The Corots are of his late manner, when he had grown sentimental, and thought retrospectively. I like best the pictures of Italy he did in youth.
No. 5—A small Pasini. It makes me regret my pocket holds doughnuts not dollars. Delightful picture! A Moorish doorway; white, eloquently curved, bordered with mosaics in faded blue. In front, an Arab, whose red upper garment outdazzles the ruby when the sun pierces its heart. A laugh of color! Pure, delicious, lyric.
Quintillian is a fine phrase maker. He speaks of the milky exuberance of Livy. What could be more juste! If one could forget the Latin text, one would think it the printed page of some incisive French critic. Writers who come at end of periods that have been æsthetically productive, are alike, just as, perhaps, peaches and pears, in the youth of Nero, or William the Silent. Few make figures of speech more startlingly brilliant, vigorous in casting light, than Quintillian. They are exploding suns.
Quintillian declares the evenly sustained mediocrity of Apollonious is not to be despised. To quote him verbatim: “The old comedy retains alone the pure grace of Attic diction.” He means Aristophanes, Eupolis, Cratinus.
The power to distinguish, differentiate, at command of Quintillian is marvellous. I seldom have greater pleasure than his pages have been giving me. Quintillian knows how to balance meaning. He splits an hair evenly with the thin edge of wit. He possessed calm, dispassionate, critical, penetrating intellect. There are few more reliable judges of men’s minds. He does not become color of the thing he reads, as small worms take color of what they feed upon. Writers of the antique world stimulate mind. Modern writers seldom do this. They are more likely to enervate me, or make me weary. The old are life giving.
That sensitive prose of Loti is expression of a tradition that goes far back in Latin life. It is in Ovid. It is in the early Italians. It is in songs of Provençe. It is in early French prosateurs. From Chateaubriand the road to him lies clear. There is no great stylist who leaps up unheralded. The mind must form a chain with some past, to which self-forgetful love has welded him.
Loti has been faithful to the garden of the soul God gave him. He kept out of it things foreign. Nothing ugly grows there. But it sheltered the beauty of the world.
I have not cared a picayune to see the kings, potentates, princes, who have come to America on various successfully disguised errands of selfishness, to visit, and at the same time to gather stray dollars. I did long to see the face of Loti. I wanted to look into eyes that had looked understandingly upon the earth’s loveliness. I wanted, too, to look upon the man who can weave such superb tissue out of words.
I stood gladly outside the Waldorf in the rain. I waited for hours. I watched across the street from the public school he was going to visit. But I did not see him. My consolation had to be what I read in the papers when I reached home that night, his farewell to America: All the winds of winter cry me home to Turkestan! Such a sentence ought to be consolation enough for any one.