Chapter 14

Rimbaud mort,Mon grand, peché radieux.

Rimbaud mort,

Mon grand, peché radieux.

Certain frail, pitiful phrases of forgotten love, from Mme. de Sévigné, dead long ago, but whose heart still beats. Mme. de Stael, whom Napoleon hated, never achieved the supreme phrase. She was logical, clear cut, sure, a problem in geometry. And plaintive, poignant Villon. Some of Manuel Galvez’ descriptions of the Argentine, in his novels about South America which are so fine, and Coelho Netto’s word-paintings of Brazil, and the fabulously luxurious life led on vast estates there.

The greatness of art of a race, is dependent upon the amount of joy, sweetness, heat stored in its heart by happiness. It can give only what is there. The joy of the ringing, triumphant clarions of the Roman legions, and the passion of Christ, echo in grand creative souls of France.

Perhaps great editors, competent critics, had something to do with making word-artists of France. If we have not had great writers in our country, neither have we great editors, at this moment, to sponsor them, great, judging from thepower of perceiving, (the artist in the editor), not considering regularity of incoming dollars. Here an editor seldom passesjudgment upon the thingper se. There must be an appetizer, so to speak, to lure him. More or less violent usually. And then there are his personal feelings toward the writer. The writing, itself, counts little.

One editor, for instance, finds a convict in a prison who can scribble. There is glory in discovery. He proclaims him. Commercialized publicity begins. He is likened to Dante in exile, and Ugo Foscolo. Country papers, having no opinions, copy abundantly, then praise. Soon it falls flat, because considered as poetry, its value was nil. The editor was not interestedin poetry, but only in himself. The writing good or bad was not of the slightest importance, in his judging.

If a girl broncho buster on an Arizona plain is good at broncho busting, she is asked to write her opinion of the Apollo Belvedere. This is excellent illustration of what is meant; the thingper sedoes not count. In France it is the thing that does count.

I once knew a plaintive, romantic lady whose ambition was to be heir to something or somebody. Editors in America have the same romantic itch, only in their case, it is itch to be adiscoverer.

I am interested in Conrad in criticism. He is troubled by Balzac, penetrated by the perfection of Maupassant, haunted by the heights of Flaubert. He could not accommodate himself to looking upon his own work in the furious emotions they create. But why should he wish to drag Conrad into such company? Only the Latin mind, I suppose, and Bielinsky, have achieved impersonal criticism.

I had a wonderful time reading Heine! In my cheap edition the books cost three cents, or five. I wish I could have it over again!

My mother knew that I was good-for-nothing, so she did not try to make anything out of me. It was good sense on her part. She let me idle and read. In reading I was out of the way, quiet, and as usual, useless. At the same time I was the scandal of a reasonable, hard-headed family who liked to work, and who knew without doubt in which direction to go. When I was learning Russian minus a teacher, at eighteen, they, my aunts, cousins, used to peer at me through windows, door cracks, then whisper tragically to each other: “She has looked at one page an hour! No one but a fool would do that!”

To them I have remained a fool. My grandmothers loved me too much to call me that. I have since wondered if in love there be not wisdom, distilled genius of perception. Love always dwells somewhere in the realms of light. What was reading Russian at eighteen, in comparison with making buttonholes that were not round like hogs’ eyes at both corners, or cream puffs that did not split? When the women could not think of any fresh gossip, they fabricated a new story about me, my laziness. To themworkwashand-work.

Happy days of life, however, were spent in a lonely, ugly, sun-and-wind-beaten, prairie village, reading in a dozen or more languages, the word-masters of the world, while the neighbors invented hair-raising tales of my laziness. I was scandal of the village! Sense of justice, very likely, is rare!

There I read Heine, all of him, every word. And over and over! I wish I could have the joy of it back. Those were memorable years in Europe when Heine, Goethe, Chopin, were in their prime.

Germany helped enlarge boundaries of the human mind, when she began putting out cheap editions of the world’s printed art. Here, for a few pennies, one can procure in scholarly renderings, classic writers of India.Kausika’s Zorn, (a play) by Kschemisvara;Savîtri, a dramatic story of the supremacy of love from the Mahabharata,Mudrarakschasa(The Chancellor’s Seal Ring), a play of the ancient Indian Drama,Malati u. Madhava, Urvasi, a dramatic piece by popular Kalidasa.

In reading these books, I found where Goethe procured short, surprising meters that do not belong to Germany, (despite theStab-Reim), which he uses in Faust. They were a borrowing from Indian Drama. Goethe borrowed from Persian writers too. He was enchanted with this newly presented art of the East, this world of beauty and blazing light. And so was Heine! Heine was akin to it. The Orient was in his blood. The soul of him dwelled under its mighty sun. I fancy his dream of the Orient was more superb than realization could have been, had he had health and money at the same time, to make the journey. Blessed be poverty! Poverty is still thenobile donna, of the divine dream of Dante. Her road is straight. Her road is narrow. But it leads far.

