Chapter III: Part 3

There is a _THUCYDIDES_ printed in Italy in 1483, in a Neapolitan gilt binding, that holds in middle of the cover something that simulates a gold expanding sun—superb and surprising, with its rich seeming of dazzling, scattered light. This was made as gift for an Aragon King.

There were printing presses in an early day in Sicily, Messina, where now, since Ætna’s repeated earth shakings, America is busy in building rows of useful and remarkably ugly dwellings.

How arts sprang up and then flowered in early Sicily! The soil seemed to suit them. When Cardinal Bembo was Secretary to Pope Leo X, he wrote a little book about Ætna, which fascinated him, and which the Aldine Press was pleased to dress lavishly in print.

From Sicily, _Girgenti_ (now a dim poignantly lovely ruin), there came, in the old days, a monk, by name Nicolas Valla, who rewrote in resonant, heroic, Latin verse the _Little Flowers of St. Francis_. Then he printed them with adorable wood-cuts, in Florence, in 1498. I vaguely remember, too, that there was a vagabond mediæval printer, from Sicily, by that name, Valla, who did a few rare books on his little press, in old Italian cities, through which he wandered.

Rare books of Germany, rich in variety and number of their wood-cuts, all bear about the same date. _Hrotsvitha_, printed in Nuremburg in 1501, with cuts by Albrecht Dürer. _Saint Brigitta_, Nuremburg, 1481. A book by Jornandes, a kind of history of Gothic people, was made in Augsburg in 1515. The wood-cuts are remarkable, by several hands, and some of them signed. Many German cities put out these exquisite things before time began to be considered. Anyone of them can fill even an humble dwelling with beauty, like the sun the fields.

But what is significant in the fact, is that the making of things supremely fine reached height and then began to decline at time of discovery of the Americas. As soon as the Twin Continents were flung so suddenly upon the Markets of Time, when gold, emeralds, pearls, silver of a New World, began to distend European pockets, with means to measure then buy the unbuyable, _Time_, the making of objects of beauty slowly ceased. Even Venice and Genoa began to lose prestige, to shrink to small subsidiary ports. A new, a surprisingly different turn was given to the human mind.

The Americas are the fateful Continents. Slowly they have destroyed the great living that existed before. And now they are forming the background for the New World, the dangerous scientific world, when values will be made over, and nothing will be as it was before, not even gods. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the death of beauty.

Some of the new and extreme schools of writing, of art in general, are merely expressions of weakness. The mind is registering wonder, uncertainty, and fear, at tremendous change. A close-up that is too sudden has caused temporary loss of mental poise. And with it has come the slower comprehension, that the old arts are dying, that they can not live on, because they will not be needed nor able to interest anyone, nor even amuse, in a scientific world.

I have read novels in German all my life and now I am asking myself why I do not have the impulse to write about them. There must be a reason. But I can not find it. I do not think that the English tongue carries German printed art any too well, when it is translated.

It is silly to say that people love different things. But sometimes it is necessary. Our friends love us only when we are foolish and they can look down upon us. A dangerous gesture always.

Some women when they are young love kittens, dogs, dolls or men, and always themselves, because they can not see themselves. As for me, I have loved words. Only words could give me the supreme emotion, because they were suffering strange and inexplainable change, which enchanted then puzzled me; transformations of sound, sense, down long alley-ways of time and living; and calling with voices changefully beautiful and broken, keeping always beyond the magic of perfect realization, and in addition, like a false love, prodigal of promises, infinite and unkept. The emotion of words, with their different rhythmic passions, in many races, in many lands, lured me. Following etymological laws, I have watched them, like gay actors on a stage in a play that never ends, put swiftly on varying vowel and consonant raiment. I have held my breath at the capricious orders of change. I have felt delight at their fresh grotesqueness.

Words are our oldest playmates. There is nothing else save the air we breathe with which so long we have been in contact.

At this moment, as a civilization changes, a period of time comes to an end, (and all else is useless and time-stained), women who play Bridge, patronize Beauty Parlors, fly in aeroplanes, use the root-words their Ayrian ancestors used, upon Indian highlands, at time of the dispersal of races, when they say _sew_—Indian _siv_. Since then the physical body has been made over in some degree, gods and religions have come and gone, the human voice has circled the globe and man learned to fly like the birds, but the little, helpless, drifting word with which we cry remains the same.

In _El Modernismo, Poetas Modernistas_, R. Blanco-Fombona has written an interesting, comprehensive, and necessary book about South American poets, and poets of old Spain.

He has related some facts which explain the discussed mystery of the meaning of the _Great Nocturn_ of Silvá. He says that where the poet speaks of their shadows (Silvá and his sister, Elvira) meeting, he is relating, in his grief, a memory of their childhood. Once they went, in summer, to a dwelling, high in the Andes, for cooler air. At night upon a balcony, with the house lights behind them, Silvá and Elvira were standing, while the flickering lamp’s flame painted their gigantic, grotesque shadows across the night-black mountains.

My translation was made long ago, the first translation of Silvá into any language.

NOCTURN OF SILVA

It was night time,
Night time lonely,
It was night time filled with murmurings of sweetness,
With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings,
It was night time,
It was night time, and the darkness hymeneal, deep and dewy,
Shone fantastical with fire-flies.
By my side then, slowly, slowly, by my side then silent, pallid,
As if to you there came knowledge of a future dark and bitter,
Troubling hidden, secret, soul-depths and the fibers of your being,
By my side along the pathway of the flowers across the pale plain,
You were walking,
And the full moon
Then up-swinging through the sweet sky’s serene azure shed upon us its
white light;
And your shadow,
Graceful, languid,
And my shadow
From the moon’s pale light out-floating,
On the sand-plain sad and lonely
Where the path wound, were united
And made one there,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow,
Were united in one lone and somber shadow.

