Down at Caxton's 3

Down at Caxton's 3

Thackeray’s were written to the tune of “more copy.” Your American

critic, Stoddard, says:—“That Crawford is a man with many talents, and

with great fertility of invention, is evident in every story that he

has written. He has written more good stories and in more diverse ways

than any English or American novelist. It does not seem to matter to

him what countries or periods he deals with, or what kind of personages

he draws, he is always equal to what he undertakes.” It may interest

you, in ending this biographic sketch, to add that he is a convert to

the Catholic Church, and with the American critic’s idea in view, a

cosmopolitan. I was not astonished by the former information. To those

who know Italy and Mr. Crawford’s wonderful drawing of it, there could

be but one opinion, that the faith of the novelist was the same as that

of his characters. No Protestant novelist, no matter how many years he

had lived in Italy, could have drawn the portraits that play in the

Saracenesca pages. One of his friends had this in his mind’s eye when

he wrote of the superiority of the novelist’s writings on Italy over

those of his countrymen. This writer tells us that “Crawford added the

indispensable advantage of being a Catholic in religion, a circumstance

that has not only allowed him a truer sympathy with the life there,

but has afforded him an open sesame to many things which must be

sealed books to Protestants.” As to my friend’s summing up Crawford as

a cosmopolitan, in the every-day meaning of that word, I take issue.

Cosmopolitan novelist is one who can produce a three-volume novel,

whose scenes are laid in all the great centers of commerce, while

he sits calmly in his library. No previous study of his novelistic

surroundings are necessary. Does the age want the beginning of the plot

in Cairo or Venice, half-way at Tokio, and a grand finale beyond the

Gates Ajar? Your novelist is ready to turn out the regulation type

with the greatest ease. Cosmopolitan novel-writing is simply a trade.

The living through of local and artistic impressions, the study of

types in their environment, the color of surroundings are unnecessary.

Imagination, divorced from nature study, is left to guide the way.

 

Once Crawford followed this school, and the result was “An American

Politician,” the “worst novel ever produced by an American.” Had

Crawford been a tradesman he might have produced a passable book, but

being an artist, he failed, not knowing what paint to mix in order

to get the coloring. The difference between an artist and tradesman,

the one must go to nature direct, the other takes her secondhand. No

artist can catch the lines of an Italian sunset from a studio window

in London. “Art is interpretive, not imitative.” Crawford is only a

novelist in the true sense when he knows his characters and their

surroundings. This is amply proven in the charming volumes that make

his Saracenesca series. Here he is at home, so to speak. The Rome

of Pius IX, with its struggles, its ambitions, the designs of wily

intriguers, the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy, the rise of

an united Italy, the flocking to Rome of the scourings and outcasts of

the provincial cities, the money-mad schemes of daring but ignorant

speculators, and over all the lovely blue Italian sky, rise before us

in all their minuteness at the biddance of Marion Crawford. His work is

hardly inferior to genuine history; “for it affords that insight into

the human mind, that acquaintance with the spirit of the age, without

which the most minute knowledge is only a bundle of dry and meaningless

facts.” Who that knows Rome of the Popes and Rome of the Vandals will

not feel heavy-hearted at these lines?

 

“Old Rome is dead, too, never to be old Rome again. The last breath has

been breathed, the aged eyes are closed forever, corruption has done

its work and the grand skeleton lies bleaching on seven hills, half

covered with the piecemeal stucco of a modern architectural body. The

result is satisfactory to those who have brought it, if not to the rest

of the world. The sepulchre of old Rome in the new capital of united

Italy.” The exclusiveness of the patrician families of Rome, families

that a brood of novelists pretend to draw life-like, is happily hit by

the painter Gouache.

 

Gouache, long resident in Rome, being asked what he knows of Roman

families, replies, “Their palaces are historic. Their equipages are

magnificent. That is all foreigners see of Roman families.” Who that

has seen the great Leo carried through the grand sala, a vision of

intellectual loveliness, will not recall it as he reads? “The wonderful

face that seemed to be carved out of transparent alabaster, smiled and

slowly turned from side to side as it passed by. The thin, fragile hand

moved unceasingly, blessing the people.” “True,” said my friend, “his

pages are delicious bits of the dead past. At every sentence we halt

and find a memory. He has the sense of art, if Maupassant’s definition

of it as ‘the profound and delicious enjoyment which rises to your

heart before certain pages, before certain phrases’ be correct.”

 

Dinner was finished. A check, Paulo. We rose and went.

 

 

 

 

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.

