Part 4

The Greek Theatre, in the hillside, where the plays of Æschylus and Aristophanes were produced, is still in good condition. They had just given a play. It seats twenty thousand. The old Roman Theatre is close beside it. It is not so lovely.

Just a step from the theatres, in another of these unforgettable gardens of long ago, the _Villa Landolina_, the German poet, Count Von Platen, is buried. And in the Museum of Siracusa there is a lovely object, likewise from this same garden, the _Landolina Venus_. Headless, without arms, she stands upon a pedestal in a dim, pink room in which there is no other object. After you look at it in the twilight, they open a window and fling the day upon it, and the marble is of a texture so unusual it seems upon the moment to palpitate, to breathe, to live again, because beauty never dies. It is form divine. It was made in an age when there were still many people who could appreciate form. It is said to have been one of the treasures of Heliogabulus who gave it to Siracusa, a city he loved. What heart-fire in the antique world! And in how many ancient tongues we have heard men say they loved cities.

The next morning early I went back again to the Museum. I offered my entrance fee, five lire. The keeper shook his head. Are you not going to let me see it? I gasped. Yes Madame. But you who know beauty may go in always free.

Over Siracusa, in summer, bends a sky of blue enamel as unbroken and changeless in hue as the sky of Africa. And along the streets and country ways are flowering trees, wisteria-blue, gold and white, and hibiscus-pink, which add to the enchantment.

It was to a friend in Sicily, I think his name was Lucillus, that Seneca wrote letters of wisdom. And once in a while he used to mention what he termed _the world renowned mountain, Ætna_.

Seneca wrote to him: If you would be free you must be poor, or else you must make yourself like unto the poor. Wisdom is a peculiar treasure, Seneca goes on to explain; you begin to acquire it as you lose everything else.

And Tu Fu, a Chinese poet of the Eighth Century, wrote:

_It is only the beggar who sings._

That kind of perception and that freedom of mind is lost. One finds the minds of these great thinkers of old something firm among the shifting ages. In the present flux they are safe to anchor to. As a nation, as a people, we are not old enough to appreciate such statements. Money can not buy anything that is genuinely fine. Only the invisible coin of the soul can purchase the genuine. The age that worships money, measures with money, is an age both base and stupid.

José Maria de Heredia wrote some of his most splendid sonnets about Sicily. He says in one of them, that it is Ætna that ripens best the purple and gold of the wine. We learn that here Greek blood unites in the veins with Saracen fury, and imperial pride of France. But time passes and everything dies. Even marble grows old and worn. Agrigenti (_Girgenti_) is nothing but a shadowy ruin, and Great Siracusa, (once most populous and powerful city of the Mediterranean world), dozes dully under the too blue sky. But metal lives. And today metal coins keep the rare perfection of profile of Sicilian maids.

Loti has moulded upon Sicily phrases lovely and indestructible as the coins of Siracusa, which preserve the unforgettable beauty of youth. It is surpassing strange that I who was always moved to emotion by the prose of Loti, who tried so many times and failed to look upon his face, should receive almost the last letter he wrote, and that he should sign his name to his calling card to send me, just before he died. Love, perhaps, is a powerful magnet. The avenues of the air are now plotted and mapped, the trackless roads of the sea, the land, but the roads of the spirit are still free, unmarked, and sure-leading. Baedeker, thank God, has neglected to chart them! Loti called this young girl’s diary charming. He said it made him want to read other things.

Ada Negri went to Sicily a few years ago, in a journey she made to Italian places of pleasure. She writes of this journey in a prose

## book called _Le Strade_ (_Streets_). Delightful poet that she is,

with lines that flame in memory, her prose is commonplace. Not many have written well both prose and verse.

Calzini was quite mad over Sicily. He tarried longest in Siracusa, to worship at the feet of the _Landolina Venus_. Somewhere he exclaims, thinking of the statue, “we have come to you across nations and across time; we have come from a civilization which has put so much despair, so much sadness and worry into love. Let us learn to worship again in you the power of creating, _generating_, profound and eternal as the sun of Sicily.”

Sicily gave birth to two delightful composers, one of whom was Scarlatti. It pleases me to know that Wagner wrote his greatest love music, the music of Isolda, by the canals of Venice, and his music of inspired spiritual vision, when he flashed forth in tone, sublime knowledge of a life that surpasses death, in Sicily.

Hear Andrew Lang:

Ah! Leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London and the bustling street, For still by the Sicilian shore The murmur of the Muse is sweet,

* * * * *

And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian Sea.

How England has loved lands of sun! There was a young English clergyman, by name Lefroy, who in the Eighties went to Sicily and wrote some memorable verses there. I can recall the first line of one:

On shores of Sicily a shape of Greece!

