,illustration3 7,photo3 ,e4 ,druet7 ,c,,zanne ,,since ,c,,zanne ,,by ,,clive ,,bell ,,acknowledgement ,most of these ,essays appeared in ,,the ,,new ,,republic and ,,the ,,athenaeum3 some1 however1 are reprinted from ,,the ,,burlington ,,magazine1 ,,the ,,new ,,statesman1 and ,,art ,,and ,,decoration4 ,i take this opportunity of thanking the editors of all4 ,c4,b4 ,,contents ,i4 ,since ,czanne ,,ii4 ,the ,artistic ,problem ,,iii4 ,the ,douanier ,rousseau ,,iv4 ,czanne ,v4 ,renoir ,,vi4 ,tradition and ,movements ,,vii4 ,matisse and ,picasso ,,viii4 ,the ,place of ,art in ,art ,criticism ,,ix4 ,bonnard ,x4 ,duncan ,grant ,,xi4 ,negro ,sculpture ,,xii4 ,order and ,authority 7#a and #b7 ,,xiii4 ,marquet ,,xiv4 ,standards ,,xv4 ,criticism3 #a4 ,first thoughts #b4 ,second thoughts #c4 ,last thoughts ,,xvi4 ,othon ,friesz ,,xvii4 ,wilcoxism ,,xviii4 ,art and ,politics ,,xix4 ,the ,authority of ,m4 ,derain ,,xx4 ,plus de ,jazz ,,illustrations ,c,,zanne ,,seurat ,,matisse ,,picasso ,,bonnard ,,duncan ,,grant ,,othon ,,friesz ,,derain ,illustration3 7,photo3 ,e4 ,druet7 ,,seurat ,,since ,c,,zanne ,with anyone who concludes that this preliminary essay is merely to justify the rather appetizing title of my book ,i shall be at no pains to quarrel4 ,if privately ,i think it does more1 publicly ,i shall not avow it4 ,historically and critically1 ,i admit1 the thing is as slight as a sketch contained in five-and-thirty pages must be1 and certainly it adds nothing to what ,i have said1 in the essays to which it stands preface1 on sthetic theory4 ,the function it is meant to perform--no very considerable one perhaps--is to justify not so much the title as the shape of my book1 giving1 in the process1 a rough sketch of the period with certain aspects of which ,i am to deal4 ,that the shape needs justification is attributable to the fact that though all1 or nearly all1 the component articles were written with a view to making one volume1 ,i was conscious1 while ,i wrote them1 of dealing with two subjects4 ,sometimes ,i was discussing current ideas1 and questions arising out of a theory of art2 at others ,i was trying to give some account of the leading painters of the contemporary movement4 ,sometimes ,i was writing of ,theory1 sometimes of ,practice4 ,by means of this preface ,i hope to show why1 at the moment1 these two1 far from being distinct1 are inseparable4 ,to understand thoroughly the contemporary movement--that movement in every turn and twist of which the influence of ,czanne is traceable--the movement which may be said to have come into existence contemporaneously almost with the century1 and still holds the field--it is necessary to know something of the sthetic theories which agitated it4 ,one of the many unpremeditated effects of ,czanne's life and work was to set artists thinking1 and even arguing4 ,his practice challenged so sharply all current notions of what painting should be that a new generation1 taking him for master1 found itself often1 much to its dismay1 obliged to ask and answer such questions as ,what am ,i doing8 ,why am ,i doing it8 ,now such questions lead inevitably to an immense query--,what is ,art8 ,the painters began talking1 and from words sprang deeds4 ,thus it comes about that in the sixteen or seventeen years which have elapsed since the influence of ,czanne became paramount theory has played a part which no critic or historian can overlook4 ,it is because to-day that part appears to be dwindling1 because the influence of theory is growing less1 that the moment is perhaps not inopportune for a little book such as this is meant to be4 ,it comes1 if ,i am right1 just when the movement is passing out of its first into the second phase4 ,during this first phase theory has been much to the fore4 ,but it has been theory1 you must remember1 working on a generation of direct and intensely personal artists4 ,in so curious an alliance you will expect to find as much stress as harmony2 also1 you must remember1 its headquarters were at ,paris where flourishes the strongest and most vital tradition of painting extant4 ,in this great tradition some of the more personal artists1 struggling against the intolerable exactions of doctrine1 have found powerful support2 indeed1 only with its aid have they succeeded at last in securing their positions as masters who1 though not disdaining to pay homage for what they hold from the new theories1 are as independent as feudal princes4 ,but the more ,i consider the period the more this strange and restless alliance of doctrine with temperament appears to be of its essence2 wherefore1 ,i shall not hesitate to make of it a light wherewith to take a hasty look about me4 ,here are two labels ready to hand--temperamental and doctrinaire4 ,i am under no illusion as to the inadequacy and fallibility of both2 neither shall ,i imagine that1 once applied1 they are bound to stick4 ,on the contrary1 you will see1 in a later chapter1 how1 having dubbed ,matisse temperamental and ,picasso theorist1 ,i come1 on examination1 to find in the art of ,matisse so much science and in that of ,picasso such extraordinary sensibility that in the end ,i am much inclined to pull off the labels and change them about4 ,but though1 for purposes of criticism coarse and sometimes treacherous1 this pair of opposites--which are really quite compatible--may prove two useful hacks4 ,as such ,i accept them2 and by them borne along ,i now propose to make a short tour of inspection1 one object of which will be to indicate broadly the lie of the land1 another to call attention to a number of interesting artists whose names happen not to have come my way in any other part of this book4 ,i said1 and ,i suppose no one will deny it1 that ,paris was the centre of the movement3 from ,paris1 therefore1 ,i set out4 ,there the movement originated1 there it thrives and develops1 and there it can best be seen and understood4 ,ever since the end of the seventeenth century ,france has taken the lead in the visual arts1 and ever since the early part of the nineteenth ,paris has been the artistic capital of ,europe4 ,thither painters of all foreign nations have looked2 there many have worked1 and many more have made a point of showing their works4 ,anyone1 therefore1 who makes a habit of visiting ,paris1 seeing the big exhibitions1 and frequenting dealers and studios1 can get a pretty complete idea of what is going on in ,europe4 ,there he will find ,picasso--the animator ,a of the movement--and some of the best of his compatriots1 ,juan ,gris and ,marie ,blanchard for instance1 to say nothing of such fashionable figures as ,,mm4 ,zuloaga et ,sert4 ,there he will find better ,dutchmen than ,van ,dongen1 and an active colony of ,scandinavians the most interesting of whom is probably ,per ,krohg4 ,the career of ,krohg1 by the way1 is worth considering for a moment and watching for the future4 ,finely gifted in many ways1 he started work under three crippling disabilities--a literary imagination1 natural facility1 and inherited science4 ,the results were at first precisely what might have been expected4 ,now1 however1 he is getting the upper hand of his unlucky equipment2 and his genuine talent and personal taste1 beginning to assert themselves1 have made it impossible for criticism any longer to treat him merely as an amiable member of a respectable group4 ,what is true of ,spain and ,scandinavia is even truer of ,poland and what remains of ,russia4 ,goncharova and ,larionoff--the former a typically temperamental artist1 the latter an extravagantly doctrinaire one--,soudeikine1 ,grigorieff1 ,zadkine live permanently in ,paris2 while ,kisling1 whom ,i take to be the best of the ,poles1 has become so completely identified with the country in which he lives1 and for which he fought1 that he is often taken by ,english critics for a ,frenchman4 ,survage 7with his eccentric but sure sense of colour71 ,soutine 7with his delicious paint71 and ,marcoussis 7a cubist of great merit7 each1 in his own way1 working in ,paris1 adds to the artistic reputation of his native country4 ,in the rue ,la ,botie you can see the work of painters and sculptors from every country in ,europe almost1 and from a good many in ,africa4 ,the ,italian ,futurists have often made exhibitions there4 ,while the work of ,severini--their most creditable representative--is always to be found chez ,lonce ,rosenberg1 hard by in the rue de la ,baume4 ,footnote ,a3 ,for this word1 which ,i think very happily suggests ,picasso's role in contemporary painting1 ,i am indebted to my friend ,m4 ,andr ,salmon4 ,however1 most of the ,futurists have retired to their own country1 where we will leave them4 ,on the other hand1 the most gifted ,italian painter who has appeared this century1 ,modigliani1 was bred on the ,boulevard ,montparnasse4 ,in the movement he occupies an intermediate position1 being neither of the pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation4 ,he was not much heard of before the war1 ,b and he died less than a year after peace was signed4 ,in my mind1 therefore1 his name is associated with the war--then1 at any rate1 was the hour of his glory2 he dominated the cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time when most of the ,french painters1 masters and disciples1 were in the trenches4 ,modigliani owed something to ,czanne and a great deal to ,picasso3 he was no doctrinaire3 towards the end he became the slave of a formula of his own devising--but that is another matter4 ,modigliani had an intense but narrow sensibility1 his music is all on one string3 he had a characteristically ,italian gift for drawing beautifully with ease3 and ,i think he had not much else4 ,i feel sure that those who would place him amongst the masters of the movement--,matisse1 ,picasso1 ,derain1 ,bonnard1 and ,friesz--mistake2 for1 with all his charm and originality1 he was too thoughtless and superficial to achieve greatly4 ,he invented something which he went on repeating2 and he could always fascinate simply by his way of handling a brush or a pencil4 ,his pictures1 delightful and surprising at first sight1 are apt to grow stale and1 in the end1 some of them1 unbearably thin4 ,a minor artist1 surely4 ,footnote ,b3 ,he was at work1 however1 by #aijf--perhaps earlier4 ,though ,paris is unquestionably the centre of the movement1 no one who sees only what comes thither and to ,london--and that is all ,i see--can have much idea of what is going on in ,germany and ,america4 ,germany has not yet recommenced sending her art in quantities that make judgement possible1 while it is pretty clear that the ,american art which reaches ,europe is by no means the best that ,america can do4 ,from both come magazines with photographs which excite our curiosity1 but on such evidence it would be mere impertinence to form an opinion4 ,of contemporary art in ,germany and ,america ,i shall say nothing4 ,and what shall ,i say of the home-grown article8 ,having taken ,paris for my point of view1 ,i am excused from saying much4 ,not much of ,english art is seen from ,paris4 ,we have but one living painter whose work is at all well known to the serious amateurs of that city1 and he is ,sickert4 ,c ,the name1 however1 of ,augustus ,john is often pronounced1 ill--for they will call him ,augustin--and that of ,steer is occasionally murmured4 ,through the salon d'automne ,roger ,fry is becoming known2 and there is a good deal of curiosity about the work of ,duncan ,grant1 and some about that of ,mark ,gertler and ,vanessa ,bell4 ,now1 of these1 ,sickert and ,steer are essentially1 and in no bad sense1 provincial masters4 ,they are belated impressionists of considerable merit working in a thoroughly fresh and personal way on the problems of a bygone age4 ,in the remoter parts of ,europe as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century were to be found genuine and interesting artists working in the ,gothic tradition3 the existence of ,sickert and ,steer made us realize how far from the centre is ,london still4 ,on the ,continent such conservatism would almost certainly be the outcome of stupidity or prejudice2 but both ,sickert and ,steer have still something of their own to say about the world seen through an impressionist temperament4 ,the prodigious reputation enjoyed by ,augustus ,john is another sign of our isolation4 ,his splendid talent when1 as a young man1 he took it near enough the central warmth to make it expand 7besides the influence of ,puvis1 remember1 it underwent that of ,picasso7 began to bear flowers of delicious promise4 ,had he kept it there ,john might never have tasted the sweets of insular renown3 he would have had his place in the history of painting1 however4 ,the ,french know enough of ,vorticism to know that it is a provincial and utterly insignificant contrivance which has borrowed what it could from ,cubism and ,futurism and added nothing to either4 ,they like to fancy that the ,english tradition is that of ,gainsborough and ,constable1 quite failing to realize what havoc has been made of this admirable plastic tradition by that puerile gospel of literary pretentiousness called ,pre-,raphaelism4 ,towards these mournful quags and quicksands1 with their dead-sea flora of anecdote and allegory1 the best part of the little talent we produce seems irresistibly to be drawn3 by these at last it is sucked down4 ,that1 at any rate1 is the way that most of those ,english artists who ten or a dozen years ago gave such good promise have gone4 ,let us hope better of the new generation--recent exhibitions afford some excuse--a generation which1 if reactionarily inclined1 can always take ,steer for a model1 or1 if disposed to keep abreast of the times and share in the heritage of ,czanne as well as that of ,constable1 can draw courage from the fact that there is1 after all1 one ,english painter--,duncan ,grant--who takes honourable rank beside the best of his contemporaries4 ,footnote ,c3 ,the ,irish painter ,o',conor1 and the ,canadian ,morrice1 are both known and respected in ,paris2 but because they have lived their lives there and known none but ,french influences they are rarely thought of as ,british4 ,in a less degree the same might be said of that admirable painter ,george ,barne4 ,it is fifteen years since ,czanne died1 and only now is it becoming possible to criticize him4 ,that shows how overwhelming his influence was4 ,the fact that at last his admirers and disciples1 no longer under any spell or distorting sense of loyalty1 recognize that there are in painting plenty of things worth doing which he never did is all to the good4 ,it is now possible to criticize him seriously2 and when all his insufficiencies have been fairly shown he remains one of the very greatest painters that ever lived4 ,the serious criticism of ,czanne is a landmark in the history of the movement1 and still something of a novelty2 for1 naturally1 ,i reckon the vulgar vituperation with which his work was greeted1 and the faint praise with which it was subsequently damned1 as no criticism at all4 ,the hacks and pedagogues and middle-class metaphysicians who abused him1 and only when it dawned on them that they were making themselves silly1 in the eyes of their own flock even1 took to patronizing1 are forgot4 ,they babble in the ,burlington ,fine ,arts ,club--where nobody marks them--and have their reward in professorships and the direction of public galleries4 ,the criticism that matters1 of which we are beginning to hear something1 comes mostly from painters1 his ardent admirers1 who realize that ,czanne attempted things which he failed to achieve and deliberately shunned others worth achieving4 ,also1 they realize that there is always a danger of one good custom corrupting the world4 ,czanne is the full-stop between impressionism and the contemporary movement4 ,of course there is really no such thing as a full-stop in art any more than there is in nature4 ,movement grows out of movement1 and every artist is attached to the past by a thousand binders springing from a thousand places in the great stem of tradition4 ,but it is true that there is hardly one modern artist of importance to whom ,czanne is not father or grandfather1 and that no other influence is comparable with his4 ,to be sure there is ,seurat1 of whom we shall hear more in the next ten years4 ,although he died as long ago as #ahia his importance has not yet been fully realized1 his discoveries have not been fully exploited1 not yet has his extraordinary genius received adequate recognition4 ,seurat may be the ,giorgione of the movement4 ,working in isolation and dying young1 he is known to us only by a few pictures which reveal unmistakeable and mysterious genius2 but ,i should not be surprised if from the next generation he were to receive honours equal almost to those paid ,czanne4 ,the brave douanier was hardly master enough to have great and enduring influence2 nevertheless1 the sincerity of his vision and directness of his method reinforced and even added to one part of the lesson taught by ,czanne3 also1 it was he who--by his pictures1 not by doctrine of course--sent the pick of the young generation to look at the primitives4 ,such as it was1 his influence was a genuinely plastic one1 which is more1 ,i think1 than can be said for that of ,gauguin or of ,van ,gogh4 ,the former seemed wildly exciting for a moment1 partly because he flattened out his forms1 designed in two dimensions1 and painted without chiaroscuro in pure colours1 but even more because he had very much the air of a rebel4 ,il nous faut les barbares1 said ,andr ,gide2 il nous faut les barbares1 said we all4 ,well1 here was someone who had gone to live with them1 and sent home thrilling1 and often very beautiful1 pictures which could1 if one chose1 be taken as challenges to ,european civilization4 ,to a considerable extent the influence of ,gauguin was literary1 and therefore in the long run negligible4 ,it is a mistake on that account to suppose--as many seem inclined to do--that ,gauguin was not a fine painter4 ,van ,gogh was a fine painter1 too2 but his influence1 like that of ,gauguin1 has proved nugatory--a fact which detracts nothing from the merit of his work4 ,he was fitted by his admirers into current social and political tendencies1 and coupled with ,charles-,louis ,philippe as an apostle of sentimental anarchy4 ,sentimental portraits of washerwomen and artisans were compared with ,marie ,donadieu and ,bubu de ,montparnasse2 and by indiscreet enthusiasm the artist was degraded to the level of a preacher4 ,nor was this degradation inexcusable3 ,van ,gogh was a preacher1 and too often his delicious and sensitive works of art are smeared over1 to their detriment1 with tendencious propaganda4 ,at his best1 however1 he is a very great impressionist--a neo-impressionist1 or expressionist if you like--but ,i should say an impressionist much influenced and much to the good1 as was ,gauguin1 by acquaintance with ,czanne in his last and most instructive phase4 ,indeed1 it is clear that ,gauguin and ,van ,gogh would not have come near achieving what they did achieve--achieved1 mind you1 as genuine painters--had they not been amongst the first to realize and make use of that bewildering revelation which is the art of ,czanne4 ,of that art ,i am not here to speak2 ,i am concerned only with its influence4 ,taking the thing at its roughest and simplest1 one may say that the influence of ,czanne during the last seventeen years has manifested itself most obviously in two characteristics--,directness and what is called ,distortion4 ,czanne was direct because he set himself a task which admitted of no adscititious flourishes--the creation of form which should be entirely self-supporting and intrinsically significant1 la possession de la forme as his descendants call it now4 ,to this great end all means were good3 all that was not a means to this end was superfluous4 ,to achieve it he was prepared to play the oddest tricks with natural forms--to distort4 ,all great artists have distorted2 ,czanne was peculiar only in doing so more consciously and thoroughly than most4 ,what is important in his art is1 of course1 the beauty of his conceptions and his power in pursuit3 indifference to verisimilitude is but the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace4 ,for some1 however1 though not for most of his followers his distortion had an importance of its own4 ,to the young painters of #aijd1 or thereabouts1 ,czanne came as the liberator3 he it was who had freed painting from a mass of conventions which1 useful once1 had grown old and stiff and were now no more than so many impediments to expression4 ,to most of them his chief importance--as an influence1 of course--was that he had removed all unnecessary barriers between what they felt and its realization in form4 ,it was his directness that was thrilling4 ,but to an important minority the distortions and simplifications--the reduction of natural forms to spheres1 cylinders1 cones1 etc4--which ,czanne had used as means were held to be in themselves of consequence because capable of fruitful development4 ,from them it was found possible to deduce a theory of art--a complete sthetic even4 ,put on a fresh track by ,czanne's practice1 a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate on the nature of form and its appeal to the sthetic sense1 and not to speculate only1 but to materialize their speculations4 ,the greatest of them1 ,picasso1 invented ,cubism4 ,if ,i call these artists who forged themselves a theory of form and used it as a means of expression ,doctrinaires it is because to me that name bears no disparaging implication and seems to indicate well enough what ,i take to be their one common characteristic3 if ,i call those who1 without giving outward sign 7they may well have had their private speculations and systems7 of an abstract theory1 appeared to use distortion when1 where1 and as their immediate sensibility dictated1 ,fauves1 that is because the word has passed into three languages1 is admirably colourless--for all its signifying a colour--and implies the existence of a group without specifying a peculiarity4 ,into ,doctrinaires--,theorists if you like the word better--and ,fauves the first generation of ,czanne's descendants could1 ,i feel sure1 be divided2 whether such a division would serve any useful purpose is another matter4 ,what ,i am sure of is that to have two such labels1 to be applied when occasion requires and cancelled without much compunction1 will excellently serve mine1 which may1 or may not1 be useful4 ,i would not insist too strongly on the division2 certainly at first it was not felt to be sharp4 ,plenty of ,fauves did their whack of theorizing1 while some of the theorists are amongst the most sensitive and personal of the age4 ,what ,i do insist on--because it explains and excuses the character of my book--is that in this age theory has played so prominent a part1 hardly one artist of importance quite escaping its influence1 that no critic who proposes to give some account of painting since ,czanne can be expected to overlook it3 some1 to be sure1 may be thought to have stared indecently4 ,the division between ,fauves and ,theorists1 ,i was saying1 in the beginning was not sharp2 nevertheless1 because it was real1 already in the first generation of ,czanne's descendants the seeds of two schools were sown4 ,already by #aiaj two tendencies are visibly distinct2 but up to #aiad1 though there is divergence1 there is1 ,i think1 no antipathy between them--of antipathies between individuals ,i say nothing4 ,solidarity was imposed on the young generation by the virulent and not over scrupulous hostility of the old2 it was l'union sacre in face of the enemy4 ,and just as political allies are apt to become fully alive to the divergence of their aims and ambitions only after they have secured their position by victory1 so it was not until the new movement had been recognized by all educated people as representative and dominant that the ,fauves felt inclined to give vent to their inevitable dislike of ,doctrinaires4 ,taken as a whole1 the first fourteen years of the century1 which my malicious friend ,jean ,cocteau sometimes calls l'poque hroque1 possessed most of the virtues and vices that such an epoch should possess4 ,it was rich in fine artists2 and these artists were finely prolific4 ,it was experimental1 and passionate in its experiments4 ,it was admirably disinterested4 ,partly from the pressure of opposition1 partly because the family characteristics of the ,czannides are conspicuous1 it acquired a rather deceptive air of homogeneity4 ,it was inclined to accept recruits without scrutinizing over closely their credentials1 though it is to be remembered that it kept its critical faculty sufficiently sharp to reject the ,futurists while welcoming the ,cubists4 ,i cannot deny1 however1 that in that moment of enthusiasm and loyalty we were rather disposed to find extraordinary merits in commonplace painters4 ,we knew well enough that a feeble and incompetent disciple of ,czanne was just as worthless as a feeble and incompetent disciple of anyone else--but1 then1 was our particular postulant so feeble after all8 ,also1 we were fond of arguing that the liberating influence of ,czanne had made it possible for a mediocre artist to express a little store of recondite virtue which under another dispensation must have lain hid for ever4 ,i doubt we exaggerated4 ,we were much too kind1 ,i fancy1 to a number of perfectly commonplace young people1 and said a number of foolish things about them4 ,what was worse1 we were unjust to the past4 ,that was inevitable4 ,the intemperate ferocity of the opposition drove us into ,protestantism1 and ,protestantism is unjust always4 ,it made us narrow1 unwilling to give credit to outsiders of merit1 and grossly indulgent to insiders of little or none4 ,certainly we appreciated the ,orientals1 the ,primitives1 and savage art as they had never been appreciated before2 but we underrated the art of the ,renaissance and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries4 ,also1 because we set great store by our theories and sought their implications everywhere1 we claimed kinship with a literary movement with which1 in fact1 we had nothing in common4 ,charles-,louis ,philippe and the ,unanimistes should never have been compared with the descendants of ,czanne4 ,happily1 when it came to dragging in ,tolstoyism1 and ,dostoievskyism even1 and making of the movement something moral and political almost1 the connection was seen to be ridiculous and was duly cut4 ,the protagonists of the heroic epoch 7#aijd--aiad shall we say87 were ,matisse and ,picasso4 ,in modern ,european painting ,picasso remains the paramount influence2 of modern ,french1 however1 ,derain is the chief2 while ,matisse1 who may still be the best painter alive1 has hardly any influence at all4 ,in these early days ,derain1 considerably younger than ,matisse and less precocious than ,picasso1 was less conspicuous than either2 yet he always held a peculiar and eminent position1 with an intellect apt for theoretical conundrums and sensibility to match that of any ,fauve and his personal genius brooding over both4 ,about the best known of ,matisse's companions--for they were in no sense his disciples--were1 ,i should say1 ,friesz1 ,vlaminck1 ,laprade1 ,chabaud1 ,marquet1 ,manguin1 ,puy1 ,delaunay1 ,rouault1 ,girieud1 ,flandrin4 ,i think ,i am justified in describing all these1 with the exception1 perhaps1 of ,girieud and ,flandrin1 as ,fauves2 assuredly ,i have heard them all so described4 ,in very early days ,maurice ,denis was by some reckoned a chief1 the equal almost of ,matisse2 but through sloppy sentiment he fell into mere futility1 and by now has quite dropped out4 ,friesz1 on the other hand1 has gone ahead1 and is to-day one of the half-dozen leaders3 ,i shall have a good deal to say about him in a later part of this book4 ,vlaminck a few years ago had the misfortune to learn a recipe for making attractive and sparkling pictures2 he is now1 ,i understand1 in retirement trying to unlearn it4 ,rouault is a very interesting artist of whom we see little2 from what ,i have seen ,i should be inclined to fear that a taste for romance and drama is too often suffered to smother his remarkable gift for painting4 ,marquet1 with gifts equal to almost anything1 is content1 it seems1 to remain a brilliant but superficial impressionist4 ,puy is a thoroughly sound artist1 and so in a smaller way is ,manguin4 ,what has become of ,chabaud1 who was a bit too clever1 and a little vulgar even8 ,and what of ,delaunay8 ,and of ,flandrin--what has become of him8 ,something sufficiently interesting1 at any rate1 to give pause even to a critic in a hurry4 ,his name must not go by unmarked4 ,flandrin was amongst the first to rebel against ,impressionism--against that impressionism1 ,i mean1 which remained implicit in post-impressionism4 ,resolutely he set his face against the prevailing habit of expressing an aspect of things1 and tried hard to make a picture4 ,so far he has succeeded imperfectly3 but he is still trying4 ,of one artist who is certainly no ,doctrinaire1 nor yet1 ,i think1 a ,fauve1 but who has been influenced by ,czanne1 ,i shall here do myself the honour of pronouncing the name4 ,aristide ,maillol is so obviously the best sculptor alive that to people familiar with his work there is something comic about those discussions in which are canvassed the claims of ,mestrovic and ,epstein1 ,archipenko and ,bourdelle4 ,these have their merits2 but ,maillol is a great artist4 ,he works in the classical tradition1 modified by ,czanne1 thanks largely to whom1 ,i imagine1 he has freed himself from the impressionism--the tiresome agitation and emphasis--of ,rodin4 ,he has founded no school2 but one pupil of his1 ,gimon--a very young sculptor--deserves watching4 ,from the doctrine a small but interesting school of sculpture has come3 ,laurens1 an artist of sensibility and some power1 and ,lipsitz are its most admired representatives4 ,at home we have ,epstein and ,dobson2 both have been through the stern school of abstract construction1 and ,epstein has emerged the most brilliant pasticheur alive4 ,brancuzi 7a ,bohemian7 is1 ,i should say1 by temperament more ,fauve than ,doctrinaire4 ,older than most of ,czanne's descendants1 he has nevertheless been profoundly influenced by the master2 but the delicacy of his touch1 which gives sometimes to his modelling almost the quality of ,wei sculpture1 he learnt from no one--such things not being taught4 ,gaudier ,brzcska1 a young ,french sculptor of considerable promise1 was killed in the early months of the war4 ,he had been living in ,england1 where his work1 probably on account of its manifest superiority to most of what was seen near it1 gained an exaggerated reputation4 ,the promise was indisputable2 but1 after seeing the ,leicester ,gallery exhibition1 ,i came to the conclusion that there was not much else4 ,indeed1 his drawings often betrayed so superficial a facility1 such a turn for calligraphic dexterities1 that one began to wonder whether even in expecting much one had not been over sanguine4 ,the extravagant reputation enjoyed by ,gaudier in this country will perhaps cross the mind of anyone who happens to read my essay on ,wilcoxism3 native1 or even resident1 geese look uncommonly like swans on home waters3 to see them as they are you should see them abroad4 ,bonnard and ,vuillard1 unlike ,aristide ,maillol1 though being sensitive and intelligent artists who make the most of whatever serves their turn they have taken what they wanted from the atmosphere in which they work1 are hardly to be counted of ,czanne's descendants4 ,rather are they children of the great impressionists who1 unlike the majority of their surviving brothers and sisters1 instead of swallowing the impressionist doctrine whole1 just as official painters do the academic1 have modified it charmingly to suit their peculiar temperaments4 ,not having swallowed the poker1 they have none of those stiff and static habits which characterize the later generations of their family4 ,they are free and various2 and ,bonnard is one of the greatest painters alive4 ,mistakenly1 he is supposed to have influenced ,duncan ,grant2 but ,duncan ,grant1 at the time when he was painting pictures which appear to have certain affinities with those of ,bonnard1 was wholly unacquainted with the work of that master4 ,on the other hand1 it does seem possible that ,vuillard has influenced another ,english painter1 ,miss ,ethel ,sands3 only1 in making attributions of influence one cannot be too careful4 ,about direct affiliations especially1 as this case shows1 one should never be positive4 ,it is as probable that ,miss ,sands has been influenced by ,sickert1 who has much in common with ,vuillard1 as by ,vuillard himself2 and most probable of all1 perhaps1 that the three have inherited from a common ancestor something which each has developed and cultivated as seemed to him or her best4 ,la recherche de la paternit was ever an exciting but hazardous pastime3 if ,bonnard and ,vuillard1 in their turn1 are claimed1 as they sometimes are1 for descendants of ,renoir1 with equal propriety ,sickert may be claimed for ,degas4 ,and it is worth noting1 perhaps1 as a curious fact1 that in the matter of influence this is about as much as at the moment can be claimed for either of these masters4 ,both ,renoir and ,degas lived well on into the period of which ,i am writing2 but though both were admired1 the former immensely1 neither up to the present has had much direct influence on contemporary painting4 ,from #aijh--;,i choose that year to avoid all risk of ante-dating--there existed side by side1 and apparently in alliance1 with the ,fauves a school of theoretical painters4 ,of ,cubism ,i have said my say elsewhere3 if ,i have some doubts as to whether1 as a complete theory of painting1 it has a future1 ,i have none that what it has already achieved is remarkable4 ,also1 ,i recognize its importance as a school of experiments1 some of which are sure to bear fruit and leave a mark on history4 ,of the merits of many of its professors ,i say nothing1 because they are manifest and admitted4 ,picasso stands apart3 he is the inventor and most eminent exponent1 yet ,i refuse to call him ,cubist because he is so many other things4 ,braque1 who at present confines himself to abstractions1 and to taste and sensibility adds creative power1 is to my mind the best of the bunch3 while ,lger1 ,gris1 ,gleizes1 and ,metzinger are four painters who1 if they did not limit themselves to a means of expression which to most people is still perplexing1 if not disagreeable1 would be universally acclaimed for what they are--four exceptionally inventive artists1 each possessing his own peculiar and precious sense of colour and design4 ,but besides these pure doctrinaires there were a good many painters who1 without reducing their forms to geometrical abstractions1 by modifying them in accordance with ,cubist theory gave a new and impressive coherence to their compositions4 ,of them the best known1 in ,england at all events1 is ,jean ,marchand1 whose admirable work has been admired here ever since the ,grafton ,galleries exhibition of #aiab4 ,lately he has moved away from ,cubism1 but has not become less doctrinaire for that4 ,indeed1 if ,i have a fault to find with his grave and masterly art it is that sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibility and inspiration4 ,marchand is so determined to paint logically and well that he seems a little to forget that in the greatest art there is more than logic and good painting4 ,it is odd to remember that ,lhote1 who since the war has been saluted by a band of young painters 7not ,french for the most part1 ,i believe7 as chief of a new and profoundly doctrinaire school which is to reconcile ,cubism with the great tradition1 stood at the time of which ,i am writing pretty much where ,marchand stood4 ,his undeniable gifts1 which have not failed him since1 were then devoted to combining the amusing qualities of the imagiers 7popular print-makers7 with the new discoveries4 ,the results were consistently pleasing2 and ,i will here confess that1 however little ,i may like some of his later preaching and however little he may like mine1 what ,lhote produces in paint never fails to arrest me and very seldom to charm4 ,herbin1 who was another of those who about the year #aiaj were modifying natural forms in obedience to ,cubist theory1 has since gone all lengths in the direction of pure abstraction3 his art is none the better for it4 ,valloton1 so far as ,i can remember1 was much where ,herbin was4 ,now apparently he aims at the grand tragic2 an aim which rarely fails to lead its votaries by way of the grand academic4 ,perhaps such aspirations can express themselves only in the consecrated formul of traditional rhetoric2 at all events1 the last ,i saw of ,valloton was furiously classical4 ,d ,and for all that he remains1 what he was in the beginning1 an ,illustrator4 ,footnote ,d3 ,his exhibits in the salon d'automne of #aiba1 however1 suggest that he has come off his high horse4 ,to me these artists all seem to be of the first generation of ,czanne's descendants4 ,about the dates of one or two1 however1 ,i may well be mistaken2 and so may ,i be when ,i suppose half a dozen more of whose existence ,i became aware rather later--only a year or two before the war1 in fact--to be of a slightly later brood4 ,for instance1 it must have been at the end of #aiab1 or the beginning of #aiac1 that ,i first heard of ,modigliani1 ,utrillo1 ,segonzac1 ,marie ,laurencin1 ,luc-,albert ,moreau and ,kisling1 though doubtless all were known earlier to wide-awake men on the spot4 ,none of them can fairly be described as doctrinaire3 by that time an artist with a pronounced taste for abstractions betook himself to ,cubism almost as a matter of course4 ,all owe much to ,czanne--,utrillo least2 ,modigliani and ,marie ,laurencin owe a good deal to ,picasso's blue period2 while ,luc-,albert ,moreau owes something to ,segonzac4 ,of the two first ,modigliani is dead and ,utrillo so ill that he is unlikely ever to paint again4 ,e ,a strange artist1 ,utrillo1 personal enough1 just as ,modigliani was handsome enough1 to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama1 with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion--expressing itself in an inimitable white--for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the ,parisian suburbs4 ,towards the end1 when he was already very ill1 he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing4 ,his career was of a few years only1 but those years were prolific2 beginning in a rather old-fashioned1 impressionistic style1 he soon found his way into the one he has made famous4 ,to judge his art as a whole is difficult3 partly because his early productions are not only unequal to1 but positively unlike1 what he achieved later2 partly because many of the ,utrillos with which ,paris is overstocked were painted by someone else4 ,footnote ,e3 ,with great pleasure ,i contradict this4 ,according to latest reports ,utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting again4 ,perhaps the most interesting1 though neither the most startling nor seductive1 of this batch is ,segonzac4 ,like all the best things in nature1 he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day2 so1 as he is already a thoroughly good painter1 like the nigger of ,saint-,cyr he has but to continue4 ,before nature1 or rather cultivation1 with its chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees1 as before the sumptuous splendours of a naked body1 his reaction is manifestly1 flatteringly1 lyrical4 ,he might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of ,gascony4 ,his emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on the art of painting4 ,nevertheless1 there are critics who complain that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms definition4 ,and perhaps they do sometimes3 only in these1 as in other respects1 his art improves steadily4 ,f ,footnote ,f3 ,salon d'automne1 #aiba3 ,it has again made a big stride forward4 ,segonzac is now amongst the best painters in ,france4 ,sa peinture a une petite ct vicieuse qui est adorable--,i have heard the phrase so often that ,i can but repeat it4 ,marie ,laurencin's painting is adorable2 we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity so well1 and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering it in an effort to paint like a man2 but she is not a great artist--she is not even the best woman painter alive4 ,she is barely as good as ,dufy 7a contemporary of ,picasso unless ,i mistake1 but for many years known rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils7 who1 while he confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making images1 was very good indeed4 ,his oil-paintings are another matter4 ,dufy has a formula for making pictures2 he has a clich for a tree1 a house1 a chimney1 even for the smoke coming out of a chimney4 ,in this way he can be sure of producing a pretty article1 and1 what is more1 an article the public likes4 ,very different is the art of ,kisling4 ,rarely does he produce one of those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat4 ,what you will find in his work1 besides much good painting1 is a serious preoccupation with the problem of externalizing in form an sthetic experience4 ,and as1 after all1 that is the proper end of art his work is treated with respect by all the best painters and most understanding critics1 though it has not yet scored a popular success4 ,kisling ne triche pas1 says ,andr ,salmon4 ,the war did not kill the movement3 none but a fool could have supposed that it would4 ,nevertheless1 it had one ghastly effect on contemporary painting4 ,when ,i returned to ,paris in the autumn of #aiai ,i found the painters whom ,i had known before the war developing1 more or less normally1 and producing work which fell nowise short of what one had come to expect4 ,i saw all that there was to be seen2 ,i admired2 and then ,i asked one who had already1 before the war1 established a style and a reputation--,i asked ,friesz1 ,i think--,et les jeunes8 ,nous sommes les jeunes was the reply4 ,those young ,french painters who should have been emerging from the ruck of students between #aiad and #aiai had either been killed1 or deflected from their career1 or gravely retarded4 ,only now is la jeunesse beginning to give signs of vitality2 only now is a new crop coming to the surface2 so now ,i will take the foolhardy risk of pronouncing the names of a few who seem to me to have given proof of undeniable talent--,gabriel-,fournier1 ,favory1 ,lotiron1 ,soutine1 ,corneau1 ,durey1 ,monzain1 ,richard1 ,guindet1 ,togores1 ,gromaire1 ,alix1 ,halicka4 ,i must not be taken to assert that all of these are under thirty1 or that none was known to discerning amateurs before the war1 or in its first years at any rate4 ,certainly1 the work of ,gabriel-,fournier1 ,favory1 ,soutine1 and ,i think of ,corneau1 was known to me even1 through photographs1 before the ,armistice was signed4 ,as certainly ,i think it is true that all are of a later crop than ,segonzac1 ,marie ,laurencin1 ,luc-,albert ,moreau1 etc41 while ,monzain1 ,richard1 ,togores1 ,gromaire1 ,alix1 ,guindet1 and ,halicka are very young indeed4 ,so here are a dozen painters--most of them little known at present outside a smallish circle of artists1 critics1 and inquisitive amateurs--who appear to give promise of excellence3 amongst them ,i should be inclined to look for the masters of a coming age4 ,g ,footnote ,g3 ,twelve years ago ,i made a list of young or youngish painters--the men of thirty or thereabouts--from whom it seemed to me reasonable to expect great things4 ,it included such names as ,derain1 ,picasso1 ,vlaminck1 ,marchand1 ,friesz1 ,maillol1 ,duncan ,grant3 one need not be laudator temporis acti to feel that the men of the new generation are on a smaller scale4 ,this merely confirms my often expressed notion that the decade #ahge-he produced a prodigious quantity of greatly gifted babies4 ,on the other hand1 if by comparison with the salon d'automne of #aiaa that of '#bl seems unexciting1 we must not fail to do justice to the extraordinarily high level of painting that has now been attained4 ,and this confirms another of my pet theories--that we live in an age comparable 7so far as painting goes7 with the quattro cento4 ,the works of even the smallest artists of that age enchant us now1 because in that age any man of any talent could make a picture2 but doubtless at the time critics and amateurs sighed for the first thrilling years of the movement--for the discoveries of ,masaccio and ,donatello--and were quite ready to welcome the novelties of the high renaissance when they came4 ,the world moves faster nowadays2 already we look regretfully back to the days when ,matisse and ,picasso were launching the movement1 and another high renaissance may be nearer than we suppose4 ,to this list ,i would add1 in no spirit of paradox1 two names which1 at first sight1 must appear singularly out of place--,camoin and ,gurin4 ,both were at work before the contemporary movement--the ,czanne movement--was born or1 at any rate1 launched2 both for a long time seemed to be1 if anything1 opposed to it2 both for some years lay dormant in a chrysalis-like state to emerge recently a pair of very interesting painters4 ,the ,camoin and the ,gurin with whom ,i am concerned appeared since the war2 they may1 of course1 relapse into their former condition3 time will show4 ,apparently it was only three or four years ago that ,camoin realized that ,matisse--his contemporary--was the master from whom he could draw that nourishment which one good artist may very legitimately draw from another4 ,so nourished1 he seems to have made a fresh start2 at any rate his work has now a freshness and vivacity which in his younger days he could never impart4 ,the case of ,gurin is odder still4 ,a passionate admirer of ,watteau1 he would seem to have locked himself up in a rather sterile devotion to the eighteenth century master4 ,one must suppose that there was something dead in his appreciation1 something recognized but unfelt1 and therefore not really understood4 ,this deadness came through into his work4 ,lacking genuine inspiration1 struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and conventions1 he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright vulgarity4 ,suddenly1 and without renouncing any ancient loyalty1 he has come to life4 ,it is ,watteau that inspires him still2 but the essential ,watteau--,watteau the painter--not that