 

 

Venice, that lovely city by the sea, has been described a thousand

times by the painter’s brush, by the poet’s pen. It is the last bit of

poetry left to us, in the ever increasing dulness of this world—the

only place that one would expect to meet a goblin or a genial Irish

fairy. It is not the intention of this paper to describe the queenly

city. More than a thousand kodak fiends are daily doing that work,

with the eagerness of a money-lender and the artistic sense of a

fence painter. A city may, however, have many attractions, other than

its magic beauty; nay, even a dull uninteresting place may become

interesting from some great historic event that happened there, or

from some impression caught and treasured in memory’s store-house.

Venice has a charm for me other than the poetry that lurks in its every

stone; it was there that I first dipped into one of those rare hooks

whose charms grow around the heart soft and green as a vine-tendril.

 

A professor of mine, one of those men who hugs one saying in life,

thereon building a false reputation for wisdom, was in the habit

of saying, “Accidents are the spice of life.” As it is his only

contribution approaching the threshold of the philosopher’s goddess

that I heard in the five years of his weary cant, I willingly record

it. To me it expresses a truth, albeit five years is a long hunt.

Illustrations sometimes improve the text, and this brief paper, by the

way, is but a design to enhance the professor’s. It was an accident,

pure and simple, that made me wend my way to the Rialto, there to lean

against the parapet watching some probably great unknown painting,

something that might be anything the imagination cared to conjure up.

It was an accident that made an English divine ask me in sputtering

French what the painter was working on. It was an accident that made

me inform him in common American English that my telescope, by some

accidental foresight, was at my lodgings. The divine was a genial

man, one of those breaths of spring that we sometimes meet in life.

Invited to my lodgings, he fancied a few tiny volumes of the apostle

of “sweetness and light” to pass those hours that hang heavily, in all

lands save Eden. In my pocket he thrust, as he remarked, “a no ordinary

book, one that will hold you as in a vice.” This proceeding was rather

remarkable, had he not in the same breath invited me to take a gondola

to one of the isles, and there enjoy the pocketed volume. It is

delightful to meet a genuine man, speaking your mother-tongue, after

weary months of Italian delving. To the little isle we went, an isle

known to readers of Byron, as the place where he labored long under

Armenian monks to learn their guttural tongue, the monks say “with

success.” I knew nothing, in those days, of destructive criticism.

After a tour in the monastery, of the ordinary Italian type, I lay down

on the green sward under the beneficent shade of a huge palm, wrapped

in the odors of a thousand flowers that sleepily nodded to the music

of the creamy breakers on the rocky shore. Books have their atmosphere

as well as men. Deprive them of it, and many a charm is lost. I drew

the little volume from my pocket, and there in that atmosphere, akin to

the one in which it was begot, I read of life in summer seas, life that

floats along serene and sweet as a bell-note on a calm, frosty night,

life

 

“Where the deep blue ocean never replies

To the sibilant voice of the spray.”

 

My Anglican friend was unable to give any clue to the author’s

identity, other than what the meagre title-page afforded. The

title-page was of that modest kind that says, “Enter in and see for

yourself.” It had none of the tricks of book-making, and none of the

airs of a _parvenu_. Under other skies than Italian I learned that

the author of “South Sea Idyls,” Charles Warren Stoddard, poet and

traveller, was one of the kindest and most modest of men. In truth,

that it was the combination of these rare qualities that had kept him

from the crowd when lesser men made prodigious sales of their wares.

To the man of mediocrity, it is a tickling sensation to float with the

current to the music of the shore-rabble, who shout from an innate

desire to hear their voices. With the possessor of that rare gift,

genius, the mouthings of the present count little; it is for a future

hold on man, that he toils. It is to do something, to paint a face,

to carve a bust whose glorious shape shall hand to the ages a form

of beauty, to weave a snatch of melody that shall go down the stream

of time consoling dark souls. Mediocrity is mortal, genius immortal.

The common mind, without bogging in metaphysics or transcendentalism,

subjects so dear to American critics, may readily grasp the destination

by a comparison in poetry of the “Proverbial Philosophy” with “In

Memoriam,” in prose “Barriers Burned Away,” with “Waverly.” Another

point for mediocrity, perhaps from its possessor’s view the best:

it is well recompensed in this life. The very reverse is the case

with genius. If then the author of the “South Sea Idyls” is not as

popular with the crowd as the writers of short stories who revel in

analysis, whether it be a gum-boil or the falling of my lady’s fan,

he can have no fear. It is but his badge of superiority. The few great

men, who are the literary arbiters of each century, have spoken, and

their verdict is the verdict of posterity. “One does these things but

once,” say they, “if one ever does them, but you have done them once

for all; no one need ever write of the South Sea again.” Here, it is

well to impress on the casual reader, in the light of this verdict, a

great historic truth cobwebbed over by critical spiders; that it was

not the Italians that gave the chaplet to Dante, nor the Spaniards to

Cervantes, nor the Portuguese to Camoëns, nor the Germans to Goethe,

but the great cosmopolitan few, scattered over the world, guardians of the garden of immortality.