Volume 24 31
art, contended that the true artist tends to be inhu-
man: “They painstakingly search for the traces of
inhumanity, traces which are to be found nowhere
in nature.”
He discovered in the works of the cubists the
fourth dimension of reality, which he deemed not
only an act of creation but of divinity. This new
dimension was conveyed by simultaneous repre-
sentations in various perspectives, giving the im-
pression of the immensity of space which pointed
in all directions at the same time and suggested the
infinite. The cubists were thereby producing,
according to Apollinaire, a fusion of science and
metaphysics. Through his observations of the
cubists’ activities he was able to make a crucial dis-
tinction between the new and the old mental for-
mation of the artist: the traditional artist is a sieve
of human experiences and, stimulated by the muse
of inspiration, he is a facile interpreter of life; while
the new artist, like the scientist, plods from effort
to effort in the process of construction, unaided by
divine inspiration, but possessing himself the grains
of divinity.
Apollinaire’s friendship with Picasso, Braque,
Picabia and the Douanier Rousseau made him a bet-
ter apologist for the new art than the painters them-
selves could have been, thus setting a precedent for
closer association between the arts of painting and
writing, a relationship which was to prove so sig-
nificant and influential in the development of
dadaism and surrealism.
The influence of ideas is a subtle thing and an
elastic one. To what extent an individual is the orig-
inator and principal propagator of concepts can be
a subjective evaluation. Certainly in the writings of
several early century thinkers there are to be found
parallel challenges to the new artist to become con-
cretely creative. Saint-Pol-Roux, that remarkable
esthetician too long associated exclusively with
symbolism, had made in his analysis of current ten-
dencies in French literature in 1913 the same pre-
diction as Apollinaire in regard to the viability of
art under the stress of science’s competition: “Not
to reproduce but to produce. The whole future of
art seems to be there.” Similarly Max Jacob, who
was Apollinaire’s friend and contemporary, laid the
same stress on inventiveness and the faculty of us-
ing concrete imagery in his Conseils à un jeune
poète;and the gifted young poet, Pierre Reverdy,
was seeing in cubism in 1917 much the same thing
as Apollinaire and expressing it in almost the same
words: “an art of creation and not of reproduction
or interpretation.” And strangely, in an issue of La
Phalange,at the time when Apollinaire was book
reviewer of it, there appeared the translation of an
article by the American, Gerald Stanley Lee, ex-
plaining the modern writers’ fear of the machine
and deploring their melancholy attitude toward it.
The artist, he said, is afraid of the machine only be-
cause he has let himself be dominated by it instead
of emulating the attitude of mind which created it.
The examples could be multiplied; Apollinnaire’s
importance lies not so much in being the origina-
tor of an attitude as in having stated it more
provocatively and held to it more persistently than
his contemporaries. His ideas on art did not remain
in the realm of theories but were illustrated con-
sciously in the major part of his poetic work.
Apollinaire was not a suggestive artist in the
way that the symbolists have been found to have
developed the art of suggestion. Like the magician
whom he wished to emulate, the poet tried to in-
fuse his work with unexpected sparks: visions con-
cretely resplendent and limitless, meant to surprise
and mystify the reader in the manner of one who
pulls a rabbit out of his sleeve. The old artistic aim
was to arouse the emotions of the reader or spec-
tator; now art was to be a sort of jovial game to
create not pity nor empathy, but wonder—and
sometimes irritation.
His earliest poetical work, L’Enchanteur pour-
rissant(1909), in which he depicts the imprison-
ment of the enchanter by those who exploited his
power but also prophesies the magician’s eventual
resurrection, ends with a piece of writing called
“Onirocritique,”which is a natural appendix to his
work. It represents Apollinaire’s earliest example
of inventive writing: in an apocalyptic vision of the
universe he combines creatures and disintegrates
them into a hundred feet, eyes, in an ever-changing
panorama; sounds are transformed into beings, si-
lence into movement, trees consume stars; and
each reader is left with his own interpretation of
the imagery.
In Alcools(1913), his first collection of verse,
we find instances of the same mixture of perspec-
tives and sensations. Just as the technologist formed
a new world of realities with existing matter, Apol-
linaire believed that words could make and unmake
a universe. He attempted to use his “five senses and
a few more” to string side by side images often log-
ically disconnected, demanding of the reader leaps
and bounds of the imagination to keep pace with
his self-characterized “oblong” vision. His dislo-
cations of temporal and spatial perspective defy or-
dinary reality but are of this earth in their tactility,Always