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 great pleasure I contradict this. According to latest
reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting
again.]

Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor
seductive, of this batch is Segonzac. Like all the best things in
nature, he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he
is already a thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he
has but to continue. Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its
chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the
sumptuous splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly,
flatteringly, lyrical. He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not
his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you
would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony. His
emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on
the art of painting. Nevertheless, there are critics who complain
that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms
definition. And perhaps they do sometimes: only in these, as in other