I took long journeys and went to far places, where he was announced to lecture, only to find that that day some one else lectured in his stead. For me to look upon him was not to be. He was example of a kind of mind the West has not produced.
He admired the Christ. It chanced to be upon Christmas Eve when he determined to renounce the world. During his early preaching days he used to say to his followers: Go ye and become Christs! Around camp fires, at night, in remote, lonely, Indian settlements, he related the story of The Crucified.
I did see Duse, however, whom I had longed to see, although it was when she was old. Like Vivekânanda she was great of soul. To her and her power, years were inconsequential.
I did not admire Bernhardt. Deep in her nature there was too much that was vulgar, coarse—not fine. She had a too keen eye for the box office. She was, of course, an accomplished technician. Duse possessed that which made the art of primitive people supreme, the pleasure-and-pain-distilled honey of the heart.
Flaubert insists that art is to speculation what heroism is to morality—something useless.
Of Flaubert’s books, of which I am a reader, I like L’Education Sentimentale best. Flaubert was in the Orient two years. What must he not have seen, he who owned amazing color sense! From oriental mind he gained new splendors, fresh conceptions, all of which we can sense in his salon-piece, Salammbô, and in Herodias. Palaces and ruins he saw in India aided him in building those tremendous architectural backgrounds of his Carthage. His eyes had seen, in the marvelous East, such things realized.
It is only in case of weak, inconsequential books that men can argue about realism, romanticism, schools. Great things are above mind-mapping distinctions. They are all things at once. God has touched them. He has said: Let there be life!
Chateaubriand declared that we paint well only our hearts, and genius is merely assembled memory. Of course he meant memory distributed through many different lives, in æons of time. In his haste he condensed explanation.
I wonder in how many other lives I saw some such city as Venice drifting with magic eloquence upon an opal sea! Venice, like Venus, is a God and sea-born.