Timon le Magnifique, (Max Daireaux), is a merited satire upon today, its playthings, its vain, but would-be serious toys, a clever synthesis, usually false, of how something may be made out of nothing. It is written in a cold, detached manner. But I should not be surprised if it were aimed at individuals of Paris. Cubist, futurist art, is skillfully enough interpreted. There is sincerity. Often there is perception. And there does not seem to be more malice than necessary. The temper of mind of the central personality is characterized by lukewarmness. The frail story gives opportunity to display reflections about life, which have, as motive persistent disillusion, and no small amount of scorn of that human animal, man. It is the tragic skepticism of a world, once eloquent, at fire heat, now tepid, among men who are weaker, who have fewer moments of grandeur. There were things said brilliantly but without emotion. Fine food, served cold. Take it or leave it, I do not care. If you can think, you will see I am right.
It would have been as well if the author of Timon le Magnifique had hung up his cold shining observations in an essay instead of a story. The display room would have been less obstructed.
Occasionally these observations are commonplaces said backwards. He likes to reverse the engine of living. He likes to watch wheels work. To every person his own wheels!
A pessimist without passion. A competent observer without conviction. The reading makes me feel that in France the prose of masters is no more. The greater number of French novels I have read recently, and they are many, are unforceful muddy rivulets trickling along slowly, with difficulty, where once roared the diamond-glittering torrents.
De Wandelende Jood (The Wandering Jew), by the Flemish writer and critic, August Vermeylen, is worth reading, then remembering. The description of the Crucifixion is superb. It moved me. I felt afresh the world’s Great Drama. It held my mind fascinated for days. It banished inclination to read anything else.
The book recalls the powerful painting of old Holland Masters. It is formed plastically like a play, cast in four undivided parts, and it possesses some singular plastic force, something that depends upon form alone.
The second part is very fine. It opens with a picture of Ahasuerus after the Crucifixion. It is clean and grim. In some magic heightening of the etched word it shows us the beginning of the curse of wandering, and the indelible flicker across his heart, his mind, of the gentle, the unforgettable smile of Christ: “Hij ging, het hoofd naar de aschgrauwe aarde gebogen; de hemel daarboven was er mit meer moor hem, hij wilde nietz meer zien. Maar onafwendbaar brande in hem de zachte vlam van Christus.” This shadows forth—this story of the Wandering Jew—the something persistent, super-enduring in the Hebrew race.
It is interesting to compare novelists who have written of Rome: Zola’s Rome. Serao’s Conquista de Roma. Lagerlof’s Rome. Pater’s Rome in Marius, with its memories of the wolves and snow of winter upon the Alban Hills, and the yellow, luxurious, too lovely winter roses from Carthage; the book’s sumptuous, peculiar spirituality. And the Rome each one builds for himself when he reads Suetonius, the Twelve Caesars. Ricarda Huch’s Rome. Niebuhr’s Rome is a colossus and the work of a colossus. Bourget’s Cosmopolis, which is Rome again.
Serao shows us Rome in Lettere d’una Viaggiatrice, a splendid piece of the kind of resonant prose, she only knew how to make. Goethe’s pictures in letters to friends in Germany, and in that remarkable verse-sequence, Die Römische Elegien, and Winklemann’s Rome, cold, plastic, devoid of color. I refer to what Winklemann called his little writings of Greek and Roman art, and the majestic, almost too glorious Rome of d’Annunzio. It is interesting to follow reactions of such people of power as these to the call of the Eternal City. In the opening lines of d’Annunzio’s Il Piacere, there are sentences so luxurious, silken, they remind me of rich reflections upon old Venetian velvet.
Loti, accomplished savoureur of all that was exquisite in space or in time, steered carefully from Rome the Mighty. Rome, divine and immortal, lured the immortals. Other superb cities have known and felt the magic of his art. But Rome he left untouched.