That is just what men can find there today, the vivid memory of something perfect.

Few things happened to mar the long hot monotony of the sun-swept plains. Few people of importance came. Dude-ranching was of the future.

But when I was in my first teens the Great Salvini came, and with him a son. They played _The Three Musketeers_, in what popular pride, somewhat feeble in fact, called the Opera House. The dramatic production here was of slight importance to them. What they really came for was to go quail hunting in the Indian Territory. My father, as it happened, was the best wing-shot in the State. I had inherited a little of his ability; I was permitted to go along.

The two Italians were impressed with the eloquence, the space-surprise of the unmarked land-levels, where roads were just anywhere you wished to go, and the sweep of light unimpeded. I was impressed with the beauty, the charm of the young Italian. In addition to genius, there was upon him the seal of an ancient rich, finely tempered living.

The winter that followed I was in a university in the north, lonely and homesick for the sun, for the south. Then I saw that Salvini was billed.

After the first performance I went behind the scenes to renew acquaintance with my gay hunting companion of the autumn. This was the beginning of a week of delight such as my child’s soul had not known, a week when I saw daily this engaging Italian youth, so unlike the young men of the plains whom I had known. I, who even then, was peculiarly sensitive to beauty, was all but stricken dumb by this alluring personality. I sensed the splendid things he had known which were unknown to me.

When at length he had to go away, I wept. He was beauty and youth and love and charm. He was all the things I liked and dumbly wanted. What remained was the snow-bound, duty-filled Michigan winter, where day was too short, too quickly black-rimmed with dusk and night. As in the case of Adonis of old, beauty was dead and my heart was lamenting.

Years passed. Life like an uncontrollable tidal-wave swept in, bearing the things I hated or had no interest in. In short, I grew old with the years.

Then, one night in New York, in a little moving-picture theatre on a cheap side street, one night of winter, when the snow outside was deeply white, just as it used to be by black forest edges, in those long forgotten Michigan winters, I saw laughing down upon me from the silver screen, in a luxurious Roman garden-scene from _Quo Vadis_, a face I seemed to have known. What dimly remembered delight was there! In the eyes, mouth, the careless gesture of the head, the trained grace of hands! It was the face of a man no longer in his first youth, but keeping still youth’s slenderness, youth’s lines. A face more eloquent, made more impassioned and moving by the years, and crowned with the flowers I always loved, the fragile flowers of an Italian spring. The background was an old, rich garden of the south, and beyond—the Immortal City, _Rome_. Into the eyes as they looked upon me crept a look I seemed to remember. _Salvini!_

The years rolled back. I was sixteen again. I was mounting my mustang under swaying trees, in a windy dawn of early autumn. Shining and resplendent was the outspread circle of the plains, and beside me, moving along at speed, over the gold-hued grasses of dying summer, a youth I liked, with the face of Italy; a dark impassioned face; eloquent; and a voice speaking in my ear, with luscious, singing phrase I never forgot. The young Salvini!

There is only one other thing I remember with equal delight, equal vividness. It is night. And likewise a night of long ago. It is near a Latin land, by the Mexican Gulf; a sultry night of summer; a silent, outspread, sullen water, with faint, far stars winking down into it, and the white gleam, and the drunken, too heavy scent of magnolia blossoms. These two memories sway my senses.

Now I know that the reason is because they keep securely the same emotional height.

I have found something in a French writer I like: _Only Cezanne knew the color of Provençe._ I have been fluttering, mentally, long, around that idea, searching for it, trying to seize it like a bird its nest, at night.

Why was Margaret of Navarre the helpless sport of fate and accident? Whenever I re-read _The Heptameron_ I wonder more. She had beauty, youth, health, intelligence above the ordinary, something that resembled the gift of genius, and in her old French world none were more highly placed. She was born and lived beside a throne. Yet she had no power of direction over days. She was as helpless on the current of years as driftwood. What was lacking? Was it the saving grain of salt of the commonplace? Or are human beings sport of deep tides of time, and the so-called _lucky ones_, who get what they want the way they want it, grow conceited, and cry out like the little fat boy in Mother Goose: _See what a plum I found!_ The fact is, they had nothing to do with it.

A delusion is not a bad thing to grow. It is superior to reality because it is out of range of attack and can not wear out. It transcends time and accelerates action.

When one is young one wants happiness to last. When one grows old one finds it was made to taste of, never to keep. Happiness is merely the wholesale price of wisdom.

The mind that is perfectly clear, if such a thing were conceivable, would not be the mind to succeed. A certain amount of prejudice (little wrongs for alloy with pure gold) is necessary. It guides.

