Down at Caxton's. William A. McDermott
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.
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