Italy is almost as rich in dignified, nobly chiseled sonnets as in chiseled marbles. Today we are trying to belittle the sonnet. Frequently we make it tawdry. The sonnet is akin to the eye which is one of the windows of the soul. It is not an up-heaped bargain-counter, for a noisy bargain sale.
Heredia, despite his varied story-telling in sonnet form, did not overcrowd the line. He was too reliable an artist. He knew what a frame is silence. Nor did d’Annunzio! Both were too sensitive for this indelicate wrong.
Very likely the chief difficulty lies in the fact that the sonnet does not suit the life of the present. New art-form must be invented for our restless, changing existence. The old bottles are not strong enough for the heavy, strange effervescences, from grapes, of this crowded, disconcerting, wild Garden of Time.
Goethe expatriated the soul of him astonishingly in that war-vexed Germany that knew the wild ways of Napoleon, when he wrote The Roman Elegies. (Die Römische Elegien.) They are calm. They are chiseled like marbles of Attica. They are sincere, noble, firm, truly visioned; the kind of art we shall not see soon again. They have given me unvarying pleasure throughout the years because of the perfection they keep. Their wholeness is source of strength. I read them over and over.
And yet it is the same as reading Tibullus, Propertius, or the Amores. It is the same art, happening merely to be written in a northern tongue.
Goethe was a unique, powerful figure in history of letters for one whose manhood saw the French Revolution. One of the strangest things in literature is that it did not move him. When it was sweeping grandly on, for freeing man from trammels of the past, Goethe wrote a scholarly friend in Paris about the good news. The friend supposed of course he meant the Revolution. Goethe, however, had no such thought. He was merely referring to praise the French Academy had given his scientific discoveries.
I have read Brandes’ book about Goethe, and with interest, because practically every idea projected was given long ago by the late Professor Calvin Thomas, who very likely is the most trustworthy authority on the Man of Weimar. A comparison of the two books about the German writer is interesting. There has seldom been, perhaps, so much rehashing of projected thought of the past as now, so many evidences that limitation has come, and that reconstructed mental clothes are considered good enough.
The etched line of Whistler, especially in the first Italian series, is peculiarly like the sentence-line of Loti in his earlier books on the East. There is the same rare distinguished attack, of which not two in a generation are capable. The same wistful, intensified, highly personal beauty, flashed upon the dazzled senses by a moment of tremendous seeing. The same tremulous sensitiveness, that only the exquisitely dowered possess. Mingled with all, witchcraft, the vanishing essential of art, which none may seize easily with words.
I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for me.