superficies which is more or less familiar to every hack1 be he limner or penman1 who dabbles in the eighteenth century4 ,how amusing to fancy that the just admiration now felt for the genius of ,watteau by those descendants of ,czanne who formerly misesteemed it has somehow put ,gurin himself in the way of becoming intimate with an art he had formerly worshipped at a distance6 ,though the war did not kill or even cripple the movement1 since the war there has been a change1 or1 at any rate1 a change has become apparent4 ,to begin with1 ,picasso has1 in a sense1 retired from public life--from the life of the cafs and studios ,i mean--and in isolation works out those problems that are for ever presenting themselves to his restless brain4 ,the splendid fruit of his solitude we saw last summer chez ,paul ,rosenberg4 ,from time to time ,picasso still paints a ,cubist picture--to keep his mind in--but he is hardly to be reckoned a ,cubist1 and certainly not a pure one4 ,of that school1 which still flourishes 7exhibiting at la ,section d',or or rue de la ,baume the work of ,braque1 ,gleizes1 ,lger1 ,metzinger1 ,gris1 ,laurens1 ,lipsitz1 ,marcoussis1 ,henry ,hayden1 and the brilliant ,irne ,lagut71 ,picasso is the inspiration1 perhaps1 but not the chief4 ,his influence in the western world and on foreign painters in ,paris is as great as ever2 but the ,french1 slightly vexed1 maybe1 at having accepted so long the leadership of a ,spaniard1 show signs of turning back towards their national tradition4 ,so1 though ,picasso remains the animator of the doctrinaire school or schools1 ,lhote may become the master4 ,it is the fashion1 ,i know1 not to take his influence seriously4 ,no matter how clever a man he may be1 ,lhote--they say--is not a big enough painter to be a chief4 ,it may be so--,i suspect it is--yet we should not forget that1 besides being intelligent and capable of drawing more or less plausible inferences from premises of his own choosing1 ,lhote can point to a practice by no means despicable4 ,for the rest1 he is the apostle of logic and discipline1 and so finds plenty to approve in the ,cubist doctrine and the ,french tradition from ,poussin to ,david4 ,i do not know whether ,bissire is to be ranked amongst his disciples--,i should think not--but ,bissire1 a most attractive artist1 is perhaps significant of the new tendency in that he has chosen to express a whimsical temperament in terms of prim science4 ,about the science of picture-making1 as the director of the ,national ,gallery calls it1 he has little to learn4 ,he knows the masters1 the ,primitives especially1 and has a way1 at once logical and fantastic1 of playing on their motifs which gives sometimes the happiest results4 ,bissire is too fanciful and odd ever to be a chef d'cole or representative even2 but the very fact that1 being what he is1 he has chosen such means of expression is symptomatic4 ,so the doctrinaire side of the movement persists1 animated by ,picasso1 and schooled to some extent by ,lhote4 ,the main current1 however1 has found another channel2 and1 unless ,i mistake1 we are already in the second phase of the movement--a phase in which the revelations of ,czanne and ,seurat and the elaborations of their immediate descendants will be modified and revitalized by the pressure and spirit of the great tradition4 ,the leader has already been chosen4 ,derain is the chief of the new ,french school--a school destined manifestly to be less cosmopolitan than its predecessor4 ,the tendency towards nationalism everywhere is unmistakeable--a consequence of the war1 ,i suppose4 ,it is useless to deplore the fact or exult in it3 one can but accept it as one accepts the weather4 ,even ,england has not escaped2 and it is to be noted that our best painter1 ,duncan ,grant1 a descendant of ,czanne who has run the whole gamut of abstract experiment1 is settling down1 without of course for a moment denying his master1 to exploit the ,french heritage1 with feet planted firmly in the ,english tradition--the tradition of ,gainsborough and ,constable4 ,in ,france1 where tradition is so much richer1 its weight will confine more closely and drive more intensely the new spirit4 ,one new tendency--that which insists more passionately than ever on order and organization--merely continues the impetus given by ,czanne and received by all his followers2 but another1 more vague1 towards something which ,i had rather call humanism than humanity1 does imply1 ,i think1 a definite breach with ,cubism and the tenets of the austerer doctrinaires4 ,it is not drama or anecdote or sentiment or symbolism that this would bring back to the plastic arts1 but rather that mysterious yet recognizable quality in which the art of ,raffael excels--a calm1 disinterested1 and professional concern with the significance of life as revealed directly in form1 a faint desire1 perhaps1 to touch by a picture1 a building1 or a simple object of use some curious over-tone of our aesthetic sense4 ,deep in their quest of that borderland beauty which is common to life and art ,french painters are once again deeply concerned with life3 to borrow an idea from my next essay1 they have chosen a new artistic problem4 ,to them1 however1 life does not mean what it means to the sentimentalists or melodramatists1 nor even precisely what it meant to the ,impressionists4 ,contemporary ,french painting has no taste for contemporary actualities4 ,by life it understands1 not what is going on in the street1 but--what to be sure does go on there because it goes on everywhere--the thing that poets used to call the animating spark4 ,about life1 in that sense1 the painters of the new generation will1 ,i fancy1 have something to say4 ,they will come at it1 not by drama or anecdote or symbol1 but1 as all genuine artists have always come at whatever possessed their imaginations1 by plastic expression1 or--if you like old-fashioned phrases--by creating significant form4 ,they will seek the vital principle in all sorts of objects and translate it into forms of every kind4 ,that humane beauty after which ,derain strives is to be found1 ,i said1 in ,raffael3 it is to be found also in the ,parthenon4 ,i think this preliminary essay should close1 as it began1 on a note of humility and with an explanation4 ,twenty years ago1 when ,i was an undergraduate1 ,i remember reading just after it was published ,m4 ,camille ,mauclair's little book on the ,impressionists4 ,long ago ,i ceased much to admire ,m4 ,mauclair's writing3 his theorizing and pseudo-science now strike me as silly1 and his judgements seem lacking in perspicacity4 ,but whatever ,i may think of it now ,i shall not forget what ,i owe that book4 ,even at ,cambridge the spirit of the age1 which is said to pervade the air like a pestilence1 had infected me2 and ,i set out on my first visit to ,paris full of curiosity about what was then the contemporary movement--at its last gasp4 ,my guide was ,m4 ,mauclair2 his book it was that put me in the right way4 ,for by bringing me acquainted with current theories and reputations1 and by throwing me into a fever of expectation1 he brought my sthetic sensibilities to that state in which they reacted swiftly and generously to the pictures themselves4 ,this1 as ,i shall explain in another essay1 is1 to my mind1 the proper function of criticism4 ,i shall never forget my first visits to the ,caillebotte collection2 and in the unforgettable thrill of those first visits ,m4 ,mauclair's bad science and erratic judgement counted for something--much perhaps4 ,they put me into a mood of sympathetic expectation2 and such a mood is1 even for highly sensitive people1 often an indispensable preliminary to sthetic appreciation4 ,there are those who have got to be made to feel something before they can begin to feel for themselves--believe me1 they are not the least sensitive or genuine of amateurs3 they are only the most honest4 ,i should like very much to do for even one of them what ,m4 ,mauclair did for me4 ,it would be delightful to believe that by putting him in the way of the best modern painting and the theories concerning or connected with it--theories which1 it seems1 for some make it more intelligible--,i was giving his sensibility a serviceable jog4 ,everyone1 ,i know1 must see with his own eyes and feel through his own nerves2 none can lend another eyes or emotions3 nevertheless1 one can point and gesticulate and in so doing excite4 ,if ,i have done that ,i am content4 ,twenty years hence1 it is to be presumed1 those who now read my writings will be saying of them what ,i was saying of ,m4 ,mauclair's4 ,the prospect does not distress me4 ,i am not author enough to be pained by the certainty that in ten years' time this book will be obsolete4 ,like ,m4 ,mauclair's1 it will have served its turn2 and ,i make no doubt there will be someone at hand to write another1 the same in purpose1 and in execution let us hope rather neater4 ,we all agree now--by we ,i mean intelligent people under sixty--that a work of art is like a rose4 ,a rose is not beautiful because it is like something else4 ,neither is a work of art4 ,roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves4 ,unluckily1 the matter does not end there3 a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above1 and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind4 ,in so far as we are mere spectators and connoisseurs we need not bother about these2 all we are concerned with is the finished product1 the work of art4 ,to produce the best eggs it may be that hens should be fed on hot meal mash4 ,that is a question for the farmer4 ,for us what matters is the quality of the eggs1 since it is them and not hot meal mash that we propose to eat for breakfast4 ,few1 however1 can take quite so lordly an attitude towards art4 ,we contemplate the object1 we experience the appropriate emotion1 and then we begin asking ,why8 and ,how8 ,personally1 ,i am so conscious of these insistent questions that1 at the risk of some misunderstanding1 ,i habitually describe works of art as significant rather than beautiful forms4 ,for works of art1 unlike roses1 are the creations and expressions of conscious minds4 ,i beg that no theological red herring may here be drawn across the scent4 ,a work of art is an object beautiful1 or significant1 in itself1 nowise dependent for its value on the outside world1 capable by itself of provoking in us that emotion which we call sthetic4 ,agreed4 ,but men do not create such things unconsciously and without effort1 as they breathe in their sleep4 ,on the contrary1 for their production are required special energies and a peculiar state of mind4 ,a work of art1 like a rose1 is the result of a string of causes3 and some of us are so vain as to take more interest in the operations of the human mind than in fertilizers and watering-pots4 ,in the pre-natal history of a work of art ,i seem to detect at any rate three factors--a state of peculiar and intense sensibility1 the creative impulse1 and the artistic problem4 ,an artist1 ,i imagine1 is one who often and easily is thrown into that state of acute and sympathetic agitation which most of us1 once or twice in our lives1 have had the happiness of experiencing4 ,and have you noticed that many men and most boys1 when genuinely in love1 find themselves1 the moment the object of their emotion is withdrawn1 driven by their feelings into scribbling verses8 ,an artist1 ,i imagine1 is always falling in love with everything4 ,always he is being thrown into a state of mind4 ,the sight of a tree or an omnibus1 the screaming of whistles or the whistling of birds1 the smell of roast pig1 a gesture1 a look1 any trivial event may provoke a crisis1 filling him with an intolerable desire to express himself4 ,the artist cannot embrace the object of his emotion4 ,he does not even wish to4 ,once1 perhaps1 that was his desire2 if so1 like the pointer and the setter1 he has converted the barbarous pouncing instinct into the civilized pleasure of tremulous contemplation4 ,be that as it may1 the contemplative moment is short4 ,simultaneously almost with the emotion arises the longing to express1 to create a form that shall match the feeling1 that shall commemorate the moment of ecstasy4 ,this moment of passionate apprehension is1 unless ,i mistake1 the source of the creative impulse2 indeed1 the latter seems to follow so promptly on the former that one is often tempted to regard them as a single movement4 ,the next step is longer4 ,the creative impulse is one thing2 creation another4 ,if the artist's form is to be the equivalent of an experience1 if it is to be significant in fact1 every scrap of it has got to be fused and fashioned in the white heat of his emotion4 ,and how is his emotion to be kept at white heat through the long1 cold days of formal construction8 ,emotions seem to grow cold and set like glue4 ,the intense power and energy called forth by the first thrilling vision grow slack for want of incentive4 ,what engine is to generate the heat and make taut the energies by which alone significant form can be created8 ,that is where the artistic problem comes in4 ,the artistic problem is the problem of making a match between an emotional experience and a form that has been conceived but not created4 ,evidently the conception of some sort of form accompanies1 or closely follows1 the creative impulse4 ,the artist says1 or rather feels1 to himself3 ,i should like to express that in words1 or in lines and colours1 or in notes4 ,but to make anything out of his impulse he will need something more than this vague desire to express or to create4 ,he will need a definite1 fully conceived form into which his experience can be made to fit4 ,and this fitting1 this matching of his experience with his form1 will be his problem4 ,it will serve the double purpose of concentrating his energies and stimulating his intellect4 ,it will be at once a canal and a goad4 ,and his energy and intellect between them will have to keep warm his emotion4 ,shakespeare kept tense the muscle of his mind and boiling and racing his blood by struggling to confine his turbulent spirit within the trim mould of the sonnet4 ,pindar1 the most passionate of poets1 drove and pressed his feelings through the convolutions of the ode4 ,bach wrote fugues4 ,the master of ,st4 ,vitale found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic portraits wrought in an intractable medium4 ,giotto expressed himself through a series of pictured legends4 ,el ,greco seems to have achieved his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the fustian of theatrical piety4 ,there is apparently nothing that an artist cannot vivify4 ,he can create a work of art out of some riddle in engineering or harmonics1 an anecdote1 or the frank representation of a natural object4 ,only1 to be satisfactory1 the problem must be for him who employs it a goad and a limitation4 ,a goad that calls forth all his energies2 a limitation that focuses them on some object far more precise and comprehensible than the expression of a vague sensibility1 or1 to say the same thing in another way1 the creation of indefinite beauty4 ,however much an artist may have felt1 he cannot just sit down and express it2 he cannot create form in the vague4 ,he must sit down to write a play or a poem1 to paint a portrait or a still life4 ,almost everyone has had his moment of ecstasy1 and the creative impulse is not uncommon2 but those only who have a pretty strong sense of art understand the necessity for the artistic problem4 ,what is known of it by the public is not much liked2 it has a bad name and is reckoned unsympathetic4 ,for the artistic problem1 which limits the artist's freedom1 fixes his attention on a point1 and drives his emotion through narrow tubes1 is what imports the conventional element into art4 ,it seems to come between the spontaneous thrill of the artist and the receptive enthusiasm of his public with an air of artificiality4 ,thus1 a generation brought up on ,wordsworth could hardly believe in the genuineness of ,racine4 ,our fathers and grandfathers felt1 and felt rightly1 that art was something that came from and spoke to the depths of the human soul4 ,but how1 said they1 should deep call to deep in ,alexandrines and a pseudo-classical convention1 to say nothing of full-bottomed wigs8 ,they forgot to reckon with the artistic problem1 and made the mistake that people make who fancy that nothing looking so unlike a ,raphael or a ,titian as a ,matisse or a ,picasso can be a work of art4 ,they thought that because the stuff of art comes from the depths of human nature it can be expressed only in terms of naturalism4 ,they did not realize that the creating of an equivalent for an sthetic experience out of natural speech or the common forms of nature is only one amongst an infinite number of possible problems4 ,there are still ladies who feel sure that had they been in ,laura's shoes ,petrarch might have experienced something more vivid than what comes through his mellifluous but elaborate rime4 ,to them he would have expressed himself otherwise4 ,possibly3 but whatever he experienced could not have become art--significant form--till it had been withdrawn from the world of experience and converted into poetry by some such exacting problem4 ,one problem in itself is as good as another1 just as one kind of nib is as good as another1 since problems are valuable only as means4 ,that problem is best for any particular artist that serves that particular artist best4 ,the ideal problem will be the one that raises his power most while limiting his fancy least4 ,the incessant recourse of ,european writers to dramatic form suggests that here is a problem which to them is peculiarly favourable4 ,its conventions1 ,i suppose1 are sufficiently strict to compel the artist to exert himself to the utmost1 yet not so strict as to present those appalling technical difficulties--the sort presented by a sestina or a chant royal--that make self-expression impossible to any but a consummate master4 ,the novel1 on the other hand1 as we are just beginning to suspect1 affords for most writers an unsatisfactory1 because insufficiently rigorous1 problem4 ,each age has its favourites4 ,indeed1 the history of art is very much the history of the problem4 ,the stuff of art is always the same1 and always it must be converted into form before it can become art2 it is in their choice of converting-machines that the ages differ conspicuously4 ,two tasks that painters and writers sometimes set themselves are often mistaken for artistic problems1 but are1 in fact1 nothing of the sort4 ,one is literal representation3 the other the supply of genius direct from the cask4 ,to match a realistic form with an sthetic experience is a problem that has served well many great artists3 ,chardin and ,tolstoi will do as examples4 ,to make a realistic form and match it with nothing is no problem at all4 ,though to say just what the camera would say is beyond the skill and science of most of us1 it is a task that will never raise an artist's temperature above boiling-point4 ,a painter may go into the woods1 get his thrill1 go home and fetch his panel-box1 and proceed to set down in cold blood what he finds before him4 ,no good can come of it1 as the gloomy walls of any official exhibition will show4 ,realistic novels fail for the same reason3 with all their gifts1 neither ,zola1 nor ,edmond de ,goncourt1 nor ,mr4 ,arnold ,bennett ever produced a work of art4 ,also1 a thorough anarchist will never be an artist1 though many artists have believed that they were thorough anarchists4 ,one man cannot pour an sthetic experience straight into another1 leaving out the problem4 ,he cannot exude form3 he must set himself to create a particular form4 ,automatic writing will never be poetry1 nor automatic scrabbling design4 ,the artist must submit his creative impulse to the conditions of a problem4 ,often great artists set their own problems2 always they are bound by them4 ,that would be a shallow critic who supposed that ,mallarm wrote down what words he chose in what order he pleased1 unbound by any sense of a definite form to be created and a most definite conception to be realized4 ,mallarm was as severely bound by his problem as was ,racine by his4 ,it was as definite--for all that it was unformulated--as absolute1 and as necessary4 ,the same may be said of ,picasso in his most abstract works3 but not of all his followers1 nor of all ,mallarm's either4 ,was he really a great painter8 ,a new generation is beginning to ask the question that we answered1 once and for all as we thought1 ten years ago4 ,yes1 of course1 the douanier was--a remarkable painter4 ,the man who influenced ,derain1 and to some extent ,picasso1 is not likely to have been less4 ,but a great painter8 ,for the present1 at any rate1 let us avoid great words4 ,in #aijc1 when first ,i lived in ,paris1 ,rousseau appeared to be very much in the movement4 ,that was because by nature he was what thoughtful and highly trained artists were making themselves by an effort3 he was direct4 ,to us it seemed1 in those days1 that a mass of scientific irrelevancies and intellectual complications had come between the artist and his vision1 and1 again1 between the vision and its expression4 ,in a desperately practical and well-organized age1 which recognized objects by their labels and never dreamed of going beneath these to discover the things themselves1 artists1 we thought1 were in danger of losing the very stuff of which visual art is made--the direct1 emotional reaction to the visible universe4 ,people had grown so familiar with the idea of a cup1 with that purely intellectual label cup1 that they never looked at a particular cup and felt its emotional significance4 ,also1 professional painters had provided themselves with a marvellous scientific apparatus for describing the idea of a cup in line and colour3 they had at their fingers' ends a plastic notation that corresponded with the labels by which things are intellectually recognized4 ,they neither felt things nor expressed their feelings4 ,for even when an artist was capable of a direct1 personal reaction it was almost impossible for him not to lose it in the cogs and chains of that elaborate machinery of scientific representation to which he had been apprenticed4 ,a determination to free artists from utilitarian vision and the disastrous science of representation was the theoretic basis of that movement which is associated with the name of ,czanne4 ,from the latter1 at any rate1 the douanier needed no freeing4 ,such science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to expressing himself and not to picture-making4 ,as for his vision1 that was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a ,primitive or a child2 and to a ,primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him1 to a child his detractors4 ,his admirers were right3 his art is not childish4 ,primitives1 because they are artists1 have to grapple with the artistic problem4 ,they have1 that is1 to create form that will express an emotional conception2 they have to express their sense of something they have seen and felt4 ,a child may well have an artistic vision2 for all that1 a child is never1 or hardly ever1 an artist4 ,it wrestles with no problem because it does not try to express anything4 ,it is a mere symbolist who uses a notation