The French are not unwilling to believe that they are the heirs of Greece and Rome.  So, if I am right, the extraordinary influence of Derain may be accounted for partly, at any rate, by the fact that he, above all living Frenchmen, has the art to mould, in the materials of his age, a vessel that might contain the grand classical tradition.  What is more, it is he, if anyone, who has the strength to fill it.  No one who ever met him but was impressed by the prodigious force of his character and his capacity for standing alone.  At moments he reminds one oddly of Johnson.  He, too, is a dictator, at once humorous and tragic like the mirific doctor, but, unlike him, infinitely subtle.  He, too, is troubled, and not by any sense of isolation nor yet by the gnawings of vanity and small ambition.  It is the problem that tortures him.  Can he do what Raphael and Racine did?  Can he create something that shall be uncompromising as art and at the same time humane?

Face to face with that problem Derain stands for what is to-day most vital and valid in France—­a passionate love of the great tradition, a longing for order and the will to win it, and that mysterious thing which the Athenians called [Greek:  spoudiotes]; and schoolmasters call “high seriousness.”  He accepts the age into which he has stumbled with all its nastiness, vulgarity, and cheek.  He accepts that woebegone, modern democracy which could not even make its great war fine.  He believes he can make something of it.  Because he has a first-rate intellect he can afford to mistrust reason; and so sure is he of his own taste that he can brush refinement aside.  Yet neither his scepticisms nor his superstitions alienate the intelligent, nor are the sensitive offended by his total disregard of their distinctions.  And though all this has nothing to do with painting, on painters, I surmise, it has its effect.

“PLUS DE JAZZ” [Y]

[Footnote Y:  1921]

On the first night of the Russian ballet in Paris, somewhere about the middle of May, perhaps the best painter in France, one of the best musicians, and an obscure journalist were sitting in a small bistrot on the Boulevard St. Germain.  They should all have been at the spectacle; all had promised to go; and yet they sat on over their alcools and bocks, and instead of going to the ballet began to abuse it.  And from the ballet they passed to modern music in general, and from music to literature:  till gradually into the conversation came, above the familiar note of easy denigration, a note of energy, of conviction, of aspiration, which so greatly astonished one, at least, of the three that, just before two o’clock—­the hour at which the patron puts even his most faithful clients out of doors—­he exclaimed, with an emphasis in him uncommon, “Plus de Jazz!”