Ellis Parker Butler declares pigs is pigs. Then monkeys must be monkeys, tails long or short.
I used to know a little shop in Paris where they kept only books about imaginary travels, travels that never existed. This kind of writing seems to have been done for a little while in the Eighteenth Century. One is about an imaginary trip to the pole and published in Amsterdam in 1723. Abbé Bordelon published a little earlier, a book about a hypochondriac who was forced to travel all the time whether he wanted to or not. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe belongs to this period. Louis Holberg wrote, about the middle of the Eighteenth Century, describing a strange journey to the interior of the earth. There was an Arab philosopher, by name Ibn Tophail, earlier by a century, in the late Seventeenth Century, who wrote one of the most fascinating travel books in the world. It tells about a boy shipwrecked on a desert island south of Asia, who by means of travel and contemplation, trained his mind to comprehension of the verities, and scientific knowledge. The writer himself had an amazing life spent partly in Africa and partly as Secretary to the Governor of Granada.
Novels which give us the souls of races and the ancient historical progression of peoples such as: Reymont’s Peasants, Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, are precious, powerful things. In no other way can we know thoroughly other lands and them who dwell there. A series of novels is being published in South America by that accomplished artist and man of letters, Manuel Galvez, which does just that. He is writing a series of fascinating historical novels of the wars in Paraguay, and of life in that great rich country Argentina. At this moment the Paraguay Trilogy is ready. The books are Los caminos de la muerte, Humaitá and Tierra de espectos. One of his earlier books, El solar de la raza, won the Argentine Prize. It is a travel book of old Spain. There are eloquent pages about Castile, strong, proud, noble, profound, whose glories Galvez says he has faith to believe will be duplicated again in Argentina. In this, Galvez has written as eloquently of time-stained, tragic Toledo as Zorilla, or Blanco-Fombona. As prelude to his description of the old stronghold of Spanish cities he says: “Now we are living in an epoch of transition; it is the imperialism of energy under two expressions, namely, will and muscle, while the older civilization of Spain was founded upon imperialism of the spirit. There the soul dominated. In modern cities of the New World people live preoccupied exclusively with material things; sensual pleasures, health, fashion, the acquiring of wealth. In the old days, in old cities such as Toledo, people were preoccupied with questions of the soul, God. Today we have the combative man, the pioneer, the self-made. We have epics of multitudes, whose interests are wholly material.”
“Toledo affirms for us the indelible quality of grief. It is one more illustration of the sudden end of things human. Even the stones of Toledo keep telling that life is continuous death. Cities, philosophies, glories of empire, books—everything—die. In time the civilization of Europe will pass into oblivion too. Later, American civilization will disappear, and with it the civilization of Argentina. Then some writer a thousand years hence will make a soulful and elegiac description of the end. He will find in the abandoned streets of my beloved Buenos Aires the same lofty sorrow, the same memories of the past, which, in nights I can now never forget, the stones of Great Toledo have revealed to me.”
Galvez is the author of many powerful novels of Argentina of today. Among them El mal metafísico, La vida multiple, La sombra del convento, La tragedia de un hombre fuerte, Nacha Regules. To me his most powerful book is El cántico espiritual. A book that has qualities which permit it to rank with the great novels of the world. It is the story of a young South American artist who goes to Paris to live, to continue his profession. There he falls in love with a rich, beautiful, but married woman from his own Argentina. For many years this love dominates his life. He pays court to her. He tries to make her his mistress, but without success. There are pages and pages of noble and inspired writing, rich revelations into the depths of an impassioned heart. After the years they both go back to Argentina again, to Buenos Aires, and here he finds out that she is ready to yield to his pleas and become his mistress. Then he finds his love for her is a thing of the spirit not of the flesh. He finds that she was merely the protective star that watched over his ambitions, his art. These years of sorrow had without his knowing it become years of progression for him, in which he had left behind forever his longing for the inferior beauty and had passed on to a nobler thing. Beauty Absolute, which is divine. In El cántico espiritual, Galvez writes (the close of the novel) the triumph of the spirit over the material, the triumph of an ideal world over a world of reality. It is the long pilgrimage of the soul toward the Absolute, the love of Dante for Beatrice, the philosophy of Socrates in the Banquet. It should be the hymn of a love that was pure, love eternal, a thing of comprehension of the soul, powerful enough to disdain the flesh. At their last meeting when he takes farewell of her, Suzanna, in his studio in Buenos Aires, he says: (This is the close of the novel.) I quote: “For this work which I wish to create, Suzanna, we must be pure. We must forget the flesh and the body. We must be able to life up our souls to the Great Beauty.”
“The darkness was drawing closer about them. They did not light the light. After Morris touched her brow fleetingly with his lips, his face again wore its noble ecstatic expression, his eyes too were strangely revealing of some richer happiness that seemed foreign, far.... With the eyes of the spirit he had confronted the Beauty which is Absolute. He had progressed from the love of one woman toward love of all human things, and from old art which was limited, to a comprehension of the essence of all art, the Divine.”
This book is nobly felt, nobly executed.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Quotation marks have been added to the following paragraphs to be consistent with similar occurrences within the text:
Pg 7: “There is ... national soul.”
Pg 8: “Lima! Your ... of Spain.”
Pg 27: “Il y a dans ... Dame Reality.)”
Pg 31: “Il me fallut ... and Vitellius.”
Pg 41: “Figure aux ... last God.”