Traveling once—when I was young—in the South West, near the Rio Grande, I met on a night train into some hot, lonely city, a homesick old man who spoke Spanish. His clothing indicated poverty. In his pocket he had a piece of dirty paper upon which he had copied down a poem, which he kept reading over and over. And sometimes when he read, he cried. I was puzzled. After awhile I told him I could read Spanish, and asked to see it. It was The Nocturn—before it had ever been printed. How I wish I had asked him about Silvá, and why he cried! (Many disputed editions of it exist today, because not so long after this, Silvá killed himself.) My translation was approved by English reading, Spanish and French critics, but Americans had little interest in it. None of them had heard of Silvá; and fewer knew that his poem was one of the greatest written on the Twin Americas. Later—some years—the Mercure de France sent a representative all the way to Colombia, to gain information about the life of Silvá. To the United States he still remains terra ignota. The greatest critics of the Continent have raved over this one exquisite creation of Silvá, the great Colombian. Silvá was the first of the new and the last of the old. Pedro-Emilio Coll declared he had never met a more comprehensive intelligence, nor one more hospitable to every phase of thought.
Years later, going up the pea-soup-hued, gloomy, shadowed Magdalena River in Colombia, it was not the strangely engaging tropic world about me that I thought of, but Silvá, exquisite creator, who like Catullus, died in his youth. In my heart, to him I was saying ... Hail! And farewell.
It is a peculiar thing that Mrs. Asquith should write. It is something for which she has no ability. In her case it is one of the multiple shadows of conceit, too long, too unearned material well-being. She has nothing to say. And she does not know how to say nothing well.
Frequently she seems ungrammatical. Her power is personality, speech; nerve. Another example of Mr. Phinney’s Turnip growing beyond its boundaries, in a period of time made for turnips. Only an age when art is dying could have printed her. But when the house threatens to fall, who can prophecy what will rush in!
In reading her books I do not recall finding one commanding idea, sentence, not to mention beauty of any kind. In print her mind is harsh, cruel, insensitive. One does not see the majestic moving forward of that which charms, interests.
But such writing from England as Charles M. Doughty did makes up for what Mrs. Asquith has inflicted upon a helpless public. How glorious is this from Doughty’s Arabia:
“This vast Arabian upland is, in a word, a seered and wasteful wilderness full of fear, where every man’s hand is ready against another; a lean, wild, grit and dust, stiffened with everlasting drouth, where running water lacks, and whose sun-stricken face is seamed from of old, here and there, with shallow, dry water courses....”
There Great England speaks! And I all but weep because I fear it is for the last time ... in my day. England has given the world prose. I am glad Doughty’s books are fat and many. They will hold out—perhaps. Metal that rings. No base alloy!
There were sentences, phrases of De Gourmont, in his great, gay, unshadowed, before-the-war days which I like to remember; they keep that silken, warm, sun-penetrated and protected luminousness, I seek continually and find seldom. It may be he was somewhat of an æsthetic pedant—at times, too! Life escaped him. But he was the last fine flower of something unnameable, now dead in a mechanized world, which only rich European civilization could lift to fine, free blooming. Such patient priests of beauty will not be numerous in a scientific world, because there can be none to listen—none to praise. For a New World, a new art. There are pages and pages of De Gourmont soaked through and through with beauty. There are too few left to create like him.
Hear what he writes of style: Le style peut se fatiger, comme l’homme même. Il veillira de même que l’intelligence et la sensibilité dont il est le signe; mais pas plus que l’individu, il ne changera de personalité a moins d’un cataclysme psychologique.