TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST

THE
TASTE OF HONEY

THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST

BY EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD

PORTLAND MAINE
THE MOSHER PRESS
MDCCCCXXX

COPYRIGHT
EDNA WORTHLEY UNDERWOOD
1930

Manufactured in the United States of America

TO THREE PROSATEURS
LOTI, BLANCO-FOMBONA, D’ANNUNZIO

FOREWORD

The Taste of Honey is a genuine diary, of somewhat the same kind as De Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète, or Diary of a Kentish Gentleman, in that it was not written for public approval, but for personal pleasure. It is not dated nor arranged in order, partly because it was jotted down upon loose leaves which were threaded upon a string; partly because of the period of years covered and the vicissitudes that befall perishable substances such as paper.

Part was written at the age of sixteen, eighteen; part recently. Many pages have been lost; indeed as recently as the spring of 1928 a manuscript of over three hundred pages disappeared from the office of a New York magazine. Some notes from this are included however.

Selections from the Note Book have been published, in both French and English, Le Disque Vert of Belgium carried pages, when Hellens was director. American papers have carried other pages.

It has not been edited nor changed for publication. It is the unreserved expression of what was in the reader’s mind, set down with malice toward none and always with sincerity.

THE TASTE OF HONEY
THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST

THE TASTE OF HONEY

THE NOTE BOOK OF A LINGUIST

Goethe wrote: Was ich litt und was ich lebte, sind hier Blumen nur im Strausz. I paraphrase: Was ich lese und was ich denke, hab ich hier bewahrt für mich. (What I read and what I think I have stored up here for myself.)

This sentence from one of Concha Espina’s novels pleased me: Acaso han huido para siempre en el mundo las aves altarnaras de la Humanidad. (Perhaps vanished forever from the earth are the heavenly wings of humanity.) That is what Spanish thinkers declare that we lack more than anything else, human values.

Byron and Shelley created merely to console themselves for the fact that they could not learn how to live. To them a man of action was something strange, something enviable.

Maurois’s Ariel (Shelley) is satisfying and unsatisfying at the same time. I feel some of it might be better. It lacks substance, and yet it is pleasant reading enough. The book is semi-fiction; it was not meant to be yard-wide fact. But I keep the feeling of being forced to look at a water-color when I am longing for a rich, deep-pigmented oil. There is something I want and can not find. It is bad form however to look a fact too firmly in the face.

What was really wrong with the lives of Shelley and Byron, and some of their delightful friends, was the influence in cold, Saxon England, with its peculiar ability to cling to a straight line and ignore the nimble necessity of corners, of the French Eighteenth Century. It made the duller English mad. They did not put on well the mental clothes of French thought and philosophy. As a race they have never been too successful in putting on any clothes.

They lacked humor and a kind of emotional release in the wearing. The clothes did not fit. But they thundered ahead with desperate earnestness, and neglected the gay occasional dandying trot. British seriousness minus Gallic salt.

An English woman of cultivation and good intent, in America, recently showed the same peculiarity. She started a movement to suppress Mother Goose. She insisted the book would teach children to lie, to distrust their elders. The following is one of her quoted illustrations:

The little dog laughed to see such a farce

And the cow jumped over the moon.

The estimable, (and as it happens good looking woman), asserts truthfully, that cows have not the habit of jumping over the moon and that it is wrong to tell it to children.

She writes an article on the subject. She asks intervention of the Press to back her statement that she has never seen a cow jump over the moon. No one doubted her!

It did not occur to her the line is nonsense. Such writing is escape from the prison of fact. Mother Goose is art of its kind. In a subway city, of course, it is not easy to think of such exhibits—nor of anything the other side of wit. It is being witty in good form—which is the good form the polite English have overlooked. It registers by what it is not—like English wit. Referring again to Maurois’ book, one can not help being grateful for another glimpse of the bodily beauty of Byron, of Shelley.

That delightful short story writer of Venezuela—Pedro-Emilio Coll, was influenced deeply in boyhood by the sensuous, the finished prose-technique of d’Annunzio. Who would not be, who could both read and appreciate it? Coll could not forget it. It may have helped to the commendable control he holds.

In the Eighteen Eighties, Venezuela had some cuentistas, whose style, whose imaginative reach, was above the ordinary. Some of these men could command a prose-surface greater than anyone save Hearne, who was not American, but Irish and Greek. Latin people of the South keep an art-sense, a kind of finura, that we of more mixed blood to the north, have not. Spanish blood is having a second, a royal flowering down there.

Opopomax, by Coll, is the story of a perfume. Aside from owning an idea, this and his other stories have trained workmanship. It is well done. I sometimes wonder if the novel ever reaches quite the same intensity—the perfect fluidity of dissolving vision, as the short story.

