Chapter II · II

I have been corroborated in this opinion by a recent essay of Don Adolfo de Castro, who discovers and applauds in certain verses of Saint Teresa, almost as a heavenly gift or divine grace, that very property of being read backward or forward with identical sense.

The truth of the matter, when all is weighed and considered with impartial circumspection, is that such a rhetorical manner is ridiculous when adopted as a crutch or used as a standard formula for writing; but if spontaneous, it is very well: it is the true language of passion.

Let us picture a young, pretty, and doting mother, holding in her arms a chubby, rosy, fair-haired two-year-old boy. As she dandles him and he smiles up at her, she will naturally and simply pour out an endless list of names and objects, some of them nonsensical. She will call him an angel, a little imp, a monkey, a kitten, an oddity, her heart, her soul, her life, her charm, her treasure, her king, her prince, and a thousand other things. And all of it will be well, and seem delightful to us, in whatever order it may be arranged. In the same way, any composition in prose or verse may proceed after that fashion, provided this mode of composing is neither deliberately sought out nor too frequently indulged.

The most illustrious model of the genre, its archetypal exemplar, is the litany. The Virgin is the gate of heaven, the morning star, the tower of David, the ark of the covenant, the house of gold, and a thousand other things in whatever sequence we please to recite them.

The Song of Gold is just such a piece: it is a litany, only infernal instead of heavenly. It is in the taste for litanies that Baudelaire composed his hymn to the demon; yet, conceding that The Song of Gold is indeed a litany, and an infernal one, I take pleasure in maintaining that it is one of the most poetic, opulent, and energetic I have ever read. It is a flood of images, a tumultuous procession of all that exists, to laud gold and proclaim its splendors.

To quote a fragment is to impair the effect, which resides in the very abundance of things disorderly cited that hasten to sing of gold, ‘mysterious and silent in the bowels of the earth, and clamorous when it gushes forth into full sunlight and all vitality; resounding like a chorus of cymbals, the embryo of stars, the residue of light, the incarnation of ether; born of the sun, it falls in love with night, and, bestowing its final kiss, besprinkles her mantle with stars as with a great multitude of sovereigns. Spurned by Jerome, cast away by Anthony, reviled by Macarius, humiliated by Hilarion, it is the flesh of idols, the golden calf, the fabric from which Phidias fashions Minerva’s robe. From it are wrought the strings of the lyre, the locks of the tenderest sweethearts, the grains of the ear of wheat, and the peplum donned at dawn by Olympic Aurora.’

I had resolved to quote nothing, yet I have quoted something, however little. The piece is an inorganic litany; and nevertheless, neither the irony, nor the simultaneous love and hatred, desire and contempt that gold inspires in the poet in his penury (that chronic and epidemic affliction of poets), stand out clearly except through the plenitude of things said of gold, which are omitted here out of regard for brevity.

In conclusion, your little book, entitled Azul..., reveals you as a prose writer and a poet of true talent.

Toward your mental Gallicism I have not merely been indulgent; I have applauded it for its perfection. Even so, I should applaud it far more if, alongside that French culture you possess, there were blended the English, the German, the Italian, and why not the Spanish as well? After all, the tree of our learning has not grown so old that it can yield no more sap, nor are its branches so stunted and dry that they cannot put forth shoots like layered vines across the Atlantic. At any rate, with superior richness and a greater variety of elements, there would issue from your brain something less exclusive and possessed of higher, purer, and more serene ideals: something more blue than the blue of your present volume; something leaning less toward the green and the black. And above all, your originality and your writer’s individuality would stand forth clearer and more distinctly marked.

JUAN VALERA

(Of the Royal Spanish Academy).

THE BOURGEOIS KING

(A CHEERFUL TALE)

Friend! The sky is overcast, the air chilly, the day dreary. A cheerful story... something to dispel these fair, gray melancholies—here it is:

There lived in an immense and glittering city a very powerful king, who possessed fanciful and sumptuous garments, naked slave-girls both fair and dark, long-maned steeds, gleaming armor, swift greyhounds, and huntsmen with bronze horns that filled the wind with their fanfares. Was he a poet-king? No, my friend: he was the Bourgeois King.

The monarch was exceedingly fond of the arts, and favored with great largesse his musicians, his dithyramb-makers, painters, sculptors, apothecaries, barbers, and fencing masters.

When he rode to the forest, beside the wounded and bloody roebuck or wild boar, he would have his professors of rhetoric improvise pertinent verses; the servants filled goblets with sparkling, golden wine, and the women clapped their hands with graceful, rhythmic movements. He was a sun-king in his Babylon full of music, laughter, and feast-day revelry. When he grew weary of the bustling city, he rode hunting, making the forest ring with his cavalcade; he drove the frightened birds from their nests, and the clamor echoed in the deepest recesses of the caverns. The hounds with their supple legs broke through the brushwood in full chase, and the huntsmen, leaning over the necks of their horses, let their crimson cloaks stream behind them, their faces flushed and their hair tossed by the wind.

The king possessed a magnificent palace wherein he had amassed treasures and wondrous objects of art. One approached it through avenues of lilacs and expansive pools, being greeted by white-necked swans even before the stiff footmen bowed. Good taste. One mounted a stairway lined with columns of alabaster and emerald stone, flanked by marble lions like those of Solomon’s throne. Refinement. Besides the swans, he kept a vast aviary, like a true lover of harmony, cooing, and birdsong; and near it he would go to expand his mind, reading the novels of Monsieur Ohnet, or fine treatises on grammatical matters, or Hermosillan criticism. To be sure: a staunch defender of academic correctness in literature, and of the polished manner in the arts; a sublime soul devoted to the pumice-stone and orthography.

Chinoiserie! Japonaiserie! Pure luxury and nothing more.

