II.
Written without method, dotted down carelessly and currente calamo on the leaves of my pocket-book, the notes I now publish were never intended to be read by any one but myself. A wanderer for many long years, I have contracted the habit of making daily memoranda of the fleeting, evanescent impressions of my travels, and thus giving them a more tangible form. These notes, drawn up hastily and for myself alone, have no literary merit whatever, but they most unequivocally tell the truth. Is this an adequate compensation for the numerous negligences of style which criticism may discover in them? You answer my question affirmatively, my dear M——. Be that as it may, these reminiscences of travel have often solaced the ennui and fatigue of my erratic life. In writing of the present, the bitterness of the past vanished; and again, if the present were tedious or fraught with care, I reverted to the sunny pages of the time that is no more, and revived the sweet emotions of the long-forgotten past.
Under your patronage I now place these poor leaves. They have been the partners of my joys and my griefs, of my toils and my leisure, during the last three years that have whirled me relentlessly in that most monotonous, yet agitated circle, yclept "a life of concerts." Should you find evidence too flagrant, even for your prepossessed eyes, of the inexperience of my pen, bear in mind, I pray you, that I am but a musician, and only a pianist at that.
January, 1862. Once more in New York, after an absence of six years!—Six years madly squandered, scattered to the winds, as if life were infinite, and youth—eternal! Six years, in the space of which I have wandered at random beneath the blue skies of the tropics, yielding myself up indolently to the caprice of Fortune, giving a concert wherever I happened to find a piano, sleeping wherever night overtook me, on the green grass of the savanna, or under the palm-leafed roof of a veguero, who shared with me his corn-tortilla, coffee, and bananas, and thought himself amply renumerated, when, at dawn, I took my departure with a "Dios se lo pague á V." (May God reward you!) to which he responded by a "Vaya V. con Dios!" (God be with you!)—these two formulæ constituting, in such unsophisticated countries, the entire operation, so ingeniously perfected by civilized nations, which generally is known by the name of "settling the hotel-bill." And when at last I became weary of the same horizon, I crossed an arm of the sea, and landed on some neighboring isle, or on the Spanish Main. Thus, in succession, I have visited all the Antilles,—Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish; the Guianas, and the coasts of Para. At times, having become the idol of some obscure pueblo, whose untutored ears I had charmed with its own simple ballads, I would pitch my tent for five, six, eight months, deferring my departure from day to day, until finally I began seriously to entertain the idea of remaining there forevermore. Abandoning myself to such influences, I lived without care, as the bird sings, as the flower expands, as the brook flows, oblivious of the past, reckless of the future, and sowed both my heart and my purse with the ardor of a husbandman who hopes to reap a hundred ears for every grain he confides to the earth. But, alas! the fields, where is garnered the harvest of expended doubloons, and where vernal loves bloom anew, are yet to be discovered; and the result of my double prodigality was, that one fine morning I found myself a bankrupt in heart, with my purse at ebb-tide.
Suddenly disgusted with the world and with myself, weary, discouraged, mistrusting men, (ay, and women, too,) I fled to a desert on the extinct volcano of M——, where, for several months, I lived the life of a cenobite, with no companion but a poor lunatic, whom I had met on a small island, and who had attached himself to me. He followed me everywhere, and loved me with that absurd and touching constancy of which dogs and madmen alone are capable. My friend, whose insanity was of a mild and harmless character, fancied himself the greatest genius in the world. He was, moreover, under the impression that he suffered from a gigantic, monstrous tooth. Of the two idiosyncrasies, the latter alone made his lunacy discernible,—too many individuals being affected with the other symptom to render it an anomalous feature of the human mind. My friend was in the habit of protesting that this enormous tooth increased periodically and threatened to encroach upon his entire jaw. Tormented, at the same time, with the desire of regenerating humanity, he divided his leisure between the study of dentistry, to which he applied himself in order to impede the progress of his hypothetical tyrant, and a voluminous correspondence which he kept up with the Pope, his brother, and the Emperor of the French, his cousin. In the latter occupation he pleaded the interests of humanity, styled himself "the prince of thought," and exalted me to the dignity of his illustrious friend and benefactor. In the midst of the wreck of his intellect, one thing still survived,—his love of music. He played the violin, and, strange as it may appear, although insane, he could not understand the so-called music of the future.