Occasionally pages of Indian literature are richly studded with color, like their white lace-work marbles. The Peacock Throne, for example, with gems! The same lavishness! The same piling of richness uponrichness, that not even their astounding sun could destroy, and which their black eyes, deep and disconcerting as pools of ebony, knew how to love.

Compare this, (to return to Goethe’s borrowing), from theHitopadesa, with Faust:

Grausam zart,Sanft und hart,Falsch und wahrImmerdar.Spenden Gabe,Suchend Habe,Immer gebend,Guterstrebend.

Grausam zart,

Sanft und hart,

Falsch und wahr

Immerdar.

Spenden Gabe,

Suchend Habe,

Immer gebend,

Guterstrebend.

Would you not think you were reading Faust? Goethe’sWest-Östlicher Divanis merely a divine way, a proud impenitent poet’s way, of translating Firdusi, Hafiz, Saadi. He declared that in reading life-giving books of the East, he had cast off years, grown young. Somewhere inThe Divanhe cries:Once more I will be young! I will mingle with the herdsmen on the plains. I will travel with the caravan!

I expected a revel of delight from Verhaeren’sHelen. I did not get it. At the same time I admired its reason, logical unfolding, keeping in key; few lines of color and great passion, wisely distributed. Verhaeren is best in lyrics, occasional poems, which picture Flanders. In this, if I mistake not, he is great.Les Flamandsis a masterpiece. And so isVilles Tentaculaires. What can equal those portraits of the monks! He paints with words as Flemish artists painted, The van Ostade, (Adrian and Isaac), the Brothers Maris, later, for example. Nothing too humble.

He has given me pleasure. For forty years Flanders has had an increasingly talented company of men, in the novel, short story, verse, and in the history of art and art criticism, they have such commanding and accomplished figures as Dr. Josef Muls, whose books are available in most of the countries of the Continent in adequate translations. They are too little known, on this side the Atlantic. No one can count, it seems, the vagaries of editors who accept translations. Couperus, the Hollander, and Ibañez, the Spaniard, are not representative of the races to which they belong. Both, however, have been heralded as that by American editors.

As an editor Mr. Kreymborg is not a success. But I admire his individual work. It is genuine. It is original. It is unblushingly itself. I think Mr. Kreymborg a man of power in a new field. He has a strange, queer, colorless daintiness. He fine-foots it, with muffled vowels like a learned fugue of long ago. He is as afraid of their bold, gay, brass blatancy, as a small boy of a scare-crow, in a cherry garden. A quaint, low-voiced, dull-hued, crotchety, somewhat ill-tempered little figure, dreaming of conjuring worlds into vision, with dim, small gestures. May he multiply and grow fat!

Stuart Merrill dedicates a volume of poems to Verhaeren, whom I admire, with two lines so noble they should not be forgotten. He speaks of him as a

Nom qui sonne comme un fracas d’armesQu’un roi barbare aurait laissé choir dans la nuit.

Nom qui sonne comme un fracas d’armes

Qu’un roi barbare aurait laissé choir dans la nuit.

Albert Samain gives me something the sensation of those warmly lucid, those golden, early evenings of Lorraine which hold out life’s pitiful false promise of perfection. The same distilled imagined richness of the past! The picture of the pagan world snared his heart. His verse keeps the sensations ofun beau soir d’Italie. It is a magnificent antique world he saw, and knows how to show.

Chariot d’Or, by Samain, presents a way to journey with the mind, a little while, delightfully. Imagine if you can that this book of his went through eighteen editions, with speed, in France. What kind of verse-book could do that in America? Not one ofthisclass! You can not serve your soul and an editor’s taste, at the same time.And greed!In America gold must be served. And thenfamily!

Of his sonnet sequences I enjoy theVersailles Sequencebest. He learned how to make it from Heredia. But a good thing is good, bastard or honest-born. Lines cling to memory. Such for instance as:

Ce mépris de la mort, comme une fleur aux levres!

But it should not have closed with an exclamation point. Perhaps it did not! My memory is at fault. There is no need of blowing a trumpet after such a line.

Silvá, like Venice, is a phantom of delight, I can never forget. He wasan exquisite, on a level with Petronius, and he lived in a city to which patrician memories and the royal pride, of that royal race, the Spanish, had been transplanted, Bogotá.

He loved butterflies and childhood and the first early nights of May; fleeting things, light lovelinesses which pause only long enough to die. He loved the flight of swallows which he liked to call the wings of Spring.

