and continues to do, gross injustice
to the genuine artists who have drawn inspiration, or sustenance at any
rate, from Jazz.

During the last ten years Jazz had dominated music and coloured
literature: on painting, as I have said, its effect has been negligible.
What, for want of a better name, I must call the Cezanne movement was
too profound a stream to be modified by so shallow a current. All the
great contemporary painters are extremely serious; they make no faces at
their predecessors, or at anyone else. They are not _gavroche_. Surprise
is the last emotion they wish to arouse. And, assuredly, they have
neither gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor shown the
slightest desire to amuse them. This is as true of Picasso as of
Derain: only, Picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the
impression of a will to surprise, while his habit of turning everything
to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every
new manifestation of vitality. I have seen him enthusiastic over _la
politique_ Lloyd-George, and I should not be in the least surprised if
he found something in it to serve some one or other of his multifarious
purposes. If, however, surprise were what Picasso aimed at he could go a
very much easier way about it. He could do what his tenth-rate imitators
try to do--for instance, he could agreeably shock the public with
monstrous caricatures and cubist photography--those pictures, I mean,
which the honest stockbroker recognizes, with a thrill of excitement at
his own cleverness, as his favourite picture-postcards rigged out to
look naughty. But Picasso shows such admirable indifference to the
public that you could never guess from his pictures that such a thing
existed: and that, of course, is how it should be. He never startles for
the sake of startling; neither does he mock. Certainly, unlike the best
of his contemporaries, he seems almost as indifferent to the tradition
as he is to the public; but he no more laughs at the one than he tries
to startle the other. Only amongst the whipper-snappers of painting
will you discover a will to affront tradition, or attract attention by
deliberate eccentricity. Only, I think, the Italian Futurists, their
transalpine apes, a few revolutionaries on principle, but especially
the Futurists with their electric-lit presentation of the more obvious
peculiarities of contemporary life and their taste for popular
actualities can be said defini