Silvá’s Nocturns are 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. The Nocturns are 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 in De David à Degas, and follow it with such inane useless things as the Cahiers 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 Degas is 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!