Both Loti and Barrés suffered from a consuming fear of death, says Daudet. They were constantly preoccupied with the thought that some-time life for them would be no more. Loti fought the fear with change of place, traveling; Barrés, with political affairs. Both were fêted and flattered while they suffered continual boredom. That accomplished Portuguese, Fidelino de Figueiredo, declares that it was boredom which caused the death of Louis Cotter, historian, who wrote Splendor and Decay of the House of Austria.
He died of mental weariness because he could not adapt himself to the mediocrity of a provincial town, its petty quarrels, its local injustice, its horror and hatred of any kind of superiority.
The brilliant Portuguese goes on to say that it was this attitude of mind which caused the French Revolution, and which is now beginning to afflict the minds of men again, with close of a period of time. People sense dumbly that the treasures of emotion, treasures stored by rich soul life (being rapidly destroyed) can never be reassembled. The result means death of culture. Marie Henrietta once wrote that to live does not mean to be upon the Earth either a brief time or a long time, but to be able to feel, to register a great range of sensations.
Evidently lovely Marie Henrietta did not sense the leanness of the long, thin years. Nor the New World that was coming.
A most satisfying and illuminating writer upon art is the Spaniard, Ballesteros de Martos. His Artistas Españoles Contemporaneos is a gem of its kind. It is splendidly illustrated. There is some quality in the prose of De Martos which recalls to my mind the great sculptors of his country who work direct from life in hard stone. It is economy; some unusual direct, swift power of expression. He is not only art critic but novelist and editor. One of his late novels is Luz en el Camino. He was one of the editors of that brilliant Spanish review, Cervantes.
I like this from Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: “The images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking actions and opinions in succeeding ages.”
Charm can come again, even in this dull day! It must be born, however, of brilliant mind united with nobility. Professor Jay William Hudson, in Abbé Pierre’s People, owns that graceful, alluring, polished-surfaced prose, and kindly seeing, Stevenson taught us to know in his short stories, and Charles C. D. Roberts, the Canadian, in little word-canvasses that witched before us French Canada, white winter, and the delicate, blossom-touched, brief spring of the north. He is not only novelist, story writer, but distinguished philosopher, thinker.
Pleasure has disappeared. Now to illumine tædiam vitæ we have gain, efficiency, and a desire for swifter and swifter movement from place to place, physical restlessness. Monkeys in tropic forests move swiftly, daylong, from bough to bough. They are restless because they have no mind and can not live. The people whose physical movements are swiftest and most continual, we ask to write books, philosophize for us, become models of intellect. A rare item, this, in the Great Confusion!
There are pleasures that are, of course, seemingly foolish. One of mine is just to hold in my hands old books printed in Venice.
I suppose there is some difference between peasants on a money-holiday that lasts too long, and nimble-tailed monkeys aswing from tall tropic trees.