Volume 24 29
Croniamantal protests furiously against this perse-
cution of the artists, and pays with his life. Yet
Apollinaire leaves an undertone of criticism not
only of the rash generalizations of the glorifiers of
science, but also against the artist who has partially
merited the attack. The fault for this apparent im-
potence of poets is partly the public’s, that public
which demands boredom and unhappiness as the
subject matter of literature instead of magic such
as is expected of the modern scientist and even of
the acrobat. As for Croniamantal, he is Apolli-
naire’s concept of the authentic twentieth-century
artist, one who has looked God in the face:
I am Croniamantal, the greatest of living poets. I have
often seen God face to face. I have borne the divine
refulgence which my human eyes made softer. I have
lived eternity.He is killed by the science worshipper, who does
not realize that Croniamantal is not a stereotype
poet. His sculptor friend, cognizant of the hard
times through which poets are passing, manages to
build him a statue, an extraordinary one, “une pro-
fonde statue en rien,” ironically symbolic of the
emptiness of art and glory, also indicating that the
substance of which the true poet is made is undis-
tinguishable to ordinary eyes.
Although in Le Poète assassinéthe conflict be-
tween science and art ends in tragedy and defeat
for the artist, Apollinaire defied in his own life and
writings the secondary role attributed to the artist
in the world of new values. He sought a concilia-
tion between the work of the scientist and of the
modern artist. He called himself and those like him
“pilgrims of perdition” because they were risking
what intellectual security they had as artists to ex-
plore the uncertain and the unproven.
Although his conjectures about the potentiali-
ties of the modern mind were most precisely stated
in an article, “L’Esprit moderne,” which appeared
in the Mercure de Francein 1918 shortly after his
death, he had been crystallizing these views since
his earliest associations with the artistic and liter-
ary coteries of Paris.
The need for inventiveness to preserve the
prestige of the twentieth-century artist in competi-
tion with the twentieth-century technologist was
first illustrated through Apollinaire’s negative re-
action to the existing imitative character of early
twentieth-century writings and their author’s
concern with autobiographical lamentations. This
critical attitude is particularly apparent in his eval-
uation of the current novel, of which he was the
principal reviewer on the staff of La Phalangefor
a number of years early in his literary career. Even
when commending the originality of a novel such
as Tzimin-Chocby Louis-Bréon he makes of it an
opportunity to chide the average contemporary
novelist and expresses the hope that a change of di-
rection is at hand:
Wonder should be the primary concern of the novel-
ist, we should abandon for a while—long enough to
realize what reality is—all this false realism which
overwhelms us in most novels of today, and which
is only platitude. Under pretext of following the trend
for psychological and sentimental naturalism, most
authors do not even need to have recourse to their
imagination any longer. Autobiography is all that is
needed, and those who take the trouble to invent the
most insignificant little story become famous. They
have almost no competition to fear. But things ap-
pear to be changing. Imagination seems to be re-
claiming its rightful place in literature.
While literature had been neglecting imagination,
science had learned to make maximum use of it. It
had cast aside the known patterns of matter and
through ingenuity had created new ones. Science’s
contribution in Apollinaire’s opinion was its abil-
ity to give to reality a relative meaning and thus to
liberate it from its established synonymity with the
natural.The unnatural could become a reality, as
twentieth-century objects, which had no connection
with nature, were proving more conclusively every
day. The factory worker was all the time creating
reality. The automobile had a dynamic existence
which removed Apollinaire from the old world and
its limited concepts; candidly he states it in his
poem, “La Petite Auto:”
Nous dîmes adieu à toute une époque...
Nous comprîmes mon camarade et moiAlwaysPerhaps art,
following more and more in
Apollinaire’s footsteps, may
rid itself of its apologetic
attitude and find, as
Apollinaire hoped, that
after all the world is just
beginning and imagination
has yet to come of age.”