It was night time,
Night time lonely,
And my heart held naught save memory of your death and agony;
Separated now forever, separated by time from you, by space, by the
tomb forever,
And by shadows black and blacker,
Where my voice can never reach you,
Silent, dumb, sad and alone
By the pathway I was walking....
At the lone moon dogs were baying,
At the moon so sad and lone;
I heard harsh and ghostly croaking
Of the frogs beneath the moon....
I felt chilly, and the chill was that which held you in your chamber,
Held in your white, ghostly chamber, hands and breasts and cheeks
I loved.
Held between the snowy marble
Of the pale, dim plain of death.

’Twas the chill of things sepulchral, ’twas the ancient chill of death,
’Twas the chill of nothingness,
And my shadow,
From the moon’s pale light out-floating,
Walked there lonely,
Walked there lonely,
Lonely walked the pale plain o’er,
And your shadow grown more lovely,
Graceful, languid,
As upon that night of spring-time—fleeting spring of long ago;
As that night time filled with murmurings of sweetness,
With faint perfumes, and the music dim of birds’ wings,
Reached my shadow and swept with it,
Reached my shadow and swept with it,
Reached my shadow and swept with it—O! twin shadows interlacing!
O the interlacing shadows of twin bodies reuniting with the shadows of
their souls!
O those interlacing shadows which are seeking, still are seeking,
Through all night times, on, forever, for each other in their tears!

In Bogotá, city of old churches, patrician pride, grave gray stone palaces, the room in which Silvá killed himself was found filled with books, in many tongues, collections of precious perfumes, and rare orchids.

How vastly learned was Tertullian! How eloquent! And how bronze muscled was his prose! As I read, I recall sharply old, resonant bronzes of Han, black and polished archaic pottery from fabulous dead cities upon the slopes of the Andes, in Peru, such as that fluent painter and distinguished scientist and explorer, A. Hyatt Verrill, discovered, where in the long black night of time forgotten civilizations flowered then disappeared, and tides of Spanish conquest and exploration rose and fell, the black marble of the Baiæan pleasure-palaces of Tiberius Caesar, and black pearls from the Indian Ocean.

In truth Tertullian’s prose is black and splendid. It glows with the magic light of poignant drowned moons in perished Egyptian midnights, and the pictured onyx pendants that chilled the cruel breasts of Herodias. It moves me tremendously. And what power to swing the great sentence, then make it humbly sinuous, simple, and supple! Hear him:

“O tardy messengers! O sleepy despatches, through whose fault Cybele had not an earlier knowledge of the Imperial decease, that the Christians might have no occasion to ridicule a goddess so unworthy!...”

“And yet the Romans have never done such homage to the Fates which gave them Carthage against the purpose and the will of Juno, as to the abandoned harlot Larentina. It is not undoubted that not a few of your gods have reigned on earth as men.”

“If from the beginning of the world the Milesians sheared sheep, and the Serians spun trees, and the Tyrians dyed, and the Phrygians embroidered with the needle and the Babylonians with the loom, and pearls gleamed and onyx-stones flashed, if gold had issued with the cupidity which accompanies it from the ground, if the mirror had license to lie so largely, Eve, expelled from Paradise, already dead, would have coveted these things!”

The preachments of Tertullian keep the interest of romance and the exciting, restless intrigue of the novel. It is not surprising that a few books could satisfy so well the elder world: It is because each of the few kept the power of many. In the confusing complexity of today, Tertullian and Procopius could take the place of many for me. The long breath of power was theirs.

The sentences of Procopius are packed richly with meaning. Each has meat for meditation. And it is that rare writing that I love, because I keep the illusion of it being chiseled upon metal. It is firm. And it keeps a gleam in my mind. The attack of the first lines of his chapters is frequently magnificent. Here is an example:

“The Taurus mountain range of Cilicia passes first Cappadocia and Armenia and the land of the so-called Persarmenians, then Albania and Iberia both independent or subject to Persia. It extends a great distance, and as one proceeds along its range, it spreads out to extraordinary breadth, rises to imposing height....”

What an eminence from which to view the outspread plain of events of the chapter, and what harmony of mind and emotion he has given us, by the powerful placing of words and the unfolding of idea.

The old writing has kinship with plastic art; it was of line and form and surface, instead of color, emotion, nerves. Thought is a plastic thing when it is not chipped, sliced thin, like cheap cheese. That sense of plasticity, the need of a different moulding process, is something lost in word-craft. It helps give that which is deathless to much antique art. That, and a sincerity which is priceless.

I can read Tertullian and Procopius over and over. They are always new; they are filled with the essential of thought, which is something inexhaustible. They inspire. They give comfort and courage.

But the old writers wrote because they had something to say, not for applause, popularity, nor money.

The Bible tells us somewhere, that in the end of the world there will be many gods. As writing, as an art, a conveyance of thought, of idea, comes to an end, before all writing is used for purely scientific matter, there are many writers.

It is too bad they do not make children’s books for grown people today, delightful, unreal fables for adults, to temper the prosaic duties of living, to make them forget the regrettable, cast off care, and be joyous. There are none who need such books more than grown people. I am thinking of Ariosto, his _Orlando Furioso_. How long ago Ariosto was born! Before the discovery of America.

I like the name an old Italian historian applied to him in his youth, _uno gentiluomo ferrarese_. His charm of manner won him appointment as gentleman in waiting at the Court of Cardinal Hippolyte of Este. He was grateful for this. It meant life among lettered men, nobles, beauties, at Court of a powerful Cardinal.