I have read verses of his which give me exactly the same sensation as verses of the Greek Anthology.

Old windows were another passion of his. Very frequently occur the words,vieja ventana.

En la estrecha calle una muy vieja ventana colonialPenetrando al traves de los rejasde antigua ventanaEl cantor ...de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barraPer la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—...del espacio la negra sombreflitran por la ventana rayos de luna...

En la estrecha calle una muy vieja ventana colonial

Penetrando al traves de los rejasde antigua ventana

Penetrando al traves de los rejas

de antigua ventana

El cantor ...de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra

El cantor ...

de la vieja ventana se asiò a la barra

Per la antigua ventana que de sobre al jardin—

...del espacio la negra sombreflitran por la ventana rayos de luna...

...del espacio la negra sombre

flitran por la ventana rayos de luna...

I think of him as thepoet of windows. I wonder why they fascinated him so? Were they symbols of escape? Or did they spread out vistas for him? Always in his lines, for me, there is some maddening, unseizable beauty, which holds me helpless like a magnet, makes me a speechless, but willing prisoner.

His little posthumous book of verse (The greater number of his poems together with all his short stories and most of his prose, were lost in shipwreck on the Venezuelan coast.) is a musicale diary of his days,alas! so few. Here transformed, then preserved in beauty, we find fact.

A new use of recurrent sound, with him wholly personal, spots phrases with weird echoes, insistent wild, wayward emotion. There slips over us continually the sad shiver of faint, far fairy bells.

There are rhythms like the clash of armor-resonant; and rhythms like the shrill song of little yellow birds at dawn. He says that among verse-forms, the sonnet is king.

He can give perfectly the aroma of the season of the year.A few words.... I smell the winds of autumn in a high mountain-land and taste the purpling grape. All from three chained words of Silvá! Then I see white mist distort the meadows and feel the frost. He witches back the spirit of what has vanished, and with a lordly gesture. The past, perhaps, perfumed his dreams. The trembling fragility of his sensations is something almost beyond comprehension. I have received tremendous emotion from the haunting beauty of old windows, in old grey, stone-stucco, tinted, crumbling palaces of theconquistadores—after Silvá has taught me to see.

Silvá’sNocturnsare as rich as the twilights of Chopin. I wish I knew how to hand on his charm to others, in my colder English tongue! But no one will ever do it. Behind each word lie layer after layer of emotion, vision, all the hauntingly sweet, indefinite horizons of great poets, who have suffered.

No one could snare twice (I am thinking of the work of the translator) the suggestive charm of all these unseen landscapes of the soul, of space, of time, and over them the perfume of divine, unspeakable regret. TheNocturnsare windows, the windows of his soul, open upon forlorn and fanciful worlds, which allure too greatly, with some sad, not sufficiently forbidden fatality. The greater the poet, the richer his evocativeness.

He loved the faint blue light of tardy twilights; and white luminous August, with its restless clouds. He kept always a lingering backward glance toward the magic valleys of childhood.

In many languages I have read the poets of the world, but none have touched me quicker to the keen emotion which blasts the present, and whirls on toward the deeps. Like Goya in painting, he was one of the first to take the important step from the old to the new. In verse-forms, he was one of the path makers. Coll said he had built Silvá an altar in his heart.

I do not understand how a man could write such a charming book as Jacques Blanche wrote inDe David à Degas, and follow it with such inane useless things as theCahiers d’un Artiste. I regret I wasted money on a copy of the last set. I haven’t money to waste.

He wrote the art criticisms for love. He knew what he was talking about. He talked well.

He wrote the last for money, bolstered up by a questionable sense of duty to say something about war. He said it. His friends regret it.

The introduction to the book on art, is by Marcel Proust. It is delightful; fresh, spontaneous, joyous. I read it three times.

De David à Degasis a book of perceptions, just appreciations, knowledge. I was surprised, however, in his article on Whistler that he should omit the influence of incomparable Chinese and Japanese draftsmen. He can see but one influence, of course,France. He does not relish the genius of Whistler; he gives us to understand he was not so much,in Paris. He feels about Whistler as Conrad feels when he thinks of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant. Conrad was never really great. He merely coquetted with greatness. No page of Conrad ever satisfied my thirst for beauty! Perhaps English was not the proper garment with which to dress his soul!

Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an unacknowledgedpoint de départfor modernism. There is some unexplained law operative why a man of such genius as Condor can not grasp what is his during life. Is it envy of the base? Is it envy of the little ones? The little are always so greatly in the voting majority.

The portraits by Jacques Blanche in oil, are not more alluring than some he draws with pen. For instance, listen to this about Manet: ...ce joli homme blond, gracieux, elegant, à la cravate Lavalière bleue, à pois blancs. Does not that make you feel as if a friend said hello over the telephone, or a speckled trout nibbled your bait, on a bright blond morning of May? He makes delightful Fantin live again. He declares that after Courbet, Manet was the last painter of tradition.