not to express what it feels but to convey information4 ,a child's drawing of a horse is not an expression of its sense of a horse1 but a symbol by which other people can recognize that what occupies a certain position in its figured story is a horse4 ,the child is not an artist1 but an illustrator who uses symbolism4 ,when1 using ,mr4 ,bertrand ,russell's new symbolism1 ,i say that ,lc#cn,i--,cct the ,almighty1 clearly ,i am not expressing my feeling for infinite and omnipotent goodness4 ,neither does the child who teases you to look at its charming coloured diagram of the farmyard expect you to share an emotional experience4 ,doubtless the vanity of the craftsman demands satisfaction2 but chiefly the child wishes to assure itself that some impartial judge can interpret its notation4 ,one definitely artistic gift1 however1 many children do possess1 and that is a sense of the decorative possibilities of their medium4 ,this gift they have in common with the ,primitives2 and this the douanier possessed in an extraordinary degree4 ,of ,rousseau's sense of the decorative possibilities of paint it is1 ,i suppose1 unnecessary to say anything4 ,gauguin called his black inimitable4 ,but1 indeed1 we all agree now that1 if the term decorative is to be used in this limited and rather injurious sense1 ,rousseau1 as a decorator1 takes rank with the very greatest4 ,more important is it to realize that ,rousseau had his problem2 and that he approached it in the spirit of a ,primitive4 ,his reactions were as simple and genuine as those of any child2 he experienced them with that passion which alone provokes to creation2 his problem was to express them sincerely and simply in the medium of which he could make such exquisite use4 ,his vision was as unsophisticated as that of ,orcagna1 and in translating it he was as conscientious2 but he was a smaller artist because he was less of an artist4 ,it has been said that ,rousseau came short of greatness for want of science4 ,that ,i do not believe4 ,can it be supposed that any man who has applied himself intelligently to any art for forty years will not have acquired science enough to state clearly what is clear1 intense1 and clamoring for expression in his mind8 ,i see no reason for supposing that ,rousseau ever failed from lack of science to express himself completely4 ,the fault was in what he had to express4 ,rousseau was inferior to the great ,primitives because he lacked their taste1 or1 to put the matter more forcibly1 because he was less of an artist4 ,an artist's conception should be like a perfectly cooked pudding--cooked all through and in every part4 ,his problem is to create an expressive form that shall fit exactly an artistic conception4 ,his subject may be what he pleases4 ,but unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art1 and there1 in a dry sthetic atmosphere1 sealed up in a purely sthetic conception it can never be externalized in pure form4 ,that is what the great ,primitives did1 and what the douanier could not do always4 ,in his pudding there are doughy patches4 ,he is sentimental2 and he is not sentimental as ,raphael and ,el ,greco are4 ,with a race of genteel1 but strangely obtuse1 critics it was formerly the fashion to depreciate ,raphael and ,el ,greco on the ground that they were sentimental4 ,sentimental they are1 in a sense4 ,their subjects are sentimental2 and the religiosity of some of ,greco's is downright disgusting4 ,but of these subjects every scrap has been passed through the blazing furnace of conception and fused into artistic form4 ,it is as though a potter1 working with dirty hands1 had left a stain burnt by the fire into his gloriously fashioned clay4 ,the blemish is superficial2 the form is untouched4 ,with ,rousseau it is otherwise3 lumps of unfused matter break through his conception and into his design2 his pudding is not thoroughly baked4 ,take that well-known picture of his1 ,le ,prsent et le ,pass1 which used to be in the ,jastrebzoff collection1 and of which photographs are familiar to everyone3 the two silly1 detached heads in the sky1 stuck in for sentiment's sake1 are1 as the saying goes1 out of the picture and yet play the devil with it4 ,they injure the design4 ,what is more1 in themselves they are as feeble and commonplace as the drawing of a pavement artist1 which1 in fact1 they resemble4 ,they are unfelt1 that is the explanation--unfelt sthetically4 ,they have not been through the oven4 ,they are artistically insincere4 ,sentimentality makes strange bedfellows4 ,rousseau has slipped into the very hole wherein ,mr4 ,frank ,dixie and ,sir ,luke ,fildes disport themselves2 only1 by betraying his vice in a picture that is1 for the most part1 so exquisitely sure in its simple1 delicate expression of a frank and charming vision he gives us an impressive example of the danger1 even to a good artist1 of bad taste4 ,and there is another fault in ,rousseau that springs from this lack of complete artistic integrity4 ,he is something plebeian3 he suffers a slightly self-complacent good-fellowship to creep into his pictures4 ,occasionally there grins through his design1 and ever so little disfigures it1 a touch of fatuity4 ,he cannot help being glad that he is so simple and so good1 nor quite resist telling us about it4 ,look at that portrait of himself--and ,i impose a most agreeable task1 for it is charming--that portrait dated #ahij1 and belonging also to ,m4 ,jastrebzoff2 do you not feel that the author is a little too well pleased with himself8 ,do you not fancy that he will soon be regaling his sitter with a good1 round platitude from the exterior boulevards or a morsel from some regimental ditty in which he once excelled1 that1 in another moment1 he will be tapping him on the back1 and that he has gone a little out of his way to tell you these things8 ,the ,primitives tell us nothing of that sort2 they stick to their business of creating significant form4 ,whatever of their personalities may reach us has passed through the transmuting fires of art3 they never prattle4 ,the ,primitives are always distinguished2 whereas occasionally the douanier is as much the reverse as the more successful painters to the ,british aristocracy are always4 ,yet ,i daresay it was this jovial and unaffected good-fellowship1 quite as much as his unquestionable genius1 that won the brave douanier his place in the hearts of those brilliant people who frequented what he used to call his soires toutes familiales et artistiques4 ,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 ,rousseau4 ,whatever the real differences between a noble savage and an unspoilt artisan may be1 the difference between the ideas of them with which a jaded society diverts itself is negligible4 ,il nous faut les barbares1 said ,gide4 ,well1 we have got them4 ,h ,and1 maybe1 the next generation but one will make as much fuss about a new ,matthew ,arnold as we made about ,marguerite ,audoux4 ,footnote ,h3 ,this essay was written a few weeks after the signing of the ,armistice4 ,meanwhile the douanier came at the right moment4 ,his soires toutes familiales et artistiques were crowded with admirers--,picasso1 ,delaunay1 ,duhamel1 ,guillaume ,apollinaire1 ,jules ,romain1 ,max ,jacob1 ,ren ,arcos1 ,braque1 ,andr ,salmon1 ,soffici1 ,blanche ,albane1 ,marie ,laurencin1 elegant and eminent people from ,north and ,south ,america1 ,russia1 ,germany1 and ,scandinavia1 to say nothing of his pupils 7he professed both painting and music7 and les demoiselles de son quartier4 ,the entertainment consisted1 if ,i may trust an ear-witness1 of a little bad music worse played1 a little declamation1 a glass of wine1 and democracy untainted with the least suspicion of snobbery4 ,there was a delicious absence of culture1 on the one hand1 and of romantic squalor on the other4 ,the whole thing was solidly and sympathetically lower middle-class4 ,the soire tant familiale qu'artistique closed with a performance of the ,marseillaise2 and the intelligentsia retired to bed feeling that life was full of beauty and significance4 ,illustration3 ,,matisse 7,photo3 ,e4 ,druet7 ,c,,zanne ,i4 ,footnote ,i3 ,paul ,czanne4 ,par ,ambroise ,vollard4 7,paris3 ,crs4 #d;fr4 #ge47 ,it was the opinion of ,degas that le peintre en gnral est bte1 and most people seem to think that ,czanne was no exception to the rule4 ,before agreeing1 ,i should want to know what precisely they understood by the word bte4 ,czanne was silly certainly1 but he was not stupid3 he was limited and absurd1 but not dull2 his opinions for the most part were conventional1 but his intelligence was not common2 and his character was as obviously that of a man of genius as the most ardent hero-worshipper could desire4 ,czanne was a great character4 ,it is a mistake to suppose that great characters are always agreeable ones4 ,few people1 ,i imagine1 found ,czanne agreeable2 yet painters1 one would suppose1 were eager to meet him that they might hear what he had to say about painting4 ,czanne's ideas on painting are not like ideas at all3 they are like sensations2 they have the force of sensations4 ,they seem to give the sense of what was in his mind by a method more direct than the ordinary intellectual one4 ,his meaning reaches us1 not in a series of pellets1 but in a block4 ,these sayings of his remind one oddly of his art2 and some of his comments on life are hardly less forcible and to the point4 ,this1 for instance1 provoked by ,zola's ,l',oeuvre1 is something more than a professional opinion3 ,on ne peut pas exiger d'un homme qui ne sait pas1 qu'il dise des choses raisonnables sur l'art de peindre2 mais1 ,n4 de ,d---- et ,czanne se mit taper comme un sourd sur sa table--comment peut-il oser dire qu'un peintre se tue parce qu'il a fait un mauvais tableau8 ,quand un tableau n'est pas ralis1 on le f444 au feu1 et on en recommence un autre6 ,ralis--,czanne's incessant complaint that he was unable to realize has been taken by many stupid people to imply that ,czanne was conscious in himself of some peculiar and slightly humiliating inhibition from which his fellows were free2 and even ,m4 ,vollard has thought it necessary to be continually apologizing for and explaining away the phrase1 which1 moreover1 he never does explain4 ,yet the explanation is as simple as can be4 ,genius of the very highest order never1 probably1 succeeds in completely realizing its conceptions1 because its conceptions are unrealizable4 ,when ,czanne envied ,m4 ,bouguereau his power of realization he was perfectly sincere and perfectly sensible4 ,a ,bouguereau can realize completely the little nasty things that are in his mind3 if a ,czanne1 a ,shakespeare1 or an schylus could realize as completely all that was in his the human race would think more of itself than it does4 ,czanne's consciousness of the impossibility of realizing completely his conceptions--his consciousness1 rather1 that he had not completely realized them--made him regard all his pictures as unfinished4 ,some day1 he thought--or liked to believe--he would push them a little further4 ,his habit of destroying his own works1 however1 had nothing to do with any sense of failure or incapacity4 ,it was simply a manifestation of rage and a means of appeasement4 ,some people like cups and saucers3 ,czanne preferred oil-paintings1 and his own were always to hand4 ,a word of commendation for les professeurs 7qui n'ont rien dans le ven44n44tr44re--les salauds--les chtrs--les j4f444s7 or the least denigration of ,chardin or ,delacroix was sure to cost a still-life or a water-colour at any rate4 ,it is surprising that ,m4 ,vollard should not have made this more clear1 for he certainly understood the genius and character of ,czanne4 ,his book is an amazingly vivid presentment of both2 and to have made such a book out of the life of a man whose whole life went into the art of painting is a remarkable feat4 ,for ,czanne poured all his prodigious energy and genius into a funnel that ended in the point of his brush4 ,he was a painter if ever there was one1 and he was nothing else2 he had no notion of being anything else4 ,there is enough in ,paris1 one would have supposed1 to attract from himself for a moment the attention of the most preoccupied and self-absorbed of men4 ,when ,czanne lived in ,paris he rose early1 painted as long as there was light to paint by1 and went to bed immediately after dinner4 ,the time during which he was not painting he seems to have spent in wondering whether the light would be satisfactory 7gris clair7 next day4 ,czanne in ,paris1 like the peasant in the country1 spent most of his spare time thinking about the weather4 ,comme il se couchait de trs bonne heure1 il lui arrivait de s'veiller au milieu de la nuit4 ,hant par son ide fixe1 il ouvrait la fentre4 ,une fois rassur1 avant de regagner son lit il allait1 une bougie la main1 revoir l'tude qui tait en train4 ,si l'impression tait bonne1 il rveillait sa femme pour lui faire partager sa satisfaction4 ,et pour la ddommager de ce drangement1 il l'invitait faire une partie de dames4 ,all of ,czanne went into his painting2 only now and then a drop escaped that voracious funnel and splashed on to life4 ,it is by collecting and arranging these odd drops and splashes that ,m4 ,vollard has managed to construct his lively picture of this extraordinary character4 ,it is because his task must have been so abominably exacting--the task of catching the artist outside his work--that we easily forgive him a few lapses from good sense when he is not talking about his hero4 ,it is annoying1 nevertheless1 to hear quite so much of the stupid and insensitive people who attacked and insulted ,czanne4 ,m4 ,vollard never tires of telling us about those who hid their ,czannes or threw them out of window1 or sold them for next to nothing and would now give their eyes to get them back2 of those who jeered at ,czanne and would not hang his pictures at exhibitions1 refusing him that public recognition he was human enough to covet--in a word1 of the now discomfited and penitent majority4 ,i had thoughts once of printing a selection from the press-cuttings that reached us at the ,grafton ,galleries during the first ,post-,impressionist exhibition4 ,it would have revealed our leading critics and experts1 our professors and directors1 our connoisseurs1 our more cultivated dealers and our most popular painters vying with each other in heaping abuse and ridicule on the heads of ,czanne1 ,gauguin1 and ,van ,gogh4 ,the project is abandoned4 ,that sort of thing ,i perceive becomes a bore4 ,and ,i only wish ,m4 ,vollard had perceived it when he was writing about ,zola4 ,zola failed to appreciate ,czanne1 of course4 ,zola was an ordinary middle-class man3 he was vain1 vulgar1 petty2 he longed for the consideration of people like himself1 and was therefore ostentatious2 he had a passion for money and notoriety2 he wanted to be thought not only clever but good2 he preached1 he deprecated1 he took a moral standpoint and judged by results2 and his taste was execrable4 ,we meet people of ,zola's sort every day in third-class railway carriages and first1 on the tops of omnibuses and in ,chelsea drawing-rooms1 at the music-hall1 at the opera1 at classical concerts1 and in ,bond ,street galleries4 ,we take them for granted and are perfectly civil to them4 ,so why1 because he happened to have an astonishing gift of statement and rapid generalization1 should ,zola be treated as though he were a monster8 ,though ,diggle1 the billiards champion1 care little or nothing for poetry1 he may have an excellent heart1 as well as a hand far surpassing in dexterity that of our most accomplished portrait-painters4 ,no one dreams of reviling him4 ,let us be equally just to ,zola2 let us notice1 too1 how amusingly he sets off ,czanne4 ,both were greatly gifted men3 neither was the man of intelligence and talent1 the brilliant man with the discursive intellect1 who carries his gift about with him1 takes it out when and where he pleases1 and applies it where and how he likes4 ,zola1 when he was not using his gift1 posed as an artist1 a saint1 or simply a great man2 but he never contrived to be anything but a bourgeois--a sale bourgeois1 according to ,czanne4 ,czanne was all gift3 seen as anything but a painter he looked like a fool4 ,at ,aix he tried to pass for a respectable rentier2 he found no difficulty in being silly1 but he could not achieve the necessary commonplaceness4 ,he could not be vulgar4 ,he was always an artist4 ,instead of telling us so much about ,zola and tutti quanti ,m4 ,vollard might have told us more about ,czanne's artistic development4 ,what1 for instance1 is the history of his relations with ,impressionism8 ,the matter is to me far from clear4 ,czanne began his artistic life amongst the ,impressionists1 he was reckoned a disciple of ,pissarro2 yet it is plain from his early work that he never swallowed much of the doctrine4 ,gradually he came to think that the ,impressionists were on the wrong tack1 that their work was flimsy and their theory misleading1 that they failed to realize4 ,he dreamed of combining their delicate vision1 their exquisite sensation1 with a more positive and elaborate statement4 ,he wanted to make of ,impressionism quelque chose de solide et de durable comme l'art des ,muses4 ,he succeeded4 ,but at what moment did his dissent become acute1 and to what extent was he aware from the first of its existence8 ,towards the end of his life he took to scolding the ,impressionists1 but one fancies that he was never very willing that anyone else should abuse them4 ,regardez1 said he to a young painter who had caught him coming out of church one stormy ,sunday morning1 as he pointed to a puddle touched by a sudden ray of sunlight1 comment voulez-vous rendre cela8 ,il faut se mfier1 je vous le dis1 des ,impressionnistes444,tout de mme1 ils voient juste6 ,the critical moment in ,czanne's life--if in such a life one moment may without impertinence be thought more critical than another--must have come somewhere about #ahgj4 ,m4 ,vollard once asked him what he did during the war4 ,ecoutez un peu1 monsieur ,vollard6 ,pendant la guerre j'ai beaucoup travaill sur le motif l',estaque4 ,m4 ,vollard is too good a patriot to add that during the war he also went into hiding1 having been called up for military service4 ,czanne1 ,i am sorry to say1 was an insoumis--a deserter4 ,he seems to have supposed that he had something more important to do than to get himself killed for his country4 ,it was not only in art that ,czanne gave proof of a surprisingly sure sense of values4 ,some fulsome journalist1 wishing to flatter the old man after he had become famous1 represented him hugging a tree and1 with tears in his eyes1 crying3 ,comme je voudrais1 celui-l1 le transporter sur ma toile6 ,for a moment ,czanne contemplated the picture in terrified amazement1 then exclaimed3 ,dites1 monsieur ,vollard1 c'est effrayant1 la vie6 ,useless to blame the particular imbecile3 it was the world in which such things were possible that filled him with dismay4 ,i stretch my hand towards a copy of the ,burlington ,magazine and come plumb on the following by the present ,director of the ,tate ,gallery3 ,the truth is that the ecstasy of art and good actions are closely interrelated1 the one leading to the other in endless succession or possibly even progression4 ,dites1 monsieur ,vollard1 c'est effrayant1 la vie6 ,j ,footnote ,j3 ,since writing these words ,i learn that the director of the ,tate ,gallery has been unable to find1 in his series of vast rooms1 space for two small and fine works by ,czanne4 ,it is some consolation to know that he has found space for more than twenty by ,professor ,tonks4 ,,renoir ,k ,footnote ,k3 ,renoir4 ,par ,albert ,andr4 ,crs et ,cie4 ,renoir is the greatest painter alive4 ,l ,there are admirers of ,matisse and admirers of ,picasso who will contradict that1 though the artists themselves would probably agree4 ,also1 there are admirers of ,m4 ,bouguereau and of ,sir ,marcus ,stone1 there are ,italian ,futurists and members of the ,new ,english ,art ,club1 with whom one bandies no words4 ,renoir is the greatest painter alive4 ,footnote ,l3 ,this essay was written in #aiai4 ,he died in #aibj4 ,he is over forty3 to be exact1 he is seventy-seven years old4 ,yet1 in the teeth of modern theories that have at least the air of physiological certainties1 one must admit that he is still alive4 ,a comparison between the five-and-thirty photographs reproduced by ,m4 ,besson and those at the end of ,herr ,meier-,graefe's monograph suggests that even since #aiaj his art has developed4 ,but what is certain is that1 during his last period1 since #aijj that is to say1 though so crippled by rheumatism that it is with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush1 he has produced works that surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age4 ,renoir was born in #ahda1 and in '#ed bound prentice to a china-painter4 ,a fortunate invention deprived him of this means of livelihood and drove him into oil4 ,he escaped early from the cole des ,beaux-,arts1 and1 of course1 came under the influence of ,courbet4 ,by #ahfc he was being duly refused at the ,salon and howled at by the respectable mob4 ,he thus made one of the famous ,salon des ,refuss1 and has1 in consequence1 been generally described as an ,impressionist4 ,it is an honour he neither desires nor deserves4 ,the pure doctrine of ,impressionism1 as formulated by ,claude ,monet1 enjoins scientific truth and submission to ,nature1 whereas ,renoir observed one day to an astonished disciple1 ,avec la ,nature on ne fait rien2 and on being asked where1 then1 the student should learn his art added1 without any apparent sign of shame or sense of sin--,au muse1 parbleu6 ,renoir thus affirmed what every artist knows1 that art is the creation and not the imitation of form4 ,in his eyes the most valuable part of an artist's education is the intelligent study of what other artists have done4 ,for his own part he studied ,courbet and then ,delacroix1 and1 assuredly1 from these picked up useful hints for converting sensibility into significant form4 ,sensibility he never lacked4 ,renoir's painting gift may1 without unpardonable silliness1 be compared with the singing gift of ,mozart4 ,his conspicuous characteristics are loveliness and ease4 ,no painter1 ,i suppose1 gives more delight1 or gives it more frankly4 ,that is why his name provokes an odd1 personal enthusiasm in thousands of people who have never seen him4 ,that is why ,frenchmen1 who have sometimes a terribly intimate way of explaining themselves1 have been known to assert that they feel for ,renoir the sort of grateful affection that every sensitive man feels for a woman who has given him joy4 ,but ,renoir's natural masters--parents one would say if a man could have more than two--were ,fragonard1 ,boucher1 and ,watteau4 ,these1 two of whom he has surpassed1 with ,rubens1 whom he almost equals1 are responsible for most of what is derivative in his art during his first great period 7#ahgj-ahha74 ,that this should be the period beloved of amateurs does not surprise me4 ,it is the period of ,mme4 ,matre 7#ahga71 ,la ,loge 7#ahgd71 ,moulin de la ,galette 7#ahgf71 and ,m4 ,choquet--portrait d'un fou par un fou1 ,renoir calls it--pictures of ravishing loveliness to set dancing every chord in a spectator of normal sensibility4 ,also1 it is a period