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.