The taste of honey

by Edna Worthley Underwood

The book is full of missed opportunities. This may be fault of the translation. I have read many translations, however, by De Mattos, a veteran translator, which were splendid. I regret I did not read Couperus in the original! I looked forward to glorious renewal of joy in the rich past of Egypt, its astonishing architecture. What an opportunity Couperus missed in describing that pilgrimage of people to roof of the Temple of Serapis, where, under witchery of an African moon, they were to sleep, royally robed, in honor of the god, then garner dreams! I, myself, then began to dream hungrily of Africa, amazing land which man has never conquered any more than the ocean; of Tunis, in the barren wastes behind which, the Colossus of Thêbes used to burst into radiant song when the sun came up and the burning rays touched it. The book possesses neither beauty of portrayal nor scholarly exposition, to lure the weary, discriminating epicure of things of the mind.

There is a poised, a praiseworthy calm about René Bazin. There is something that comes from nobility of nature that I like. He has observed the good brown earth, the humble trees with happy little leaves, in an intimate, loving, painstaking way that recalls Hardy’s forests of Wessex.

I recall an autumn in the forests of Wessex, where the importance of each gold-brown leaf that fell was lifted to power of romance. Most subtly, delicately felt, then adequately reported. When I read the early tales of Hardy, I regret that in America we have lost so many rich Anglo-Saxon word-forms, that American English has become anæmic. It has grown thin, showy. The novels of Hardy are England, the fibre of England, while American novels are not of any land. They might have been written in comfortable ingrain, or Brussels carpeted places, where there is noise and a phonograph, in Fez or Ispahan. It is a pity to miss savor of the soil. It is a pity to be flowers grown in dry, movable, windowpots, instead of in the Earth’s brown, wrinkled breast.

The soul of René Bazin is preeminently Christian, with seal of the Christian ages. He can not conceive beauty for itself. For him it must become morality. He speaks of the grand refroidissement de l’art national, which has been called The Renaissance.

The soul of him belongs to the world in which pity was born, and this, if I mistake not, is trait of his nature. Even in objective seeing it threatens to become paramount.

In Redemption, Le Blé qui Lève, Bazin belongs to the group of Millet, Rousseau, and Breton, only he happens to use words instead of oil and brush.

The overflowing Loire in spring, (Redemption), the broad mist-dim meadows it feeds, are magnificent. The great landscape art of France is there. I felt a thrill of pleasure, sense of thirst for beauty satisfied, as when I look upon a canvas. In this canvas, it seemed to me the light was finely managed; balanced massing of shadow with sun. The effect was ennobling. There was something that made one believe again in one’s fellow men. It is good for the heart of the world to read books like his.

I fancy Hardy regrets poetry was going out of fashion when he began to write, or he would have been a poet. Like two other novelists, Paul Bourget and Anatole France, he was born with gift for it. The delicately woven texture of his thoughts belongs more to poetry than prose. His brush is a poet’s brush, his are a poet’s observations. And he has read them prodigiously, great and little. English and Latin poetry few know better. He is too sensitive for the broad blare of prose.

Hardy does not know women. His women are monotonous, undeveloped. They are little more than sketches. To be sure it may be objected that the peasant type he prefers does not lend itself to shading, to differences. But I will venture to assert, without definite knowledge of any kind on the subject, that he himself did not know women. If there had been anything of Burns in his nature it would have come to the surface, either in life or in books.

But no one has described inanimate, humble life of the fields as he has; the lonely downs, grass, furze, the forsaken sea’s edge; the desertion and chill of winter or early autumn, on lonely settlements and isolated homesteads. To read him is good as taking a vacation, he gives so truly the freshness of open spaces. He paints in words the same type in England that Millet painted with brush in France. In both is reverence, sincerity. Like Millet he lived among the people he pictured.