In the first Canto of the _Furioso_ he thanks him.

_Ippolito aggradír questo che vuole
e darvi sol puo l’úmil sérvo vostro
Quel ch’io vi debbo, posso di parole
Pagare in parte, e d’opere d’inchióstro._

He can pay only in part and with words; with pen and ink, he declares humbly.

The story-telling splendor of the world is in this glowing, complex, impossible fable, written when chivalry was in flower, in Italy.

Its remote forebears were great Indian Epics, the heroic tales of Firdusi, who was the Persian Homer; and its relative in time in his own land, was Virgil’s _Æneid_. All this accomplished invention went to its grace.

The opening is from Virgil:

_Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amóri,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese io canto._

One of this book’s gay far descendants (It has many!) wandered from Italy northward, to fields of France. There it was known as _The Three Musketeers_. It has had rollicking, gay followers, imitators in the art of letters, throughout the world; not only merry, entire book-sequences, like the romance of Dumas _père_, but individual lines have been re-written down the centuries.

Tennyson was a renowned borrower from Latin, from Italian masters. It is difficult indeed to estimate his debt to Horace.

Here are descriptions of castles like that impregnable one of the Niebelungs. Here are lines that tally with Dante—

_Come i gru van cantando lor lai._

Here is the modern storehouse of romance, in short, from which scholars, from which poets, drew material. Here are pictures in words which Watteau painted again in colors. Here is an art of writing rich, fluent, as the countless carven marbles of Italy.

No one can write such books today. It belongs to the mammoth, the monumental past. We are _little_. Its fluency, ease, grace, its inventive power, are incomparable.

There lingers about it the tapestried leisure of ancient monarchies. Not many books keep so securely the atmosphere in which they were first read. The atmosphere that created it dominates.

It belonged to a period that did not know subways nor moving pictures.

It belonged to sheltered corners of old-world gardens, graveled, bordered gravely with cypress, with ilex, where fountains played, where the yellow marbles of Greece, of Rome, were not out of place.

It belonged to luxurious drawing rooms, lighted by long oriel-topped windows, where furniture was slenderly shapen, gilt, and where hundreds of tall white tapers glimmered crisply in the twilight. It belonged to dim corners of walnut or oak, wainscoated libraries, where the early, pale, precious celadon of China gleamed, and ancient pink and blue globes stood, mounted in silver, mounted in crystal.

How different was the place where I read it! How far removed from nobly beautiful, romantic Italy!

I read it in the hot summers of the plains, with all the curtains drawn down tightly, with just one exception, which permitted a narrow strip to be open, through which filtered sunlight yellower than the peach’s heart, while outside through deep sand, green farm wagons rumbled heavily, laden with ripe melons, or painted Indians pranced on limber-legged ponies, which bright floating blankets covered.

To me the romance of Italy was a golden arabesque, covered with gems, covered with glowing enamels, a noble, far-reaching arabesque of art, which generously connected me in my little dwelling upon the plains with the gracious, the splendid thinking of gifted Mediterranean peoples.

I can renew youth and delight by opening its worn, finger-printed covers.

From the court-romances of Italy, much of the art of France came, when a daughter of the luxury loving Medici condescended to become Queen of France.

Ah!—what did she not teach these younger, these more ingenuous people of the north, of art, of crime, of subtlety, of luxurious thinking!

The long tradition of the Caesars was in her blood. Her heart had ripened for crime in palaces whose far architectural ancestry had been in Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, while over her cumulative consciousness there had drifted all the sins of Asia. I would like to look into her eyes! I would like to peer into those deep wells of the past.

There is a book that is chiseled in bronze. Do you know it? It has splendid, bare monotonous spaces where echoes beat like iron. It has resonance. It responds like metal struck by savages for battle. It is richly hued, deepened in splendor, with the dusty accumulated gold of centuries.

It is Xenophon’s story of _The Expedition of Cyrus_. Not in Greek, thunderous and splendid, I regret to tell you, but in Latin: _De Cyri Expeditione_. Oxford Edition. The translation made by Thomas Hutchinson. (What Latin scholars they made in England in the days of the Oxford Press!) My edition was printed in 1735.

There are no false strokes. There are no vacillations. There are no explanations. It marches onward with the iron feet of warriors. It is proud as the crests upon their helmets.

This sure, this masterly carving upon metal, which only Time is permitted to shade, is a lost art. It proceeded from a mental equipment different from that with which the modern artist works.

The old writers put down what they knew. The modern writers put down loosely, and sometimes eloquently, what they do not know. Always in the vague, weedy, word-garden of the present, I miss this unequivocating directness; clearness, firmness; this chiseled accuracy.

No roads have been so clear in my mind as the road the warriors of Cyrus traveled on the expedition which Xenophon recounts. No cities have been so firmly situated beside the roads, alluringly, so glowingly. No expanse of plain, of meadow or mountain, so reliably bounded. After the Latin and Greek historians ceased writing, it seemed suddenly to me that there were no roads left leading to Great Asia. A part of the world had fallen into space.

They did not say anything for effect. Space upon bronze was too precious to waste in filling in.

There are no vague foolishnesses. There are no indefinite horizons. Words were serious, expressive things. They were treated like gold, like silver. They did not throw them away.

They were majestic, these historians, like the Hebrew Prophets. They force respect. The vision I keep in my eye of them is something the same. They too were white robed, stately, brave, and eloquent.