Papini, wild-eyed Italian youth, with surprised up-standing hair, who editedLionardoin Florence is, in my opinion of slight consequence as poet, prose writer, philosopher. To put the cart before the horse, his philosophising is acute indigestion from too much Nietzsche, Kant, Jungs-Stilling, Hegel,et cetera ad infinitum. In this melange of German mind and northern morals, he was unable to see his surprised way, or anybody’s way. He read. He suffered. He vomited words. His philosophy isaccount of the peregrenations of a nostalgic, young and ambitious mind. His early verse might be called pretty, puerile, powerless. Lines like these are not great poetry:

Quaderno bianco, principio di giorno,Conto vergine pagina prima—non si parli di ritornoche in cima all’ultima cima.

Quaderno bianco, principio di giorno,

Conto vergine pagina prima—

non si parli di ritorno

che in cima all’ultima cima.

His verse is weak. His twenty little reasonings about verse are no better. There does not seem to be reason for being. They possess neither logic of art nor life, nor discrimination for the dull. However, in South America, in Buenos Aires (or as they say down there, B. A.), and in Rio, they prize him. I respect their opinion, those Spanish and Portugueseliterati. It may bemea culpa! They are ahead of us in appreciation of arts of the Old World.

I enjoy André Gide. And he lacks sense of form which belongs to Frenchmen. Few have written better of Verlaine. HisLes Nourritures Terrestrescontained lines I liked. Once in a while there flashes from his pages, a touch of the fine prose of France.

Nenewhich won aPrix Goncourt, is finely simple, without pose. It is sincere. The rejuvenating breath of fields is in this story of peasant life. Perhaps that is what French prose must do, like the giant in the fable of antiquity, go back to the soil, in order to leap up renewed, strengthened. The descriptions of nature have an unsought charm:Le soir tombait, un soir d’octobre....

Evening fell, an evening of October, lovely as an evening of summer, but holding keener, more grievous beauty, something more intimate that makes the soul shiver.

It has the poignancy, poetry I recall in early peasant scenes by Cazin, the same glory of yellowing fields; the same sadly serene peace of the sky.

El Encanto de Buenos Aires, by Gomez Carillo, is attractive. He is the Spanish Loti. Not so wonderful as master of words, of course, but worth consideration. He was one of that band of brilliant Spaniards who helped Rubén Darío editMundial, in Paris, the lamented Amado Nervo being of the number.

The book is well printed, pleasing typographically. Carillo, like Loti, loves the souls of far cities. He says in the introduction: ...mi alma siente la gracia de ciertas ciudades con una intensidad que los grandes ministros y los grandes periodistos desdeñan. Like Loti, he is a stylist, if not such a commanding one. I have followed him in various quarters of the globe. One I recall happily, is Egypt. He says he likes to watch resplendent stars he has never seen, rise from the lonely depths of oceans. Sometimes he forgets and becomes sentimental. It is easy to forgive, because so many times he forgets and then becomes artist. He has more than a little of Loti’s distinguished manner. He has sympathy, too!

His impression of New York pleases me. By New York I suppose he means America in general. The educated Spaniard, as a rule, keeps fine disdain of us, what he termsthose new uncultivated people, up north,known as Americans. Hear him:La vida ahi es un vertigo, y el hombre un iluminado o un automata, una maquina, o un delirio. De arte, de gusto, de armonia, de medida, de distincion, ni siquiera una idea tiene la metropoli norte americana en su existio callejero.There is some truth in this!

What makes this more interesting is that nowhere is there more what he callsvertigo, than in B. A., Rio. I read all their magazines. They are brilliant, just as aggregated diamonds are brilliant. This, what he has just been saying, is what Spanish and Portuguese neighbors think of us. I could not count the number who have said something similar to me. In it there is unconscious aristocratic disdain of king-lovers for a young, ill-bred, free, and too noisy people who boast of democracy when they do not boast of dollars. We bow our heads to the superiority of Latin culture. They swung a long time from Caesar’s coat-tail. We did not. In fact, we are just beginning to swing. And not from Caesar’s. The Spanish-Americans write noble, flexible prose. Carillo’s prose has rhythms both ample and fine.

He sends stinging arrows, some of which hit, at New York, Chicago, America. He is of the opinion that cities that are beautiful, (meaning those of the Old World), are dirty and uncomfortable. Ourcomfortableclean cities, on the other hand, are ugly. They are something with which he does not like to profane fine, sensitive eyes. He hates Broadway. His sensuous, sumptuous soul loves the lasting summer of rich hued tropic lands, their languid, their sapphire seas, and perfected luxury of living.

