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, called _The
Painter of Dead Women_. It was first printed in the _Smart Set_ many
years ago and later made one of a book of short stories called _Dear
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 of _Lost Atlantis_ continues 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 and _Pour 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’s _L’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
grand manner (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 temps_ and 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. _Nineveh_ I long for as the hungry
for food. Please page _Nineveh_, Apollinaire, for me in your bright
Paradise! I am sure _Nineveh_ is 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 establish _le 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, of _The 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 in _El 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 his _Aire Suave_ with 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 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 out _Pentelicas_. Since, his output has
been considerable, _Grito Bohemio_, _Idilio Tragico_. The last is
called _Arias Sentimentales_. From this volume I quote a verse of the
Nocturn:
_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 dramatic
_voyages_ to 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 a _History of the Literature of the Negro_ was
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 one _feels_ jade, 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 gold coin
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 famous _Black
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:
When I die I pray you bury
Me upon a hill,
Where the great steppe’s circles widest
My Ukraine Land fill,
That the broad out-spreading meadows,
The great river’s shore,
And the bright on-rushing Dneiper
I may see, and hear the roar,
When it sweeps the foreign soldiers—
The red blood of them we slew—
Far away where skies are blandest
Where my dear Ukraine lies blue.
The face has the warm, slightly sensual pallor, we see in painted
dreams of proud Italian masters. An eloquent, impassioned brush
caresses it to life. Yuri died during The War. Not long after this
memorable portrait was made by his father! It stands for an ideal of
Cossack youth.
Repin is a portraitist! Russian subtlety combined with forceful line.
His portrait of Kerensky is interesting. It shows a blond, youthful
figure with indecision in it. He is painted sitting by an open
window, through which falls light strangely ruddy; a little wild. The
line is sure, quick.
The single portrait of a _Black Sea Pirate_ is superb. Dramatically
poised; brutal. It keeps wise contrast of pale blue and angry red,
between which the brown, naked body rises; strong, muscled, slender.
There is hint of Greece in this Black Sea body.
Repin has a brownish-yellow that is his. It is a dream of the deserts
of his ill-fated Eastern forbears, under some slanting, despairing
sun of desert autumn. His other _Black Sea Pirate_ has a different
face, one of Mongol type, with controlled, still, ill-concealed
ferocity of Asia. Past ages speak dazzlingly here.
_The Bandoura Player_ is gorgeous! A noble bit of color, with
strength of some sublime, some savage past. There is red in it which
totals the cruel splendor of a century of lost Black Sea sunsets. It
fires muscular edge of arms, shoulders. It blazes, a sun which can
not set, upon the head. There is something in form of the standing
musician that is tantamount to defiance of death, destiny. There is,
too, the flash of white teeth in song! The line of youth, and lift
of love. Behind, a sky troubled, indeterminate; a sky with something
of the sweet _souplesse_ of sound. A figure of glorious daring,
unequalled spontaneity. Proud! Resentful! There is redoubling of
rose-hues at end of the _bandoura_. It is echo of his song. With the
brush Repin is a profound historian. History, perhaps, is written
most weakly with words.
It is not easy to estimate what the poetry of such a technician,
such a powerful virtuoso in words as d’Annunzio, was to me in an
isolated village upon the plains, where everything was ugly, cheap,
except the magnificent land-levels, and the sunsets. And it is not
easy to estimate either how hard it was to get money to buy the
books. New Italian writers came high. They were not procurable in the
inexpensive outputs of older men. And then the long waiting for books
to come. I ordered from Italy. When they did come, I literally wore
out the pages of _Canto Novo, Intermezzo_.
I went around like a sleep walker for days. I forgot to eat. I
sat up at night. I increased, if possible, the disapproval, the
ill-concealed hatred of my relatives. It burst upon my thirsty,
surprised senses like stars at midnight. The beating beauty of broken
worlds was flung about me. It dazzled me. I published in obscure
newspapers, the first translations from d’Annunzio to be printed in
English.
My money reached only to buy one more verse-book—_Isottea_, and
one novel: _Le Vergini della Rocce_. To read, where I lived, _in
the daytime_, was one shade less criminal than stealing. I was a
convicted culprit of long standing. The neighbors looked at me with
untranslatable expressions in depths of their eyes, just as you look
at people who have recently served a prison term.
I bought Leopardi (his verse), next. He was an older writer. He did
not cost so much. I could procure a copy for a few _lire_. I waited
all one long hot summer for that book to come. I read his magnificent
_Ode to the Moon_ by light of a prairie moon no whit less lovely, in
a sky no less purple tinged and cloudless, than that of Italy.
_Dove vai silenziosa luna?_
When I read it over again today, and the _Hymn to an Asiatic
Shepherd_, I see the superb, languid moons of autumn above the
plains, as they looked long ago. I sweep back the years; I become
young again, and happy. That is one of the great poems of the world.
And written by one of the world’s exquisite artists.
Leopardi was a favorite of Gladstone. I translated then and
published, Gladstone’s favorite among his verses, _The Infinite_.
Gladstone ranked him with masters of antiquity, Greeks of flawless
technique. It was from the Greeks he learned his technique, lofty
standards, unswerving measure of judgment.
When I finished reading what was inside the book, I read all the
advertisements on both covers, over and over. There is no shabby
writing done by people who have been thoroughly _thrashed_ through
their Greek and Latin.
One can sit in reverence before the great soul of Leopardi, as
one sits at foot of Attic marbles, dumb, worshipful, dazed with
unreachable beauty. Someone should coin a phrase for him as fine
as Gautier coined for Tertullian. I wrote to Italian publishers
to send me lists of their new books. Out of these lists I got the
same pleasure a hungry cat gets out of a canary in a lovely, gold,
glittering, swinging cage.
It was months before I could buy another book. When at length
the pennies were scraped together, the selection was careful and
painstaking, like that of a miner sifting gold. I at length decided
upon the _Odi Barbare_ of Carducci, to whom Dante’s words apply
without strain: _Degli alti poeti ognore e lume_.
Reading Carducci gives something the sensation of looking at
the etchings which Piranesi made of Rome; noble, imperial,
history-freighted, unforgettable.
The only difference is that Piranese made his pictures upon paper,
while Carducci chiseled upon resisting stone. I have always liked
best the ode to Rome, entitled merely _Roma_.
_Roma ne l’aer tuo lancio l’anima altira Volante,
accogli o Roma e avvolgi l’anima mia di luce,
Non curioso a te de le cosa piccole io vengo,
Chi le farfalle cerca sotto l’arco di Tito?_