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April, 1858, of an old and noble family of painters, engravers, and printers. He went to Paris in 1883, and obtained a position in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but was dismissed after two or three years because of an article―Joujou Patriotisme-in which he proposed an alliance between France and Germany. He was on the editorial staff of the Mercure de France, for which he wrote to his last days. Before the war he had created a magnificent type of the Philistine, M. Croquant. When I saw him for the first time, in 1906, he gave me the impression of a weary friar smothered in books, with two great vivid eyes and a thick-lipped mouth. I saw him for the last time in 1914, at the Café de Flore, on the Boulevard Saint Germain, with his friend Apollinaire. He had been very sick, and could hardly speak. A sort of lupus disfigured one side of his face, but he kept up his thinking and his writing with a marvelous and obstinate courage. An article every day for La France; a dialogue every fortnight for the Mercure.

In Italy he ought to be well known. He wrote for several Italian reviews: for the Rassegna Internazionale, the Marzocco and Lacerba of Florence, and for the Flegrea of Naples. Sem Benelli wrote of him in the Emporium, Giuseppe Vorluni in the Flegrea.

Today the troubles of the world are leading us back to religion and to humility, and Remy de

Gourmont might seem to have outlived his time. But his time would have returned.

return.

And it will

Every death is a summons for payment. All those who knew him should pay their debts of affection. This is the beginning of my tribute.

XV

ARDENGO SOFFICI1

I

ARDENGO SOFFICI, born in 1879 at Rignano on the Arno, now a second lieutenant in an infantry battalion, is one of the most singular, most novel, and most perfect writers of the present day. In 1905, when he came back from France to become again an Italian and a writer, I was alone in recognizing his excellence. There are many today who share in that recognition, and the number will steadily increase.

Soffici did not find himself till he was nearly thirty, but he will endure the longer-as is the case with all those who have not wasted their energies in the disordered precocities of youth. He has already won a place, and a high place, in painting and in poetry.

He is extraordinarily versatile. I have seen him cover walls with frescoes, paint earthenware vases, carve wood, emboss leather, help a printer to set up difficult passages in his "lyric com

1

Written à propos of Soffici's Bif§zf+18, Florence, 1915.

pounds," imitate still-life groups on sheets of cardboard with bits of newspapers, scissors and paste, dash off newspaper articles and pages of a diary while at the café, and explain the mysteries of difficult poems and paintings, with a witty eloquence, to the hardest heads.

At times he is the most refined lyrist who has ever interwoven foreign and Italian words; at times he is the brilliant painter who with a few strokes on a sheet of blue paper creates for you a world of pure metaphysical form; then the exact and brilliant raconteur who compresses a whole romance into half a column or enlarges a village anecdote to the dimensions of an epic; then the clear, lucid, persuasive interpreter who plays with theories as a Japanese entertainer plays with fans, who condenses the most paradoxical abstractions into transparent paragraphs; then at last the elegant jongleur who between one breath and the next fuses the marvels of earth, sky, and sea in a pyrotechnic display of brilliant magic.

Thus in appearance he seems at first sight a disdainful and distinguished gentleman balancing the pyramids of the absolute on the smoke of his cigarettes; then he reveals the drawn and clouded face of a Baudelaire; then you take him for a substantial Tuscan countryman deeply rooted in his flowery soil, hale and hearty with a festive sobriety; and all of a sudden he turns

out to be a cosmopolitan dandy, expert in all the refinements of many capitals. There are days when his serious, clerical face gives you the impression of a fanatic friar ready to die for his faith; and there are days when he suggests a gay and acrobatic Pierrot. He may play the subverter of tradition, mocking old ways more cruelly than any futurist; and the next day he will make you see the beauty and the fineness of a sentence of Manzoni or a line of Leopardi as no professional man of letters will ever do.

The secret of his charm lies in the changing wealth of his many aspects. He is at the same time an aristocrat and a man of the people, a Tuscan of the Valdarno and a Parisian, a theorist and a lyrist, a devotee and a libertine, a fanatic and a dilettante, profound and transparent. Like the clear water of the Ambra which runs by his home, his polytheistic sensitiveness mirrors the infinite variety of the world, and renders it more delicate and more beautiful.

II

But in all this lively transformation of the spirit one quality remains dominant. Ardengo Soffici is at all times, and beyond all else, an artist. An artist when he tells of others, when he tells of himself, when he amuses himself by

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