His description of what he callsOxford of the Argentine, makes me wish I were a boy, young, so I could go there. It is a magnificent idea, which the Spaniards have put into execution in this school, an idea worthy the dramatic genius of Latin peoples.

He becomes lyric over the avenues, parks, of Buenos Aires, in one of which he remembers to tell us he found Rodin’sThinker.

Carillo is learned. He possesses charm with power of distinguished seeing. I have read him for years. He is seldom disappointing, unless he writes a story. In the story he lacks architectural sense-structure.

La Lampara Maravillosa, by Valle-Inclán is a charming piece of book-making; richly illustrated, printed in two colors, red and black, and from theSociedad General Española de Libreria, Madrid. I have seen lovely books from there! I wish I could buy them all. Even if one could not read them, they are pleasant to look at, like objects of art.

Valle-Inclán is a dreamer, a maker of poetic prose. I recall a merry caricature of his long, thin, black, owl-eyed, glasses-berimmed Spanish face in a magazine of Mexico. Probably the magazine wasTricolor.

The Magic Lamp, in this book, renews memory, a memory rich with the accumulation of a thousand years. It has charm, inventive grace. There is a touch to be sure here and there in the prose of the Spanish church-fathers; something monastic, shadowed, hieratic, a trifle pedantic. The gesture of a priest, in short, a lingering, regretful, graceful gesture, for beauty of a world which is passing, and which he should not pause too often to see. His prose is great enough to serve as a model for writers.

He visited Mexico. I read his articles. His reactions to the new country interested me. This dreaming scholar sees best with eyes of the mind. The eyes of his body have weakened. In his heart he loves the beauty of Greece, Rome, the pagan world. At the same time, by birth, he is a priest of the Inquisition. He has their face, too; long, thin, pale ascetic. A long list of books, sensitive, delicately and powerfully written, stand to his credit. He is one of the most accomplished stylists.

Villaespesa, ofEl Espejo Encantado, was in Mexico at about the same time. His fancy was touched to furious flame by pre-historic, Toltec Mexico; the Indian past. He wrote sonnets about it. He reconstructed the romantic twilights of long ago, by fanciful, flower-burdened lakes inthat land of fabulous forgotten wealth, and prodigious palaces where, from ears of stone statues, scattered carelessly in gardens, pink pearls hung the size of pecans; and emeralds, gold, gems, had no value. He seemed especially ableto savorits sumptuousness, then to pass on the sensation to others. He has written well, too, of the African desert. He writes novels, plays, verse. Villaespesa is poet of old Spain,España vieja. He might be great. I do not know why he is not. He has power over words, and vision.

L’Atlantide, whose originality or non-originality they have quarreled over happily in French journals, is a peculiar novel for a Frenchman to write, because it is excellent example of what is known as Teutonic imagination. As to originality, referring to his idea of injecting something into bodies of living people which would turn them to stone, this was subject of a story by myself, calledThe Painter of Dead Women. It was first printed in theSmart Setmany years ago and later made one of a book of short stories calledDear Dead Women, published by Little, Brown & Company. It is the same thing,even in details, in which it is carried out. And my book, of course, never came to notice of the Frenchman. It is a case of two people having the same idea, which is not impossible. Many of us bend at the same moment over the great grey, shining, reflecting pool which is universal mind across which, in time, all pageants pass.

There are good sentences in Benoit’s novel, pleasant pictures of Africa. The old story ofLost Atlantiscontinues to fascinate like the faces of blond women. It is a dream of vanished delight which has floated over the world. In both that novel andPour Don Carlos, Benoit proves he knew better than almost any Frenchman today, how to handle the gripping moment.

I have had happiness with André Salmon’sL’Art Vivante. It is not a great book. Instead it is a satisfying one. I commend it to people who care to know painters of the new school.

He knows how to characterize. Please listen to this about Van Dongen, the Hollander who paints women so luxuriously:Anacreon venu de pays des Kermesses, petit-neveu de Ruben’s, ignorant des mythologies, matelot ivre fournissant une pacotille galant aux sirènes, Van Dongen est un peu tout cela.

I hope I shall never by accident, as I know I shall not by intention, wander into sad village streets of Vlaminck! They are things of astonishing power. The first one I saw made me suffer like a nightmare. Some stern, grief-tempered soul I trust I shall be spared the misery of meeting, looks out of his canvasses. The vision of Vlaminck is hard, cruel, tears the world to pieces. The tragedies that have been written can not equal the imagined terrors of what must go on within those shabby dwellings whose sad exteriors, he doubles, then redoubles, by hard reflection in cold, clear surfaces of ill-kept canals, or lonely rivers.

