In considering the future of painting, Picasso is the most useful figure on which to fix your attention. This is partly in his favour inasmuch as it recognises his activity; but it is the uncertain and mercurial quality of his genius, also, that makes him the symptomatic object for your study and watchfulness. Everything comes out in him perfectly defined. Every influence in his sensitive intelligence burns up and shows itself to good advantage. There is nothing, as I have said, with regard to technical achievement, that he cannot do. He appears to me to have a genius similar to Charlie Chaplin’s; a gnome-like child. His clock stopped at fifteen summers (and he has seen more winters than Charles, although Charles is not averse to a Dickens scene of the Poor Orphan in the Snow), with all the shallowness of a very apt, facile, and fanciful child, and the miraculous skill you might expect in an exquisitely trained Bambino. These cases of arrested growth are very common in his race. You merely have to consider what sort of a child you have to deal with, what moves him most; whether this mercurial vitality, so adaptive as to be flesh-creeping, is preferable to a vertical source of power, like the sour and volcanic old _crétin_, Cézanne. It is which manner of life you most prize, admire really. You have your critical flight; and I am ready for the moment to suspend you, glide you, spin you, plunge you, or stand you on your head, according to your fancy. Now, if you are not used to critical flights, and you turn to me as one accustomed to banking, looping and splitarsing, and ask me what I advise, or, to put it in another way, what is _my_ fancy, I should answer as follows:--“I consider Pablo Picasso as a very serious and beautiful performer in oil-paint, Italian chalk, Antoine ink, pastel, wax, cardboard, bread--anything, in fact. But he appears to me to be definitely in the category of executants, like Paganini, or to-day, Pachmann, or Moiseivitch; where Cézanne is clearly a brother of Bach, and the Douanier was a cousin of Chardin.” That his more immediate and unwavering friends are dimly acquainted with this fact is proved by a statement I have just read, in the current (September 26) number of the _Athenæum_, by the French painter, M. André Lhote: “Cézanne embodies, through the romanticism with which he was impregnated, the avenging voice of Greece and Raphael. He constitutes the first recall to classical order. It was necessary, in order that the lesson he gave us might be understood, that an _interpreter_ should appear. This was Picasso. “The young Spanish painter deciphered the multiple enigma, translated the mysterious language, spelt out, word by word, the stiff phrases. Picasso illuminates in the sunshine of his imagination the thousand facets of Cézanne’s rich and restrained personality.”