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The result of all the efforts to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes plain, was an almost complete check; for to the French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry appeared macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to excess.
So was it also with the lofty thoughts of the philosopher Soloviev, the macâbre tales of Dostoïevsky, the realistic narratives of Gogol, or the popular epics of Gorky and Ouspensky. The doctrines of Marx took some strange shapes in the Russian milieu. Eminently materialistic, they were there reclothed in an abstract and dogmatic idealism in fact, Marxism in Russia was transformed into a religion.
Then he examined his other series of etchings and aquatints, his Proverbs with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wild rage, finally his plate of the Garot, of which he cherished a marvelous trial proof, printed on heavy water-marked paper, unmounted.
Of course, government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind; but really we Spanish-Americans do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary intelligence can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre.
Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the DANSE MACABRE, but one broad land of peace, of prosperity, and of widening knowledge. The nonviolent voice of Gandhi appeals to man's highest conscience. Let nations ally themselves no longer with death, but with life; not with destruction, but with construction; not with the Annihilator, but with the Creator.
She may have been an innocent and lovely young creature when alive, but dead, and lacking the usual amiable beneficencies of the undertaker, she looked like a macabre wax work of corrupt and evil youth. And she was horribly stiff. Gora went into the kitchen and made him a cup of coffee over a spirit lamp.
'Look up; I verily thought you were sped by Death in bodily shape; but 'twas all an abominable grisly pageant got up by some dismal caitiffs. 'It was the Danse Macabre, added the sweet tone that did indeed unclose Malcolm's eyes, to see Esclairmonde bending over him, and holding wine to his lips.
So he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre. Rosamund Grey written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it, strikes clearly this note in his work.
One finds in him almost typically the sensibility to the essences and colors rather more than to the spectacle, the movement, the adventure of things. The nervous delicacy, the widowhood of the spirit, the horror of the times, the mystic paganism, the homesickness for a tranquil and sequestered and soft-colored land "where shepherds still pipe to their flocks, and nun-like processions of clouds float over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le crépuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to appear; and has sought a refuge from the world in Catholic mysticism and ecstasy. Had it been given him to realize himself in music, we should undoubtedly have had a body of work that would have been the veritable milestones of the route traversed by the entire movement. Would not the "Pagan Poem" have been the musical equivalent of the mystic and sorrowful sensuality of Verlaine? Would not the two rhapsodies "L'Etang" and "La Cornemuse" have transmuted to music the macabre and sinister note of so much symbolist poetry? Would we not have had in "La Villanelle du Diable" an equivalent for the black mass and "L
For it is in the nature of Orientals that their habitations should surround themselves with a girdle of corrupting things, gruesome and yet fascinating: a Browning might have grown enamoured of its macabre spell.
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