During the last ten years Jazz had dominated music and coloured literature: on painting, as I have said, its effect has been negligible. What, for want of a better name, I must call the Cézanne movement was too profound a stream to be modified by so shallow a current. All the great contemporary painters are extremely serious; they make no faces at their predecessors, or at anyone else. They are not _gavroche_. Surprise is the last emotion they wish to arouse. And, assuredly, they have neither gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor shown the slightest desire to amuse them. This is as true of Picasso as of Derain: only, Picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the impression of a will to surprise, while his habit of turning everything to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every new manifestation of vitality. I have seen him enthusiastic over _la politique_ Lloyd-George, and I should not be in the least surprised if he found something in it to serve some one or other of his multifarious purposes. If, however, surprise were what Picasso aimed at he could go a very much easier way about it. He could do what his tenth-rate imitators try to do--for instance, he could agreeably shock the public with monstrous caricatures and cubist photography--those pictures, I mean, which the honest stockbroker recognizes, with a thrill of excitement at his own cleverness, as his favourite picture-postcards rigged out to look naughty. But Picasso shows such admirable indifference to the public that you could never guess from his pictures that such a thing existed: and that, of course, is how it should be. He never startles for the sake of startling; neither does he mock. Certainly, unlike the best of his contemporaries, he seems almost as indifferent to the tradition as he is to the public; but he no more laughs at the one than he tries to startle the other. Only amongst the whipper-snappers of painting will you discover a will to affront tradition, or attract attention by deliberate eccentricity. Only, I think, the Italian Futurists, their transalpine apes, a few revolutionaries on principle, but especially the Futurists with their electric-lit presentation of the more obvious peculiarities of contemporary life and their taste for popular actualities can be said definitely to have attempted a pictorial expression of Jazz.