From Ford Madox Ford

It was the Nightingale:
Henry James used to say that the best goods are not done up in the most fashionable looking parcels.

and (ahem)

Years ago—I should say in 1913—I was on the top of a bus in front of the Bon Marche. I saw Miss Gertrude Stein driving with a snail-like precision her Ford car. It was a vehicle of the original model of my name-sake and with its great height above the roadway gave to Miss Stein, driving, the air of awfulness of Pope or Pharaoh, borne aloft and swaying on their golden thrones. I sprang down from my bus in order to pursue that phenomenon, for I had been going to call on her. I wanted to speak to her. I was leaving Paris that after-noon and should have no opportunity for a long time. I do not remember what it was exactly that I wanted to talk to her about. I have had so many and such long arguments with that old friend—or enemy—that they seem to fuse, the one into the other in an unbroken chain of battle. It must however have been about the sculpture of either Mr. Joseph Epstein or poor Gaudier Brzeska. She had written—or more probably she was reported to me as having said—something caustic and contemptuous, probably about Gaudier. And at that date Miss Stein was both Pope and Pharaoh of the pic-ture-buying world. At any rate I was determined to have it out with her about something and I trotted on keeping that pro-cession in sight for quite a number of blocks. She out-distanced me in a stretch of roadway that was quite clear of traffic whereas the sidewalks were blocked. It occurred to me that she must be going to Picasso's: I took a taxi. But she was not at Picasso's. A number of people were and they were all disliking the new stage in which that cubist found himself, all having been en-thusiastic patrons of his earlier representational work. Upon one of them—I think it was that prominent dilet-tante, the Comte de Beaumont—the painter turned and said: "You used in the old days to say that I drew better than Raphael and painted better than Velasquez. You said it, not I. I never said it." How then was it that
they—being nobodies—dared to question him—the divine master, by their own accounts! —if in his wisdom he saw fit to take other directions? Did they imagine that he could no longer draw better than Raphael or was it to be imagined that they thought that they, the no-bodies of the audience, made the masterpieces of the divine draughtsman? That was probably what they did think. . . . Then let them go away and find other divine artists to paint, under their directions, works which were better than those of Raphael. I am not Picasso. My sympathies are altogether with revolutionary work and with no other. I would rather read work of Miss Stein or Mr. Joyce or look at the work of Picasso himself than consider the work of a gentleman who wrote like Thackeray or drew like Apelles. They may write or draw better than either master: I can do without them. But I cannot see that my own work is in the least revolutionary. I go on my way like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party. Occasionally it strikes me that if I change a little my method of sequence in presenting scenes, or shorten my sen-tences and occasionally put in instead of chasing out all assonances I may feel a little better. But all over the world there are, I am aware, gentlemen and ladies lamenting that I don't write as I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six or forty-five. Or even fifty-four. There is a German Professor, in Hamburg, I think, who castigates me for no longer imitating the verse of the Minnesingers.