Jastrebzoff; do you not feel that the author is a little too well
pleased with himself? Do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling his
sitter with a good, round platitude from the exterior boulevards or a
morsel from some regimental ditty in which he once excelled, that, in
another moment, he will be tapping him on the back, and that he has gone
a little out of his way to tell you these things? The Primitives tell
us nothing of that sort; they stick to their business of creating
significant form. Whatever of their personalities may reach us has
passed through the transmuting fires of art: they never prattle. The
Primitives are always distinguished; whereas occasionally the _douanier_
is as much the reverse as the more successful painters to the British
aristocracy are always.

Yet I daresay it was this jovial and unaffected good-fellowship, quite
as much as his unquestionable genius, that won the brave _douanier_ his
place in the hearts of those brilliant people who frequented what he
used to call his "soirées toutes familiales et artistiques." The artists
and intellectuals of my generation--the generation that received and
went down before the terrific impact of Dostoievskyism--pursued the
simple and unsophisticated at least as earnestly as any follower of an
earlier Rousseau. Whatever the real differences between a noble savage
and an unspoilt artisan may be, the difference between the ideas of them
with which a jaded society diverts itself is negligible. "Il nous faut
les barbares," said Gide. Well, we have got them. [H] And, maybe, the
next generation but one will make as much fuss about a new Matthew
Arnold as we made about Marguerite Audoux.

[Footnote H: This essay was written a few weeks after the signing of the
Armistice.]