The water is deep, clean, magnificently reflecting. The sky is angry, threatening, or else profoundly sad, as if from many tears. But the colors are fresh, insistent, ringing, proud. The brushing is joyous. It is sure and powerful. The structural similarity of his pictures is unusual. But his range is slight, and limited. His blues, greens, have primitive simplicity that contrasts with the too sophisticated structure. The inelasticity of melancholy, of depressing winters by sullen unhappy seas of the north that wearily await spring is here.

I found, the other day, a Gauguin, that is magnificently savage. Two standing women; fine, bare, brown bodies, wearing twisted about the waist, one dark blue, the other high, haunting red that keep the key of their flesh. An acrid yellow-green background with a dark, gum-pink hill. Splendid color pattern! There is something about it that renews the senses. I can drink of it with my eyes then feel good. In this same collection there was a luscious autumn by Guillamin. It reminded me of delicate flesh of tropic melons which I have seen but could not name, in lonely islands, by the Carib Sea. A level foreground, delicately tufted; dry, dull orange-yellow; faint, red-touched violet. A line of plaintive trees; one or two green, round, fat, the others faint; fragile ghosts of gold. A sky that balances daintily but deliberately both green and blue; with trailing, regretful clouds of autumn; grey, yellow, violet.

The harsh, quick assertiveness of Matisse was here; large-patterned, aggressive in hue; but strong, resonant.

Toulouse Lautrec has four portraits which are infinitely sophisticated of line, quick of touch, crisp. Memorable work; too disillusioned, but kept carefully in a low key.

Salmon, writing usually in the grand manner of French prose of the past, about men in paint of the present, who do not believe in the grandmanner (stage sweat and swagger), nor the great gesture, says startling things. Hear! Hear!Et dans sa demi-retraite André Derain achevant les œuvres peut-être les plus vastes de son tempsand so forth. (André Derain putting the finishing touches to works which perhaps are the most vast of the age.) Derain’s figure paintings are unlike his landscapes. The figure paintings are of the past; the landscapes of today.

I recall a canvas by Derain I saw in Paris: A road in the south of France somewhere, magic in simplicity; not easily disentangled charm. I carry it in my memory. It is massive, with God-like mastery of some vast disturbing chaos. Troubling! The world’s new eyes are sometimes things to consider. And with care.

Adonis is dead and the Loves are lamenting!

I quote Greek song in honor of Apollinaire, to whose pen-magic moderns in the plastic arts owe introduction first to fame, secondly, to dollars, then dinners, in regular, non-dwindling succession.

Ah, Apollinaire!delightful vagabond of art. Apollo’s second son and namesake! I regret you! My consolation must be to buy as many of your earlier writings as I can.NinevehI long for as the hungry for food. Please pageNineveh, Apollinaire, for me in your bright Paradise! I am sureNinevehis there. And you too!

Strangest of contrasts in Apollinaire, is that he, leader of the moderns, should have liked old-fashioned, sentimental, romantic writers of Germany such as Chamisso....The longing for something afar....

Maurice Barrés’Greco, Le Secret de Tolède, has firm, accurate upbuilding; architectural drawing. It gives surety, poise, reliability. Finely done, clear, precise, nobly visioned, with no yawning gaps to be filled futilely. He writes delightfully. He is an old friend, he who tried to establishle culte du moi, something old as the hills, because it is what all artists set out to do, but which he succeeded in doing better perhaps than the rest.

The prose of Barrés resembles mural paintings by de Chavannes:bleu de ciel, against which white intellectualized figures move. There is an occasional shred of gleaming gold.

The golden age of the colored race is right ahead of us. The concept,superiority, is something strange. That joy which civilization has been for centuries draining out of the white race, is stored in them; civilization has killed. If we are to continue to create, something will have to come to light our hearts, and then later on to warm them.

We shall soon have good writing from them, the colored race, painting, music, art, in every department of creative accomplishment. The work is begun.

When the colored mind flowered in the past, the result has been something original, or of rare quality. Stored within them is supply of that joy without which no one can create. In joy, art is rooted.

Two fluent writers had negro blood, Puschkin and Dumas. There may have been negro blood in Heredia, ofThe Sonnets. There may have been a trace of it in the ancestry of Hearne, whose mother was born on one of the islands south of Greece, across which tides of conquest for centuries drifted. The contrary indeed can not be proved. Negro blood influenced the brush of some of Spain’s greatest painters, and it may have been mingled in its Moorish poets. Is it not more than probable that it formed part of the racial inheritance of Matisse, Gauguin? There may have been a trace of negro blood inEl Poeta de America, Darío, who is not so much poet of America as of the world, because of cosmopolitan training. An astonishing example of receptivity, he, who came from South America to France, and at one gulp swallowed, digested, the cultivation of Europe. In this receptivity I can think of but one parallel: Russian minds of the Eighteenth Century, like Lomonosov’s.

