There has been no poet in these calm centuries of Catholic Spain to compare in quality with the poets under reign of the Moor, and the proud Prophet of Islam.
The Hellenic spirit and the Hebraic spirit are oil and water. We do not know how to mingle them. We can not perform the miracle. The alkahest is missing.
THE POEM OF DUMAS
In rummaging among writers on Russia the other day I came upon a forgotten article by Dumas the Elder, whose native charm and great story-telling power have made critics forget his scholarly traits and his usually sure and reliable information. As long ago as the Eighteen-fifties Dumas père was telling mentally receptive France of Russian writers which America would begin to think about an half century later. This article contained a poem by Dumas, who is not known as writer of verse.
Dumas journeyed across Crimea, the Caucasus. Dumas was a diligent world-explorer long before days of steam and Pullmans. He went to Baku, on his homeward way from Russia, where oil had already been discovered. He visited Derbend, too, historic city of the iron gates, so fateful strategetically, for the East and the West.
Baku and Derbend have always been points of dispute between Russia, Persia, and the Caucasus. Baku was taken over by Catherine the Great just before she died. It was one of her last acts of diplomatic plundering. It was a small place then, and insignificant. It was merely a Tartar aul of a few hundred houses.
It is Derbend that is the gateway between Europe and Asia, Derbend, perched like an eagle high among mountains that guard dramatically the passes to productive Baku, and the plains. Through this ancient gateway of narrow, goat-like defiles, the invading Mongols came. And the Scythians. Through this same ancient Pass of Derbend, Mithridates the Great, with his entire army, disappeared, as if by magic, from astonished eyes of the pursuing Greeks.
Here Dumas the Elder came when he was rich with years and honors. He was accompanied by Moynet, the artist, who was at work upon his now famous book of costumes. They spent several years together in Russia. When Dumas started home for France, he sailed from Baku, after having explored both Crimea and Caucasia. But he was forced to wait several days for a steamer. Moynet put in his time sketching the old Tartar town, while Dumas finished the novel called Ball of Snow, then he hunted ducks, and arranged his Russian cook-book, remarking while he worked upon it, that the French were the only people who still knew how to dine, and converse. Young Prince Bagration joined them here. It was his mother who had once been mistress of the Great Metternich, and one of the first woman spies whom that statesman employed.
Dumas started for Baku from interior Russia, from Novogorod, to be exact. Here the connoisseurship of Dumas was delighted by two jewels made of iron, a ring and a bracelet, which he considered gems of metal work. On inquiring about their origin, he was told that they had been made by Bestushev-Marlinski, the Russian poet, goldsmith, romancer, artist, and member of the epoch-making Decembrist Conspiracy, while in Siberia, where he had been exiled for life, by Nicholas the First. The jewels were the property of Countess Annenkov, and had been made from the hand-cuffs and shackles of her handsome husband, Count Annenkov, likewise condemned to exile. Countess Annenkov was a French woman, of humble birth, who had followed Count Annenkov, then her lover, to the mines of Siberia. About this incident Dumas made another novel, The Master of Arms, and the story related in it is true.
Some of the finest descriptions of Petersburg in the last days of Alexander, in any language, are in this book. From Novogorod, Dumas and his cook-book journeyed happily southward, and at length came to Derbend of the Iron Gates, the city from which the astounding Tartar Wall starts wandering prodigiously over great mountains, and unscalable hillsides, proving, beyond doubt, the blood-kinship of its ancient builders with the race that conceived and executed the great Wall of China.