On this pallid, dove-grey morning of winter, I have finished Blanco-Fombona’s Man of Iron, (El Hombre de Hierro). Fombona was born in Venezuela too, like Coll, but now he is living in Europe. He was in prison in Ciudad, Bolivia—1905, when he wrote this book.

In France they say of him:—“A tender soul whom no emotion leaves indifferent.” Fombona remarks that Herbert Spencer calls us hybrid beings, with all the defects of hybridism. Once Rubén Darío wrote a glorious appreciation of Fombona, as Rodo wrote one equally fine of Darío. He declared: “My friend, Rufino, was born only to realize great things.” Darío is dead now; when he was writing so eloquently about his friend he was in Mallorca—and happy. Alas!

There is a Portuguese critic in South America—in Rio—by name José Verissimo, who remarks that America was colonized at one of the most powerful moments of European mind, and that this nature of explorers, conquistadores, the something epic that makes poets, still lives in Blanco-Fombona.

His novels have conquered two worlds; the Old and the New. Spain was enthusiastic. Like Columbus, Fombona set her dreaming of a New World. A young Spaniard says: “... When I think of Fombona I connect his name with the charm of the city where he lived, Caracas ... the name of that city remains a mythological place to me—remote, perfumed, mysterious, a city which Fate will have it, that I shall sometime see. How I have lingered over Fombona’s pages, when they picture the sun of gold in that sky of azure; dawn-fresh, mountain mornings that are chill; the romantic song of old bells in old towers; the iced-water Americans drink ... lots and lots of things that suit my dream-city, city made for adventure and love, and ill luck....”

Hear Blanco-Fombona for a moment himself: (I am translating from memory)—... “and more important than everything else, more important than people, than events, that brilliant sun of America, toward which the breath of our lives ascends continually, like prayer....”

It is not true that the characters of Man of Iron are commonplace as the critics keep calling them. It is because Fombona has looked down upon them from a great height. From such height, perhaps, all the little figures in the game—life—are small and commonplace.

I can not forget his sentences. They sing on and on in my mind. They have the charm of smooth satin. They feel good upon my tongue. La luna—de esas claras lunas.... The moon—one of those clear moons of tropic nights—was laughing down upon the water. Here is another:

In the sky the little stars were twinkling, while afar I could hear the night-thunder of the Carib Sea.

Fombona’s life has been worth while; poetic, enriched with vision, with conscious power—in Caracas, the city of his delight. It is something I like to think about. I can measure its invigorating pulse in his prose. I have esteem for the artist, and admiration for the man and brave fighter, who has never been a coward.

In Man of Iron, Fombona makes the character which is both pitiful and noble, a man, just as Manuel Galvez does in one of his latest novels—La Pasión de la Pampa. And Fombona like Manuel Galvez registered so many of the apparently trifling, overlooked facts that knit up the confusing surface of the present; it resembles the difficult-to-catch, changeful, spread-out shimmer upon a sea.

South Americans picture youth, and the joys of youth, as no one else. One can live over one’s own youth, and then multiple other youths by proxy, in the reading. And every once in a while I come upon a sentence that shakes me with its splendor.

I am impressed by the fact that the literatures that Fombona reads and likes best are French, Italian, Russian. He sought literatures which could inspire him, which held the contagion of heat, Saxon races are colder, weaker perhaps in art-sense. They peg along diligently—more pedantically—with the consuming of many words like a faulty engine giving out smoke. I am carrying along as I say this, an undercurrent of memory of the stories of the English Buchan, which are so deadly dull; uninspired; devoid of artistry, of life. To me his books are sediment ... after sometime, somewhere, the pure, the sparkling wine has been withdrawn. Only rare humorless Americans could read them.

The great earthquake in Caracas as Blanco-Fombona shows it to us, is masterly. And over it, the calm of night, and the yellow, resplendent moon of the tropics. I had a thrill from this chapter.

Fombona was fascinated by the racial problem of the Americas, just as I have been. He insists the great problem here is racial. To quote him: “There is no racial unity, and consequently no national ideal.... We may not depend upon them of mixed blood, because now one element predominates, and now another, which education breaks up and still more confuses. Out of three Venezuelans—white, negro, and Indian, who could tell what could blend their energies into one? In each case the ideals are different; they have different tastes, different political impulses. We have no national soul.”

One of Fombona’s friends in old Spain, tells us how greatly Fombona is repelled by a commercial, highly mechanized civilization, because such things go against the grain of his exalted subjectivity, his belief in the spiritual elite. He says Fombona hates equally what he calls Teutonic force and prosaic, Yankee-loving money-grubbing. And especially he hates democracies, because they are arbitrary, leveling, destructive of the aristocrat—and North Americans. La Lámpara de Aladino might be termed the breviary of his prejudices.

