XIII. THE SUN. THE sun is the secret of the East. There seems to be no light elsewhere. Italy simply preludes the Orient. Sorrento is near the secret. Sicily is like its hand stretched forth over the sea. Their sunsets and dreamy days are delicious. You may well read Hafiz in the odorous orange darkness of Sorrento, and believe that the lustrous leaves languidly moving over you are palms yielding to the wooing of Arabian winds. The song of the Syrens, heard by you at evening, from these rocks, as you linger along the shore, is the same that Ulysses heard, seductive, sweet, the same that Hadrian must have leaned to hear, as he swept, silken-sailed, eastward, as if he had not more than possible eastern conquest in his young Antinous ! But the secret sweetness of that song is to you what it was to Ulysses. Son of the East, it sang to him his native language, and he longed to remain. Son of the West, tarry not thou for that sweet sing ing, but push bravely on and land where the song is realized. The East is a voluptuous reverie of nature. Its Egyptian days are perfect. light. You feel it warm in You breathe the sun- The whole system absorbs sunshine, and all your views of life become warmly and richly voluptuous. Your day-dreams rise, splendid with sun-sparkling aerial architecture. Stories are told, songs are sung, in your mind, and the scenery of each, and the persons, are such as is Damascus, seen at morning from the Salaheeyah, or Saladin, heroic and graceful, in the rosy light of chivalric tradition. The Egyptian sun does not glare, it shines. The light has a creamy quality, soft and mellow, as distinguished from the intense whiteness of our American light. The forms of our landscape stand sharp and severe in the atmosphere, like frost-work. But the Eastern outlines are smoothed and softened. The sun is the mediator, and blends beautifully the separate beauties of the landscape. It melts the sterner stuff of your nature. The intellect is thawed and mellowed. Emotions take the place of thought. Sense rises into the sphere of soul. It becomes so exquisite and refined, that the old landmarks in the moral world begin to totter and dance. They remain nowhere, they have no permanent place. Delight and satisfaction, which are not sensual, but sensuous, become the law of your being; conscience, lulled all the way from Sicily in the soft rocking lap of the Mediterranean, falls quite asleep at Cairo, and you take your chance with the other flowers. The thoughts that try to come, masque no more as austere and sad-browed men, but pass as large-eyed, dusky maidens, now, with fair folding arms that fascinate you to their embrace. Even old thoughts throng to you in this glowing guise. The Howadji feels, once more, how the Nile flows behind history, and he glides gently into the rear of all modern developments, and stands in the pure presence of primitive feeling-perceives the naturalness of the world's first worship, and is an antique Arabian, a devotee of the sun, "as he sails, as he sails." For sun-worship is an instinct of the earliest The sun and stars are the first great friends of man. By the one he directs his movements, by the light of the other he gathers the fruit its warmth has ripened. Gratitude is natural to the youth, and he adores where he loves-and of the God of the last and wisest faith, the sun is still the symbol. races. This sun shines again in the brilliance of the colors the Easterns love. The sculptures upon the old tombs and temples are of the most positive colors— red, blue, yellow, green and black, were the colors of the old Egyptians-and still the instinct is the same in their costume. The poetic Howadji would fancy they had studied the beauty of rainbows against dark clouds. For golden and gay are the turbans wreathed around their dusky brows and figures the very people of poetry, of which Titian and Paul divinely dreamed, but could never paint, sit forever in crimson turbans-yellow, blue, and white robes with red slippers crossed under them, languidly breathing smoke over Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. And the buildings in which they sit, the walls of baths, and cafés, and mosques, are painted in the same gorgeous taste, with broad bars of red, and blue, and white. Over all this brilliance streams the intense sunshine, and completes what itself suggested. So warm, so glowing, and rich, is the universal light and atmosphere, that any thing less than this in architecture, would be unnatural. Strange and imperfect as it is, you feel the heart of nature throbbing all through Eastern art. Art there follows the plainest hints of nature in costume and architecture now, as in the antique architecture. The fault of oriental art springs from the very excess, which is the universal law of Eastern life. It is the apparent attempt to say more than is sayable. In the infinite and exquisite elaborations of Arabian architecture, there is the evident effort to realize all the subtle and strange whims of a luxuriously-inspired imagination; and hence results an art that lacks large features and character, like the work of a man who loves the details of his dreams. The child's faith, that the East lies near the rising sun, is absurd until you are there. Then you feel that it was his first-born, and inherits the elder share of his love and influence. Wherever your eye falls, it sees the sun and the sun's suggestion. Egypt lies hard against its heart. But the sun is like other fathers, and his eldest is spoiled. As you sweep, sun-tranced, up the river, the strongest, most distinct desire of being an artist, is born of silence and the sun. So saturated are you with light and color, that they would seem to flow unaided from the brush. But not so readily, importunate reader, from the pen. Words are worsted by the East. Chiaro 'scuro will not give it. A man must be very cunning to persuade his pen to reveal those secrets. But, if an artist, I would tarry and worship a while in the temples of Italy, then hurry across the sea into the presence of the power there adored. There I should find that Claude was truly a consecrated priest. For this silence and sun breathe beauty along his canvass. His pictures are more than Italian, more than the real sunset from the Pincio; for they are the ideal Italy which bends |