Part 3

_Yo habia desde muy joven tenedos occasion, si bien rares veces, de observar la presencia y la accion de las fuerzas misteriosas y extraños_....

“Several times during my life I have had the opportunity to take note of the presence and action of forces beyond this world of ours.... In _Caros y Caretos_ I have written about them. There, I told once how, in the Square of the Cathedral of León in Nicaragua, in the early dawn, I saw and touched one who had passed beyond.... At the moment I was sane and in complete possession of my powers of mind and judgment.” Darío and Lugones talked often together about the occult sciences.

It was in July, 1890, that Darío came to Guatamala. He had been hired to edit a paper. On this paper his collaborator was young Gomez Carrillo, of whom Darío wrote at that moment, as follows: ... he was a young fellow with brilliant eyes and a sensual face, touched with the hue of tropic suns—and he was enjoying his first love affairs.

Darío, and three other poets, had a comical experience. In a most amusing manner, they prevented the Cathedral of San Juan from being destroyed by a cannon. The General in command was eager to show how well he could shoot.

He summoned his friends for the exhibition—among them Darío—and the poets. Down there—poets are everywhere! He gave a dinner. Darío suggested that he put off the shooting until each improvised a poem. The General agreed. They spun the poems out one entire night. They improvised and improvised. After a time the General fell asleep, and in the morning he awoke so hungry, and so tired, that he forgot about the Cathedral. It was saved.

The prose of Carillo is good. An immense charm coupled with immense primeval fury, is in Chocano, who calls himself—_el almo primitivo de los Andes_. Once I just missed Chocano, by an half-hour, at a South American hotel—I have regretted it many half-hours. He has, _in excelsis_, just what the poets of our north do not have.

We should like and enjoy our Latin neighbors to the South greatly, if we knew their tongue better, and through that, their rich and varied art.

Remy de Gourmont writes of Silvá (José Asuncion—the poet and prose writer of Bogotá) as follows: “The old eloquent tongue of Castile has been born again and made more virile in the colonies of South America. The Spanish which Silvá writes is more subtile, flexible, clear, than harsh classical Spanish.” He goes on to say that Silvá’s reading of French has helped him construct a new tongue, with memories of French sentence structure and more sensitive to the rhythm of thought.

It is now more than a quarter of a century since I translated for my own countrymen, who had no interest in it—Silvá’s immortal poem, _The Nocturn_—which every cultivated South American knows by heart.

Traveling once—when I was young—in the South West, near the Rio Grande, I met on a night train into some hot, lonely city, a homesick old man who spoke Spanish. His clothing indicated poverty. In his pocket he had a piece of dirty paper upon which he had copied down a poem, which he kept reading over and over. And sometimes when he read, he cried. I was puzzled. After awhile I told him I could read Spanish, and asked to see it. It was _The Nocturn_—before it had ever been printed. How I wish I had asked him about Silvá, and why he cried! (Many disputed editions of it exist today, because not so long after this, Silvá killed himself.) My translation was approved by English reading, Spanish and French critics, but Americans had little interest in it. None of them had heard of Silvá; and fewer knew that his poem was one of the greatest written on the Twin Americas. Later—some years—the _Mercure de France_ sent a representative all the way to Colombia, to gain information about the life of Silvá. To the United States he still remains _terra ignota_. The greatest critics of the Continent have raved over this one exquisite creation of Silvá, the great Colombian. Silvá was the first of the new and the last of the old. Pedro-Emilio Coll declared he had never met a more comprehensive intelligence, nor one more hospitable to every phase of thought.

Years later, going up the pea-soup-hued, gloomy, shadowed Magdalena River in Colombia, it was not the strangely engaging tropic world about me that I thought of, but Silvá, exquisite creator, who like Catullus, died in his youth. In my heart, to him I was saying ... _Hail! And farewell._

It is a peculiar thing that Mrs. Asquith should write. It is something for which she has no ability. In her case it is one of the multiple shadows of conceit, too long, too unearned material well-being. She has nothing to say. And she does not know how to say nothing well.

