Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an unacknowledged point de départ for 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 edited Lionardo in 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 is account 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 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 Portuguese literati. It may be mea 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. His Les Nourritures Terrestres contained lines I liked. Once in a while there flashes from his pages, a touch of the fine prose of France.
Nene which won a Prix 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....