It is too bad there is no good translation of Darío! Could square-toed Saxon reproduce such a poem as hisAire Suavewith its fluted, fairy-like fine-stepping?

Era un aire suave, de pausados giros;El hada Harmonia ritmaba sus vuelos;E iban frases vagas y tenues suspirosEntre los sollozes de los violoncelos.

Era un aire suave, de pausados giros;

El hada Harmonia ritmaba sus vuelos;

E iban frases vagas y tenues suspiros

Entre los sollozes de los violoncelos.

It was a quarter of a century ago, I believe, that the part-negro poet of Venezuela, Mata, put outPentelicas. Since, his output has been considerable,Grito Bohemio,Idilio Tragico. The last is calledArias Sentimentales. From this volume I quote a verse of the Nocturn:

Al tragico reprochede la sombra a la luz, la flor secretade la esperanza recogio su broche,cual recoge su broche la violeta.La noche al fine, poeta!Poeta, al fin la noche!

Al tragico reproche

de la sombra a la luz, la flor secreta

de la esperanza recogio su broche,

cual recoge su broche la violeta.

La noche al fine, poeta!

Poeta, al fin la noche!

The years have made him gloomy. He is tragic, sad. He is a man of cultivation.

At end of the Third and beginning of the Fourth Century of our era, there was a scholar, a Rhetorician, of Negro blood, living in Africa, who was a man of power. His name was Arnobe. He wrote the Latin tongue from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains. It is from him we know best how far south from the Mediterranean, the prodigious cultivation of Rome penetrated. He had the instincts, some of the training, of a scholar. He made attempt to classify dialects of the people among whom he lived, to show in what condition Latin, as spoken language, survived. His contribution to linguistic knowledge has not been slight. There was a man called Leo the African, who about 1511, traveled extensively in the Black Continent, and wrote in Arabic descriptions of Fez, Timbuctoo, the great rivers, and his experiences in crossing the Sahara. Early in the Seventeenth Century he was translated into French and I seem to remember the Elzevir Press published his books. I recall another interesting book (Seventeenth Century) about the Great Black Merchant, Buchor Sano, who declared there were still houses in his country with roofs of gold.

Olandah Egniano was an African; his moving story of how he was kidnapped, then brought to America in a slave ship, is more than interesting. The date was 1793. One of the earliest dramaticvoyagesto the African West Coast was made long before the discovery of America, by that indefatigable Portuguese explorer, Gomes Azurara, who was born in 1434. Other valiant Portuguese adventurers, such as Filippo Pigafetta, made many charming maps, some of them heightened with color, of Africa, in the early days. The first Hollander to describe the coast of the Great Black Continent was Marees, in 1617.

As long ago as 1808 aHistory of the Literature of the Negrowas published, somewhat lavishly, in France. The book adds a rather long list of Negroes who have written upon science and art.

Stored in the Negro, there is an unexpanded race-soul, which will be one of the future’s gifts. Whatever art in the U. S. of North America happens to be, in that the Negro will have part credit as originator.

I have visited a collection of works of Degas. Marvellous, luscious color, clothing bodies that are ugly, drawn with scorn, rage; contempt for that which is women. The walls flashed colors that make the heart ache; masterly drawing, drawing that contains the skill of surgeon and observer.

No. 64—A green we dream in English springs. Fresh, impatient brushing in! The usual daring, unplanned arrangement. The intrepidity of individual vision united with quaint, appealing ugliness of costume.

No. 59—An interior with two women. Neither is young nor beautiful. Both are soberly clad. They wear black bonnets. Superb assurance of brush lends interest. The white of a curtained window back of them, rich with faint shadow-modeling, tones in which onefeelsjade, sad pink. A dull rose on front of a bonnet gleams derisively. Painted in high, fine rhythm.

No. 1—Masterly drawing in black of an ugly woman, whose hair keeps royal shades of red-amber. In the line that shows it there is the joy of great Chinese masters. But it does not equal them because nothing can do that.

No. 14—A small picture of three women. Drawn sharply, crisply; and with black. Marvellous brushing in of yellow fluted ballet skirts. It gives sensation of a chrysanthemum torn in a too cold wind of autumn. Behind the body of the standing woman, a wash of red, dramatic, splendid. It has effect of one of the prolonged, prodigious notes of Caruso. A fine, angry, dominant note, like an outflung cloud of storm. There is one touch of green; subtle, wondrous.

No. 63—A woman seated, combing red hair. She wears a yellow robe. Behind her a dash of blue of unequalled depth. The general effect upon the senses is of luscious, tropical fruit one may not name. Over all superb, dry surface light.

