Ah! to see behind me no longer on the Lake of Eternity the implacable Wake of Time.
—Ephraïm Mikaël.
When Cintras was twenty he planned an appeal to eternity. He knew "Émaux et Camées" as pious folk their Bible; he felt that naught endured but art. So he became a pagan, and sought for firmness and delicacy in the texture, while aiming to fill his verse with the fire of Swinburne, the subtlety of Rossetti and the great, clear day-flame of Gautier. A well-nigh impossible ideal; yet he cherished it for twice ten years, and at forty had forsworn poetry for prose....
Then he read the masters of that "other harmony of prose" until he dreamed of long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody, cadences like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands. He knew Sir Thomas Browne, and repeated with unction: "Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methusaleh, and in a yard under ground, and thin walls of clay, outworn all the strong and spacious buildings above it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests; what prince can promise such diuturnity unto his relicks." ... He wondered if Milton, De Quincey, Walter Pater or even Jeremy Taylor had made such sustained music. He marvelled at the lofty structures of old seventeenth century prose-men, and compared them with the chippy staccato of the modern perky style, its smug smartness, its eternal chattering gallop. He absorbed the quiet prose of Addison and Steele and swore it tasted like dry sherry. Swift, he found brilliantly hard, often mannered; and he loved Dr. Goldsmith, so bland, loquacious, welcoming. In Fielding's sentences he heard the clatter of oaths; and when bored by the pulpy magnificence of Pater's harmonies went back to Bunyan with his stern, straightforward way. For Macaulay and his multitudinous prose, Cintras conceived a special abhorrence, but could quote for you with unfailing diction Sir William Temple's "Use of Poetry and Music," and its sweet coda: "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child that must be played with and humored to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."
Cintras had become enamoured with the English language, and emptied it into his eyes from Chaucer to Stevenson. He most affected Charles Lamb and Laurence Sterne; he also loved the Bible for its canorous prose, and on hot afternoons as the boys lolled about his room, he thundered forth bits of Job and the Psalms. Cintras was greatly beloved by the gang, though it was generally conceded that he had as yet done nothing. This is the way Berkeley put it, down at Chérierre's, where they often met to say obvious things in American-French....
"You see boys, if Cintras had the stuff in him he would have turned out something by this time. He's a bad poet—what, haven't you ever read any of his verse?—and now he's gone daft on artistic prose. Artistic rubbish! Who the devil cares for chiselled prose nowadays? In the days when link-boys and sedan chairs helped home a jag they had the time to speak good English. But now! Good Lord! With typewriters cutting your phrases into angular fragments, with the very soil at your heels saturated with slang, what hope in an age of hurry has a fellow to think of the cadence? I honestly believe Stevenson was having fun when he wrote that essay of his on the technical elements of style. It's a puzzle picture and no more to be deciphered than a Bach fugue."
"When Bill Berkeley gets the flow on, he's worse than Cintras with his variable vowels. Say, Bill, I think you're jealous of old Pop Cintras." It was Sammy Hodson, a newspaper man, who spoke, and as he wrote on space he was usually the cashier of the crowd....
Chérierre's is on University Place, and the spot where the artistic set—Berkeley, Hodson, Pauch, the sculptor, and Cintras—happened to be hanging about just then. The musician of the circle was a tall thin young man named Merville. It was said that he had written a symphony; and one night they all got drunk when the last movement was finished, though not a soul had heard a note. Every one believed Merville would do big things some day.
Cintras entered. He was hopelessly uninteresting looking and wore a beard. Berkeley swore that if he shaved he would be sent to prison; but Cintras pleaded economy, a delicate throat, also the fact that his nose was stubby. But set him to talking about the beauties of English prose, and his eyes blazed with a green fire. The conversation turned on good things to drink; wine at twenty-five cents a litre was ordered, and the chatter began....
"It seems to me, Berkeley," Cintras spoke, "that you modern fellows are too much devoted to the color scheme. I remember when I was a boy, Gautier set us crazy in Paris with his color sense. His pages glowed with all the pigments of the palette; he vied with the jeweller in introducing precious stones of the most ravishing brilliancy within the walls of his paragraph; I sickened of all this splendor, this Ruskin word-painting, and went in for cool grays, took up Baudelaire and finally reached Verlaine, whose music is the echo of music heard in misty mediæval parks while the peacock dragging by with its twilight tail, utters shrill commentary on such moonshine. After that I reached Chopin and found him too dangerous, too treacherous, too condensed, the art too filled out; and so I finally landed in the arms of Wagner, and I've been there ever since."