Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/225

Rh ,” 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