Somehow it makes me think—The Man of Iron—of youthful books by Turgéniev, such as Father and Sons, Spring Floods ... all show drawing without obtruding outline. There is some similar spiritual quality in the minds that were creating. In his two novels, he is the equal of the great Russian. I like the sheer power of the man! His steel-sharp delineations are memorable. And it has some of the same kind of power as Balzac.

The companion novel—Man of Gold, (El Hombre de Oro).

The chapter in which the three old ladies take pitiful farewell of the grand home of their ancestors, the rich, many-roomed, ancient colonial mansion, with its courts, with its flowers, is a fine piece of writing. It moved me deeply. Not many see the world we are forced to live in as clearly as Fombona, with all the different parts in reasonable and logical relation, not to mention the fine flashing forth to others, the lifting power of vision, that dazzles, then creates. There is both grandeur and fury in the soul of Fombona.

There was a short story writer in Venezuela-Caracas, in the late Eighties, whom I liked. Alejandro Fernandez Garcia. I am still on the watch for the short story of power. Hear this description of music from a story by Garcia. (Again I am translating and quoting from memory.)

“They played a joropo. From the rough, coarse, toil-worn fingers there spread out across the sensitive chords of the instrument, the flower of Venezuelan music. A flower made of race-blood, old age and its dreams; music that had come from very far away, from the inexplainable melancholy of our Carib Fathers—music, indolent and brutal, love-lustful, and cruel; music dripping through the clear nights of tropic moons like tears down the black faces of fugitive women ... plaintive, filled with rebellion and energy, like flame of hatred across the fragile cane, then again thunderous, a fitting call of bronze for war across the spaces.... In the joropo dwells the soul of our fatherland.... It is a sepulchre to guard the ashes of our dead.”

Again Garcia, enamored of music, writes: “Listen I tell you! Here comes a Creole waltz-song. Ah—how many times I have heard this song float languid and ardent like our Creole women on the sad and indifferent arms of lovers, heard it float on like a sparkling diamond-gas, across the surface of sleeping night-water ... seen it take on life and glow in the deep eyes of ranchmen at the rodeo ... in the dimming twilights of the solemn pampa.”

Passion, emotion, such as this is what I seek in story art. Cheap work does not know it. Garcia has written two books I commend. They are Búcares en Flor and Oro de Alquimia. These books hold the prose, great poets make sometimes in youth ... but seldom twice. Never in the twilight of years, because regret, although it may own a light all its own, can not gild like joy.

De Cela writes interestingly of Lima:

“Lima! Your legends and your women are beautiful. Your palaces romance-freighted and imposing; your cathedrals mysterious and solemn. In your streets dwell the Middle Age, and the age-old soul of Spain.”

The New World seems to embrace Old Spain. In Humos de Rey, by León, an old nobleman soliloquizes:

“... No one understands me. Everyone speaks an unknown tongue, and people look at me as if I were a fossil. It is not easy to find a single individual who thinks, feels, or judges as I do....

“Another age has come, with other men; there is a new world which is more than strange and inimical; more than indifferent.

“I do not need to go to cities to feel the winds of change strike me. Right here in this poor, little, old, Castilian village, dozing in shade of the tall cathedrals, where eternities have dreamed the same dream, the strangeness of a New World begins to play about me—a world that is materialistic, speed-dizzy; a peculiar life lived all on the outside; of bestial appetites of the flesh; sterile; filled with foolish emotions, plebeian ideals; and an alarming and useless scattering of spiritual energy.”

León belongs to the Royal Academy of Spain. I have read him long, but I did not expect just this of him.

When I take Italian, Spanish, or Russian books from the Public Library in New York, they show by their worn, marked pages, their general appearance of hard usage, that they have been read more intimately, more emotionally, than English books by English readers. It is evident that the passion on the pages has met and blended with a corresponding passion, with a new kind of level of comprehension, in the readers.

Books by other races (than American) still talk once in a while of honor, nobility. They acknowledge that such things have been. They accept the lofty realm of the spirit; bravery, sacrifice, virtues of the soul. American books have neither time nor inclination to mention such things which few seem to know anything about. Our books show existence, dry, exterior, concerned with money, mechanics, rapid physical movement from place to place, restlessness; cheapened pleasures. With the Latins there is heat of utterance. There is eloquence too. And rich native ability.

This novel by León, Humos de Rey, is well made. It commands respect like honest work by a person who knows how to work. He wrote it because he had something to say, and not for applause nor an itch for limelight. As a piece of portraiture it is exceptional. And there is the contrast between the Spain of great centuries dead, and the Spain being standardized, commercialized, mechanized—in short Americanized. This is going forward too speedily at the moment, and other writers besides León are taking careful note of it. It is the tragic motive in several books from Madrid and Barcelona which I have bought recently.