I like the picture of the Persian princes,

_Darii et Parysatidis duo fuere filii_,

the two royal sons, come from that fabulous, painted palace of Persepolis, upon the highlands of Persia, down, down, steep mountain passes to the plains. Just where, Xenophon is careful not to tell us. But we know it was not far from Babylon. These two sons were Artaxerxes and Cyrus. Their names filled the known world.

I should like to look upon _urbes Ionicæ illæ_, about which he tells us, those seductive Ionian cities, which the youthful eyes of Cyrus saw. The cities of the past, spread out impressively upon the Syrian plain which lay between Europe and Asia, have held the charm of magic for me.

I should like to have looked upon Cyrus, too, in his young manhood, moving upon Sardis. What a sight that must have been!

_Cyrus autem cum iis copiis Sardibus movit_, Xenophon begins to relate.

Ovid, I think it was among the Romans, remembered it and alluded to it. It teased his mind, too, with the perishing beauty of the past. He saw in fancy, probably, the crisp curls of black, the crisp, black, pointed, shining beard; the daring eyes whose gleam matched gold; the lithe, arrow-like erectness; and the barbaric gemming of Asia.

Even in his sumptuous Rome, which still kept something of the vanishing greatness of vast ages that were perishing, it made him tremble. His artist’s eyes loved the retrospective splendor of the vision of black-eyed Asia moving in battle upon the proud, blond race of the south, and giving it its death blow.

That is all history has been, will ever be, the swaying tides of a human sea, now toward Asia, toward Europe. History is a wave lifted by cosmic urge.

Today they go to battle wearing hideous clothing and disguising head gear.

In the old days they moved in the pomp of purple and gold, semi-naked and splendid, glittering with gems, under canopies of crocus silk, while clarions shrieked and long plumes caressed the air.

Go refresh your eyes with a picture of it upon the bronze pages of Xenophon! It is fortunate it was written in bronze. Otherwise it might fade.

How lonely will they be in that new, scientific, commercially-minded future, so rapidly approaching, whose eyes have kept a memory of the picture which was the past.

The scholiast of Aristophanes tells us, among other interesting things, that Timandra, who was born at Hykkara, in Sicily, was given by the Tyrant Dionysius, to Philoxenus, the poet. With Philoxenus he goes on to say, she journeyed farther. She came at length as far as Corinth. Here she lived for a considerable time and was beloved of many.

This is the kind of novel I like, one that I can expand at leisure, to suit myself, one that unfolds long, radiant, geographical vistas. In 1843, De Musset published a book called _Voyage ou il vous plaira_, (_Travel Wherever You Wish_). How I should like that! And how I now wish it were a part of life realized. In fancy I shall see the antique world. The notes of the scholiasts contain fascinating information.

“... _of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard._”

This quotation from Stevenson’s _Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes_ illustrates something not unworthy notice.

Its beauty, which no one will dispute, is not a spiritual question, nor one of mind wholly. It is founded upon the flesh.

Stylists play with vowels, with consonants, just as the pianist plays with black and white keys of his instrument. He, indeed, is not a dissimilar musician.

To return to the sentence in question. The underlined letters, _i_, _a_, _oo_, in the words _wind_, _black_ and _gloom_ mean the opening wider and wider of the back of the throat to emit sound, going from a short _i_, to long _oo_, a skillful climax, a physical emotion where muscles of the body are the instrument played upon.

The use of alternating vowels is remarkable. It is witchery. After height of stressed sound is reached in the word _gloom_, he glides gently down to rest, satisfied sound-completeness, in the slightly muted final _s_ of the word _cities_.

The sentence gives pleasant sense of slipping quietly into a blue, smiling harbor, after storm.

Stevenson performed miracles in handling sound. His verse, however, was merely graceful, which is a word good to apply to him.

Lafcadio Hearn was another master of the same kind, working with a sentence-line of keener, sharper, spirit-winged beauty. Few literatures of the world can show anything to surpass Hearn at his best.

It is possible to diagram with something approaching accuracy the effect of a sentence upon the muscles of the body.

A fine sentence is a geometrical sound-picture affecting the body as line affects the eye, built up out of vowels, soft padding of consonants packed between, to keep them from bruising each other in their expanding ecstacy, their lift, their lyric laugh.

The greatest rhythms are personal rhythms, that conform to no rule save deeps of self, consciousness of world-currents, the moment’s inspired emotion.

Lafcadio Hearn is a delicate, learned, vowel-musician. No language has a master who surpasses him. Listen to this, (I quote from memory): “So I wait for the poet’s Pentecost, the inspiration of nature, the descent of the Tongues of Fire. And I think they will come when the wild skies brighten and the Sun of the Mexican Gulf reappears for his worshipper, with hymns of wind and sea, and the prayers of birds.”

Learned, exquisite, infinitely wise in construction. He has worked magic.

Hear this from Aristophanes: “Our splendid dithyrambs are misty and duskyish, and dark gleaming, and high flown.”

This from Euripedes, from one of the choruses of Electra:

“In ancient song is the tale yet told,
How Pan the master of forest and mead,
Unearthly sweet while the melody rolled,
From his pipes of cunningly linked reed,
Did of yore from the mountains of Argus lead
From the midst of the tender ewes of the fold....”

The construction shines through the none too skillful turning into a modern tongue, in both examples. And in both we still feel recurrence of balanced sound that can not be reproduced in English, and unmapped spaces of loveliness.

