_De David à Degas_ is a book of perceptions, just appreciations, knowledge. I was surprised, however, in his article on Whistler that he should omit the influence of incomparable Chinese and Japanese draftsmen. He can see but one influence, of course, _France_. He does not relish the genius of Whistler; he gives us to understand he was not so much, _in Paris_. He feels about Whistler as Conrad feels when he thinks of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant. Conrad was never really great. He merely coquetted with greatness. No page of Conrad ever satisfied my thirst for beauty! Perhaps English was not the proper garment with which to dress his soul! Blanche writes entertainingly of two Englishmen: Beardsley and Condor. One can not be too gracious to Condor! He was an unacknowledged _point de départ_ for modernism. There is some unexplained law operative why a man of such genius as Condor can not grasp what is his during life. Is it envy of the base? Is it envy of the little ones? The little are always so greatly in the voting majority. The portraits by Jacques Blanche in oil, are not more alluring than some he draws with pen. For instance, listen to this about Manet: ... _ce joli homme blond, gracieux, elegant, à la cravate Lavalière bleue, à pois blancs_. Does not that make you feel as if a friend said hello over the telephone, or a speckled trout nibbled your bait, on a bright blond morning of May? He makes delightful Fantin live again. He declares that after Courbet, Manet was the last painter of tradition. Papini, wild-eyed Italian youth, with surprised up-standing hair, who edited _Lionardo_ in Florence is, in my opinion of slight consequence as poet, prose writer, philosopher. To put the cart before the horse, his philosophising is acute indigestion from too much Nietzsche, Kant, Jungs-Stilling, Hegel, _et cetera ad infinitum_. In this melange of German mind and northern morals, he was unable to see his surprised way, or anybody’s way. He read. He suffered. He vomited words. His philosophy is account of the peregrenations of a nostalgic, young and ambitious mind. His early verse might be called pretty, puerile, powerless. Lines like these are not great poetry: _Quaderno bianco, principio di giorno, Conto vergine pagina prima— non si parli di ritorno che in cima all’ultima cima._ His verse is weak. His twenty little reasonings about verse are no better. There does not seem to be reason for being. They possess neither logic of art nor life, nor discrimination for the dull. However, in South America, in Buenos Aires (or as they say down there, B. A.), and in Rio, they prize him. I respect their opinion, those Spanish and Portuguese _literati_. It may be _mea culpa_! They are ahead of us in appreciation of arts of the Old World.