Frequently she seems ungrammatical. Her power is personality, speech; _nerve_. Another example of _Mr. Phinney’s Turnip_ growing beyond its boundaries, in a period of time made for turnips. Only an age when art is dying could have printed her. But when the house threatens to fall, who can prophecy what will rush in!

In reading her books I do not recall finding one commanding idea, sentence, not to mention beauty of any kind. In print her mind is harsh, cruel, insensitive. One does not see the majestic moving forward of that which charms, interests.

But such writing from England as Charles M. Doughty did makes up for what Mrs. Asquith has inflicted upon a helpless public. How glorious is this from Doughty’s _Arabia_:

“This vast Arabian upland is, in a word, a seered and wasteful wilderness full of fear, where every man’s hand is ready against another; a lean, wild, grit and dust, stiffened with everlasting drouth, where running water lacks, and whose sun-stricken face is seamed from of old, here and there, with shallow, dry water courses....”

There Great England speaks! And I all but weep because I fear it is for the last time ... in my day. England has given the world prose. I am glad Doughty’s books are fat and many. They will hold out—perhaps. _Metal that rings. No base alloy!_

There were sentences, phrases of De Gourmont, in his great, gay, unshadowed, before-the-war days which I like to remember; they keep that silken, warm, sun-penetrated and protected luminousness, I seek continually and find seldom. It may be he was somewhat of an æsthetic pedant—at times, too! Life escaped him. But he was the last fine flower of something unnameable, now dead in a mechanized world, which only rich European civilization could lift to fine, free blooming. Such patient priests of beauty will not be numerous in a scientific world, because there can be none to listen—none to praise. For a New World, a new art. There are pages and pages of De Gourmont soaked through and through with beauty. There are too few left to create like him.

Hear what he writes of style: _Le style peut se fatiger, comme l’homme même. Il veillira de même que l’intelligence et la sensibilité dont il est le signe; mais pas plus que l’individu, il ne changera de personalité a moins d’un cataclysme psychologique._

He declares again that style is being able to see, think, feel, and nothing more.

Now that I am no longer young the prose of Loti has the same power, the same almost fateful charm over me, it had in my youth. How he keeps words in place! I did not see my own youth; I saw only his. By it I have kept a proxy perhaps by means of which I shall not grow old.

I wonder if there is anything in the fact that we were born almost upon the same day, month, and the stars keep for us still the fervent memory of rare emotional moments which have perished!

I have never seen anyone else who could do the same thing to words. He can spread apart their boundaries, then crowd and crush them edgefull with meaning. He can make them glowing and magnificently iridescent, like the necks of the wild ducks he used to hunt in the misty autumn in Camargue.

He has loved the things I have loved. And among them Sicily. Hear what he writes of this island over which almost all great civilizations have at one time or another swept.

He was in Siracusa at the time; in January, the month of his birth and mine; and almost the day. The year was in his diary:

“A classic land; ancient olive trees; and always snowy Ætna sparkling above the clouds. I see again before me landscapes of old Italian painters; ruins, pastoral scenes, shepherds, goats. I feel the sad charm of winter. But it is a winter so gentle I am not surprised to see palms, flowers, cacti. Siracusa keeps the melancholy, the expanding mystery, of the Middle Age.

“Tonight I saw upon the Gulf a sunset of Italy. High up, Ætna kept glowing like a brasier. When I came back to the ship I carried a bouquet of wild anemones, the hue of pale violets, plucked by some ancient temple.”

I am glad to have an opportunity to see the remainder of the diaries of Loti’s youth. And what a youth it was! Do you know of another so splendid? It was enhanced by contact (comprehension) with the beauties of creation. And while he was writing his account of it, I, in a far, lonely, wind-swept prairie village was living his youth with him. I was caring almost nothing for the people or the things about me. Instead, I was climbing the mountain highways of Persia, _with Loti_, to look upon Persepolis, and dream of the face of that Greek courtesan for whom Alexander the Great gave order that it be burned.