León creates in a higher key than colder Saxon races of the North can keep. There is intensely centered light. There is a different tempo—and selection of portrayal. And he writes of course, for a different public.

In the foreign books I am reading continually, the idea has been creeping in more and more in the last few years, that ideals are dying. In periodicals in North America, to one who reads many other literatures, one is impressed, by the overstressing of two things: money, efficiency. It is stupid, the recurring and recurring, of the words. Next comes speed. León’s book is far away, in inception, from such things. Faith breathes from it; bravery, and endurance. It upholds the nobler banner of the past, before the present decadence had set in, which is evident in printed art.

Don Carlos de Araoz, the nobleman in León’s novel, is a person. Collective living has not touched him. He has made no compromise with ideals. He is erect, fine, free. And brave. When he fights, he fights openly, face to face. He does not strike, like the coward in the night, in the back. Zurburan might well have painted him. The book should have been called The Last of the Caballeros. There are not many finer portraits than his.

“Padecia Don Carlos la decadencia.... Don Carlos suffered because of the falling away of power in his family, whose minds and energies were turned toward base things, shabby results. The men of his family were taking to wild and futile paths. They no longer had ideals nor robust faith; nor in the heart the power of creative goodness. They had no objective that was worth while; they were neither noble nor generous, but dull, mentally blind, and lukewarm toward the things of tradition. They could neither comprehend great things nor face bravely the future....”

It seems that Spain, just as in Columbus’ day can still show New Worlds to us.

Zorilla has flung forth this sketch of Toledo: “A place black, ruined, sad, and forgotten amid the sands—Great Toledo. Abandoned now, at mercy of the winds, Toledo, and not sufficiently protected by the mantle of royalty. Broken down, furrowed with sorrow and care, a slave, without soldiers to protect it, nor laws, it sleeps wrapped in its glory.

“All it owns is the great name of old, a kind of parody, with which it attempts to wrap then cover its shame—Toledo, once the sumptuous, the free. It has a great temple hid in a hollow, two bridges, and between the ruins and the marble of old armorial blazons, a stupid little village that sleeps on and on....”

Venice pleases me infinitely. I might have written this instead of De Regnier—I, who love Venice.

Like De Regnier, I love its climate, its color, its light. The kind of life men live there is the life that suits my taste.

There I have a happiness I never know elsewhere, a peculiar physical well-being, and in the midst of a great variety of objects that take up pleasantly the space of days. Both my eyes and my thoughts are busy. Even the old history of commerce of Venice is a thing of delight. Not many romances can equal it.

Nowhere else do days drop away so delightedly. Nowhere else is loneliness wholly without bitterness. There is no other spot in the world where I am myself—where neither years nor place, nor people can touch me. There is no other city where I can so happily support the necessary boredom of living.

My first sight of Venice gave me the greatest emotion, I think I have ever felt. I was tired. I had just journeyed through the Austrian Alps, the Bavarian Alps, and a corner of Switzerland. The train into Venice was late. It was cold. It was threatening rain.

We got in at exactly twelve o’clock, at night. It took long to get traveling bags through the customs. We left the trunks for the next day’s struggle.

Long ago the little steamers and the noisy water boats had gone to bed. We signalled a gondola with two oarsmen.

Then began the most amazing ride. We swung suddenly into the black, mirroring water of the Grand Canal, which Napoleon called the finest street in the world.

I saw a wide space of silent water. It was tideless, motionless, with a strange scent of decay hanging over it. On either side, seeming to slip farther and farther away—great, dim, tinted palaces that kept memories of the architecture of the East, rich India, radiant Arabia. And the grave Goth.

No glare of electric lights. There were dim little lamps swinging in front of fabulous façades, sometimes painted. There was no sound save the hiss of our long black oars against blacker water. I all but lost my senses at the beauty and the strangeness of it—this divine, dead city which seemed dropping away, on the point of disappearing forever, beneath the water of the Adriatic.

For hours in the heart of the night, we swung noiselessly along cold, black, shining canals. We slipped under the Bridge of the Rialto. We slipped under the Bridge of Sighs. We saw dim ghosts of loveliness of every conceivable color and form, tower above us in the darkness, and the majesty of it and the beauty, combined with silence, kept a kind of terror. Not a sound anywhere. Not a sign of life.

For a little while we lived in one of the old yellow, faded palaces. And in the daylight again we drifted down this unrivaled street, whose pictured palaces represent every period of Venetian history; on some were placards telling who had lived there; such men as Wagner, Byron, Murger, Maupassant.

Then we moved to the Royal Daniele, the famous hostelry of Venice, once the home of a great family. It was built about the year 800. Any of these renowned mansions are worth a trip across the Atlantic to see. I remembered Ruskin said, that beauty began to die in the world after the Eleventh Century. And I was pleased to think I had discovered that fact myself.

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.

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.

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.