that has an extraordinary charm for the literary connoisseur4 ,it throws glamour over the seventies1 and1 for that matter1 on to the eighties4 ,here are the characters of ,flaubert and ,maupassant as we should wish them to be4 ,that djeuner by the ,seine was probably organized by the resourceful ,jean de ,servigny1 and there1 sure enough1 is ,yvette with a fringe4 ,the purest of painters becomes historical by accident4 ,he expresses the unalloyed sensibility of an artist in terms of delicious contemporary life and gives us1 adventitiously1 romance4 ,a fascinating period1 but not the great one4 ,towards the end of #ahha ,renoir set out on a tour in ,italy1 and1 as if to show how little he was affected by what he found there1 painted at ,naples a large and important ,baigneuse 7now in the ,durand-,ruel collection7 in which ,i can discover not the slightest trace of ,italian influence4 ,he is too thorough a ,frenchman to be much of anything else4 ,the emphatic statement and counter-statement of the great ,primitives is not in his way4 ,he prefers to insinuate4 ,even in his most glorious moments he is discreet and tactful1 fonder of a transition than an opposition1 never passionate4 ,the new thing that came into his art about this time1 and was to affect it for the next twenty years1 was not ,italy but ,ingres4 ,the influence was at first an unhappy one4 ,during three or four years1 unable1 it seems1 to match the new conception of form with his intensely personal reaction1 ,renoir produced a certain number of unconvincing and uncharacteristic pictures 7e4g41 the dance series1 ,dance la ,ville1 etc474 ,there is an uneasy harshness about the contours1 the forms are imperfectly felt1 they are wooden even1 and in their placing one misses the old inevitability4 ,signed with another name these essays might by a dashing critic be called doctrinaire4 ,then in #ahhe came the first ,baigneuses 7collection ,j4,e4 ,blanche71 whereby ,renoir put himself a good head above all contemporaries save ,czanne4 ,if this picture were hung in a public gallery1 and the numerous drawings made for it ranged alongside1 how finely discredited would be those knowing ones who1 in their desire to emphasize the difference between form and that of which form is composed1 are in the habit of calling ,renoir a great colourist and then pausing impressively4 ,i suppose it is because he rarely uses a lead pencil that the wiseacres are able to fulfil their destiny4 ,drawing in charcoal or pastel need not be taken seriously2 while drawing with the brush is apparently not drawing at all4 ,that ,renoir is a great draughtsman may be inferred from almost everything he has ever done4 ,but 7though that amazing ,boy with a ,cat was achieved as early as #ahfh7 it is the work of this period--and ,les ,baigneuses1 with its attendant studies1 are capital examples--that makes patent his mastery and entitles him obviously to a place between ,ingres and ,daumier4 ,that it should be difficult to find a date for the beginning of ,renoir's last period does not much trouble me2 but ,i am sorry that it is quite impossible to indicate in words its character4 ,one can say confidently that the new conception was being elaborated between #ahie and #aijj2 one can suppose that its final character was to some extent imposed on the master by his growing infirmities4 ,a painter who can hardly move arm or fingers will neither sweep nor wiggle4 ,he must paint1 if he is to paint at all1 in blobs and smears and patches and soft strokes2 and it is out of these that ,renoir's latest works are built up4 ,built up--the expression is absurd4 ,rather1 it is as though forms had been melted down to their component colours1 and the pool of iridescent loveliness thus created fixed by a touch of the master's magic--lightly frozen over by an enchanting frost4 ,only ice is cold4 ,at any rate1 what happens to the spectator is that first he perceives a tangle of rather hot and apparently inharmonious tones2 gradually he becomes aware of a subtle1 astonishing1 and unlooked-for harmony2 finally1 from this harmony emerge completely realized and exquisitely related forms4 ,after which1 if he has any sense of art1 he remains spellbound and uncritical1 and ceases to bother about how the thing was done4 ,that1 at least1 is my impression of ,renoir's latest style4 ,examples of it abound in ,paris1 notably ,m4 ,maurice ,gangnat's collection2 and it is said that the artist intends these pictures to improve by keeping4 ,in his pleasant1 well-written introduction ,m4 ,albert ,andr gives a portrait of ,renoir that is almost too good to be true3 we are encouraged to believe just what we should like to believe4 ,it is incredibly sympathetic4 ,yet it is very much what we might have guessed from the pictures had we dared4 ,and1 indeed1 we did dare--some of us2 for1 besides its purely sthetic character1 its ,french taste and tact1 the art of ,renoir has over-tones to which the literary and historical intelligence cannot choose but listen4 ,an intimate eulogy of ,france by a most lovable ,frenchman is what1 in our lazy moods1 we allow these pictures to give us4 ,they do it charmingly4 ,for instance1 though ,i never saw a ,renoir that could justify a district visitor in showing more of her teeth than nature had already discovered1 here1 unmistakably1 are ,parisians enjoying themselves in their own ,parisian way4 ,here is the ,france of the young man's fancy and the old man's envious dreams4 ,here1 if you please1 you may smell again that friture that ate so well1 one ,sunday at ,argenteuil1 twenty years ago1 in the company of a young poet who must have had genius and two models who were certainly divine4 ,and that group with the fat1 young mother suckling her baby--there is all ,french frankness and ,french tenderness and family feeling without a trace of its wonted grimness and insincerity4 ,renoir is as ,french as ,french can be1 and he knows it3 ,lorsque je regarde les matres anciens je me fais l'effet d'un bien petit bonhomme1 et pourtant je crois que de tous mes ouvrages il restera assez pour m'assurer une place dans l'cole franaise1 cette cole que j'aime tant1 qui est si gentille1 si claire1 de si bonne compagnie444 ,et pas tapageuse4 ,renoir will have his place in that school1 but another niche has been prepared for him amongst an even grander company4 ,when1 in #aiag1 ,les ,parapluies 7a beautiful but not very characteristic work7 was placed in the ,national ,gallery some hundred ,english artists and amateurs seized the opportunity of sending the master a testimony of their admiration which1 rather to their surprise and to their intense joy1 apparently gave pleasure4 ,in this they said3 ,ds l'instant o votre tableau s'est trouv install parmi les chefs-d'oeuvre des matres anciens1 nous avons eu la joie de constater qu'un de nos contemporains avait pris place d'emble parmi les grands matres de la tradition europenne4 ,they said not a word too much4 ,,tradition ,,movements ,much to its embarrassment1 the ,national ,gallery finds itself possessed of that superb picture ,les ,parapluies2 and as the director at last feels obliged to exhume those masterpieces which1 for so many happy months1 he and his colleagues have had1 albeit in the dark1 to themselves1 we can now see ,renoir amongst his peers4 ,he is perfectly at home there4 ,renoir takes his place quite simply in the great tradition2 and when ,czanne1 who is still too cheap to be within the reach of a national collection1 has attained a price that guarantees respectability he1 too1 will be seen to fit neatly into that tradition of which he is as much a part as ,ingres or ,poussin1 ,raphael or ,piero della ,francesca4 ,that ,czanne was a master1 just as ,poussin and ,piero were1 and that he1 like them1 is part of the tradition1 is what all sensitive people know and the wiser keep to themselves4 ,for by stating the plain fact that ,renoir1 ,czanne1 and1 for that matter1 ,matisse are all in the great tradition of painting one seems to suggest that the tradition is something altogether different from what most people would wish it to be4 ,if one is right it follows that it is not simply the counter-movement to the contemporary movement2 indeed1 it follows that it is not a movement at all4 ,this is intolerable4 ,an artist1 seen as the protagonist of a movement1 the exponent of a theory1 and the clue to an age1 has a certain interest for all active-minded people2 whereas1 seen merely as an artist1 which is how he must be seen if he is to be seen in the tradition1 he is of interest only to those who care for art4 ,the significant characteristics of an artist1 considered as the representative of a movement1 are those in which he differs most from other artists2 set him in the traditions and his one important characteristic is the one he shares with all--his being an artist4 ,in the tradition a work of art loses its value as a means4 ,we must contemplate it as an end--as a direct means to sthetic emotion rather--or let it be4 ,tradition1 in fact1 has to do with art alone2 while with movements can be mixed up history1 archology1 philosophy1 politics1 geography1 fashions1 religion1 and crime4 ,so1 by insisting on the fact that ,matisse1 ,czanne1 ,poussin1 ,piero1 and ,giotto are all in the tradition we insist on the fact that they are all artists4 ,we rob them of their amusing but adscititious qualities2 we make them utterly uninteresting to precisely #ii4ii per cent4 of our fellow-creatures2 and ourselves we make unpopular4 ,the tradition of art begins with the first artist that ever lived1 and will end with the last4 ,always it is being enriched or modified--never is it exhausted4 ,the earliest artists are driven to creation by an irresistible desire to express themselves4 ,their over-bubbling minds supply abundance of matter2 difficulties begin when they try to express it4 ,then it is they find themselves confronted by those terrible limitations of the human mind1 and by other limitations1 only less terrible1 imposed by the medium in which they work4 ,every genuine artist--every artist1 that is1 with something of his own to say--is faced afresh by the problem1 and must solve it for himself4 ,nevertheless1 each one who succeeds in creating an appropriate form for his peculiar experience leaves in that form a record1 and from the sum of these records is deduced something1 less definite far than a code1 by no means a pattern or recipe1 which is yet a sign and a source of half-conscious suggestion to those that follow4 ,no artist can escape the tradition of art except by refusing to grapple with the problem2 which is how most do escape it4 ,the academic humbug uses the old language to say nothing1 the bombastic charlatan devises a new one for the same purpose2 but once a man has something to express1 and the passion to express it1 he will find himself attacking the eternal problem and leaning on the inevitable tradition4 ,let anyone who doubts this mention quickly the name of some artist who owes nothing to his predecessors4 ,often1 however1 owing either to some change in circumstances or to his innate peculiarity1 a man of uncommon force and imagination will find himself with something to say for which the traditional instrument is1 or at first seems to be1 inadequate4 ,what shall he do8 ,why1 what ,giotto did1 what ,masaccio did1 what ,ronsard and the poets of the ,pliade did1 what ,wordsworth did1 and what ,czanne has done4 ,all these great artists struck new veins1 and to work them were obliged to overhaul the tool-chest4 ,of the traditional instruments some they reshaped and resharpened1 some they twisted out of recognition1 a few they discarded1 many they retained4 ,above all1 they travelled back along the tradition1 tapping it and drawing inspiration from it1 nearer to its source4 ,very rarely does the pioneer himself work out his seam3 he leaves it to successors along with his technical discoveries4 ,these they develop1 themselves making experiments as they go forward1 till of the heritage to which they succeeded they have left nothing--nothing but a fashion to be flouted by the next great original genius who shall rise4 ,such is the shape of a movement4 ,a master1 whose sole business it is to express himself1 founds it incidentally1 just as incidentally he enriches the tradition from which he borrows2 successors exploit it2 pious great-grand-nephews mummify and adore it4 ,movements are nothing but the stuff of which tradition is made4 ,at any given moment tradition ends in the contemporary movement2 the capital works of any age are almost sure to be capital examples of that movement2 but a hundred years later1 when these are clear-set in the tradition1 the movement will have become dust and ashes--the daily bread of historians and archologists4 ,though lecturers still hold up the ,renaissance as an example of the happy and stagnant state of the arts in a golden age when rebels were unknown1 their pupils are aware that ,giotto1 the father of ,renaissance painting1 broke with the maniera greca at least as sharply as ,czanne did with the nineteenth-century convention2 that in the art of the fifteenth century we have a revolt against ,giottesque which must grievously have wounded many pious souls2 and that ,raphael himself stood1 in his day1 for a new movement4 ,but distance gives a sense of proportion4 ,we see the art of the ,italian ,renaissance whole1 growing out of ,byzantine and into ,french4 ,the continuity is patent2 and1 what is much to my purpose1 it is ,giotto and his successors rather than the artists of the ,palaeologie who seem to us to carry on the ,byzantine tradition1 while the heirs of the ,renaissance are not ,salvator ,rosa and ,carlo ,dolci1 but ,claude and ,poussin4 ,the great artists stand out and join hands3 the contests that clashed around them1 the little men that aped them1 the littler that abused1 have fallen into one ruin4 ,the odd thing is that1 as often as not1 the big men themselves have believed that it was the tradition1 and not the stupid insensibility of their fellows1 that thwarted them4 ,they have made the mistake their enemies made infallibly3 they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition4 ,for movements die2 that is one of the respects in which they differ most significantly from the tradition4 ,the movement is a vein which is worked out2 the tradition a live thing that changes1 grows1 and persists4 ,the artist with a new vision comes on the tradition at its near end1 and finds its implements lying in a heap mixed with the fashions of the moribund movement4 ,he chooses2 he changes2 what happens next will depend a good deal on the state of public opinion4 ,should the artist have the luck to be born in a sensitive age and an intelligent country his innovations may be accepted without undue hubbub4 ,in that case he will realize that artists can no more dispense with the tradition than tradition can exist without artists1 and will probably come to feel an almost exaggerated reverence for the monuments of the past4 ,but should the public be dull and brutish1 and hardening the dust of dead movements into what it is pleased to call tradition1 pelt with that word the thing which above all others is to dull brutes disquieting--,i mean passionate conviction--the artist1 finding himself assailed in the name of tradition1 will probably reply1 ,damn the tradition4 ,he will protest4 ,and1 for an artist1 to become a protestant is even worse than using bad language4 ,only in ,france1 so far as ,i know1 are the men who are working out the heritage of ,czanne allowed to be artists and expected to be nothing more4 ,elsewhere1 the public by its uncritical attitude seems to encourage them to pose as supermen or to become rebels4 ,assuredly ,i am not advocating that slightly fatuous open-mindedness which led some ,germans to seize on the movement before it was well grown and deal with it as they have dealt with so many others1 collecting its artists as though they were beetles1 bottling them1 setting them1 cataloguing them1 making no mistake about them1 and arranging them neatly in museums for the dust to settle on4 ,organized alertness of that sort is only less depressing than the smartness of those ,italians who pounced so promptly on the journalistic possibilities of the movement as a means of self-advertisement4 ,all ,i ask for in the public is a little more intelligence and sensibility1 and a more critical attitude4 ,surely1 by now1 it should be impossible to hear what ,i heard only the other day--,mr4 ,charles ,shannon being extolled1 to humiliate some enterprising student1 as a traditional artist4 ,why1 it would be as sensible to call the man who makes nest-eggs a traditional ,buff ,orpington6 ,and ought it still to be possible for a cultivated dealer1 because ,i had refused to admire a stale old crust by some young ,new ,english painter1 who1 to be in the movement1 had misshaped a few conventionally drawn objects and put black lines round others--for a dealer1 ,i say1 who dabbles in culture to exclaim indignantly1 as one did to me not long ago1 ,i can't think why you don't like it3 it's ,post-,impressionist1 isn't it8 ,if we cannot lose this habit of calling artists names1 at least let us know exactly what we mean by them4 ,by associating artists with movements and counter-movements we encourage the superstition that in art there is some important distinction besides the distinction between good art and bad4 ,there is not4 ,such distinctions as can be drawn between the genuine artists of one age and another1 between traditional artists and eccentrics1 though serviceable to historians and archologists1 are pitfalls for critics and amateurs4 ,to him who can help us better to appreciate works of art let us be duly grateful3 to him who1 from their extraneous qualities1 can deduce amusing theories or pleasant fancies we will listen when we have time3 but to him who would persuade us that their value can in any way depend on some non-sthetic quality we must be positively rude4 ,now1 if we are to get rid of those misleading labels from which works of art are supposed to derive a value over and above their sthetic value1 the first to go should be those arch-deceivers1 traditional and revolutionary4 ,let us understand that tradition is nothing but the essence1 congealed and preserved for us by the masters in their works1 of innumerable movements2 and that movements are mere phases of the tradition from which they spring and in which they are swallowed up4 ,we shall then be armed1 on the one hand1 against the solemn bore who requires us to admire his imitation of an old master because it is in the tradition2 on the other1 against the portentous ,ist1 whose parthenogenetic masterpiece we are not in a state to relish till we have sucked down the pseudo-philosophic bolus that embodies his eponymous ,ism4 ,to each we shall make the same reply3 ,be so good as to remove your irrelevant label and we will endeavour to judge your work on its merits4 ,illustration3 ,,picasso 7,collection ,paul ,rosenberg7 ,the names go together1 as do those of ,shelley and ,keats or ,fortnum and ,mason4 ,even to people who seldom or never look seriously at a picture they have stood1 these ten years1 as symbols of modernity4 ,they are pre-eminent2 and for this there is reason4 ,matisse and ,picasso are the two immediate heirs to ,czanne4 ,they are in the direct line2 and through one of them a great part of the younger generation comes at its share of the patrimony4 ,to their contemporaries they owe nothing3 they came into the legacy and had to make what they could of it4 ,they are the elder brothers of the movement1 a fact which the movement occasionally resents by treating them as though they were its elder sisters4 ,even to each other they owe nothing4 ,matisse1 to be sure1 swept for one moment out of his course by the overwhelming significance of ,picasso's early abstract work1 himself made a move in that direction4 ,but this adventure he quickly1 and wisely1 abandoned2 the problems of ,cubism could have helped him nothing to materialize his peculiar sensibility4 ,and this sensibility--this peculiar emotional reaction to what he sees--is his great gift4 ,no one ever felt for the visible universe just what ,matisse feels2 or1 if one did1 he could not create an equivalent4 ,because1 in addition to this magic power of creation1 ,matisse has been blest with extraordinary sensibility both of reaction and touch1 he is a great artist2 because he trusts to it entirely he is not what for a moment apparently he wished to be--a chef d'cole4 ,picasso1 on the other hand1 who never tried to be anything of the sort1 is the paramount influence in modern painting--subject1 of course1 to the supreme influence of ,czanne4 ,all the world over are students and young painters to whom his mere name is thrilling2 to whom ,picasso is the liberator4 ,his influence is ubiquitous3 even in ,england it is immense4 ,not only those who1 for all their denials--denials that spring rather from ignorance than bad faith--owe almost all they have to the inventor of ,cubism1 but artists who float so far out of the main stream as the ,spensers and the ,nashes1 ,mr4 ,lamb and ,mr4 ,john1 would all have painted differently had ,picasso never existed4 ,picasso is a born chef d'cole4 ,his is one of the most inventive minds in ,europe4 ,invention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensibility is that of ,matisse4 ,his career has been a series of discoveries1 each of which he has rapidly developed4 ,a highly original and extremely happy conception enters his head1 suggested1 probably1 by some odd thing he has seen4 ,forthwith he sets himself to analyze it and disentangle those principles that account for its peculiar happiness4 ,he proceeds by experiment1 applying his hypothesis in the most unlikely places4 ,the significant elements of negro sculpture are found to repeat their success in the drawing of a lemon4 ,before long he has established what looks like an infallible method for producing an effect of which1 a few months earlier1 no one had so much as dreamed4 ,this is one reason why ,picasso is a born chef d'cole4 ,and this is why of each new phase in his art the earlier examples are apt to be the more vital and well-nourished4 ,at the end he is approaching that formula towards which his intellectual effort tends inevitably4 ,it is time for a new discovery4 ,meanwhile a pack of hungry followers has been eyeing the young master as he made clearer and ever clearer the nature of his last4 ,to this pack he throws hint after hint4 ,and still the wolves pursue4 ,you see them in knots and clusters all along the road he has travelled1 gnawing1 tugging at some unpicked idea4 ,worry6 worry6 worry6 ,here is a crowd of old laggards still lingering and snuffling over the blue period4 ,a vaster concourse is scattered about the spot where the nigger's head fell1 and of these the strongest have carried off scraps for themselves1 which they assimilate at leisure1 lying apart2 while round the trunk of ,cubism is a veritable sea of swaying1 struggling1 ravenous creatures4 ,the howling is terrific4 ,but ,picasso himself is already far away elaborating an idea that came to him one day as he contemplated a drawing by ,ingres4 ,and1 besides being extraordinarily inventive1 ,picasso is what they call an intellectual artist4 ,those who suppose that an intellectual artist