He could well indulge himself in a salon worthy of the taste of a Goncourt and the millions of a Croesus: bronze chimeras with gaping jaws and coiled tails in fantastic, wondrous groupings; Kyoto lacquers inlaid with leaves and boughs of monstrous flora and animals of an unknown fauna; strange fan-shaped butterflies mounted upon the walls, colored fowl and fishes; masks of infernal grimace with eyes that seemed alive; partisans with antique blades and hilts shaped like dragons devouring lotus blossoms; and upon eggshell porcelain, robes of yellow silk seemingly spun from spider threads, sown with red cranes and green clumps of rice; and great urns, porcelain of many centuries, whereon Tartar warriors clad in skins down to their loins bear drawn bows and bundles of arrows.

Besides, there was the Greek salon, filled with statuary: goddesses, muses, nymphs, and satyrs; the salon of the gallant age, with paintings by the great Watteau and Chardin; two, three, four—so many salons!

And Maecenas strolled through them all, his face suffused with a certain majesty, his belly contented, and the crown upon his head, like a king in a deck of cards.

One day they brought a strange specimen of a man before his throne, where he sat surrounded by courtiers, rhetoricians, and masters of horsemanship and dance.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘Sire, it is a poet.’

The king had swans upon the pond, canaries, sparrows, and mockingbirds in the aviary: a poet was something novel and strange.

‘Leave him here.’

And the poet said:

‘Sire, I have not eaten.’

And the king:

‘Speak, and you shall eat.’

He began:

‘Sire, for a long time I have sung the word of the future. I have spread my wings to the gale, I was born in the hour of dawn: I seek the chosen race that must await, with hymn upon their lips and lyre in hand, the rising of the great sun. I have forsaken the inspiration of the unhealthy city, the bedchamber full of perfumes, the muse of flesh that fills the soul with pettiness and the face with rice powder. I have dashed the flattering harp of frail strings against the Bohemian goblets and the flagons where foams that wine which intoxicates without imparting strength; I have cast off the cloak that made me appear a player, or a woman, and have clad myself in savage, splendid fashion: my rag is of royal purple. I have gone to the forest where I have grown vigorous and sated with fertile milk and the liquor of new life; and on the shore of the rugged sea, tossing my head beneath the dark, mighty tempest, like a proud angel or an Olympian demigod, I have essayed the iambic, consigning the madrigal to oblivion.

‘I have caressed mighty Nature, and sought the warmth of the ideal—the verse that dwells in the star at the depths of heaven, and that which abides in the pearl in the ocean’s deep. I have longed to be powerful! For the hour of great revolutions approaches, with a Messiah all light, all agitation and might, and it behooves us to receive his spirit with a poem that shall be a triumphal arch, of strophes of steel, strophes of gold, strophes of love.

‘Sire, art does not abide in cold shrouds of marble, nor in sleek paintings, nor in the excellent Monsieur Ohnet! Sire! Art wears no trousers, nor does it talk like a bourgeois, nor dot every i. It is august, it wears robes of gold or flame, or walks stark naked, kneading clay in fever, painting with light; it is opulent, and beats its wings like eagles or deals blows like lions with their paws. Sire, between an Apollo and a goose, choose the Apollo, even if the one be of baked clay and the other of ivory.

‘Ah, poetry!

‘And yet! Rhythms are prostituted, women’s beauty spots are sung, and poetic syrups are concocted. What is more, sire, the cobbler criticizes my hendecasyllables, and the professor of pharmacy puts punctuation marks to my inspiration. Sire, and you authorize all of this...! The ideal, the ideal...’

The king interrupted:

‘You have heard him. What is to be done?’

And a fashionable philosopher remarked:

‘If you permit it, sire, he may earn his food with a music box; we can place him in the garden near the swans, for when you take your promenade.’

‘Yes,’ said the king; and turning to the poet: ‘You shall turn a crank. You shall hold your tongue. You shall play a music box that plays waltzes, quadrilles, and galops, unless you prefer to starve to death. A piece of music for a piece of bread. No more gibberish, no more ideals. Begone.’

And from that day forth, at the edge of the swans’ pool, one could see the hungry poet turning the crank: ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling... abashed before the gaze of the great sun! Did the king pass nearby? Ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling...! Was the stomach to be filled? Ting-a-ling! All amid the mockery of the wild birds that came to drink dew from the blossoming lilacs; amid the hum of bees that stung his face and filled his eyes with tears... bitter tears that rolled down his cheeks and fell upon the dark earth!

And winter came, and the poor wretch felt cold in body and soul. And his brain seemed petrified, and the great hymns were forgotten, and the poet of the eagle-crowned mountain was nothing more than a poor devil turning a crank: ting-a-ling.

And when the snow fell, the king and his vassals forgot all about him; the birds were sheltered, but he was left to the glacial wind that gnawed at his flesh and lashed his face.

And one night when the white rain of crystallized feathers fell from above, there was a feast in the palace, and the chandelier lights laughed merrily upon the marble, the gold, and the robes of the mandarins on the ancient porcelain. And frantic applause greeted the toasts of the professor of rhetoric, crammed with dactyls, anapests, and pyrrhics, while in the crystal flutes the champagne simmered with bright, fleeting bubbles. A winter night, a festival night! And the wretched man, covered in snow near the pond, turned the crank to warm himself, shivering and frozen, insulted by the north wind beneath the relentless, icy whiteness in the gloomy night, making the mad music of galops and quadrilles echo among the leafless trees; and he died, thinking that the sun of the coming day would rise, and with it the ideal... and that art would wear no trousers, but a mantle of flame or of gold... Until the next day the king and his courtiers found him, the poor devil of a poet, like a sparrow struck dead by the frost, with a bitter smile upon his lips, and his hand still upon the crank.