s sovranty, and now completely
dominates the other elements in his art. Assuredly he is in the great
European tradition, but specifically he is of the French: Chardin,
Watteau, and Poussin are his direct ancestors. Of Poussin no one who saw
_La Boutique Fantasque_ will have forgotten how it made one think. No
one will have forgotten the grave beauty of those sober greys, greens,
browns, and blues. They made one think of Poussin, and of Racine, too.
And yet the ballet was intensely modern; always you were aware that
Derain had been right through the movement--through Fauvism, Negroism,
Cubism. Here was an artist who had refused nothing and feared nothing.
Could anyone be less of a reactionary and at the same time less of
an anarchist? And, I will add, could anyone be less _gavroche_? _La
Boutique Fantasque_, which is not only the most amusing, but the most
beautiful, of Russian ballets, balances on a discord. Even the fun of
Derain is not the essentially modern fun of Massine. Derain is neither
flippant nor exasperated; he is humorous, and tragic sometimes.

English criticism is puzzled by Derain because very often it is
confronted by things of his which seem dull and commonplace, to English
critics. These are, in fact, the protests of Derain's genius against
his talent, and whether they are good or not I cannot say. Derain has a
super-natural gift for making things: give him a tin kettle and in half
a morning he will hammer you out a Summerian head; he has the fingers
of a pianist, an aptitude that brings beauty to life with a turn of the
wrist; in a word, that sensibility of touch which keeps an ordinary
craftsman happy for a lifetime: and these things terrify him. He ties
both hands behind his back and fights so. Deliberately he chooses the
most commonplace aspects and the most unlovely means of expression,
hoping that, talent thus bound, genius will be stung into action.
Sometimes, no doubt, Achilles stays sulking in his tent. I suppose
Derain can be dull.

But what does he want this genius of his to do? Nothing less, I
believe, than what the French genius did at its supreme moment, in the
seventeenth century, what the Greek did in the fifth. My notion is that
he wants to create art which shall be perfectly uncompromising and at
the same time human, and he would like it none the worse, I dare say,
were it to turn out popular as well. After all, Racine did this, and
Moliere and La Bruyere and Watteau and Chardin and