The little dog laughed to see such a farce
And the cow jumped over the moon.
The estimable, (and as it happens good looking woman), asserts truthfully, that cows have not the habit of jumping over the moon and that it is wrong to tell it to children.
She writes an article on the subject. She asks intervention of the Press to back her statement that she has never seen a cow jump over the moon. No one doubted her!
It did not occur to her the line is nonsense. Such writing is escape from the prison of fact. Mother Goose is art of its kind. In a subway city, of course, it is not easy to think of such exhibits—nor of anything the other side of wit. It is being witty in good form—which is the good form the polite English have overlooked. It registers by what it is not—like English wit. Referring again to Maurois’ book, one can not help being grateful for another glimpse of the bodily beauty of Byron, of Shelley.
That delightful short story writer of Venezuela—Pedro-Emilio Coll, was influenced deeply in boyhood by the sensuous, the finished prose-technique of d’Annunzio. Who would not be, who could both read and appreciate it? Coll could not forget it. It may have helped to the commendable control he holds.
In the Eighteen Eighties, Venezuela had some cuentistas, whose style, whose imaginative reach, was above the ordinary. Some of these men could command a prose-surface greater than anyone save Hearne, who was not American, but Irish and Greek. Latin people of the South keep an art-sense, a kind of finura, that we of more mixed blood to the north, have not. Spanish blood is having a second, a royal flowering down there.
Opopomax, by Coll, is the story of a perfume. Aside from owning an idea, this and his other stories have trained workmanship. It is well done. I sometimes wonder if the novel ever reaches quite the same intensity—the perfect fluidity of dissolving vision, as the short story.
On this pallid, dove-grey morning of winter, I have finished Blanco-Fombona’s Man of Iron, (El Hombre de Hierro). Fombona was born in Venezuela too, like Coll, but now he is living in Europe. He was in prison in Ciudad, Bolivia—1905, when he wrote this book.