Goethe declares, thinking, perhaps, of this: “_Man studiere nicht die Mitgeborenen und Mitstrebenden, sondern grosse Menschen der Vorseit, deren Werke seit Jahrhunderten gleichen Wert und gleiches Ansehen behalten haben.... Man studiere Molière, man studiere Shakespeare, aber vor allen Dingen, die alten Griechen, und immer die alten Griechen._”

(Study not always men of your own age and those engaged in the same occupation as yourself, but likewise the great men of antiquity whose works have kept the same worth for centuries.... Study Molière, study Shakespeare, above all things study the ancient Greeks, _and always the ancient Greeks_.)

The choruses of Euripedes are among the loveliest things in existence, an undying beauty, which not time nor change mar. Do you happen to recall this?

_The long white reach of Achilles’ Beach
Where his ghost feet shine on the sand._

After centuries, after wasted ink and paper, the thundering, the fault-finding of teachers, we know no more about words than the Attic Greeks, centuries before the birth of Christ. No more did I say? We do not know as much.

The age of Attic splendor antidated, I believe, the Birth of the Saviour by some five hundred years. In nobility of form, in beauty of tone, they are masters. We do not learn easily.

I wonder if beauty is a pagan thing which Christianity helped to kill? Has anything so supremely lovely been done since? And I am quoting at random, and always from memory. Memory, of course, is not a storehouse for so great a treasure as the past.

They say the cedars of Lebanon can not grow in the modern world. There is something that kills them as soon as the city, modern civilization, begin to approach. Their last stronghold is the slopes of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Now they tell us, the French, who are trying to change ways of living there, that few young trees are springing up and the old are showing rapid signs of decay, the same decay that ruined their beauty in the Holy Land.

_The Cedars of Lebanon and Beauty!_ Can they exist only in a pre-Christian world? It will never be possible to harmonize the Hellenic and the Hebraic spirit.

There has been no poet in these calm centuries of Catholic Spain to compare in quality with the poets under reign of the Moor, and the proud Prophet of Islam.

The Hellenic spirit and the Hebraic spirit are oil and water. We do not know how to mingle them. We can not perform the miracle. The alkahest is missing.

THE POEM OF DUMAS

In rummaging among writers on Russia the other day I came upon a forgotten article by Dumas the Elder, whose native charm and great story-telling power have made critics forget his scholarly traits and his usually sure and reliable information. As long ago as the Eighteen-fifties Dumas _père_ was telling mentally receptive France of Russian writers which America would begin to think about an half century later. This article contained a poem by Dumas, who is not known as writer of verse.

Dumas journeyed across Crimea, the Caucasus. Dumas was a diligent world-explorer long before days of steam and Pullmans. He went to Baku, on his homeward way from Russia, where oil had already been discovered. He visited Derbend, too, historic city of the iron gates, so fateful strategetically, for the East and the West.

Baku and Derbend have always been points of dispute between Russia, Persia, and the Caucasus. Baku was taken over by Catherine the Great just before she died. It was one of her last acts of diplomatic plundering. It was a small place then, and insignificant. It was merely a Tartar _aul_ of a few hundred houses.

It is Derbend that is the gateway between Europe and Asia, Derbend, perched like an eagle high among mountains that guard dramatically the passes to productive Baku, and the plains. Through this ancient gateway of narrow, goat-like defiles, the invading Mongols came. And the Scythians. Through this same ancient Pass of Derbend, Mithridates the Great, with his entire army, disappeared, as if by magic, from astonished eyes of the pursuing Greeks.

Here Dumas the Elder came when he was rich with years and honors. He was accompanied by Moynet, the artist, who was at work upon his now famous book of costumes. They spent several years together in Russia. When Dumas started home for France, he sailed from Baku, after having explored both Crimea and Caucasia. But he was forced to wait several days for a steamer. Moynet put in his time sketching the old Tartar town, while Dumas finished the novel called _Ball of Snow_, then he hunted ducks, and arranged his Russian cook-book, remarking while he worked upon it, that the French were the only people who still knew how to dine, and converse. Young Prince Bagration joined them here. It was his mother who had once been mistress of the Great Metternich, and one of the first woman spies whom that statesman employed.

Dumas started for Baku from interior Russia, from Novogorod, to be exact. Here the connoisseurship of Dumas was delighted by two jewels made of iron, a ring and a bracelet, which he considered gems of metal work. On inquiring about their origin, he was told that they had been made by Bestushev-Marlinski, the Russian poet, goldsmith, romancer, artist, and member of the epoch-making Decembrist Conspiracy, while in Siberia, where he had been exiled for life, by Nicholas the First. The jewels were the property of Countess Annenkov, and had been made from the hand-cuffs and shackles of her handsome husband, Count Annenkov, likewise condemned to exile. Countess Annenkov was a French woman, of humble birth, who had followed Count Annenkov, then her lover, to the mines of Siberia. About this incident Dumas made another novel, _The Master of Arms_, and the story related in it is true.

Some of the finest descriptions of Petersburg in the last days of Alexander, in any language, are in this book. From Novogorod, Dumas and his cook-book journeyed happily southward, and at length came to Derbend of the Iron Gates, the city from which the astounding Tartar Wall starts wandering prodigiously over great mountains, and unscalable hillsides, proving, beyond doubt, the blood-kinship of its ancient builders with the race that conceived and executed the great Wall of China.

He tells us his first warning that he was approaching the historic gate between the old world of the perishing East and the new commercial, more enterprising world of Europe, was a Tartar cemetery, perched upon an amphitheatre-like hill overtopping the Caspian Sea. Prince Bagration, who was still accompanying him, exclaimed:

“_Look! That is the tomb of Sultanetta!_” pointing enthusiastically toward a monument of rose color and green towering conspicuously among the sacred graves turned toward the East.

“Who is she?” queried Dumas.

