an remember, was much where Herbin was. Now apparently he aims at the
grand tragic; an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries by way of
the grand academic. Perhaps such aspirations can express themselves only
in the consecrated formulae of traditional rhetoric; at all events, the
last I saw of Valloton was furiously classical. [D] And for all that he
remains, what he was in the beginning, an Illustrator.

[Footnote D: His exhibits in the _salon d'automne_ of 1921, however,
suggest that he has come off his high horse.]

To me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of Cezanne's
descendants. About the dates of one or two, however, I may well be
mistaken; and so may I be when I suppose half a dozen more of whose
existence I became aware rather later--only a year or two before the
war, in fact--to be of a slightly later brood. For instance, it must
have been at the end of 1912, or the beginning of 1913, that I first
heard of Modigliani, Utrillo, Segonzac, Marie Laurencin, Luc-Albert
Moreau and Kisling, though doubtless all were known earlier to
wide-awake men on the spot. None of them can fairly be described
as doctrinaire: by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for
abstractions betook himself to Cubism almost as a matter of course. All
owe much to Cezanne--Utrillo least; Modigliani and Marie Laurencin owe
a good deal to Picasso's blue period; while Luc-Albert Moreau owes
something to Segonzac. Of the two first Modigliani is dead and Utrillo
so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist,
Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to
satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of
madness and an odd nostalgic passion--expressing itself in an inimitable
white--for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the
Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he
began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes
which might have been his undoing. His career was of a few years only,
but those years were prolific; beginning in a rather old-fashioned,
impressionistic style, he soon found his way into the one he has made
famous. To judge his art as a whole is difficult: partly because his
early productions are not only unequal to, but positively unlike, what
he achieved later; partly because many of the Utrillos with which Paris
is overstocked were painted by someone else.

[Footnote E: With gre