I was slipping along hot jungle-ways, by night, to look for the first time, with startled senses, upon fabulous Angor. _J’ai vu l’étoile de soir se lever sur les ruines d’Angor._ Angor, too, under the swift light of Eastern dawns, when the stealthy tigers come. I have lived intensely in many lands through the prose of many masters.

I saw plum blossoms fall like rain in rare forgotten spring times of Japan, and listened to the clear falling of sweet water in South Sea Isles, where are men whose bodies keep black gleams like bronze.

I saw Pekin, with its gold and jade; perishing temples of Egypt, in sumptuous and brilliant evocations, and deserted rose-marble cities upon the highlands of India. I climbed the Street of the Kasbah, in windless African nights, when scent of almond blossoms hung heavy on the air. The too _troublante_ beauty of Africa brushed my senses. And I enjoyed the rare, early African spring creeping northward over the Sea, to Sicily, whose little old villages were literally buried in flowers, and where there were violets as rich, as deeply fragrant, and as purple, as the mists of England make. How I have loved night and sunset on his distant seas, and chaste, too ardent tropic dawns.

I have not found my own country so lovely. Nothing has moved me here in the same degree save human life, and for that I have kept something resembling a scientist’s interest, because of our racial complexity. We are the New World’s newly made people. Loti said he was afraid of Dame Reality. Perhaps I am, too.

He was fortunate in being able to go from dream to dream. But if for the briefest time this precious, inspired wandering were interrupted, he suffered. He cried out: “_Il y a dans la vie de ces périodes d’ennui que l’on traverse ... en compagnie de Dame Réalité_.

(There are periods of boredom which one is forced to traverse in life ... in company with Dame Reality.)”

The more ancient, the more manifold, the life of a city, the lovelier I always find it. That is why Sicily has delighted me. Certain villages, certain streets, in Sicily, and canals in Venice, are the only perfectly satisfying things I have known. They are greater than love, because they keep twice its intensity. Love may be a vulgarity, but an enchanting city—never. And men are about the same, while cities change.

Loti was so busy in the only genuine kind of living there is, which is storing up emotion, subtile comprehensions, that life became so exquisite a thing at last, he felt grief for each moment that sped.

Whenever I am in Paris I go to a bench beside the Medici Fountain, in the Gardens of the Luxembourg, to sit a little while where Loti used to sit and look out happily upon his blond, beloved Paris.

The individual is passing so rapidly in America, and collective living being substituted, that we can not expect to enjoy again such an exquisite personality. Here the daily paper thinks for us, the Movie feels for us, the radio talks us deaf and dumb, and the department stores put upon us what clothes they wish, while we remain limp and unresisting. _Collective living_ where mind and senses grow dull.

The old arts are dying. They have no place in a mechanical civilization. Man has procured a strangely noisy set of grown-up toys that engross his energies.

I hope that in the struggle for world supremacy which is plainly threatening, the older mind of Asia will triumph sometimes, instead of American mind. A purely commercial civilization is dangerous.

Just as the good go to heaven, it is supposed, sometime, the painters, poets, people who have given me greatest pleasure, go to Sicily.

Pedro-Emilio Coll, that delightful Venezuelan, writes about it. He says: The king starts out to enjoy himself—meaning Blanco-Fombona. For pleasure he went to Palermo to dwell a time under the azure shell of the Sicilian sky confronting an azure sea. Coll goes on to say that ever afterward, Fombona experienced something like homesickness for Sicily.

I myself would much rather live and go to Palermo, than die and go to Heaven. To everyone his Heaven! I wonder why no one thought before of likening Palermo’s rich, old Moorish palaces to the dwellings of Paradise!