is one who spends his time on his head mistake4 ,milton and ,mantegna were intellectual artists3 it may be doubted whether ,caravaggio and ,rostand were artists at all4 ,an intellectual artist is one who feels first--a peculiar state of emotion being the point of departure for all works of art--and goes on to think4 ,obviously ,picasso has a passionate sense of the significance of form2 also1 he can stand away from his passion and consider it2 apparently in this detached mood it is that he works4 ,in art the motive power is heat always2 some drive their engines by means of boiling emotion1 others by the incandescence of intellectual passion4 ,these go forward by intense concentration on the problem2 those swing with breathless precision from feeling to feeling4 ,sophocles1 ,masaccio1 and ,bach are intellectuals in this sense1 while ,shakespeare1 ,correggio1 and ,mozart trust their sensibility almost as a bird trusts its instinct4 ,it never entered the head of a swallow to criticize its own methods2 and if ,mozart could not write a tune wrong1 that was not because he had first tested his idea at every point1 but because he was ,mozart4 ,yet no one ever thought of going to a swallow for lessons in aviation2 or1 rather1 ,ddalus did1 and we all know what came of it4 ,that is my point4 ,i do not presume to judge between one method of creation and another2 ,i shall not judge between ,matisse and ,picasso2 but ,i do say that1 as a rule1 it is the intellectual artist who becomes1 in spite of himself1 schoolmaster to the rest4 ,and there is a reason for this4 ,by expressing themselves intellectual artists appeal to us sthetically2 but1 in addition1 by making1 or seeming to make1 some statement about the nature of the artistic problem they set us thinking4 ,we feel sure they have something to say about the very stuff of art which we1 clumsily enough1 can grasp intellectually4 ,with purely sthetic qualities the intellect can do nothing3 but here1 it seems1 is something the brain can get hold of4 ,therefore we study them and they become our leaders2 which does not make them our greatest artists4 ,matisse may yet be a better painter than ,picasso4 ,be that as it may1 from ,matisse there is little or nothing to be learned1 since ,matisse relies on his peculiar sensibility to bring him through4 ,if you want to paint like him1 feel what he feels1 conduct it to the tips of your fingers1 thence on to your canvas1 and there you are4 ,the counsel is not encouraging4 ,these airy creatures try us too high4 ,indeed1 it sometimes strikes me that even to appreciate them you must have a touch of their sensibility4 ,a critic who is apt to be sensible was complaining the other day that ,matisse had only one instrument in his orchestra4 ,there are orchestras in which fifty instruments sound as one4 ,only it takes a musician to appreciate them4 ,also1 one hears the others talking about the pretty1 tinkley stuff of ,mozart4 ,those who call the art of ,matisse slight must either be insensitive or know little of it4 ,certainly ,matisse is capable of recording1 with an exquisite gesture and not much more1 just the smell of something that looked as though it would be good to eat4 ,these are notes4 ,notes are often slight--,i make the critics a present of that4 ,also of this3 it takes a more intense effort of the creative imagination to leave out what ,tchehov leaves out of his short stories than to say what ,meredith put into his long ones4 ,in the ,plutarchian method there was ever a snare1 and ,i have come near treading in it4 ,the difference between ,matisse and ,picasso is not to be stated in those sharp antitheses that every journalist loves4 ,nothing could be more obtuse than to represent one as all feeling and the other all thought4 ,the art of ,picasso1 as a matter of fact1 is perhaps more personal even than that of ,matisse1 just because his sensibility is perhaps even more curious4 ,look at a ,cubist picture by him amongst other ,cubists4 ,here1 if anywhere1 amongst these abstractions you would have supposed that there was small room for idiosyncrasy4 ,yet at ,m4 ,lonce ,rosenberg's gallery no amateur fails to spot the ,picassos4 ,his choice of colours1 the appropriateness of his most astonishing audacities1 the disconcerting yet delightful perfection of his taste1 the unlooked-for yet positive beauty of his harmonies make ,picasso one of the most personal artists alive4 ,and if ,picasso is anything but a dry doctrinaire1 ,matisse is no singing bird with one little jet of spontaneous melody4 ,i wish his sculpture were better known in ,england1 for it disposes finely of the ridiculous notion that ,matisse is a temperament without a head4 ,amongst his bronze and plaster figures you will find sometimes a series consisting of several versions of the same subject1 in which the original superabundant conception has been reduced to bare essentials by a process which implies the severest intellectual effort4 ,nothing that ,matisse has done gives a stronger sense of his genius1 and1 at the same time1 makes one so sharply aware of a brilliant intelligence and of erudition even4 ,amongst the hundred differences between ,matisse and ,picasso perhaps1 after all1 there is but one on which a critic can usefully insist4 ,even about that he can say little that is definite4 ,only1 it does appear to be true that whereas ,matisse is a pure artist1 ,picasso is an artist and something more--an involuntary preacher if you like4 ,neither1 of course1 falls into the habit of puffing out his pictures with literary stuff1 though ,picasso has1 on occasions1 allowed to filter into his art a1 to me1 most distasteful dash of sentimentality4 ,that is not the point1 however4 ,the point is that whereas both create without commenting on life1 ,picasso1 by some inexplicable quality in his statement1 does unmistakably comment on art4 ,that is why he1 and not ,matisse1 is master of the modern movement4 ,,the ,,place ,,of ,,art ,,in ,,art ,,criticism ,the knowing ones--those1 ,i mean1 who are always invited to music after tea1 and often to supper after the ballet--seem now to agree that in art significant form is the thing4 ,you are not to suppose that1 in saying this1 ,i am trying to make out that all these distinguished1 or soon to be distinguished1 people have been reading my book4 ,on the contrary1 ,i have the solidest grounds for believing that very few of them have done that2 and those that have treat me no better than they treated ,hegel4 ,for1 just as an ,hegelian is not so much a follower of that philosopher as an expounder1 one who has an interpretation of his own1 and can tell you what ,hegel would have said if ,hegel had been endowed by ,the ,absolute with the power of saying anything1 so of those admirable people who agree1 for the moment1 that significant form is what matters1 no two are quite agreed as to what significant form is4 ,only as to what it is not is there complete unanimity2 though there is a tendency to come together on one or two positive points4 ,it is years since ,i met anyone1 careful of his reputation1 so bold as to deny that the literary and anecdotic content of a work of visual art1 however charming and lively it might be1 was mere surplusage4 ,the significance of a picture1 according to the cognoscenti1 must be implicit in its forms2 its essential quality is something which appeals directly to the sensibility of any sensitive person2 and any reference to life1 to be of consequence1 must be a reference to that fundamental experience which is the common heritage of mankind4 ,thus1 those who cannot bring themselves to accept the more austere definition of the term are willing to recognize as significant certain qualities which are not purely formal4 ,they will recognize1 for instance1 the tragedy of ,michael ,angelo1 the gaiety of ,fra ,angelico1 the lyricism of ,correggio1 the gravity of ,poussin1 and the romance of ,giorgione4 ,they recognize them as pertaining1 not to the subjects chosen1 but to the mind and character of the artist4 ,such manifestations in line and colour of personality they admit as relevant2 but they are quite clear that the gossip of ,frith and the touching prattle of ,sir ,luke ,fildes are nothing to the purpose4 ,and so we get a school of lenient criticism which takes account of an appeal to life1 provided that appeal be to universal experience and be made by purely sthetic means4 ,according to this theory we can be moved sthetically by references to universal experience implicit in certain arrangements of line and colour1 always provided that such references are expressions of the artist's peculiar emotion1 and not mere comments on life and history or statements of fact or opinion4 ,these by everyone are deemed unessential4 ,no one seriously pretends that in a picture by a ,primitive of some obscure incident in the life of a minor saint there is anything of true sthetic import which1 escaping the subtlest and most sensitive artist1 is revealed to the expert hagiographer3 neither does anyone still believe that to appreciate ,sung painting one must make oneself familiar with the later developments of ,buddhist metaphysics as modified by ,taoist mysticism4 ,such is the prevailing critical theory4 ,what of critical practice8 ,it seems to me that even our best come something short of their professions2 and when ,i confess that ,i am going to pick a quarrel with such fine exponents of their craft as the critics of ,the ,times and the ,nation readers will guess that for once ,i mean to take my confrres seriously4 ,lately we have seen a hot dispute in which1 unless ,i mistake1 both these gentlemen took a hand1 raging round a figure of ,christ by ,mr4 ,epstein4 ,for me the only interesting fact that emerged from this controversy was that1 apparently1 most of the disputants had not so much as heard of the greatest living sculptor--,i mean ,maillol1 of course4 ,certainly1 with the art of ,maillol clearly in his mind1 it is inconceivable that one so discriminating as the critic of the ,nation should have said1 as ,i think he did say1 that ,mr4 ,epstein now stands for ,european sculpture as ,rodin stood before him4 ,not only is ,maillol quite obviously superior to ,mr4 ,epstein2 in the opinion of many he is a better artist than ,rodin4 ,but it was not around such questions as these1 vexatious1 no doubt1 but pertinent1 that controversy raged4 ,the questions that eminent critics1 writers1 and dignitaries of divers churches discussed in public1 while colonels1 ,socialists1 and cultivated theosophical ladies wrangled over them at home1 were3 ,has ,mr4 ,epstein done justice to the character of ,christ8 and1 ,what was ,his character8 ,was ,christ intelligent or was ,he something nobler1 and what has ,mr4 ,epstein to say about it8 ,was ,he disdainful or was ,he sympathetic8 ,was ,he like ,mr4 ,bertrand ,russell or more like ,mr4 ,gladstone8 ,and did ,mr4 ,epstein see ,him with the eyes of one who knew what for ages ,christ had meant to ,europe1 or with those of a ,jew of the first century8 ,questions such as these--,i will not swear to any particular one of them--were what the critics threw into the arena1 and no one much blames the parsons and publicists for playing football with them4 ,but the critics must have known that such questions were utterly irrelevant2 that it mattered not a straw whether this statue1 considered as a work of art1 represented ,jesus ,christ or ,john ,smith4 ,this the critics knew3 they knew that the appeal of a work of art is essentially permanent and universal1 and they knew that hardly one word in their controversy could have meant anything to the most sensitive ,chinaman alive1 unless he happened to be familiar with the ,christian tradition and ,christian ethics4 ,if there be no more in ,mr4 ,epstein's figure than what the critics talked about1 then1 should the ,christian religion ever become obsolete and half-forgotten1 ,mr4 ,epstein's figure will become quite insignificant4 ,most of us know next to nothing about ,buddhism and ,totemism1 and only a little about ,greek myths and ,byzantine theology1 yet works of art historically associated with these remain1 by reason of their permanent and universal1 that is to say their purely sthetic1 qualities1 as moving and intelligible as on the day they left their makers' hands4 ,about ,mr4 ,epstein's sculpture the important thing to discover is whether1 and in what degree1 it possesses these permanent and universal qualities4 ,but on that subject the critics are dumb4 ,an instructive parallel in literary journalism occurs to me4 ,i have noticed lately a tendency in the intellectual underworld--for here ,i take leave of first-class criticism--to belittle ,ibsen1 with the object1 apparently1 of magnifying ,tchekov1 and always it is in the name of art that ,ibsen is decried4 ,now1 if our literary ragamuffins cared two pence about art they would all be on their knees before ,ibsen1 who is1 ,i suppose1 the finest dramatic artist since ,racine4 ,few things are more perfect as form1 more admirably consistent and self-supporting1 than his later plays4 ,it was he who invented the modern dramatic method of seizing a situation at the point at which it can last be seized1 and from there pushing it forward with imperturbable logic and not one divagation4 ,as an artist ,ibsen is to a considerable extent the master of ,tchekov2 but1 as art is the last thing to which an ,english ,intellectual pays attention1 this fact has been overlooked4 ,what our latter-day intellectuals take an interest in is what interested their grandmothers--morals4 ,they prefer ,tchekov's point of view to that of ,ibsen1 and so do ,i4 ,they are vexed by the teaching implicit in ,ibsen's tendencious plays2 so am ,i4 ,yet when ,i ask myself3 ,is ,ibsen's moralizing worse than anyone else's8 ,i am forced to admit that it is not4 ,the fact is all moralizing is tedious1 and is recognized as such by everyone the moment it becomes a little stale4 ,another generation1 with other ideals1 will be as much irritated by ,tchekov's ill-concealed propaganda as our generation is by ,ibsen's1 and as ,ibsen's was by ,tennyson's4 ,depend upon it3 by those young people in the next generation but one who talk loudest1 wear the worst clothes1 and are most earnest about life and least sensitive to art1 ,tchekov will be voted a bore4 ,what is more1 it will be in the name of art that they will cry him down4 ,every now and then we hear eloquent appeals to the appropriate authorities1 praying them to add to their school of journalism a department of art criticism4 ,i hope and believe the appropriate authorities will do no such thing4 ,should1 however1 their sense of economy be insufficient to restrain them from paying this last insult to art1 they will still find me waiting for them with a practical suggestion4 ,any student proposing to educate himself as a critic should be compelled to devote the first years of his course to the criticism of non-representative art4 ,set down to criticize buildings1 furniture1 textiles1 and ceramics1 he will find himself obliged to explore the depths of his own sthetic experience4 ,to explain honestly and precisely why he prefers this chair to that requires1 he will find1 a far more intense effort of the intellect and imagination than any amount of fine writing about portraits and landscape4 ,it will force him to take account of his purely sthetic emotions and to discover what exactly provokes them4 ,he will be driven into that world of minute differences and subtle reactions which is the world of art4 ,and until he knows his way about that world he would do well to express no opinion on the merits of pictures and statues4 ,,bonnard ,m ,footnote ,m3 ,bonnard4 ,par ,lon ,werth4 ,paris3 ,crs4 #dj fr4 ,in ,france1 where even amateurs of painting enjoy a bit of rhetoric1 for two or three days after the death of ,renoir one could not be long in any of their haunts without being told either that ,renoir est mort et ,matisse est le plus grand peintre de ,france or that ,renoir est mort et ,derain1 etc4 ,also1 so cosmopolitan is ,paris1 there were those who would put in the query3 ,et ,picasso8 but1 as no ,frenchman much cares to be reminded that the man who1 since ,czanne1 has had the greatest effect on painting is a ,spaniard1 this interjection was generally ill-received4 ,on the other hand1 those who queried3 ,et ,bonnard8 got a sympathetic hearing always4 ,m4 ,lon ,werth deals neither in rhetoric nor in orders of merit4 ,bonnard is his theme2 and on ,bonnard he has written thirty-six pages without1 ,i think1 pronouncing the name of one rival1 leaving to his readers the agreeable task of putting the right heads in the way of such blows as he occasionally lets fly4 ,of ,bonnard he has written with a delicacy of understanding hardly to be matched in contemporary criticism4 ,he has sketched exquisitely a temperament1 and if he has not told us much about its fruits1 about the pictures of ,bonnard that is to say1 he can always refer us to the series of reproductions at the end of the volume4 ,illustration3 ,,bonnard 7,photo3 ,e4 ,druet7 ,what ,m4 ,werth would say to the distinction implied in my last paragraph ,i cannot tell2 but ,i am sure it is important4 ,certainly1 behind every work of art lies a temperament1 a mind2 and it is this mind that creates1 that causes and conditions the forms and colours of which a picture consists2 nevertheless1 what we see are forms and colours1 forms and colours are what move us4 ,doubtless1 ,m4 ,werth is right in thinking that ,bonnard paints beautifully because he loves what he paints2 but what ,bonnard gives us is something more significant than his feeling for cups or cats or human beings4 ,he gives us created form with a significance of its own1 to the making of which went his passion and its object1 but which is something quite distinct from both4 ,he gives us a work of art4 ,to consider a picture by ,vuillard1 whose work is often compared with that of ,bonnard1 might help us here4 ,vuillard loves what he paints1 and his pictures are attractive1 as often as not1 chiefly because they represent lovely things4 ,a picture by ,bonnard1 for all its fascinating overtones1 has a life entirely of its own4 ,it is like a flower1 which is beautiful not because it represents1 or reminds one of1 something beautiful1 but because it is beautiful4 ,a picture by ,bonnard escapes from its subject1 and from its author1 too4 ,and this is all-important because it is just this independent life of its own that gives to a work of art its peculiar character and power4 ,unluckily1 about this detached life1 about a work of art considered as a work of art1 there is little or nothing to be said2 so perhaps ,m4 ,werth has done well to confine himself to the task of giving his readers a taste of the quality of an artist's mind4 ,this task was difficult enough in all conscience2 the mind of ,bonnard is subtle1 delicate1 and creative1 and it has needed subtlety1 delicacy1 and not a little creative power1 to give us even a glimpse of it4 ,the first thing one gets from a picture by ,bonnard is a sense of perplexed1 delicious colour3 tones of miraculous subtlety seem to be flowing into an enchanted pool and chasing one another there4 ,from this pool emerge gradually forms which appear sometimes vaporous and sometimes tentative1 but never vapid and never woolly4 ,when we have realized that the pool of colour is1 in fact1 a design of extraordinary originality and perfect coherence our sthetic appreciation is at its height4 ,and not until this excitement begins to flag do we notice that the picture carries a delightful overtone--that it is witty1 whimsical1 fantastic4 ,such epithets one uses because they are the best that language affords1 hoping that they will not create a false impression4 ,they are literary terms1 and the painting of ,bonnard is never literary4 ,whatever1 by way of overtone1 he may reveal of himself is implicit in his forms3 symbolism and caricature are not in his way4 ,you may catch him murmuring to himself1 ,that's a funny-looking face2 he will never say ,that's the face of a man whom ,i expect you to laugh at4 ,if you choose to take his ,aprs-,midi ,bourgeoise 7which is not reproduced here7 as a sly comment on family life you may3 but anyone who goes to it for the sort of criticism he would find in the plays of ,mr4 ,shaw or ,mr4 ,barker is1 ,i am happy to say1 doomed to disappointment4 ,what amused ,bonnard was not the implication1 social1 moral1 or political1 of the scene1 but the scene itself--the look of the thing4 ,bonnard never strays outside the world of visual art4 ,he finds significance in the appearance of things and converts it into form and colour4 ,with the pompous symbolism of the grand-mannerist1 or the smart symbolism of the caricaturist1 or the half-baked symbolism of the pseudo-philosophical-futuro-dynamitard he has no truck whatever4 ,his ambition is not to convey1 without the aid of words1 certain elementary ideas1 unimportant facts1 or obvious sentiments1 but to create forms that shall correspond with his intimate sense of the significance of things4 ,the paraphernalia of symbolism are nothing to his purpose3 what he requires are subtlety of apprehension and lightness of touch1 and these are what he has4 ,so ,m4 ,lon ,werth meets people who complain that ,bonnard manque de noblesse4 ,bonnard is not noble4 ,a kitten jumping on to the table moves him1 not because he sees in that gesture a symbol of human aspiration or of feminine instability1 the spirit of youth or the pathos of the brute creation1 nor yet because it reminds him of pretty things1 but because the sight is charming4 ,he will never be appreciated by people who want something from art that is not art4 ,but to those who care for the thing itself his work is peculiarly sympathetic1 because it is so thoroughly1 so unmitigatedly that of an artist2 and therefore it does not surprise me that some of them should see in him the appropriate successor to ,renoir4 ,like ,renoir1 he loves life as he finds it4 ,he1 too1 enjoys intensely those good1 familiar things that perhaps only artists can enjoy to the full--sunshine and flowers1 white tables spread beneath trees1 fruits1 crockery1 leafage1 the movements of young animals1 the grace of girls and the amplitude of fat women4 ,also1 he loves intimacy4 ,he is profoundly ,french4 ,he reminds one sometimes of ,rameau and sometimes of ,ravel1 sometimes of ,lafontaine and sometimes of ,laforgue4 ,renoir never reminded anyone of ,ravel or ,laforgue4 ,renoir and ,bonnard are not so much alike after all4 ,in fact1 both as artists and craftsmen they are extremely different4 ,renoir's output was enormous2 he painted with the vast ease of a lyrical giant4 ,his selections and decisions were instinctive and immediate4 ,he trusted his reactions implicitly4 ,also1 there is nothing that could possibly be called whimsical1 nothing critical or self-critical1 about him4 ,bonnard1 on the other hand1 must be one of the most painstaking artists alive4 ,he comes at beauty by tortuous ways1 artful devices1 and elaboration4 ,he allows his vision to dawn on you by degrees3 no one ever guesses at first sight how serious1 how deliberately worked out his compositions are4 ,there is something ,chinese about him2 and he is one of those rare ,europeans who have dealt in imposed rather than built-up design4 ,bonnard's pictures grow not as trees2 they float as