“Once the mistress of a Tartar Prince, and renowned throughout the entire Caucasian country for her beauty ... _and her adventures_,” he added.

“Perhaps you will hear the story at Derbend.”

At Derbend they found an invitation awaiting them from the Commandant of the Fortress, to take dinner on the following day. While at dinner the wife of the Commandant remarked:

“Monsieur Dumas, just outside the window here”—pointing with her hand—“near where you are sitting, is the grave of Oline Nesterzof!” “And who is she?” inquired again the great romancer, scenting avidly, as was his habit, a novelty for his eager, prolific pen. “She was the mistress of Bestushev-Marlinski.”

“Ah! that name again! _Poet, goldsmith, artist, romancer, revolutionist!_” he enumerated with relish and excitement.

“I heard of him first at Novogorod, and saw the jewels he made of iron. Unavoidably I seem to be setting out on the trail of Marlinski.”

After dinner was over, the Commandant’s wife guided them up a steep hillside, to a little lowly mound, marked by one humble stone. “Bestushev-Marlinski, you know,” she went on to explain, “was condemned to be quartered alive by Nicholas the First, for his share in the Decembrist Uprising, which he steadily refused to disavow. But by some caprice in the heart of him who never knew mercy, he changed the sentence to exile for life in Siberia, and wrote under it the now famous—_So be it, Nicholas!_ That was early in the summer of 1826, before the crowning of Nicholas.

“In 1828, the young Czar was beginning fresh wars in his new Caucasian possessions, for peace and safety here at Derbend, and also for the city of newly discovered wealth in oil, over the mountains, Baku. He had need of trained officers. He remembered Bestushev who had refused to disavow his guilt. Above all things Nicholas revered the truth. He changed his sentence again. He sent him, this time, to the Caucasus. But lest he be accounted too merciful, he stripped him of military honors, and made him a soldier in the ranks.

“In the bloody and perilous warfare that was being waged continually here, Bestushev, who had now changed his name to Bestushev-Marlinski, rapidly won promotion and became an officer again. Then he came to live right here, in the old bullet-shattered, smoke-blackened Fortress of Derbend,” pointing to walls above their heads marked by many sieges.

“Not long after his promotion, he fell in love with a young and beautiful girl, of poor family, in the village, by name, Oline Nesterzof. After a time she came to live with the writer.

“One night some Russian officers from Petersburg, were being banquetted in the very room where we have just been dining. When they were well under influence of wine, a friend of Bestushev, who had drunk too heavily, laughing, wagered he could prove the lovely Oline Nesterzof was untrue to her poet-lover. This enraged Bestushev to such degree he lost his head and took the wager. For days thereafter the friend of Bestushev spied upon the young and innocent girl, who was barely nineteen at that time, in order to win his wager. Finding it impossible to do so by fair means, he made a plot with other young friends of the poet—who had been present at the banquet—in order to play a trick upon him, and gave to Bestushev, at length, the ‘_framed_’ proof of her falsity.

“The emotional, unrestrained nature of Bestushev was deeply affected by treachery of the girl he sincerely loved. The very next day when Oline Nesterzof, ignorant of what had happened, and Bestushev were alone together in a room of this old Fortress of Derbend, a shot was heard. Bestushev, palled, disheveled, ran out to the courtyard, waving his arms wildly, calling for help. Oline Nesterzof was found upon the floor dying, having been shot through the breast. She was still able to speak, however. In her great and forgiving love for Bestushev, she declared that in attempting to clean his pistol she had shot herself by accident. This noble declaration of the dying girl, made in the presence of a priest, under the last rites of the Church, saved Bestushev from the death penalty.”

“And this is her grave, you say?” asked Dumas with emotion, looking down upon the humble marker of stone, which Bestushev had made. The only adornment upon the piece of marble was a rose, which the poet carved there, and which was now blackened with powder, broken. Beneath the rose one Russian word, _sondba_, was engraved, which means an _Act of Fate_. On the other side were her name and age.

Here lies the body of
Mademoiselle Oline Nesterzof
Born 1814. Died 1833.

Dumas was deeply touched by the humble grave and its story. He stood silent some time beside the pitiful, lonely, little mound of the ill-fated girl, hidden beneath grim walls of the Fortress of Derbend. Then he took his note book. He wrote a verse, something rare from hands of that single-hearted _prosateur_. He handed it to Commandant of the Fortress, asking him to have it engraved beneath the word _fatality_, with his name attached, as lasting memory of his visit to Derbend. Dumas said he loved poetry but he left the writing of it to other people.

The following proves sufficiently it was excessive modesty that impelled him to do it.

She had lived twenty years. She was loved, she was fair,
On a twilight she fell like a rose on the wind;
Where she sleeps with the dead, earth, press lightly there,
For her weight was so light upon human-kind.

After the tragedy of Oline Nesterzof, melancholy madness fell upon the brilliant Bestushev, who, by the way, was distantly related to Russia’s great and extraordinary Chancellor, Bestushev-Rjumin, of the days of Catherine the Great.

He courted death. He was in the front of the battle. And always as if by magic he escaped. Bullets whizzed past him, but they did not touch him. Unscathed he emerged from combat.

In the spring of 1838, a particularly unsettled period for the Caucasus, the commanding officer, Captain Alberand, had been told to capture some mutinous mountaineers. They were said to be in hiding in a little piece of woods. Just before order to attack was given, a messenger rode up in haste to tell them the woods were filled with concealed soldiers, and to enter meant death to every man. The Captain ordered retreat. Bestushev-Marlinski disobeyed the order. He put spurs to his horse. He rode into the woods and out of sight. He was never seen nor heard from again.

