Renoir. It is in the
French tradition to believe that there is a beauty common to life and
art. The Greeks had it, so runs the argument, and the Italians of the
high renaissance, but the English poets tended to sacrifice art to
beauty, and the moderns--so Derain may think--sacrifice beauty and
grandeur to discretion. The motto "Safety first" did, I will confess,
just float across my eyes as I walked through the last _salon
d'automne_. And, then, Derain may feel that there is in him something
besides his power of creation and sense of form, something which
philosophers would call, I dare say, a sense of absolute beauty in
things, of external harmony. However we may call it, what I mean is the
one thing at all worth having which the Greeks had and the Byzantines
had not, which Raphael possesses more abundantly than Giotto. In Derain
this sense is alive and insistent; it is urging him always to capture
something that is outside him; the question is, can he, without for one
moment compromising the purity of his art, obey it? I do not know. But
if he cannot, then there is no man alive to give this age what Phidias,
Giorgione, and Watteau gave theirs.

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