If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem expresses a Fauvist influence on William Faulkner, the authorial beast of authorial beasts, the “Lion in the Garden” of Madeleine Chapsal’s designation, the authorial complement of the artist Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire’s le fauve des fauves. In embarking on their fresh artistic trajectory, the Fauvists had followed Friedrich Nietzsche’s lead, but Fauvism “demanded a new critical vocabulary which painters,” as Christopher Butler relates, “were often themselves not able to provide, hence their reliance on literary men, like Pound and Apollinaire and Marinetti.” In return, the literary avant-garde gained insights into related possibilities for their own fields, these reciprocal realizations finding expression in works that at once respected past innovators and promoted innovators new. “Thinking in other arts tended to follow painting’s lead at that time, and the reasons for this are worth considering,” as Butler explains. “Painting affronted well-entrenched academic conventions most directly, as painters are trained in relation to previous styles in a way that poets are not” (229). In this vein, as Matisse’s former student Hans Purrmann avers, “the masters of the nineteenth century, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and Rodin, were also compelled to make their own tradition and mould it after their own requirements.” Indeed, Purrmann “often heard Matisse complain that every one [sic] must find an individual form for his own sensations.” In the light of this complaint, Purrmann “and many another of his students praise Matisse because he has subjected us to a training, a critique of form, and the proper respect for colour, as well as teaching us how to judge and analyse our antecedents” (40).