No. 39—Large canvas. Two dancers. Drawn in black against vague green. Upon the skirt of the first dancer, a dash of magenta, of orange, so splendid it recalls wild audacities of South American orchids. Something to dream over forever! Intensities, that could have been born only in the mind of a solitary genius like Degas.

No. 60—Long picture of two seated dancers. They wear skirts of pink that make one commit sudden infidelity to the memory of Watteau. This, against a yellow, rare, too lovely.

The color-key of each picture catches, then holds you with emotion, as music does. Imperative, inescapable things, made so seldom we can afford to take time to consider them.

Brushing in as beautiful, blond, unforgettable, as summer over northern seas.

No. 4—Figures of three dancers. They make a striking ensemble. They have the firm totality of carved jade. Blue of a haunting but slightly acid tint. The daring emphasis of ugly things.

No. 26—The picture keeps the effect of blown flame in some boisterous wind of spring, or neglected nasturtiums in a burnished, overturned British garden. With beauty, one somehow remembers England! A group of ballet girls; gay spirits.

No. 40—Again ballet girls. Sober. Restrained. Distinguished. A wall of sullen, silken yellow. A yellow that only Arabian or Indian textiles know. Gauguin would have loved it.

Degas sometimes shows pale, regretful blue that attunes the mind like a melody of Schumann, heard when November snows begin to fall, then filter flower-bought sunlight. Like chalcedony! Colors personal, that expressed the lonely soul that could find no pleasure in people. His pleasure, his companionship, was in tone the rainbow knows in unreachable heavens.

He knew purples, pinks, that quickened his heart. He knew talkative, loquacious yellows that were like sensations. He knew savage, slashing reds, hues of crime and temptation, that gave him the feeling of languorous liaisons, flattered, foolish gayety with women; love; delightful debauchery. He knew greys that kept the self-commendatory feeling of discipline and restraint.

This was the way he was active and energetic. In imagination he dashed across lush, green hunting fields, with the wet, warm wind on his mouth, hounds at his heels, and gay companions, and grew dizzy at the scent of the grasses. This was life. This was society for him. He never allowed anything to divert him from his one joy,painting.

Never for a moment was he unfaithful. There was nothing that could tempt him. Therefore his reward was great. He spilled the goldcoin of his heart like a dazzled spendthrift. His buying was commensurate. Only the generous, the self-forgetful, can buy as he did.

Art critics have given scant attention, and measured scantily, their courtesy to Tami Koume, Japanese extremist in painting. But sometimes there are more things concealed in painting than even in the philosophy of critics, good in concealing or great in ignorance.

Here modernism is manipulated by a wizard Eastern hand, and seen, then estimated through the ancient trained mind of the Orient. He expresses what he thinks by line, color, without confusing form, without complexity of object; telltale, indiscreet fact. In this way it is art purified.

He gives his brush, sensations music gives. He has done well. He has a spiritual subtlety that did not belong to French and Italians who did the same thing, something of a more exquisite, older race.Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.Koume has brought unheard melodies.

Essentials of sensation, line, color, have become revolutionists, forsworn allegiance to fact. They have started independent existence. Like lost ships on uncharted oceans, they are careening toward the unknown.

No. 7—Only the deep sea when it weaves pearls can equal the dumb loveliness of this, by Koume. This spirit was working in painting on silk, made in China, centuries ago. It would not have astonished Sung Masters. They knew rhythms like these, they understood weight, and unweighable excellences of structure, felt subtly by ancient people, who have known Loveliness long enough not to be vexed with her, in any mood. And always at least, on friendly terms.

At last I have seen paintings by Ilya Repin! I thought the time would never come when I could. To see them means a trip to Russia. They are full of enjoyment and feeling. They are vehement, passionate, proud; and pagan in beauty; rich in firm characterization. His famousBlack Sea Pirates(large canvas) does not need a frame. Curiously enough the pale green foam of the pictured sea frames it. It is as important as the boat, or its occupants.

The portrait of his son, Yuri, likewise a painter whose canvasses of the Finnish Sea I have seen, is eloquent. Picture to yourself a face pale, dark, expressive, impassioned. It might symbolize Russia’s poet of tragic days, in youth, Puschkin. I could with difficulty look away.

The head is slightly turned to the left, a pose frequently chosen by Repin. He wears a coffee-colored caftan, bordered dully with white. He has dark brown eyes; large, beautiful, soulful. He has brown, dark, wavy hair; thick, a trifle long. The gesture of the folded arm and shoulder-line is arresting, peculiarly noble. The poetry of the Don Cossack country, the songs Schevschenko wrote in youth by the shores of rivers great as seas, are in the face. I recalled a song I translated years ago, from this Cossack poet, while I was looking at it:

Back to Index Next