Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (60 page)

And always in Italy, you find the luxury of marble. Here you will see the illustrious stone carved into bas reliefs at the entrance, statuary all along the monumental steps, and the long series of busts of Terminus throughout the woods and copses. These spots are impregnated as though with the perfumes of love, of readings from breviaries; they are filled with the whispers of worldly conversations. And over there, to one side, by one of the great walls, there is a spot to which death beckons. It is the wall from which suicides leap, the point chosen by the desperate, from which they can erase the nightmare of their lives; it is the refuge of the poor in faith, the prisoners of destiny. Paris has her Seine; London, its Thames; Madrid, its viaduct; Rome—the Pincio wall.

In one corner of the Pincio is the Villa Borghese. Both are entered through the Piazza del Popolo: the Pincio, via the monumental steps; the villa, via a broad door at which a municipal employee stands and collects the entry fee. Even at the gates one can see how vast and harmonious this park is. It is filled with enchanted spots and delicious shady retreats and secluded corners perfect for lovers. Cypresses, ilexes, pines rise tall, evocative, in the vast convent of trees. Crumbling columns, invaded by vines and ivies, illustrated with archaic inscriptions, and temples and fountains of venerable antiquity delight one with their classic grace. One strolls past a structure in the Egyptian style and comes, among pagan figures, flowers, and leaves that stir in the soft sweet breeze, to a lovely lake, composed with lyrical taste, upon which a loggia, reached by a little bridge, stands in the midst of the transparent emerald water that is inhabited, above, by silent swans, below, by schools of rosy trout. On the shore of the lake I see an old painter, copying a place where stalks of water lilies rise. . . . Before me lies a marvelous view, out to the Roman suburbs. From this magnificent lookout one sees valleys and hills and picturesque profiles in a landscape like those favored by magical Leonardo for the background of his paintings. The sun is setting in a soft drowsy haze; the light slowly dies, in an endless twilight sigh. The statues, the peristyles, take on a mysterious splendor of gold and violet. And when I bid my sad farewell to this paradise, and make my way along a new path, I see a luminous fluttering of pheasants. In my poet’s spirit, I feel the loving health of the earth, the generosity of nature. The pines, with their aristocratic elegance, raise toward the firmament their thick, dark parasols in a gesture of praise and offering; the cypresses’ bow is long and languid; the centuries-old ilexes display the same nobility as the poems and paintings of this city. In a second, a past world comes to life again—a heraldic world of cardinals and royalty and emperors and popes, a world of valor, of culture, of strong virtues and noble vices, a world of crimson, of marble, of iron and gold, a world that there, in the villa’s museum, is eternalized in the glories of an age of beauty and struggle and life. And it fills me with real sadness and grief and
bother
that I have to go say hello to people, to communicate with so many persons that are strangers to me, to enter once more into the abomination of my contemporaries. . . . In the Piazza del Popolo I buy a newspaper. . .

 

October 12, 1900

 

As I leave the Immortal City, to the hoarse noise of the train, I make an inventory of memories. One, of course, is of an afternoon spent in the Forum and the Coliseum, the revelation of a stone, Ruskin’s “bread,” ruin, a broken column, a gravestone, a statue, an inscription. . . .

In the Coliseum I recalled that remark by the Goncourts: “Like a circle-dance suddenly violently interrupted, and with some of the dancers fallen over on their backs: one entire side of the Coliseum tumbled to earth.” Colossal, cyclopean, enormous, a place of lions and emperors. And I imagine the ancient circusian spectacle to which nothing is comparable today save perhaps bullfights. The fact is, however, that as I stood before these ruins—as I had stood earlier before the Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima, the Baths—the usual phrase came to mind: The work of the Romans. In our days, the Yankees, on account of their tendency to make, or have, “the biggest one in the world,” claim for themselves that saying. I read, for example, in an article on the upcoming Exposition in Buffalo, where an enormous stadium is to be built: “The stadium will offer sports fanatics the most spacious and splendid arena ever constructed in the United States. The Athletic Carnival to be held during the Grand Exposition will be the most remarkable in the history of sports in the United States, for the finest promoters of athletic games, contests, and matches in the country have pledged their support. . . .” Rome’s Coliseum, built in the first century of the Christian era, is said to have held eighty thousand spectators. The Pan American stadium will be 129 feet longer, though only 10 feet wider, than the historic amphitheater in Rome, but the gladiatorial arena will be larger, so that there will be seats for only twenty-five thousand persons. Such a reaching toward the colossal, the
Coliseum.
But for me there is no hesitation between those fairground “matches” sponsored by egalitarian democracy and the formidable performances in which Caesarean magnificence watered with blood the ground on which the symbolic tree of Christ would be raised.

