, maps, old globes, and the Hakluyt Voyages. When I read about a drawing made of a ship a thousand years old, I shiver as at some line of immortal verse. The great emotion sweeps me. Russel Clark wrote: _The most beautiful expression of the hand of man is the sailing ship._ Old shipping books interest me. And the adventures of whaling days. The mischances that befell the Whaling Barque, _George Henry_, kept me awake nights. And the wild-tongued, great Elizabethan Voyagers! I hope pictures have been kept of all the great old ships that ever sailed the seas!

I love gardens. But I do not enjoy reading about them. I hate to see words fade and die. I learn of gardens from painters, etchers. And then I try to remember them without words. In Persian and Indian Miniatures I have loved them best. And the flowers Renoir painted when he was old. Yet that old book _Gerard’s Herbal_ still gives out some of the spiced sweetness of all gardens.

I doubt if in novel making there is such thing as Romanticism, Classicism. Critics, like creations of God He forgot to call good, may be little men, who see in part only, or else through a glass darkly. The two terms merely classify different degrees of visibility.

It is not strange that Dr. Jozef Muls, born in one of the world’s richest art cities, Antwerp, a city that knew Rubens, Quentin Matsys, and Breughel, should write about art. And he has written well.

His _Modern Art, The Twilight of Flemish Art Cities_, and _From Greco to Cubism_, (_Van El Greco Tot Het Cubisme_), give him indisputable rank among the foremost critics of the day. Not only are they penetrating and profound as criticism, but accurately documented, and sensitive, and written in delightful, sympathetic prose. He writes in two languages, French and Flemish; and in speech, he is master of many.

He has not only written books of art but books of travel, short stories, and books of verse. I keep in memory two pleasant booklets about cities. One is _Rouen_, by André Maurois, the other is _Het Levende Oud-Antwerpen_, by Jozef Muls. The latter has eight etchings by Vaes. Both books have the indescribable charm which love of the thing written about gives to words. He writes again of the city of his birth in _De Val Van Antwerpen_.

A work of his which has given me hours of enjoyment is still another book about cities. This is called _Steden_. The chapters on Constantinople and Venice are alluring. He came across from Trieste to Venice one hot August night, over night-black water, to be confronted at dawn with a golden city floating upon a lapis sea. It looked to him like something fabulous from the depths of the ocean. The decaying palaces resembled splendors seen only in a dream. The Bridge of Sighs made him think of melancholy Byron whose heart, he insists, lives on in Venice. He rejoiced in all the eloquent memories of Tintoretto, connoisseur of art that he is, and the past glories of the Republic.

The great canals were merely the mirrors of Venice, Queen of Cities.

Albert Besnard, the distinguished painter, after being for many years director of the school of art in Italy where the coveted _Prix de Rome_ is given, turned to writing after he was an old man. And the book, properly enough, is about Rome: _Sous le ciel de Rome_. For this he was made an _Académicien_. And he deserves the honor. Only one or two other men, for a single work’s grace, have become members of _L’Académie Française_. Books of travel written by sensitive painters like Besnard are things rare and charming. In one place I recall, he exclaims: “I am standing alone at foot of stairway of the Capitol. _Rome under the stars—what delight!_” I think Besnard is quite as fine in prose as in the bejeweled, gauze-robed, almond-eyed beauties he painted in India.

Besnard remembers Marie Bashkirtseff, as he saw her once in her youth, standing beside a fountain in the gardens of the Villa Medici. She reminded him of a little golden, furred cat. He considered her fine instead of beautiful. His trained eyes found her arms too short. She was exquisite and fashionable, but she was too cold, and in her face there was no joy. Her originality, to him, was in her peculiar physical attractiveness, her elegance, and not in her conversation. He called her a poor, little child whose only pleasure was to design, then wear wonderful gowns, briefly, for the eye-pleasure of the Great Julian. He always remembered her own too cold, sharply expressive blue eyes.

His observations are arresting. He thinks it is the fatality of order and equilibrium with which modern youth can not put up. A balance is lost. Somewhere else he declares that grief is the ransom of genius. Only they who can suffer, arrive. Whenever he returns to Rome, he likes to pause a moment before entering his dwelling, on one of the hills, just for the pleasure of penetrating first with his eyes, the rich, grey, sculptured mass, which is the world’s incomparable wonder, _Rome_. He savored with pleasure the beauty of the sky that bends over the Deathless City; the grandeur, the severity of outline of Roman horizons; the deserted _campagna_; the mystery of magnificent palaces with their murmuring fountains, and above everything else, the peculiar charm of the people, who throughout the centuries have known how to keep vehement passions, the grace of the inspiring gesture, and beauty.

Writing from Rome again, he speaks of the winds of art which blow freshly in one’s face, to renew ideas, then strengthen intelligence. Besnard’s book is so alluring, every page of it, (and his book about India, too), that I should not like anyone to miss them. He is a great admirer of D’Annunzio. He writes of the splendor of the Italian poet’s soul on a par with the century-reinforced splendor of the Eternal City.

Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held. It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.”

Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains.

Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All things perish after they flower, even the ages.

Henry Bordeaux once exclaimed: “Here I am in Rome again after seventeen years!” Then he recalls his youth: _O those morning walks in the perfumed gardens on the Pincian!_ (Rodriguez, the South American novelist, says in _Idolos Rotos_: “I can not forget the tardy twilights on the Pincian!”) Bordeaux remarks as an aside, that even humble people, in Rome, have the gift of eloquence.