water-lilies4 ,european pictures1 as a rule1 spring upwards1 masonry-wise1 from their foundations2 the design of a picture by ,bonnard1 like that of many ,chinese pictures and ,persian textiles1 seems to have been laid on the canvas as one might lay cautiously on dry grass some infinitely precious figured gauze4 ,assuredly1 the hand that lets fall these beauties is as unlike that which1 even in the throes of rheumatism1 affirmed with supreme confidence the mastery of ,renoir1 as the easy accessibility of our last old master is unlike this shy1 fastidious spirit that ,m4 ,lon ,werth1 by a brilliant stroke of sympathetic intelligence1 has contrived to catch and hold for an instant4 ,illustration3 7,mrs4 ,jowitt's ,collection7 ,,duncan ,,grant ,,duncan ,,grant ,to-day1 ,n when the ,carfax ,gallery opens its doors at ,no4 #e ,bond ,street1 and invites the cultivated public to look at the paintings of ,duncan ,grant1 that public will have a chance of discovering what has for some time been known to alert critics here and abroad--that at last we have in ,england a painter whom ,europe may have to take seriously4 ,nothing of the sort has happened since the time of ,constable2 so naturally one is excited4 ,footnote ,n3 ,february #f1 #aibj4 ,if the public knows little of ,duncan ,grant the public is not to blame4 ,during the fifteen years that he has been at work not once has he held a one-man show1 while his sendings to periodic exhibitions have been rare and unobtrusive4 ,to be sure1 there is a picture by him in the ,tate ,gallery4 ,but who ever thought of going there to look for a work of art8 ,besides1 during the last few years the ,tate1 like most other places of the sort1 has been given over to civil servants4 ,duncan ,grant is a scrupulous1 slow1 and not particularly methodical worker4 ,his output is small2 and no sooner is a picture finished than it is carried off by one of those watchful amateurs who seem a good deal more eager to buy than he is to sell4 ,apparently he cares little for fame2 so the public gets few opportunities of coming acquainted with his work4 ,duncan ,grant is the best ,english painter alive4 ,and how ,english he is6 7,british1 ,i should say1 for he is a ,highlander47 ,of course1 he has been influenced by ,czanne and the modern ,frenchmen4 ,he is of the movement4 ,superficially his work may look exotic and odd4 ,odd it will certainly look to people unfamiliar with painting4 ,but anyone who has studied and understood the ,italians will see at a glance that ,duncan ,grant is thoroughly in the great tradition2 while he who also knows the work of ,wilson1 ,gainsborough1 ,crome1 ,cotman1 ,constable1 and ,turner will either deny that there is such a thing as an ,english tradition or admit that ,duncan ,grant is in it4 ,for my part1 ,i am inclined to believe that an ,english pictorial tradition exists1 though assuredly it is a tiny and almost imperceptible rill1 to be traced as often1 perhaps1 through ,english poetry as through ,english painting4 ,at all events1 there are national characteristics2 and these you will find asserting themselves for good or ill in the work of our better painters4 ,duncan ,grant's ancestors are ,piero della ,francesca1 ,gainsborough1 and the ,elizabethan poets4 ,there is something ,greek about him1 too2 not the archological ,greek of ,germany1 nor yet the ,grco-,roman academicism of ,france1 but rather that romantic1 sensuous ,hellenism of the ,english literary tradition4 ,it is1 perhaps1 most obvious in his early work1 where1 indeed1 all the influences ,i have named can easily be found4 ,then1 at the right moment1 he plunged headlong into the movement1 became the student of ,czanne1 ,matisse1 ,picasso1 though not1 curiously enough1 of ,bonnard1 the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest affinity1 and1 for a year or two1 suffered his personality to disappear almost beneath the heavy1 fertilizing spate4 ,he painted ,french exercises4 ,he was learning4 ,he has learnt4 ,he can now express1 not someone else's ideas1 but himself1 completely and with delicious ease1 in the language of his age4 ,he is a finished and highly personal modern artist4 ,i dare say ,duncan ,grant's most national characteristic is the ease with which he achieves beauty4 ,to paint beautifully comes as naturally to him as to speak ,english does to me4 ,almost all ,english artists of any merit have had this gift1 and most of them have turned it to sorry account4 ,it was so pleasant to please that they tried to do nothing else1 so easy to do it that they scampered and gambolled down the hill that ends in mere prettiness4 ,from this catastrophe ,duncan ,grant has been saved by a gift which1 amongst ,british painters1 is far from common4 ,he is extremely intelligent4 ,his intellect is strong enough to keep in hand that most charming and unruly of its sister gifts1 sensibility4 ,and a painter who possesses both sensibility and the intellect to direct it is in a fair way to becoming a master4 ,the sensibility of ,english artists1 whether verbal or visual1 is as notorious as their sense of beauty4 ,this becomes less surprising when we reflect that the former includes the latter4 ,the fact is1 critics1 with their habitual slovenliness1 apply the term sensibility to two different things4 ,sometimes they are talking about the artist's imagination1 and sometimes about his use of the instrument3 sometimes about his reactions1 and sometimes--in the case of painters--about the tips of his fingers4 ,it is true that both qualities owe their existence to and are conditioned by one fundamental gift--a peculiar poise--a state of feeling--which may well be described as sensibility4 ,but1 though both are consequences of this peculiar delicacy and what ,i should like to call light-triggeredness of temperament1 they are by no means identical4 ,by sensibility critics may mean an artist's power of responding easily and intensely to the sthetic significance of what he sees2 this power they might call1 if they cared to be precise1 sensibility of inspiration4 ,at other times they imply no more than sensibility of touch3 in which case they mean that the contact between the artist's brush and his canvas has the quality of a thrilling caress1 so that it seems almost as if the instrument that bridged the gulf between his fingers and the surface of his picture must have been as much alive as himself4 ,sensibility of handling or hand-writing is the proper name for this4 ,in a word1 there is sensibility of the imagination and sensibility of the senses3 one is receptive1 the other executive4 ,now1 ,duncan ,grant's reactions before the visible universe are exquisitely vivid and personal1 and the quality of his paint is often as charming as a kiss4 ,he is an artist who possesses both kinds of sensibility4 ,these are adorable gifts2 but they are not extraordinarily rare amongst ,english painters of the better sort4 ,in my judgement ,gainsborough and ,duncan ,grant are the ,english painters who have been most splendidly endowed with sensibility of both sorts1 but ,i could name a dozen who have been handsomely supplied4 ,in my own time there have been four--,burne-,jones 7you should look at his early work71 ,conder1 ,steer1 and ,john1 all of whom had an allowance far above the average1 while in ,america there was ,whistler4 ,no one1 ,i suppose1 would claim for any of these1 save1 perhaps1 ,whistler1 a place even in the second rank of artists4 ,from which it follows clearly that something more than delicacy of reaction and touch is needed to make a man first-rate4 ,what is needed is1 of course1 constructive power4 ,an artist must be able to convert his inspiration into significant form2 for in art it is not from a word to a blow1 but from a tremulous1 excited vision to an orderly mental conception1 and from that conception1 by means of the problem and with the help of technique1 to externalization in form4 ,that is where intelligence and creative power come in4 ,and no ,british painter has1 as yet1 combined with sure and abundant sensibility power and intelligence of a sort to do perfectly1 and without fail1 this desperate and exacting work4 ,in other words1 there has been no ,british painter of the first magnitude4 ,but ,i mistake1 or ,gainsborough1 ,crome1 ,constable1 and ,duncan ,grant were all born with the possibility of greatness in them4 ,many ,british 7or1 to make myself safe1 ,i will say ,english-speaking7 painters have had enough sensibility of inspiration to make them distinguished and romantic figures4 ,who but feels that ,wilson1 ,blake1 ,reynolds1 ,turner1 and ,rossetti were remarkable men8 ,others have had that facility and exquisiteness of handling which gives us the enviable and almost inexhaustible producer of charming objects--,hogarth1 ,cotman1 ,keene1 ,whistler1 ,conder1 ,steer1 ,davies4 ,indeed1 with the exceptions of ,blake and ,rossetti--two heavy-handed men of genius--and ,reynolds1 whose reactions were something too perfunctory1 ,i question whether there be a man in either list who wanted much for sensibility of either sort4 ,but what ,english painter could conceive and effectively carry out a work of art8 ,crome1 ,i think1 has done it2 ,gainsborough and ,constable at any rate came near2 and it is because ,duncan ,grant may be the fourth name in our list that some of us are now looking forward with considerable excitement to his exhibition4 ,an ,englishman who is an artist can hardly help being a poet2 ,i neither applaud nor altogether deplore the fact1 though certainly it has been the ruin of many promising painters4 ,the doom of ,englishmen is not reversed for ,duncan ,grant3 he is a poet2 but he is a poet in the right way--in the right way1 ,i mean1 for a painter to be a poet4 ,certainly his vision is not purely pictorial2 and because he feels the literary significance of what he sees his conceptions are apt to be literary4 ,but he does not impose his conceptions on his pictures2 he works his pictures out of his conceptions4 ,anyone who will compare them with those of ,rossetti or ,watts will see in a moment what ,i mean4 ,in ,duncan ,grant there is1 ,i agree1 something that reminds one unmistakably of the ,elizabethan poets1 something fantastic and whimsical and at the same time intensely lyrical4 ,i should find it hard to make my meaning clearer1 yet ,i am conscious enough that my epithets applied to painting are anything but precise4 ,but though they may be lyrical or fantastic or witty1 these pictures never tell a story or point a moral4 ,my notion is that ,duncan ,grant often starts from some mixed motif which1 as he labours to reduce it to form and colour1 he cuts1 chips1 and knocks about till you would suppose that he must have quite whittled the alloy away4 ,but the fact is1 the very material out of which he builds is coloured in poetry4 ,the thing he has to build is a monument of pure visual art2 that is what he plans1 designs1 elaborates1 and finally executes4 ,only1 when he has achieved it we cannot help noticing the colour of the bricks4 ,all notice1 and some enjoy1 this adscititious literary overtone4 ,make no mistake1 however1 the literary element in the art of ,duncan ,grant is what has been left over1 not what has been added4 ,a ,blake or a ,watts conceives a picture and makes of it a story2 a ,giorgione or a ,piero di ,cosimo steals the germ of a poem and by curious cultivation grows out of it a picture4 ,in the former class you will find men who may be great figures1 but can never be more than mediocre artists3 ,duncan ,grant is of the latter4 ,he is in the ,english tradition without being in the ,english rut4 ,he has sensibility of inspiration1 beauty of touch1 and poetry2 but1 controlling these1 he has intelligence and artistic integrity4 ,he is extremely ,english2 but he is more of an artist than an ,englishman4 ,already the ,chelsea show of ,african and ,oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the ,british ,museum1 just as1 last autumn1 the show organized in ,paris by ,m4 ,paul ,guillaume filled the ,trocadero4 ,o ,fine ladies1 young painters1 and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long dreary rooms that once were abandoned to missionaries1 anthropologists1 and colonial soldiers1 enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy4 ,for my part ,i like the change4 ,i congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors1 though the young painters1 ,i cannot help thinking1 have been a little slow4 ,footnote ,o3 #aiai ,negro art was discovered--its real merit was first recognized1 ,i mean--some fifteen years ago1 in ,paris1 by the painters there4 ,picasso1 ,derain1 ,matisse1 and ,vlaminck began picking up such pieces as they could find in old curiosity and pawn shops2 with ,guillaume ,apollinaire1 literary apostle1 following apostolically at their heels4 ,thus a demand was created which ,m4 ,paul ,guillaume was there to meet and stimulate4 ,but1 indeed1 the part played by that enterprising dealer is highly commendable2 for the ,trocadero collections being1 unlike the ,british1 mediocre both in quantity and quality1 it was he who put the most sensitive public in ,europe--a little cosmopolitan group of artists1 critics1 and amateurs--in the way of seeing a number of first-rate things4 ,because1 in the past1 ,negro art has been treated with absurd contempt1 we are all inclined now to overpraise it2 and because ,i mean to keep my head ,i shall doubtless by my best friends be called a fool4 ,judging from the available data--no great stock1 by the way--,i should say that ,negro art was entitled to a place amongst the great schools1 but that it was no match for the greatest4 ,with the greatest ,i would compare it4 ,i would compare it with the art of the supreme ,chinese periods 7from ,han to ,sung71 with archaic ,greek1 with ,byzantine1 with ,mahomedan1 which1 for archological purposes1 begins under the ,sassanians a hundred years and more before the birth of the prophet2 ,i would compare it with ,romanesque and early ,italian 7from ,giotto to ,raffael72 but ,i would place it below all these4 ,on the other hand1 when ,i consider the whole corpus of black art known to us1 and compare it with ,assyrian1 ,roman1 ,indian1 true ,gothic 7not ,romanesque1 that is to say71 or late ,renaissance it seems to me that the blacks have the best of it4 ,and1 on the whole1 ,i should be inclined to place ,west and ,central ,african art1 at any rate1 on a level with ,egyptian4 ,such sweeping classifications1 however1 are not to be taken too seriously4 ,all ,i want to say is that1 though the capital achievements of the greatest schools do seem to me to have an absolute superiority over anything ,negro ,i have seen1 yet the finest black sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is entitled to a place beside them4 ,i write1 thinking mainly of sculpture1 because it was an exhibition of sculpture that set me off4 ,it should be remembered1 however1 that perhaps the most perfect achievements of these savages are to be found amongst their textiles and basket-work4 ,here1 their exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed gift for filling a space are seen to greatest advantage1 while their shortcomings lie almost hid4 ,but it is their sculpture which1 at the moment1 excites us most1 and by it they may fairly be judged4 ,exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic4 ,touch one of these ,african figures and it will remind you of the rarest ,chinese porcelain4 ,what delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modelling is here implied6 ,what tireless industry and patience6 ,run your hand over a limb1 or a torso1 or1 better still1 over some wooden vessel2 there is no flaw1 no break in the continuity of the surface2 the thing is alive from end to end4 ,and this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them4 ,i think ,i never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar--except1 of course1 things made quite recently under ,european direction4 ,this is a delicious virtue1 but it is a precarious one4 ,it is precarious because it is not self-conscious3 because it has not been reached by the intelligent understanding of an artist1 but springs from the instinctive taste of primitive people4 ,i have seen an ,oxfordshire labourer work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe1 in the true spirit of a savage and an artist1 admiring and envying all the time the lifeless machine-made article hanging1 out of his reach1 in the village shop4 ,the savage gift is precarious because it is unconscious4 ,once let the black or the peasant become acquainted with the showy utensils of industrialism1 or with cheap1 realistic painting and sculpture1 and1 having no critical sense wherewith to protect himself1 he will be bowled over for a certainty4 ,he will admire2 he will imitate2 he will be undone4 ,at the root of this lack of artistic self-consciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of ,negro to the very greatest art4 ,savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence4 ,and because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions4 ,beauty1 taste1 quality1 and skill1 all are here2 but profundity of vision is not4 ,and because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes4 ,one of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which1 as wholes1 are of infinitely greater value than the sum of their parts4 ,that1 it seems to me1 is what savage artists generally fail to do4 ,also1 they lack originality4 ,i do not forget that ,negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention4 ,they have been making figures of tribal gods and fetiches1 and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition4 ,but were not ,european ,primitives and ,buddhists similarly bound1 and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations8 ,that the ,african artists seem hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure afresh for themselves and realize in wood a personal vision does1 ,i think1 imply a definite want of creative imagination4 ,just how serious a defect you will hold this to be will depend on the degree of importance you attach to complete self-expression4 ,savage artists seem to express themselves in details4 ,you must seek their personality in the quality of their relief1 their modulation of surface1 their handling of material1 and their choice of ornament4 ,seek1 and you will be handsomely rewarded2 in these things the niggers have never been surpassed4 ,only when you begin to look for that passionate affirmation of a personal vision which we ,europeans1 at any rate1 expect to find in the greatest art will you run a risk of being disappointed4 ,it will be then1 if ever1 that you will be tempted to think that these exquisitely gifted black artists are perhaps as much like birds building their nests as men expressing their profoundest emotions4 ,and now come the inevitable questions--where were these things made1 and when8 ,at different times and in different places1 would be the most sensible reply4 ,about the provenance of any particular piece it is generally possible to say something vague2 about dates we know next to nothing4 ,at least1 ,i do2 and when ,i consider that we have no records and no trustworthy criteria1 and that so learned and brilliant an archologist as ,mr4 ,joyce professes ignorance1 ,i am not much disposed to believe that anyone knows more4 ,i am aware that certain amateurs think to enhance the value of their collections by conferring dates on their choicer specimens2 ,i can understand why dealers encourage them in this vanity2 and1 seeing that they go to the collectors and dealers for their information1 ,i suppose one ought not to be surprised when journalists come out with their astounding attributions4 ,the facts are as follows4 ,we know that ,portuguese adventurers had a considerable influence on ,african art in the sixteenth1 and even in the fifteenth1 century4 ,there begins our certain knowledge4 ,of work so influenced a small quantity exists4 ,of earlier periods we know nothing precise4 ,there are oral traditions of migrations1 empires1 and dynasties3 often there is evidence of past invasions and the supersession of one culture by another3 and that is all4 ,the discoveries of explorers have so far thrown little light on archology2 and in most parts of ,west and ,central ,africa it would be impossible even for trained archologists to establish a chronological sequence such as can be formed when objects are found buried in the sand one above the other4 ,but1 in fact1 it is to vague traders and missionaries1 rather than to trained archologists1 that we owe most of our fine pieces1 which1 as often as not1 have been passed from hand to hand till1 after many wanderings1 they reached the coast4 ,add to all this the fact that most ,african sculpture is in wood 7except1 of course1 those famous products of early ,european influence1 the bronze castings from ,benin71 that this wood is exposed to a devastating climate--hot and damp--to say nothing of the still more deadly white ants1 and you will probably agree that the dealer or amateur who betickets his prizes with such little tags as ,gaboon1 #ajth century evinces a perhaps exaggerated confidence in our gullibility4 ,whenever these artists may have flourished it seems they flourish no more4 ,the production of idols and fetiches continues1 but the production of fine art is apparently at an end4 ,the tradition is moribund1 a misfortune one is tempted to attribute1 along with most that have lately afflicted that unhappy continent1 to the whites4 ,to do so1 however1 would not be altogether just4 ,such evidence as we possess--and pretty slight it is--goes to show that even in the uninvaded parts of ,west ,central ,africa the arts are decadent3 wherever the modern white man has been busy they are1 of course1 extinct4 ,according to experts ,negro art already in the eighteenth century was falling into a decline from some obscure1 internal cause4 ,be that as it may1 it was doomed in any case4 ,before the bagman with his ,brummagem goods an art of this sort was bound to go the way that in ,europe our applied arts1 the art of the potter1 the weaver1 the builder and the joiner1 the arts that in some sort resembled it1 have gone4 ,no purely instinctive art can stand against the machine4 ,and thus it comes about that1 at the present moment1 we have in ,europe the extraordinary spectacle of a grand efflorescence of the highly self-conscious1 self-critical1 intellectual1 individualistic art of painting amongst the ruins of the instinctive1 uncritical1 communal1 and easily impressed arts of utility4 ,industrialism1 which1 with its vulgar finish and superabundant ornament1 has destroyed not only popular art but popular taste1 has merely isolated the self-conscious artist and the critical appreciator2 and the nineteenth century 7from ,stephenson to ,mr4 ,ford71 which ruined the crafts1 in painting 7from ,ingres to ,picasso7 rivals the fifteenth4 ,meanwhile1 the scholarly activities of dealers and journalists notwithstanding1 there is no such thing as nigger archology2 for which let us be thankful4 ,here1 at any rate1 are no great names to scare us into dishonest admiration4 ,here is no question of dates and schools to give the lecturer his chance of spoiling our pleasure4 ,here is nothing to distract our attention from the one thing that matters--sthetic