Once I wrote to engage rooms in an hotel in Palermo. I had just replied to a publisher a few days before, to a request asking me what my next novel would be, telling him that I had one in mind which I heard in the music of Parsifal. I learned, later, that in the Hotel Des Palms where I had engaged rooms, Wagner finished writing the music of Parsifal, and his last really great writing, on Friday, at the eleventh hour, January 13—almost at the exact moment when I was born.

To reach Sicily I sailed south past Sardinia. Naples, the night before from the sea, looked lovelier than from land. It was hot. There was scent of sulphur in the air. But I bought, in Naples, some charming cameos, to look at, not to wear, because on them were poignant little figures copied from the painted walls of Pompeii. The one I like best is of a dancing girl. I remember well her tomb.

From Naples it was at the edge of sunset we sailed past the islands south. One is Procida, where Lamartine wrote _Graziella_; Capri, with its ancient Phœnician stairway, cut in solid rock. With deepening twilight, we passed such shore places as Sorrento, Torre del Greco. Then away for the open sea and the night.

The next morning when I opened my port-hole we were anchored in front of dazzling white and pink mountains of stone, wild-lined, lofty. This was Sicily. We anchored far out. Little pink and violet-blue boats, roughly and heavily made, came for us and our luggage.

When at length we landed, the glare of light on white chalk-soil was terrifying, and I recalled swiftly that one of Sicily’s other names is _Island of the Sun_. Suddenly the buildings of a very ancient world swept around me. The Greeks made settlements here almost a thousand years before the Birth of Christ.

Palermo is a large city. It has wide and spacious streets, bordered with palaces of beauty—proud palaces of the Houses of Aragon, Bourbon, Orleans, Guise. Solemn, dignified, magnificent. It was here the Bourbons came for their last wild fling at power. The city is almost as lovely as Venice, which is all I am able to say, the highest praise I know.

One reason that the architecture of Sicily is alluring, is because at one time or another, almost all great races have owned it, so all lovelinesses are united. And since it does not rain from May to October, the light was dazzling.

Civilizations reached heights. The Greeks settled it at a dizzy number of centuries before Christ. The Romans held it awhile; the Norsemen. Once it was a center of Moorish culture. And then there was French, Spanish, and Italian rule.

Roger of Sicily, of song and story, built fairy palaces, and then helped bring the learning of the Orient into Europe. He inspired and caused to be built three buildings which are wonders of beauty, among them _Mon Reale_ whose interior is covered with pictures made of gold and precious marble mosaics.

_Mon Reale_ is several miles from the city, on the side of one of the towering, treeless, forbidding, pink-hued mountains of rock. The road that led to it was suffocating, white with dust, and the sun made me know that Africa was only eighty miles away. Barefoot women bearing burdens on their heads the size of their bodies, and leading donkeys, toiled along beside us. Every moment the view grew more astonishing, and greater the dazzle of unshaded light. At our feet lay the famous _Concha d’Oro_, (_Shell of Gold_), the fruitful plain that frames Palermo, filled with groves of oranges, figs, palms, and the bright blue curve of the shore, with the giant pink mountains of rock that mark it at either end.

On the road to _Mon Reale_ we visited Villa Tasca, a palace of rose-tinted marble. Its garden is famous. Out of the dust-white road into a paradise of flowers! Only oriental people, like the Arab, who have known the desert and thirst and the sun’s too direct heat, know how to make gardens. It was one of their perfected arts. And in these gardens they knew how to set pleasure places of unbelievable charm.

All the old gardens of the South, of Latin races, are among the richest enchantments. It takes centuries and wars and changing kings, caprice and madness, and love, to ripen gardens. Money and haste can not do it. A garden, in the finest acceptance of the term, will be impossible in our country for centuries. Even the flowers are lovelier in Latin gardens of the South, because they seem to be freighted with so many memories.

