Paris has worked perhaps too much upon Picasso. It has made him a “court” painter. This is intrinsically no ill thing: Ronsard and Racine were poets of the Court. The essential dynamism of Picasso has been urbanized; his intellectual stuffs have been turned at times into theory, into impulse. From creation, he has been deflected into analysis which is the antithesis of creation.[43] All this, because Paris is a Court of painters, with the tendency to cultivate the statement which clarifies at the expense of the creation; to address only itself; to polish surfaces rather than plumb new depths. Or, perhaps, the trouble is that this Court of Paris is not Picasso’s. It has needed him, more than he Paris. Too often has Picasso fragmented his invention into sharp annunciations of the theory others builded from his work. Yet for all that, he has brought light to the west: it came with him from Málaga: it rises from Andalusian depths older than Spain and yet forever Spanish. * * * * * Juan Ramón Jiménez[44] has come far indeed since the early poems and the sweet idyll, _Platero y Yo_, which appeared in 1907. That book was written in a prose crisp as young leaves. Yet it was the conveyancer of old emotions. The poet’s spirit was already old; only his senses urged him to the gait of youth. Such delicacy promised rather to crack than to reveal in later years what is perhaps the profoundest poetic intelligence today in Europe. Jiménez has lost the audience which his earlier work won him. He is very little read. He has sloughed off cleverness and minor sentiment. His work has become stark and stripped. He has gone from exquisite grace to a virtuosic clumsiness and uncouthness, which brings astoundingly close the face of truth, and turns it into a strange, impersonal thing. He has become a recluse. Yet his seclusion has not divorced him from contact on his own terms with his generation. No poet serves youth more sedulously than he. He is the master and the friend of the young poets of Castilian, not alone in Spain but in the greater Spain across the sea. He is in touch with Paris, with Germany and Austria. And he has read the work of Whitman, of Emily Dickinson, of Frost, of Robinson and Sandburg....