Presumably a powerful nature develops at once, disregarding the schedules of human growth and the laws of probation. William Blake was a case of a being who took little notice of the dawdling ritual of growth. On the other hand, many individuals, highly developed in adult life, have shown no precocity at all. Genius no doubt has its system of working in a man, all the facts of the case--the best time to strike--the mental resources--the character of the gift to be hatched--in its possession. As regards the Naif, Rousseau the Douanier is the only great naif as far as I know. In his case Nature made on the one hand his Douanier’s calling a water-tight case against sophistication; and then put something divinely graceful and simple--that we associate with “childhood” and that that abstraction sometimes has--at his disposal for the term of his life. Nothing seemingly could corrupt or diminish it; and it brought with it, like a very practical fairy, or a sardine tin with its little key, an instrument with which to extract all the genius from within this Douanier of forty or fifty years old. To return to the Child proper. The only case in which the drawing of a child is of value, is when it possesses the same outstripping or unusual quality that the work of a very few adult artists possesses. The adult in question may have accomplished nothing himself as a child. But the drawing of the child would seem perhaps to be his work at a more immature stage. It is not a question of Child or Adult. It is a question simply of the _better being_. Both belong to an exceptional type of being. There is also a fresh and delicate charm of very young life that some children, not many, have the power of infusing into their drawings. And there remains the melancholy fact that no infant’s pictures could be duller than the average adult’s. And therefore there is every bit as much justification for exhibiting any twenty children’s scribbles as there is for exhibiting those of any twenty professional painting adults. _Machinery and Lions_ The Futurists had in their idée fixe a great pull over the sentimental and sluggish eclecticism, deadness and preciosity of the artists working in Paris.