VILLA TASCA

If Love could build a place for pure delight ’Twould be like this—pink marble, stone-white lace, Within a garden grave and gay, kind both to bird and flower, With friendly paths, curved, perfume-bordered ways, And plaintive settles princely lover chose; With water-mirrors, with the fountain’s spray.

Some lovely, ancient land like Sicily, Since centuries alone make gardens rich— Caprices, memories—royal death—and love. Who boasts he can buy beauty with bare gold Is like the fool whom God gives back to Fate.

As long ago as the Twelfth Century, the brilliant, unfettered mind of the Eighteenth Century was active in Sicily. The Renaissance would have begun earlier, if Europe had been able to comprehend, and then seize the astonishing intellectual development of this little island.

I used to wonder where Wagner drew the impetus, the power, for the sacred music of the close of Parsifal, with its dizzy heights of impassioned vision. Now I know. It was from religious paintings done in gold and gems, by inspired Twelfth Century builders, here in Sicily. He caught fire from a great age of faith.

Goethe, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, knew that this was a land drenched with a kind of power that was passing. He lived here long. And daily he went to write in a lovely garden, called _Villa Giulia_, and he, too, had hard work to drag himself away. Hence the fable, perhaps, of the Sirens. The Square of the Great Cathedral (partly Moorish) is perhaps the loveliest thing I ever looked upon, save old Venetian Palaces. And it haunts me still, like the Grand Canal of Venice, under some unforgettable light.

The giant-bodied, blond, Norse sea-kings who came were robbers. But that which was Greece and the Orient touched them mightily. They became followers of the Christ, planned Crusades, married princesses of France, and all the time dwelled in a Moorish Court and spoke both the tongues of the East and the West. Here East and West met, then blended. A superstition was shattered.

We visited the graveyard where sleep Roger of Sicily and his descendant, Manfred, of whom Byron wrote, men who helped make the civilization of Europe. Here again I am on the trail of Loti. He declared this graveyard is the loveliest in the world save one—_Eyoub_—in Stamboul.

It is a long hot journey by rail to cross Sicily in summer. It is a day spent amid pale yellow fields of ripening grain. They shimmered like canary-hued satin. I recalled that it was to raise grain for the Caesars, and forget his long sad years of service in the East, that Pontius Pilate came here to end his days. A French writer makes him say: “_Il me fallut ... sous le coup d’une disgrace immeritée...._

I was held by the blow of unmerited disgrace. Swallowing my tears, my heart filled with bitterness, I retired to my Sicilian estates, where I should have died of loneliness, if my daughter Pontia had not come to console me. Here I raised grain, the finest in the land. Today life is over. Let the future judge between me and Vitellius.”

The man who was talking with Pontius Pilate in the French story, says to him after awhile, this man had known him, been a companion, when the older was Prefect of Judea. They are talking together of old days of youth in Asia. The younger confesses: ... It was harder for me to do without a beautiful woman whom I knew there, than even the wines of Greece. A long time later I learned that this mistress of mine had joined a little band of men and women who followed a Galilean Prophet. They called him Jesus the Nazarene, and for some deed he was put to the cross. Do you happen to remember this man, my friend Pontius?

Pontius Pilate drew his brows together. He frowned. He thought and thought. His reply was simple and sincere. Jesus, you say his name was? Jesus, the Nazarene? No, I can’t seem to recall any such name.

After a time, above the satin-yellow of the grain fields, towered Ætna, white with ice, with snow. I recalled the songs of Greek poets written on this very plain. I recalled the pride and joy in the lines of Theocritus who dwelled just where we were spinning along:—These lines have always thrilled me.

_I, Thêtis of Ætna, have come! I, Thêtis of Ætna, will sing!_ It was in Siracusa that Theocritus was born. _Ah!_ how long ago, and his lines so fresh today. Three hundred B. C.

South of Siracusa, upon this radiantly blue sea, Greece fought some of her greatest battles, and it was here, and on these waters to the south, that the twilight first began to fall upon perhaps the most perfect civilization the world has seen.