To one deprived of it, whose crystal-clear, dispassionate intelligence sees all sides at once, whose brain is weakened in its progress toward choice by weighing infinitesimal differences, selections, resolute action, would not be easy. We keep many unpaid debts to wrong. That is where right gets its crown. As brevity is the soul of wit, delusion is the fiber of life.

A curiosity in America today is the insistent effort to make the dollar rule ideas and ideals.

Keeping house resembles a clock. You wind it up on Saturday night and it puts in the rest of the week in running down.

Life is about as satisfactory in its attempts as the thrusts of swordsmen fencing with blindfolded eyes.

One of my greatest regrets has been that life has no back door.

Necessity is quite as often the mother of goodness as invention.

In the old wars recorded eloquently in tapestries, marbles, canvasses, men died and kept their faith. The coming wars will be wars of science. They will be fought largely by the brain, in lonely rooms. Men will die just the same, but they will not keep their faith. Sacrifices will be heaped to a new God—Super-Mechanics.

Yet the Greeks used to write songs to Apollo in which they called him both _Destroyer_ and _Healer_. If circles of time are vast, still they are circles.

Republics have been the world’s dream of justice. Now Science is shaking them sadly. What is there Science is not shaking? Is there a field of mind not attacked?

The thinking of France, the philosophical dreaming of Germany, the peculiarly destructive quality in the brain of the Hebrew, have together been helpful in hastening change. There is no value not suffering transformation.

Hear what De Tocqueville writes about democracy in America. He had one of the most dangerously penetrating minds the world has known: _I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before ... men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from

## acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence._

The gentle, the humanity loving philosophizing of the painter, Redon, in his notes, is good to know. It tells us, too, how great his heart was. He insists continually upon something I have always believed, that, in supreme creating, the heart, nobility of nature, play a not yet credited part.

As the Bhagavad Gita is a breviary for the soul, some of the notes of Redon are a breviary for art and its making. Few can read him without feeling an impulse to be better, loftier visioned. His brief notes, his diary jottings, are a kind of New Testament of Beauty.

A Biblical soul, flinging forth proud, powerful phrases! A prophet painting super-terrestrial flowers, too ripe in color, too wise, graceful, lovely, but weighted with divine regret!

Redon could see and feel. Sometimes his words are poetry, especially when he addresses the sea. In words he snares amazing, unexpected revelations. In his unselfconscious hours of meditation, sometimes he is a thinker. Again I am impressed with the fact that they who are great, keep within untapped deeps of good. He declares that that which comes from the heart can not die. Goethe said something similar. And that was the teaching of Faust. The last resolve of its united modern and mediæval wisdom was the heart’s supremacy. Beethoven asserted it. Redon, as it happened, adored Beethoven. As I recall the musician’s words they were these: “Man’s title to nobility is his heart.” Now I recall Goethe’s words: _Nur was vom Herzen kommt, zum Herzen geht._ This completing of logic in word-phrase is a characteristic, I think, of the great German.

Redon goes on to say that if on some centenary of Michael Angelo he were chosen to make the address, he would speak only of the great soul of the man.

There were long periods when Michael Angelo neither painted nor modeled. In these between spaces his sonnets were written. I recall at this moment a sonnet in that old Italian tongue I have loved so long, which tells how he likes sleep and the substance of stone:

_Caro m’è ’l sonno, e piu esser di sasso._

The woman whom Michael Angelo loved declared she wrote only to give vent to inner grief:—

_Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia._

He was greater. He wrote selflessly.

It was in Bordeaux, a letter informs me, that Redon was born, instead of Marseilles.... He seems to have possessed a noble nature, with a peculiarly personal quality of penetration. He stood face to face with basic emotions.

He declares the dilettante amuses himself, while the artist, going through agony, produces grain for broader sowing. Mixed with his love, his knowledge of art, there was reverence.

He explains how memories of what his father used to tell him in childhood helped him. Of his father, he remarks: “He loved the outdoor world. He talked often about the pleasure the great spaces of America gave him, and forests, where once he was lost for days. He liked to recall the wild life of his youth, this daring follower of luck and liberty.” His father was in New Orleans at time of the Wars of the First Empire.

In his sensitive childhood, Brittany made him sad. He explains that in Celtic lands the human soul has accumulated too much emotion. The passion of days, of years, is piled there, until material things become uncannily imbued. Hence the wealth of legends. Legends and poetry become the permanent safety vault of the agony, of the desires, of a race.

Once he pauses to praise the wines of France. He blesses men who grow the grape, who make precious liquid to dilute bitter fate with a little optimism. He calls it _liquid of dreams_. He rejoices that there is something that can exalt mind.

He tells of his first art teacher who did not try to teach. He kept still and rejoiced when the boy went mad over the canvasses of Delacroix. From that man, he declares, I learned the essentials of creation.