Fifty Mingrelian Chasseurs were sent by the Captain to rescue his valiant officer whom he loved, and to bring him back. But nothing was ever heard of him. With entry of the forest he disappeared from face of the earth. He had hastened to self-chosen death.

On return to the Fortress, the daughter of the Commandant showed the room which Bestushev-Marlinski had occupied, to Dumas, and to his surprise and delight, pointing to a chest of drawers, she said: “Some unpublished writing of the poet, done after the sad murder of Oline, is still there.”

The next day Dumas’ Russian secretary, a young student of literature from the University of Moscow, read aloud in French, to the great romancer, the last writing of the tragic Russian. One of these forgotten manuscripts was a novel, _Sultanetta_, (the woman whose picturesque grave of rose color and green, Prince Bagration had pointed out with emotion, in the little Tartar Cemetery that crowned the hill, on their arrival). Dumas was so delighted with the faithful, colorful story of adventure and love among Tartar peoples of the mountains, that he rewrote the novel himself, and published it later in Paris, under the same name Bestushev-Marlinski himself had given it.

During the weeks Dumas spent in Derbend, he devoted himself to this rewriting, and to collecting recipes for his cook-book, which he tried and perfected with pleasure. He found here a ragout of lamb which pleased his epicurean knowledge of food. Also he sampled with delight the white wine of Erivan and the red wine of Kislar. He enjoyed himself tremendously. The only drawback to perfect contentment was that he could not procure, in the humble shops of Derbend, blue paper of an especial tint, which was what he used for his work. But he added vastly to his collection of splendid weapons, almost more than he was able to transport. Some were historic, and bore names of great warriors, or blessings from the Koran, in gold, along the blade. And he jotted down in his diary: “_I wrote like a God all the time I was in Derbend!_” Moynet, his friend and companion, was making the first colored pictures of costumes worn in the Caucasus, which are familiar today in authoritative works on dress.

The second manuscript which the daughter of the Commandant of the Fortress brought to the attention of Dumas was Bestushev-Marlinski’s _Ode to a Nose_, which Dumas asserts is not only one of the most original things that has been written, but one of the most delightful. We append this poem in Dumas’ prose translation, taking no credit ourselves, remarking at the same time, as inconsequential aside, that in one of Dumas’ later novels he gives another, a freer version of _The Nose_, without taking the trouble to refer to the dead Russian poet as author.

But only tolerance can be meted to one so great, so invariably delightful. Dumas writes: “In addition to other interesting things about the Georgians, there is one thing of which I have not spoken, and not to do so would be to do them wrong. They have noses such as no other race in the world have. Bestushev-Marlinski, the romancer, made an ode about the Georgian nose, which I quote since I can not hope to do better than he.”

“Have you reflected, dear readers, about what an admirable thing a nose is?

A nose? Yes, a nose!

And how useful to every individual, who, as Ovid says, lifts his face to heaven!

It is indeed a strange and unheard of ingratitude; not a poet has had the idea of making an ode to a nose.

It has remained for me, who am not poet at all, or who at least make no pretensions except to follow humbly the footsteps of great poets, to have originated the idea.

In truth the nose has had that misfortune!

Man had invented many things for pleasure of the eyes. They have made songs, compliments, kaleidoscopes, pictures, decorations, glasses,

And for the ears!

First in order, come earrings, _Robert le Diable_, _William Tell_, _Fra Diavolo_, the violins of Stradivarius, the pianos of Erard, the trumpets of Sax.

And for the mouth!

Carême, _la cuisinière bourgeoise_, the Almanach of the Gastronomists. They have made soups of all kinds, from Russian _batwigne_ to the cabbage soup of France. The mouth feeds upon the reputation of the greatest men, from cutlets _à la Soubise_ to black pudding _à la Richelieu_. Its lips have been compared to coral, its teeth to pearls, its breath to benzoin. It has been served with pheasants in plumage, and wood-cocks served whole. It has even been promised roasted skylarks.

What on the other hand has been invented for the nose?

Oil of roses. And tobacco.

_Ah!_ ... what ingratitude, Philosophers my Masters, and Poets my Brothers!

And yet how faithful is this member.... It is not a member, the savants cry at me. Pardon, gentlemen, I make good the mistake. And yet how faithful is this appendix, _Ah!_... Moreover, I insist that this appendix serves us faithfully.

The eyes sleep; the mouth closes; the ears become deaf.

The nose alone is always busy and on guard.

It watches over our sleep. It contributes to our health. The other parts of the body do stupid things; the hands, the feet. The hands permit themselves to be caught in a sack like fools they are. The feet stumble, make the body fall, by their awkwardness. And in this last instance who suffers most? The feet do the wrong. It is the nose that suffers.

How common is this expression: such and such a man has broken his nose. Many noses have been broken since beginning of the world. But be so kind as to mention one nose broken by its own fault! No, you can not! All things fall upon the poor nose. Let it be so. It bears everything with saintly patience. Sometimes, to be sure, it makes bold to snore. But, when did you hear it complain? Let us forget that nature created it an instrument of admiration, a speaking trumpet to increase or diminish the voice. Let us say nothing of the service it has rendered in making itself the intermediary between our souls and the souls of flowers. Let us suppress the fame of its utility and consider only its æsthetic claims, its beauty.

Cedar of Lebanon, it tramples beneath its feet the hyssop of the mustache. Central column, it serves as base for the double arch of the brows. Upon its capital rests the eagle which is thought; round about it smiles flourish. With what pride the nose of Ajax was lifted against the storm when he declared: _I will escape despite the gods!_

With what bravery the nose of the Great Condé (who was really great only because of his nose) with what bravery the nose of the Great Condé preceded every one, even the Great Condé himself, in the intrenchments of the Spaniards! With what assurance the nose of Dugazon, which had forty-two different movements, each more amusing than the other, presented itself to the public!

