Salmon, writing usually in the grand manner of French prose of the past, about men in paint of the present, who do not believe in the grand manner (stage sweat and swagger), nor the great gesture, says startling things. Hear! Hear! _Et dans sa demi-retraite André Derain achevant les œuvres peut-être les plus vastes de son temps_ and so forth. (André Derain putting the finishing touches to works which perhaps are the most vast of the age.) Derain’s figure paintings are unlike his landscapes. The figure paintings are of the past; the landscapes of today. I recall a canvas by Derain I saw in Paris: A road in the south of France somewhere, magic in simplicity; not easily disentangled charm. I carry it in my memory. It is massive, with God-like mastery of some vast disturbing chaos. Troubling! The world’s new eyes are sometimes things to consider. And with care. _Adonis is dead and the Loves are lamenting!_ I quote Greek song in honor of Apollinaire, to whose pen-magic moderns in the plastic arts owe introduction first to fame, secondly, to dollars, then dinners, in regular, non-dwindling succession. _Ah, Apollinaire!_ delightful vagabond of art. Apollo’s second son and namesake! I regret you! My consolation must be to buy as many of your earlier writings as I can. _Nineveh_ I long for as the hungry for food. Please page _Nineveh_, Apollinaire, for me in your bright Paradise! I am sure _Nineveh_ is there. And you too! Strangest of contrasts in Apollinaire, is that he, leader of the moderns, should have liked old-fashioned, sentimental, romantic writers of Germany such as Chamisso.... _The longing for something afar_.... Maurice Barrés’ _Greco, Le Secret de Tolède_, has firm, accurate upbuilding; architectural drawing. It gives surety, poise, reliability. Finely done, clear, precise, nobly visioned, with no yawning gaps to be filled futilely. He writes delightfully. He is an old friend, he who tried to establish _le culte du moi_, something old as the hills, because it is what all artists set out to do, but which he succeeded in doing better perhaps than the rest. The prose of Barrés resembles mural paintings by de Chavannes: _bleu de ciel_, against which white intellectualized figures move. There is an occasional shred of gleaming gold. The golden age of the colored race is right ahead of us. The concept, _superiority_, is something strange. That joy which civilization has been for centuries draining out of the white race, is stored in them; civilization has killed. If we are to continue to create, something will have to come to light our hearts, and then later on to warm them. We shall soon have good writing from them, the colored race, painting, music, art, in every department of creative accomplishment. The work is begun. When the colored mind flowered in the past, the result has been something original, or of rare quality. Stored within them is supply of that joy without which no one can create. In joy, art is rooted.