The Venus of Milo!—the Venus who is not a Venus! Perhaps you have read Victor Rydberg’s beautiful essay about that glorious figure! If not, read it; it is worth while. And let me say, my dear friend, no one dare write the whole truth about Greek sculpture. None would publish it. Few would understand it. Winckelmann, although impressed by it, hardly realized it. Symonds, in his exquisite studies, acknowledges that the spirit of the antique life remains, and will always remain to the greater number, an inexplicable although enchanting mystery. But if one dared!...
And you speak of the Song of Solomon. I love it more than ever. But Michelet, the passionate freethinker, the divine prose-poet, the bravest lover of the beautiful, has written a terrible chapter upon it. No lesser mind dare touch the subject now with sacrilegious hand.
I doubt if you are quite just to Gautier. I had hoped his fancy might please you. But Gautier did not write those lines I sent you. They are found in the report of conversations held with him by Emile Bergerat;—they are mere memories of a dead voice. Probably had he ever known that these romantic opinions would one day be published to the world, he would never have uttered them.
Your Hindoo legends charmed me, but I do not like them as I love the Greek legends. The fantasies created in India are superhumanly vast, wild, and terrible;—they are typhoons of the tropical imagination;—they seem pictures printed by madness,—they terrify and impress, but do not charm. I love better the sweet human story of Orpheus. It is a dream of human love,—the love that is not only strong, but stronger than death,—the love that breaks down the dim gates of the world of Shadows and bursts open the marble heart of the tomb to return at the outcry of passion. Yet I hold that the Greek mind was infantine in comparison to the Indian thought of the same era; nor could any Greek imagination have created the visions of the visionary East. The Greek was a pure naturalist, a lover of “the bloom of young flesh;”—the Hindoo had fathomed the deepest deeps of human thought before the Greek was born.
Zola is capable of some beautiful things. His “Le Bain” is pure Romanticism, delicate, sweet, coquettish. His contribution to “Les Soirées de Médan” is magnificent. His “Faute de l’Abbé Mouret” does not lack real touches of poetry. But as the copy of Nature is not true art according to the Greek law of beauty, so I believe that the school of Naturalism belongs to the low order of literary creation. It is a sharp photograph, coloured by hand with the minute lines of vein and shading of down. Zola’s pupils, however,—those who wrote the “Soirées de Médan,”—have improved upon his style, and have mingled Naturalism with Romanticism in a very charming way.
I was a little disappointed, although I was also much delighted, with parts of Cable’s “Grandissimes.” He did not follow out his first plan,—as he told me he was going to do,—viz., to scatter about fifty Creole songs through the work, with the music in the shape of notes at the end. There are only a few ditties published; and as the Creole music deals in fractions of tones, Mr. Cable failed to write it properly. He is not enough of a musician, I fancy, for that.
By the time you have read this I think you will also have read my articles on Gottschalk and translations. I sent for his life to Havana; and received it with a quaint Spanish letter from Enrique Barrera, begging me to find an agent for him. I found him one here. His West Indian volume is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever seen. It is the wildest of possible romances.
L. H.