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Plato Profile Directory 09
Page 03
Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future. He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work--at least in so far as he understood it himself,--"Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune--the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past--are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . . Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men." And he says too that, "The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all." And he further says: "The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow'd their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best--more eligible now than any times of old were."
Considering the amount of navigation that went through, it was amazing to see how badly lighted that river was--the two lights, such as the one at Buyussu, and the one at Mandy, at the entrance of the bay of Marajo, being no bigger than and not so brilliant as the ordinary street oil-lamp in an English or French village. I understand that all ships navigating the Amazon have to pay a large tax on each journey for the maintenance of the lighthouses on that immense waterway. It is quite criminal that no proper lights are constructed in order to protect the safety of the passengers and the valuable cargoes which go by that important water route.
Wiertz (1806-1865), whose collection of works is to be seen in Brussels, was a partial exposition of romanticism mixed with a what-not of eccentricity entirely his own. Later on came a comparatively new man, Louis Gallait (1810-?), who held in Brussels substantially the same position that Delaroche did in Paris. His art was eclectic and never strong, though he had many pupils at Brussels, and started there a rivalry to Wappers at Antwerp. Leys (1815-1869) holds a rather unique position in Belgian art by reason of his affectation. He at first followed Pieter de Hooghe and other early painters. Then, after a study of the old German painters like Cranach, he developed an archaic style, producing a Gothic quaintness of line and composition, mingled with old Flemish coloring. The result was something popular, but not original or far-reaching, though technically well done. His chief pupil was Alma Tadema (1836-), alive to-day in London, and belonging to no school in particular. He is a technician of ability, mannered in composition and subject, and somewhat perfunctory in execution. His work is very popular with those who enjoy minute detail and smooth texture-painting.
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