My hut, perched on the verge of the crater, at the very summit of the mountain, commanded a view of all the surrounding country. The rock upon which it was built projected over a precipice, whose abysses were concealed by creeping plants, cactus, and bamboos. The species of table-rock thus formed had been encircled with a railing and transformed into a terrace, on a level with the sleeping-room, by my predecessor in this hermitage. His last wish had been to be buried there; and from my bed I could see his white tombstone gleaming in the moonlight, a few steps from my window. Every evening I rolled my piano out upon the terrace, and there, facing the most incomparably beautiful landscape, all bathed in the soft and limpid atmosphere of the tropics, I poured forth on the instrument, and for myself alone, the thoughts with which that scene inspired me. And what a scene! Picture to yourself a gigantic amphitheatre hewn out of the mountains by an army of Titans: right and left, immense virgin forests, full of those subdued and distant harmonies which are, as it were, the voices of Silence; before me, a prospect of twenty leagues, marvellously enhanced by the extreme transparency of the air; above, the azure of the sky; beneath, the creviced sides of the mountain sweeping down to the plain; afar, the waving savannas; beyond them, a grayish speck (the distant city); and encompassing them all, the immensity of the ocean, closing the horizon with its deep blue line. Behind me was a rock on which a torrent of melted snow dashes its white foam, and there, diverted from its course, rushes with a mad leap and plunges headlong into the gulf that yawns beneath my window.
Amid such scenes I composed "Réponds-moi la Marche des Gibaros," "Polonia," "Columbia," "Pastorella e Cavaliere," "Jeunesse," and many other unpublished works. I allowed my fingers to run over the keys, wrapped up in the contemplation of these wonders, while my poor friend, whom I heeded but little, revealed to me, with a childish loquacity, the lofty destiny he held in reserve for humanity. Can you conceive the contrast produced by this shattered intellect, expressing at random its disjointed thoughts, as a disordered clock strikes by chance any hour, and the majestic serenity of the scene around me? I felt it instinctively. My misanthropy gave way; I became indulgent towards myself and mankind, and the wounds of my heart closed once more. My despair was soothed, and soon the sun of the tropics, which tinges all things with gold, dreams as well as fruits, restored me with new confidence and vigor to my wanderings.
I relapsed into the life and manners of these primitive countries; if not strictly virtuous, they are, at all events, terribly attractive. Existence in a tropical wilderness, in the midst of a voluptuous and half-civilized race, bears no resemblance to that of a London cockney, a Parisian lounger, or an American Quaker. Times there were, indeed, when a voice was heard within me that spoke of nobler aims. It reminded me of what I once was, of what I yet might be, and commanded imperatively a return to a healthier and more active life. But I had allowed myself to be enervated by this baneful languor, this insidious far niente, and my moral torpor was such that the mere thought of reappearing before a polished audience struck me as superlatively absurd. "Where was the object?" I would ask myself. Moreover, it was too late; and I went on dreaming with open eyes, careering on horseback through the savannas, listening at break of day to the prattle of the parrots in the guava-trees, at nightfall to the chirp of the grillos in the cane-fields, or else smoking my cigar, taking my coffee, rocking myself in a hammock,—in short, enjoying all the delights that are the very heart-blood of a guajiro, and out of the sphere of which he can see but death, or, what is worse to him, the feverish agitation of our Northern society. Go and talk of the funds, of the landed interest, of stock-jobbing to this Sybarite, lord of the wilderness, who can live all the year round on luscious bananas and delicious cocoa-nuts, which he is not even at the trouble of planting,—who has the best tobacco in the world to smoke,—who replaces to-day the horse he had yesterday by a better one chosen from the first caballada he meets,—who requires no further protection from the cold, than a pair of linen trousers, in that favored clime where the seasons roll on in one perennial summer,—who, more than all this, finds at eve, under the rustling palm-trees, pensive beauties eager to reward with their smiles the one who murmurs in their ears those three words, ever new, ever beautiful, "Yo te quiero."
Moralists, I am aware, condemn this life of inaction and mere pleasure; and they are right. But poetry is often in antagonism with virtuous purposes; and now that I am shivering under the icy wind and dull sky of the North,—that I must needs listen to discussions on Erie, Prairie du Chien, Harlem, and Cumberland,—that I read in the papers the lists of the killed and wounded,—that havoc and conflagration, violence and murder, are perpetrated all around me,—I find myself excusing the half-civilized inhabitant of the savanna, who prefers his poetical barbarism to our barbarous progress.