_Italy!_ Enchanting land, which still holds the heart of the world, and all its youth!

A soundly made novel that deserves consideration from thinkers, is _Idolos Rotos_ (Broken Idols), by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez, published long ago in Venezuela. It is powerful in sense of sociological, economical, and political forces. It is a possessive reproduction of locality. I do not know of any other one book in which an idle reader can learn to understand so well, the differing values, the changing present condition of a great race, suddenly thrust into new material backgrounds, undergoing the too rapid physiological pressure of an untried climate. The book has mental detachment. It has balance of ideas. It has calm, unprejudiced observation. It is brilliant, subtle, and penetrating. And it has fine sincerity. The writer carries forward fearlessly the logic of a visioned idea. The prose is always good and sometimes great.

Few have been able to look upon the civilizations that grew up with mushroom swiftness in the new lands of the West, the Americas, with clearer eyes. We meet here the mind of South American youth. And the book has stable novel architecture.

“_Victimas de un sistema_.... Victims of an educational system which is wholly speed and with which they pretend to ripen brains and polish intelligence, just as heavy machinery is moved about by electricity or steam ... harmonious development is impossible,” writes Rodriguez.

It is a story of a wealthy young South American, educated for years in Europe, who comes home and tries to take up again the life he knew in childhood.

Of April in Caracas, he is enthusiastic: “It is a spectacle worthy of admiration, when the acacias flower, and trees wear crowns of purple and robes of flame!”

Sometimes Rodriguez warns against the dangers of democracies in words which remind us of León Daudet or De Tocqueville. There is no national soul, he says. And nothing is done to develop it. In Venezuela there are three ethnic unities which are hostile to any united progress.

He has written glowingly of the days of tropic summer. Again I translate from memory: “The cicadas sang. From every tree, every bush, rang their shrill announcement of summer. Near and far, every spot of green, every twig, leaf, was a strident trill, inescapable, like the high, glorious notes of crystal chords vibrating with frenzy until they snap. From the scanty vegetation on the edge of gorges, which, toward the north, divide capriciously the city ... swelled monotonous, sharp song.... From all points of the compass it came. And in Caracas, from every _patio_, surged the deafening song of the penetrating choir.”

Albert, idle in his studio, thought it was the tortured cry of a land sick with fever, praying the implacable blue for rain. The land was burned. This heat of fever quivered everywhere like a thirst. The fever leaped with violent color-cry to top boughs of the _búcares_. It leaped in blinding bloom to tall _tolu-trees_, to the acacias, which were breaking with blossoms. Nowhere in the city nor the forests could one see trees that were not covered with flowers, purple, red, and the hues of flame. From his window he confronted _tolu-trees_ completely enveloped like armor in purple petals.

Both Loti and Barrés suffered from a consuming fear of death, says Daudet. They were constantly preoccupied with the thought that some-time life for them would be no more. Loti fought the fear with change of place, traveling; Barrés, with political affairs. Both were fêted and flattered while they suffered continual boredom. That accomplished Portuguese, Fidelino de Figueiredo, declares that it was boredom which caused the death of Louis Cotter, historian, who wrote _Splendor and Decay of the House of Austria_.

He died of mental weariness because he could not adapt himself to the mediocrity of a provincial town, its petty quarrels, its local injustice, its horror and hatred of any kind of superiority.

The brilliant Portuguese goes on to say that it was this attitude of mind which caused the French Revolution, and which is now beginning to afflict the minds of men again, with close of a period of time. People sense dumbly that the treasures of emotion, treasures stored by rich soul life (being rapidly destroyed) can never be reassembled. The result means death of culture. Marie Henrietta once wrote that _to live_ does not mean to be upon the Earth either a brief time or a long time, but to be able _to feel_, to register a great range of sensations.

Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming.

A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard, Ballesteros de Martos. His _Artistas Españoles Contemporaneos_ is a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels is _Luz en el Camino_. He was one of the editors of that brilliant Spanish review, _Cervantes_.

I like this from Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_: “The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding ages.”

Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born, however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay William Hudson, in _Abbé Pierre’s People_, owns that graceful, alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts, the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but distinguished philosopher, thinker.

Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illumine _tædiam vitæ_ we have gain, efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place to place, _physical restlessness_. Monkeys in tropic forests move swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they have no mind and can not _live_. The people whose physical movements are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great Confusion!

There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice.

I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing from tall tropic trees.

Ellis Parker Butler declares _pigs is pigs_. Then monkeys must be monkeys, tails long or short.

I used to know a little shop in Paris where they kept only books about imaginary travels, travels that never existed. This kind of writing seems to have been done for a little while in the Eighteenth Century. One is about an imaginary trip to the pole and published in Amsterdam in 1723. Abbé Bordelon published a little earlier, a book about a hypochondriac who was forced to travel all the time whether he wanted to or not. Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_ belongs to this period. Louis Holberg wrote, about the middle of the Eighteenth Century, describing a strange journey to the interior of the earth. There was an Arab philosopher, by name Ibn Tophail, earlier by a century, in the late Seventeenth Century, who wrote one of the most fascinating travel books in the world. It tells about a boy shipwrecked on a desert island south of Asia, who by means of travel and contemplation, trained his mind to comprehension of the verities, and scientific knowledge. The writer himself had an amazing life spent partly in Africa and partly as Secretary to the Governor of Granada.