They say there are tourists who pay to see the Coliseum illuminated with torches, and romantics who go on nights when there is a full moon to remember Eudora and Cymodoce.
¹⁰⁴
The first are afflicted with an excess of Baedeker; the second, an excess of anachronism. The Coliseum surprises and overwhelms even in broad daylight, bathed in sunshine—the immense stone armature, the crumbling arches, the walls rent and cracked by centuries, carved by the ceaseless passage of hours, the vast, superb body mutilated by barbarians both ancient and modern.

As I stepped outside the vast amphitheater, there passed before my eyes, like some great insect, a man on a bicycle.

Later, dawn came to the outskirts of Rome, near the enchanted places that gave Poussin his magnificent landscapes. The Tiber ran slowly through hills and the cool countryside. The light had barely begun to creep into the eastern sky; the horizon was tinged with a sweet violet; and a wash of pearl softened a pale eruption of gold. And little by little, hills and countryside were illuminated with progressive splendor. From the earth there rose a haze of life. This was not the poisoned breath of the Pontine Marshes, but a healthful, life-giving respiration. To the soft flight of a breeze impregnated with the perfume of the countryside, the amber grasses and the leaves of the wild anemones trembled, and the fiery star of a fine golden flower opened on the river’s edge. And in a skiff caressed by the current, we floated on, a dreamy friend and I, upon the waters that mirrored back the colors of the sky. A solitary fisherman was mending a net. From the houses nearby came the shrill cry of a cock. And suddenly, there was a feast, a celebration of sunlight in the Roman firmament. . . .

And it was a luminous day in the Piazza del Capitolio, whether before the long stairway to Ara Coeli or before the Palazzo Cafarelli, among the statues of Castor and Pollux or alongside the cage of the living she-wolf that embodies the original symbol of the city of Romulus. I remembered, as I contemplated the statue of Marcus Aurelius, the traditional superstition: I looked to see whether the statue was becoming more golden, and whether it might once again be gold from head to toe, at which point the end of the world would come, accompanied by the end of the villa no longer eternal, but perishing, like all the works of man. . . .

Naples! The Vesuvius is still a pyre worthy of the funeral ceremonies of Patroclus. Are we truly in the Christian era? One has to put a strong bridle on one’s imagination to think so. The morning burns, docilely, with an impeccable azure. I have climbed to the heights crowned by Castel Sant’Elmo, the classic point from which to look out over the city, so that I may
see and conquer
before I plunge into that noisy world that whirls and laughs at my feet. And I tell you, my friends, that we are under the empire of the Augusti—nothing here reminds one of the Nazarene’s cross, nothing his religion of suffering and anguish. This sun, which even in the fullness of autumn roasts the roses, which flower twice a year, is the same jovial sun that gilded Seneca’s venerable forehead.

The Bay of Naples, softly curving, palpitating, like a swath of azure silk upon an immense lap, still sings the
cum placidum
ventis staret mare,
¹⁰⁵
in its perpetual idyll with the islets of Sirenusa, choirs of fair Oceanides. The brilliant azure of the sky, the historic azure of that immortal sky, mocks the twenty centuries that have passed since in the pious sweetness of Mt. Pausilypus the sweet Mantuan who cooed eclogues
¹⁰⁶
lay down for his eternal rest. To its right, the Isle of Capri casts upon the waves glints of aventurine
¹⁰⁷
veined with living gold....

HAMBURG, OR THE LAND OF SWANS

Huysmans has been unfair with Hamburg, and his harsh humor has been expressed in bitter paragraphs. Clearly, Durtal did not visit the paradise of swans, and M. Folantin ate badly at two marks fifty. Hamburg is gay, with almost Latin gaiety, at least so far as is admissible in a Saxon center. Hamburg is a working, trading, independent city, with its strict Senate, its factories, its canals, its grand hotels, its large warehouses, and is also a city that amuses itself, prettifies itself, flirts with the foreign visitor: it has a St. Pauli that resembles Montmartre as beer resembles champagne, open-air cafés on the bank of the Alster, which in turn is vibrant with yachts and plied by little steamboats—and on Sunday, comely lasses flirting to the sound of music. It has a large wealthy neighborhood which some call “Judea,” because powerful Semites enjoy, in their villas and “cottages,” the happiness lent by money. Huysmans vents his spleen against men and women from Caracas whom he found in this commercial emporium. I have found no compatriots of Bolívar, although it is not unusual to hear Spanish spoken, because the city has many Latin American residents, and Hamburgians who have returned to settle here with their criollo families after making fortunes in warm distant lands. Various architectures arise among the green of gardens or beside the orderly tree-lined avenues.