I have found another reason for his devotion to flowers. In his impressionable boyhood he became companion of a famous botanist, Clavand. This man was fascinated by the imperceptible, unsteady boundary line which separates flower-life from human-life. In the plastic arts, Clavand could appreciate both the serenity of Greece and the riotous Middle Age. He loved Delacroix just as Redon did. He kept telling Redon, the boy, of the intensity of life, the vital irradiation of the canvasses of Delacroix. He compared them to the plays of Shakespeare, because they held the same quality. In stored up depth of life they were Elizabethan.

Redon expresses belief that there is no such thing as art until pressure of idea, vision, force then form speech.

Remy de Gourmont applies the word _metaphore_ to the paintings of Redon. They live by logic of imagination.

His reflections are always illuminating. Speechless nature, (plants, flowers), have normal, secret life-laws which landscape painters must feel to express. There is an art of design freed from burden of details.

In life there is suffering. Art is made to console. He insists Rembrandt created _clair-obscur_ just as Phidias created _line_. New art, outside law and vision of pagan Greece, must derive from Rembrandt.

He thinks that the power to put into a work of art more significance than the creator suspects is done by them whose hearts are perfectly true, they who hold in the soul something greater than art. This means it is the rich heritage of them who have lived.

Redon remarked: “When I am alone I can love the highways.” Tu Fu, a poet of Eighth Century China, sang:

“I find that I like to walk alone.”

Thinking, evidently, is a thing outside of time. Redon says that with God, he can enjoy natural things. I prefer rough ways, uncultivated spaces, untouched by the human hand. I even love black woods when they are sad. I love wild storms, abundant rain, cold, snow and the frost. I love these harsh things men grumble over. They even keep a language which enchants me.

Long ago Redon felt sensitively the coming of the dangerous, scientifically minded New World; an age dry of emotion. He exclaimed in words touched with both grief and fear: “Plastic art is dead, because the wind of the infinite has blown upon it.” That is exactly what science will prove to be; _the wind of the infinite_.

Somewhere else I recall, he declares that the superiority of the Christ is the fact that all loved Him without argument. Over the memory of man there floated the candor of His smile, and the fact that He could love every one who approached Him.

This makes me remember a poet’s portrait of Christ, drawn by Leconte de Lisle. It is too lovely ever to forget:

_“Figure aux cheveux roux, d’ombre et de paix voilée, Errante aux bords des lacs sous son nimbe de feu, Salut! L’humanité dans ta tombe scellée O jeune Esseinien, cherche son dernier dieu!_

The boyish Christ, a halo of flame about His head, wandering along the shores of Galilee. Humanities last God.”

The dilettante plays. The great artist learns to suffer; creating is the pendant of unselfish anguish.

“How good it is to read in a quiet room!” Redon exclaims—“with a window upon a forest.” He could say that, because he had not permitted the tumult of the world to touch his heart. That was a finer thing to do than to collect dollars. Success, what is popularly called so, is more or less vulgar, and a little too noisy now-a-days.

Redon is a poet in words without suspecting it. Hear him!

Painters—go look upon the sea! There you will find color, find light; And a deep sky that lives.

There you will catch song of the sands, Countless imperceptible shadowings, You will come strengthened back from the sea, Until the great word will be yours.

It is under the charm of autumn evenings that I resume my memories. There is something in this season that turns my thoughts toward the past. It is sad, a little. It helps recall that which is gone. In my soul it makes silence; sweet and discreet, like autumn leaves that drop.

Once Redon met a man named Chenavard who had known Delacroix. This was in 1878. The man’s memories of the great painter gave him impulse to paint, he states. Delacroix always stood at his easel, or else he walked rapidly back and forth, whistling an opera of Rossini’s. The man could not forget the abandon, fertility, power of invention, _the fury_, of Delacroix.

Redon insists that success can destroy and then pervert an artist’s sense of beauty. And he was of the opinion that it is in winter when music has its greatest influence. It belongs to the skies of the evenings of winter, with their silence. Music is art of night and its dreams. But painting belongs to day and the sun!

Exactitude, truth, action, are of the domain of words. Therefore not native to Germany, land of music, abstract thought, visions. It is most at home in France, in England. He dislikes the music of England.

He loved the Basque Country. The soil seemed an ancient fatherland where he must have lived, loved, suffered. There the wandering winds of summer, the slightest motion of water, sound of the human voice, awoke imperious memories. Everything touched his heart.

In life we may be always stumbling upon our ancient and forgotten dwelling places, where in some other dress of flesh we played. One life for the manifold mind is inconceivable, for its uselessness, its injustice. Lives are multiple. Science will teach us how, _some day_, to remember.