It has been said that there has been no name so execrated as Machiavelli. He is the supremely hated. An Italian critic writing of him declares: “Voltaire hated him, and Frederick the Great; the Jesuits, and Cardinal Polo. He could only be right in a world in which there are no spiritual truths.” It is a strange thing that living in Italy, at a period when the Church dominated it, he should have written just that book.
There is not necessarily anything important in a likeness. There are resemblances in the world for which in our present condition of knowledge we are unable to account.
When José Asuncion Silvá, poet of Bogotá, who wrote a poem that recalls Poe’s Raven, was in Paris sight-seeing with friends, he happened to pause, by accident, one day in the Louvre, beside the marble bust of Lucius Verus. To their amazement, his friends found that the head of Silvá and that of the dissolute Roman lover of Faustine, were identical. A photograph of Silvá with hair and beard dressed like the statue, was made the next day, and the result is something that no one can explain. They are as alike as two peas. I have the pictures.
Years ago the Mercure de France sent its representative all the way to South America, and then on to Bogotá, city no railroad has succeeded approaching, to secure information about The Nocturn which critics call the greatest poem written in the Americas. The only notice of him in the U. S. was my translation of the poem of which the dead poet’s publishers approved.
If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano, who laughingly calls himself the spirit of the Andes. He has pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering through vast gardens filled with flaming orchids, curious in shape, amazing in color. Just so evocative is he, varied. Just so seemingly inexhaustible.
Another poet, but in the Portuguese tongue, to the south, is Machado de Assis, of the celebrated poems which all Brazilians know: Uma Creatura, Suave Mare Magno, No Alto. The sonnet which he wrote to his wife is one of the noblest in the Portuguese tongue.
Machado de Assis was telling South America of Chinese poets, translating and publishing versions of them, an half century ago. We are just getting around to it. They have kept over us of the north, the æsthetic superiority of Mediterranean peoples among whom they originated.
We are forced to admit that the outlook of Germany is vast. It is not easy to comprehend how vast. In it, individual welfare has been sacrificed as ruthlessly as the Samurai Creed sacrificed it, centuries ago, in Japan. We call this barbarism. Germany has been cut latest of the European nations by the disease, civilization. As smallpox, other ills of flesh, are more fatal in a young, fresh race, not before visited by it, so young Germany fresh from the forests, the fens, felt the disease, civilization. For her it has been most deadly.
I recall the school on the plains. School is probably too important a word. It was a few bare rooms over a business block. No building for the purpose had been put up. From the windows we could look across the Main Street into upper rooms of other buildings. These rooms had been rented to houses of ill fame. Any time we could turn from our lessons and see the painted creatures lolling in the rooms, with their lovers. They were fat, greasy, disheveled, and clad in gay, cotton Mother Hubbards.
Beneath one of these houses there was a saloon. From the windows we could look over tops of screens that cut the too plain view from the sidewalk, and see Greasers, Indians, the stragglers of the plains, drinking, gambling. They quarreled frequently. Occasionally they fought with knives, with pistols. But the thrust of a knife that killed, in the lonely silence of the circling prairie was unimportant.