An exposition of Belgian art has just opened at the Tuileries. We can revisit the Van Eycks from Ghent, Adam and Eve returned from farther away than Paradise, the Angelic Music, the Memlings from Bruges, and that prodigious Pietà of Van der Weyden which is one of the great masterpieces of Flemish art, lent by the King of Spain; it seemed to me less effective than in the sombre granite hall of the Escorial. The Vienna Breughels were also expected, but it seems that the curator of the museum who is—if I may use the word in connexion with crowns—paid to know whether it is best to let pictures travel or not, opposed their coming to a country where the currency is less depreciated. The only subject of conversation at the exhibition was the quarrel preferred by a young novelist, Henri Béraud, laureate of the Goncourt Prize, against André Gide, Jules Romains, and certain other writers for the Nouvelle Revue Française whom he accuses of being tiresome.
The reaction marked by the creation of the N. R. F. about 1908 is well known. Rimbaud, Claudel, Gide, Romains—all the authors whom the old Mercure de France had made known to the public without imposing them or making them absolutely the masters for the younger generation, found a medium there in which they could exercise in full function an influence which now—years later—is showing its effects. The thing was not accomplished without excesses on the other side, a dogmatism whose intensity was perilously near intolerance, and a calvinist spirit even in paganism which was not made to please everybody. For us who came late to the Nouvelle Revue Française, when the influence of Gide was diminishing and yielding to the more human and less literary influence of Proust, such a quarrel has no meaning;; it is full of personal rancour and seems destined to a short hold on our attention.
With the permission of those who have declared this little war against the "white covers" (as the authors of the N. R. F. are called) I am going to finish this letter by mentioning several recent volumes, among which there are three from the N. R. F. First, Filibuth ou la Montre en Or, an exquisite novel by Max Jacob. I know that the talent of Max Jacob is rather inaccessible and that his humour is not of a kind to be spontaneously relished by foreigners. But mount the steps of the little middle-class houses in Montmartre, look into the small shops where through the windows paned with tissue-paper you can see the rue Ravignan, listen to the rich speech rendered with incredible precision, a veritable science of the