Helkendorf, fresh and flowery, has delicious corners in which one may rest, court, and daydream, for it is not impossible to engage in that delicate enterprise of dreaming in a city whose inhabitants, however practical they may be, have a poetic place in a turn in the river where a large number of swans is maintained by the public treasury. These poets have no occupation but to consecrate themselves to beauty, to be white—there are some black ones—and to glide nobly along, with the dignity bequeathed them by Jupiter. They meet those obligations most exactingly, and besides the daily ration put out for them by their keepers, the public gratifies them with bits of bread. The pool is crystalline, the river bank carpeted with flowers; the golden afternoons rain a magical grace over that divine spectacle that would put even Doctor Tribulat Bonhomet into a meditative mood. And the lyrical inhabitants of that glassy pond that multiplies their Olympian figures enjoy the sweetest beatitude in the capital of counterfeiters and Teutonic merchants. Although if truth be told, I have felt a bit uneasy when, eating in the company of my friend the Semitic exporter, he has told me, with an air of gluttonous satisfaction, that the swan, like the goose, well-prepared, is—oh!!—so very tasty.

And while we are speaking of lyrical swans, let me tell you that Hamburg has a Montmartre called St. Pauli. . . . Or so I had been told, at least. A Montmartre? . . . For sailors. With one or two cafés of note, where one can eat to the soft music of an orchestra. But otherwise, the theaters are squalid, with
chanteuses
much past their prime, heavy moo-ers of romantic ballads, or skinny Parcae who shriek songs in English or in German. There is not a single cabaret, a single long-haired poet (or a short-haired one, for that matter) who might evoke a memory of Privas, Rictus, or Montoya. In a great working-class auditorium, a military band gives concerts. On the town square, a guignol attracts a large crowd; the electric sign promises marvels, but inside, the entertainment is third-rate and tiresome. But then there are the restaurants, with their sweet soups, their sausages, their braten, and their excellent beers. M. de Folantin in one way was right. But—oh,
Des Esseintes
!—what about the swans?

THE SECESSION

In 1900, when I visited the Grand Palais to see the section devoted to the Viennese Secession, what I found were quite a number of sincere worshipers of freedom in art, seekers after the new, the strange, if that suited their temperament, or personal interpreters of ancient artistic traditions, all without worldly
blague,
¹⁰⁸
without Montmartrean aestheticisms, without the absurd monstrosities which, among a very few works of talent, were being exhibited at the time by so many wretched painters in the Parisians’ Salon des Indépendants. Was the air different in Vienna? Was the struggle for
la vie et la gloire
different there? The fact is that in all the efforts of the artists of the Secession, I sensed a sincerity and a noble independence and a consecration to the ideal and realization of beauty very unlike the extravagant and
arriviste épateurs
that abound in Paris.

In their own building, built and decorated according to the aesthetic tastes and ideas of the organizers of the museum, the work of the Secession is exhibited in the Austrian capital as an undeniable testimony to the tenacity, the energy, and the talent of its pure artists. The museum is an “exceptional” museum, as Vittorio Pica would say. Nothing in it is vulgar or common, and in everything one sees a gift of high grace and a desire for loveliness and a strength of thought that marvelously honor and elevate the Austrian mentality of struggle. Here one sees that there is no attempt to
épater les bourgeois,
¹⁰⁹
but rather offer them a new revelation of beauty. Here, noble priests show dreams, a life of mystery, and the brush and chisel speak the profundity of the unknown, the arcane depths of our human existences, and the enigma that throbs in all things. Whether synthetic or complicated, they express their meditations and the inner visions, or in a strange symbolic apparatus draw forth an aspect of a possible truth, or make the light of the soul bloom, or crystallize the indecisive and the recondite. And there is frank, open expression, and a disdain for all routine. This is the only museum in the world where not only has the academic fig leaf been destroyed, but men have had the courage to reveal the most private things, the courage not to hide the most hidden—to the point that one recalls certain memorable quartets by Théophile Gautier. The legend has its cultivators. I see a hundred canvases that do not attract me; I will not mention the names of their creators, for they are not on the paintings and I have no time to produce an entire catalog. I will, however, recall potent Franz Metzner, the Austrian Rodin, the creator of that superb marble poem called
The Earth,
and of admirable decorative studies and busts and statues of an imposing and comprehensive originality. Metzner’s
The Earth
is exhibited in a special little gallery, decorated only with expressive telamons
¹¹⁰
and its unique, impressive, elegant simplicity. And the figure in which earthly life and rhythm and natural strength is expressed, reposes on its base like the majesty and mystery of a sacred simulacrum. What the Secession has sent to the St. Louis Exposition testifies to the value of its painters, decorators, sculptors, ceramicists, and furniture makers. Ferdinand Andri sends his valiant figures, which in some ways renew archaic Assyrian art; Metzner, his superb creations, his synthetic expressions of the human person; Klimt, his symbolic paintings of such extraordinary workmanship and profound meaning, such as
The Golden Apple, Life Is Combat,
Jurisprudence,
and
Philosophy,
which caused such controversy when it was exhibited in Paris at the last Universal Exposition.