No indeed, I do not believe the nose will remain in the obscurity in which up to now, the ingratitude of man has left it.

But what are you thinking of! These are all noses of the occident. There are oriental noses—And they are handsome ones.

Gentlemen of Vienna, of Paris, of Saint Petersburg, do you doubt the superiority of the nose of the East, over your own?

In that case, Viennese, take the Danube! Parisians, take the steamboat, and people of Petersburg, the _pericladnoi_, and say these simple words: To Georgia!

_Ah!_ ... but I must announce to you in advance a deep humiliation. If you should take to Georgia one of the largest noses in Europe, the nose of Alcide Tousez, of Schiller, at the boundary of Tiflis, they would look at you in surprise and say: “_Poor man_ ... he lost his nose on the way! What a pity!”

When you entered the first street.... (What am I saying!) ... when you passed the first house of the suburbs, you would be convinced that all the Greek, Roman, German, French, Spanish, and even Neapolitan noses, would wish to hide in shame, in the depths of the earth, at sight of the nose of Georgia.

_Ah!_... _Good Heavens_ ... the beautiful noses of Georgia! The robust noses, the magnificent noses! And there are noses of all shapes; round, large, long, wide. There are noses of all colors: White, rose, red, and violet. There are noses mounted with rubies, others mounted with pearls. I even saw one mounted with turquoises. You have only to press them between your fingers and the little one will spout a pint of wine of Kaketie.

In Georgia a law of Vacktang IV had abolished the unit measure; it has kept only the nose. Rich weaves are measured by the nose. They say: “I brought seventeen noses of _tarmalama_ to make a dressing gown, seven noses of _Kanaos_ for making trousers, one nose and a half of sateen for a cravat.”

And they say that the women of Georgia consider this measure superior to all others, especially the measures of Europe.”

Supreme lyric poetry (despite Robbie Burns) belongs to the Orient. It can be produced only by a race with a long past, a race that has warred much, enjoyed much, suffered much, loved much, made and unmade gods. Such mighty things go to weaving of the tissue-thin lyric.

Lord Byron’s poetic ancestry goes far back to the sagamakers of Iceland. He is child of the Nibelungs. Byron was the last fine flowering of that which was England, for Great England now is of the past. Slowly she has been drifting with the rest of the world toward the piled up civilizations of yester year.

The slow, ripening of time must go to making of lyric poetry. I do not believe many will contradict me when I state that Heine, Hafiz, Anacreon, and Tu Fu, are the supreme lyric poets of the world—the Jew, the Persian, the Greek, and the Man of China.

It is said that the best champagne is made from grapes grown upon land that has been cultivated for ages. A similar statement might be made in regard to lyric poetry. The greatest lyric poets of the world, they who represent it at its purest and best, Heine, Hafiz, Tu Fu, and Anacreon, represent the oldest races of Asia. Each is rich with the memory of a past that is glorious in achievement as history tells us, and remains among great traditions today. Not one was of the Christian race. In their veins there was either the blood of oriental Asia, or, as in the case of Anacreon, its tradition, having been born in Teos, one of the voluptuous Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Time was needed for ripening and perfecting of the races that bore them, because great poets are not born of unripe races. Their blood must be tempered by time. Slow centuries intervened between them.

Anacreon lived somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred years before Christ; Hafiz about thirteen hundred years after Christ. The exact date is uncertain. It is known, however, that in the year 1389, according to our reckoning of time, he was living in his beloved Shiraz, where he died and that at that time he was very old. Tu Fu lived in Eighth Century China, under Emperors of Tang. And Heine lived well on into the nineteenth century of our own day.

The age of each was made turbulent and restless by great conquerors. Each knew the domination of warriors whose armies shook the earth. Anacreon knew the devastating wars of Cyrus the Great; Hafiz, the brutal Tamerlane who was the scourge of God, and who made towers of human heads to rival in height the tower of Babel; Tu Fu saw Turkish rebels destroy Ch’ang-an, one of earth’s loveliest dream-cities; and Heine was born on the very day that Napoleon was made First Consul of France.

The best source of information concerning them is their words, although the outward facts of Heine’s life are told accurately enough by history, and a literature has grown up about his art. Few definite facts remain of Anacreon or Hafiz. Old Chinese writers tell us of Tu Fu with eloquence, with emotion. We do know, however, that each saw the splendid historical panorama of a world in transition unroll before his eyes; and that each saw the dominant forces in action that resulted in making the world of today. None has been circumscribed by the age in which he lived because his appeal has been universal, to humanity, whose heart beats responsively under chlamys of caftan. The lyrics of Tu Fu are as fresh and readable as if they had been written yesterday.

Perhaps the preservation of the elder writers is somewhat worthy of remark when we consider the periods in which they lived and the centuries that have intervened, since lyric poets have not been beloved of their contemporaries, nor indeed of conventional scholars of the ages, because of unrestraint of utterance, and their untamable fire. Their souls are revolutionary. They do not follow the established order. Too frequently they utter the naked thought. Someone has said that degeneracy and prudery go together. The history of creative ages seems to prove it.

In addition, lyric poets have always loved life for its own sake, unenlivened of faith and unsanctified of the spirit. Their sense and appreciation of the present has been so real, vivid, that there was left neither room nor desire to ask for anything beyond. Upon earth, in their brains, they were given the vision of a heaven.