significance4 ,here is nigger sculpture3 you may like it or dislike it1 but at any rate you have no inducement to judge it on anything but its merits4 ,,order ,,and ,,authority ,i ,m4 ,andr ,lhote is not only a first-rate painter1 he is a capable writer as well2 so when1 some weeks ago1 he began to tell us what was wrong with modern art1 and how to put it right1 naturally we pricked up our ears4 ,we were not disappointed4 ,m4 ,lhote had several good things to say1 and he said them clearly2 the thing1 however1 which he said most emphatically of all was that he1 ,andr ,lhote1 besides being a painter and a writer1 is a ,frenchman4 ,he has a natural taste for order and a superstitious belief in authority4 ,that is why he recommends to the reverent study of the young of all nations1 ,david--,david the ,schoolmaster6 ,merci1 we have our own ,professor ,tonks4 ,not that ,i would compare ,david1 who was a first-rate practitioner and something of an artist1 with the great ,agrippa of the ,slade4 ,but from ,david even we have little or nothing to learn4 ,for one thing1 art cannot be taught2 for another1 if it could be1 a dry doctrinaire is not the man to teach it4 ,very justly ,m4 ,lhote compares the ,bouchers and ,fragonards of the eighteenth century with the ,impressionists3 alike they were charming1 a little drunk and disorderly4 ,but when he asserts that it was ,david who rescued painting from their agreeable frivolity he must be prepared for contradiction3 some people will have it that it was rather the pupil ,ingres4 ,david1 they will say1 was little better than a politic pedagogue1 who1 observing that with the ,revolution classical virtues and classical costumes had come into fashion1 that ,brutus1 the tyrannicide1 and ,aristides1 called the just1 were the heroes of the hour1 suited his manners to his company and gave the public an art worthy of highly self-conscious liberals4 ,the timely discoveries made at ,herculaneum and ,pompeii1 they will argue1 stood him in good stead4 ,from these he learnt just how citizens and citizen-soldiers should be drawn2 and he drew them3 with the result that the next generation of ,frenchmen were sighing3 ,qui nous dlivrera des ,grecs et des ,romains8 ,whoever may have rescued ,european painting from the charming disorder of the age of reason1 there can be no question as to who saved it from the riot of impressionism4 ,that was the doing of the ,post-,impressionists headed by ,czanne4 ,forms and colours must be so organized as to compose coherent and self-supporting wholes2 that is the central conviction which has inspired the art of the last twenty years4 ,order3 that has been the watchword2 but order imposed from within4 ,and order so imposed1 order imposed by the artist's inmost sense of what a work of art should be1 is something altogether different from the order obtained by submission to a theory of painting4 ,one springs from a personal conviction2 the other is enjoined by authority4 ,modern artists tend to feel strongly the necessity for the former1 and1 if they be ,frenchmen1 to believe intellectually in the propriety of the latter4 ,look at a picture by ,czanne or by ,picasso4 ,what could be more orderly8 ,cubism is nothing but the extreme manifestation of this passion for order1 for the complete organization of forms and colours4 ,the artist has subordinated his predilections and prejudices1 his peculiar way of seeing and feeling1 his whims1 his fancies and his eccentricities1 to a dominant sense of design4 ,yet the picture is personal4 ,in the first place a picture must be an organic whole1 but that whole may be made up of anything that happens to possess the artist's mind4 ,now1 look at a picture by ,baudry or ,poynter and you will see the last word in painting by precept4 ,the virtuous apprentice has stuck to the rules4 ,he has done all that his teacher bade him do4 ,and he has done nothing else4 ,david ought to be pleased4 ,pray1 ,m4 ,lhote1 give him top marks4 ,post-,impressionism1 which reaffirmed the artist's latent sense of order and reawoke a passion to create objects complete in themselves1 left the painter in full possession of his individuality4 ,now individualism is the breath of every artist's life1 and a thing of which no ,frenchman1 in his heart1 can quite approve4 ,so1 if an artist happens also to be a ,frenchman--and the combination is admirably common--what is he to do8 ,why1 look one way and row the other2 which is what ,m4 ,lhote does4 ,he paints delightfully personal and impenitent pictures1 and preaches artistic ,csarism and ,david1 the saviour of society4 ,all the week he is a ,french artist1 traditional as all real artists must be1 but never denying1 when it comes to practice1 that tradition is merely an indispensable means to self-expression2 and on ,sundays1 ,i dare say1 he goes1 like ,czanne1 to lean on ,m4 le ,cur1 who leans on ,rome1 while his concierge receives the pure gospel of ,syndicalism1 which1 also1 is based on absolute truths1 immutable1 and above criticism4 ,it is notorious that you may with impunity call a placable ,frenchman butor1 sclrat1 coquin fieff1 sale chameau1 dput even1 or snateur2 but two things you may not do3 you may not call him espce d'individu1 and you may not say vous n'tes pas logique4 ,it is as unpardonable to call a ,frenchman illogique as to shout after the ,venetian who has almost capsized your gondola mal educato ,m4 ,lhote is logique all right3 but logical in ,france has a peculiar meaning4 ,it means that you accept the consequences of your generalizations without bothering about any little discrepancies that may occur between those consequences and the facts ascertained by experience2 it does not mean that your high a priori generalizations are themselves to be tested by the nasty1 searching instrument of reason4 ,thus it comes about that the second master to whom ,m4 ,lhote would put this wild and wilful age of ours to school is that mysterious trinity of painters which goes by the name of ,le ,nain4 ,i can quite understand ,m4 ,lhote's liking for the brothers ,le ,nain1 because ,i share it4 ,their simple1 honest vision and frank statement are peculiarly sympathetic to the generation that swears by ,czanne4 ,here are men of good faith who feel things directly1 and say not a word more than they feel4 ,with a little ingenuity and disingenuousness one might make a douanier of them4 ,they are scrupulous1 sincere1 and born painters4 ,but they are not orderly4 ,they are not organizers of form and colour4 ,no3 they are not4 ,on the contrary1 these good fellows had the most elementary notions of composition4 ,they seem hardly to have guessed that what one sees is but a transitory and incoherent fragment out of which it is the business of art to draw permanence and unity4 ,they set down what they saw1 and it is a bit of good luck if what they saw turns out to have somewhat the air of a whole4 ,yet ,m4 ,lhote1 preaching his crusade against disorder1 picks out the ,le ,nain and sets them up as an example4 ,what is the meaning of this8 ,m4 ,lhote himself supplies the answer4 ,it is not order so much as authority that he is after2 and authority is good wherever found and by whomsoever exercised4 ,look1 says he1 at ,le ,nain's peasants4 ,the painter represents them to us in the most ordinary attitude4 ,it is the poetry of everyday duties accepted without revolt4 ,le ,nain's personages are engaged in being independent as little as possible4 ,no ,bolshevism here3 and what a lesson for us all6 ,let painters submit themselves lowly and reverently to ,david1 and seventeenth-century peasants to their feudal superiors4 ,not that ,i have the least reason for supposing ,m4 ,lhote to be in politics an aristocrat3 probably he is a better democrat than ,i am4 ,it is the ,greek3 kratos1 the rule1 he cares for4 ,do as you are told by ,louis ,,xiv1 or ,lenin1 or ,david3 only be sure that it is as you are told4 ,m4 ,lhote1 of course1 does nothing of the sort4 ,he respects the tradition1 he takes tips from ,watteau or ,ingres or ,czanne1 but orders he takes from no man4 ,he is an artist1 you see4 ,in many ways this respect for authority has served ,french art well4 ,it is the source of that traditionalism1 that tradition of high seriousness1 craftsmanship1 and good taste1 which1 even in the darkest days of early ,victorianism1 saved ,french painting from falling into the pit of stale vulgarity out of which ,english has hardly yet crawled4 ,french revolutions in painting are fruitful1 ,english barren--let the ,pre-,raphaelite movement be my witness4 ,the harvest sown by ,turner and ,constable was garnered abroad4 ,revolutions depart from tradition4 ,yes1 but they depart as a tree departs from the earth4 ,they grow out of it2 and in ,england there is no soil4 ,on the other hand1 it is ,french conventionality--for that is what this taste for discipline comes to--which holds down ,french painting1 as a whole1 below ,italian4 ,there are journeys a ,frenchman dare not take because1 before he reached their end1 he would be confronted by one of those bogeys before which the stoutest ,french heart quails--,c'est inadmissible1 ,c'est convenu1 ,la patrie en danger4 ,one day he may be called upon to break bounds1 to renounce the national tradition1 deny the preeminence of his country1 question the sufficiency of ,poussin and the perfection of ,racine1 or conceive it possible that some person or thing should be more noble1 reverend1 and touching than his mother4 ,on that day the ,frenchman will turn back4 ,c'est inadmissible4 ,france1 the greatest country on earth1 is singularly poor in the greatest characters--great ones she has galore4 ,her standard of civilization1 of intellectual and spiritual activity1 is higher than that of any other nation2 yet an absence of vast1 outstanding figures is one of the most obvious facts in her history4 ,her literature is to ,english what her painting is to ,italian4 ,her genius is enterprising without being particularly bold or original1 and though it has brought so much to perfection it has discovered comparatively little4 ,assuredly ,france is the intellectual capital of the world1 since1 compared with hers1 all other post-,renaissance civilizations have an air distinctly provincial4 ,yet1 face to face with the rest of the world1 ,france is provincial herself4 ,here is a puzzle3 a solution of which1 if it is to be attempted at all1 must be attempted in another chapter4 ,,ii ,for the last sixty years and more one of the rare pleasures of political philosophers has been to expatiate on le droit administratif1 on the extraordinary powers enjoyed by ,government in ,france1 whatever that government may be2 and another pleasure1 which few have denied themselves1 is that of drawing the not very obscure inference that ,france is democratic rather than liberal1 and that the ,french genius has no patience with extreme individualism4 ,if its effects were confined wholly to politics1 to criticize this national characteristic would be no part of my business2 but as it has profoundly influenced ,french art as well as ,french life and thought1 the reader1 ,i trust1 will not be unbearably vexed by an essay which has little immediately to do with the subject on which ,i am paid to write4 ,what is the cause of ,french conventionality8 ,what are its consequences8 ,these are questions to which the student of ,french art cannot well be indifferent2 and these are the questions that ,i shall attempt to answer4 ,the cause1 ,i suspect1 is to be found in the defect of a virtue4 ,if it takes two to make a quarrel it takes as many to make a bargain2 and if even the best ,frenchmen are willing to make terms with society1 that must be because society has something to offer them worth accepting4 ,all conventions are limitations on thought1 feeling1 and action2 and1 as such1 are the enemies of originality and character--hateful1 therefore1 to men richly endowed with either4 ,french conventions1 however1 have a specious air of liberality1 and ,france offers to him who will be bound by them partnership in the most perfect of modern civilizations--a civilization1 be it noted1 of which her conventions are themselves an expression4 ,the bribe is tempting4 ,also1 the pill itself is pleasantly coated4 ,feel thus1 think thus1 act thus1 says the ,french tradition1 not for moral1 still less for utilitarian1 reasons1 but for sthetic4 ,stick to the rules1 not because they are right or profitable1 but because they are seemly--nay1 beautiful4 ,we are not telling you to be respectable1 we are inviting you not to be a lout4 ,we are offering you1 free of charge1 a trade mark that carries credit all the world over4 ,how ,french he 7or she7 is6 ,many a foreigner would pay handsomely to have as much said of him4 ,any ,english boy born with fine sensibility1 a peculiar feeling for art1 or an absolutely first-rate intelligence finds himself1 from the outset1 at loggerheads with the world in which he is to live4 ,for him there can be no question of accepting those conventions which express what is meanest in an unsympathetic society4 ,to begin with1 he will not go to church or chapel on ,sundays3 it might be different were it a question of going to ,mass4 ,the hearty conventions of family life which make impossible almost relations at all intimate or subtle arouse in him nothing but a longing for escape4 ,he will be reared1 probably1 in an atmosphere where all thought that leads to no practical end is despised1 or gets1 at most1 a perfunctory compliment when some great man who in the teeth of opposition has won to a ,european reputation is duly rewarded with a title or an obituary column in ,the ,times4 ,as for artists1 they1 unless they happen to have achieved commercial success or canonization in some public gallery1 are pretty sure to be family jokes4 ,thus1 all his finer feelings will be constantly outraged2 and he will live1 a truculent1 shame-faced misfit1 with ,john ,bull under his nose and ,punch round the corner1 till1 at some public school1 a course of compulsory games and the ,arnold tradition either breaks his spirit or makes him a rebel for life4 ,in violent opposition to most of what surrounds him1 any greatly gifted1 and tough1 ,english youth is likely to become more and more aware of himself and his own isolation4 ,while his ,french compeer is having rough corners gently obliterated by contact with a well-oiled whetstone1 and is growing daily more conscious of solidarity with his partners in a peculiar and gracious civilization1 the ,english lad grows steadily more individualistic4 ,daily he becomes more eccentric1 more adventurous1 and more of a character4 ,very easily will he snap all conventional cables and1 learning to rely entirely on himself1 trust only to his own sense of what is good and true and beautiful4 ,this personal sense is all that he has to follow2 and in following it he will meet with no conventional obstacle that he need hesitate for one moment to demolish4 ,english civilization is so smug and hypocritical1 so grossly philistine1 and at bottom so brutal1 that every first-rate ,englishman necessarily becomes an outlaw4 ,he grows by kicking2 and his personality flourishes1 unhampered by sympathetic1 clinging conventions1 nor much--and this is important1 too--by the inquisitorial tyranny of ,government4 ,for1 at any rate until the beginning of the war1 an ,englishman who dared to defy the conventions had less than a ,frenchman to fear from the laws4 ,i have already suggested that the consequences of this difference between ,french and ,english civilization may be studied in the history of their literature and thought4 ,for the abject poverty of ,english visual art ,i have attempted to give reasons elsewhere3 here ,i have not space to say more than that it is rarely good for an artist to be a protestant1 and that a protestant is just what the ,english attitude to painting generally forces a genuine artist to be4 ,but consider the literature of the ,french ,renaissance3 ,rabelais is the one vast figure4 ,ronsard and his friends are charming1 elegant1 and erudite2 but not of the stupendous4 ,what is even more to the point1 already with the pliade we have a school--a school with its laws and conventions1 its thus far and no further4 ,nothing is more notorious than the gorgeous individualism and personality of those flamboyant monsters whom we call the ,elizabethans1 unless it be the absence of that quality in the great ,french writers of the next age4 ,had ,pascal been as bold as ,newton he might have been as big4 ,no one will deny that ,descartes was a finer intelligence than ,hobbes1 or that his meticulous respect for ,french susceptibilities gave an altogether improbable turn to his speculations4 ,in the eighteenth century it was the ,english who did the discovering and the ,french who1 on these discoveries being declared admissibles1 brought them to perfection4 ,even in the nineteenth1 the ,revolution notwithstanding1 ,french genius1 except in painting1 asserted itself less vividly and variously than the ,russian or ,english1 and less emphatically than the ,german4 ,in recording the consequences of this ,french taste for authority we have had to register profit and loss4 ,it is true that the picture presented by ,french history offers comparatively few colossal achievements or stupendous characters4 ,with the latter1 indeed1 it is particularly ill-supplied4 ,whereas most of the great and many of the secondary ,english writers1 thinkers1 and artists have been great characters1 the slightly monotonous good sense and refinement of ,french literary and artistic life is broken only by a few such massive or surprising figures as those of ,rabelais1 ,la ,fontaine1 ,poussin1 ,rousseau1 ,flaubert1 ,czanne--a formidable list but a short one1 to which1 however1 a few names could be added4 ,on the other hand1 what ,france has lost in colour she has gained in fertility2 and in a universal ,honours ,list for intellectual and artistic prowess the number of ,french names would be out of all proportion to the size and wealth of the country4 ,furthermore1 it is this traditional basis that has kept ,french culture up to a certain level of excellence4 ,france has never been without standards4 ,therefore it has been to ,france that the rest of ,europe has always looked for some measure of fine thinking1 delicate feeling1 and general amenity4 ,without her conventionality it may be doubted whether ,france could have remained so long the centre of civilization4 ,one commonly deplored consequence of ,french conventionality is that it makes ,frenchmen incapable of well understanding or appreciating anything foreign1 or of judging acutely between foreigners and themselves4 ,but is even this a serious misfortune8 ,french critics can discriminate between ,french productions with unsurpassable delicacy and precision4 ,as for the spring of ,french inspiration1 it is so copious that the creative genius of that favoured race seems to need nothing more from outside than an occasional new point of departure1 to the grasping of which its imperfect knowledge and unprehensile taste are adequate4 ,indeed1 the rare endeavours of ,frenchmen seriously to cultivate alien methods and points of view more often than not end in disaster4 ,shortly before the war a school of particularly intelligent and open-minded writers discovered1 what we in ,england are only too familiar with1 the sthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good4 ,dostoevsky began it4 ,first1 they ran after him2 then1 setting themselves1 as well as they could1 to study ,wordsworth and ,walt ,whitman1 in translations1 they soon plunged miserably into a morass of sentimentality4 ,a gifted novelist and a charming poet1 ,charles-,louis ,philippe and ,vildrac1 were amongst the first to fall in4 ,a ,wordsworth can moralize1 a ,sterne can pipe his eye1 with impunity2 but late eighteenth and early twentieth-century literature prove how dangerous it is for a ,french author to trespass in pursuit of motives beyond the limits of his tradition4 ,the reason why ,frenchmen are incompetent to judge or appreciate what is not ,french is that they apply to all things the ,french measure4 ,they have no universal standards1 and1 what is worse1 they take for such their own conventions4 ,to read a ,french critic on ,shakespeare or ,ibsen or ,dostoevsky or ,goethe is generally a humiliating experience for one who loves ,france4 ,as often as not you will find that he is depending on a translation4 ,it seems never to strike him that there is something ludicrous in appraising nicely the qualities of a work written in a language one cannot understand4 ,rather it seems to him ludicrous that books should be written in any language but his own2 and1 until they are translated1 for him they do not exist4 ,many years ago1 at ,cambridge1 ,i remember having a sharpish altercation with ,rupert ,brooke1 who had taken it upon himself to denigrate the art of ,racine4 ,before long it came out that he had read the plays only in a translation2 for at that time--he was in his second year1 ,i think--he had little or no ,french4 ,everyone laughed1 and the argument collapsed4 ,set the scene in ,paris1 imagine a detractor of ,shakespeare or ,goethe being convicted of similar ignorance1 and ask yourself whether one ,frenchman of the party would have felt that by such an admission the critic was put out of court4 ,it cannot be denied1 ,i fear1 that the conventional habits of the ,french mind lead easily to ignorance and self-satisfaction4 ,to be frank1 the complacent aberrations of ,french taste1 with its passion for ,poe and its pathetic confidence in ,kipling and ,chesterton1 have become a standing joke abroad4 ,there is no great reason why the ,french should know anything of foreign thought and literature2 but there is every reason why1 knowing nothing1 they should refrain from comment4 ,and how many ,frenchmen do know anything8 ,when ,i reflect that hardly one can quote a line of ,english without committing or1 at any rate1 permitting the grossest and most nonsensical blunders1 ,i am inclined to suspect that the answer is1 very few4 ,and ,i suppose it is this combination of ignorance with an incapacity for handling criteria of universal validity which gives to the nation that is assuredly the centre of civilization its paradoxical air of provinciality4 ,a ,frenchman discoursing on foreign peoples or on mankind in general--a favourite topic--suggests to me sometimes the fantastic vision of a dog-fancier criticizing a steer4 ,grant his premises--that whatever he admires in the one must be essential to the other--and nothing could be more just and luminous than his remarks4 ,undeniably the creature is a bit thick in the girth and1 what is worse1 bull-necked4 ,only1 as the points of an ox are different from those of a poodle1 the criticism is something beside the mark3 and there is not much more virtue in the objection to ,shakespeare's later tragedies that they are not written in rhymed verse4 ,blank verse1 however1 is not in the great tradition2 and the ,french critic1 with one eye fixed submissively on authority1 doubts whether he would be justified in admiring it unreservedly4 ,such are the inevitable consequences of conventionality3 and ,french conventionality is1 in its turn1 the inevitable consequence of a civilization so gracious and attractive that even the most lawless of its children cannot bear to appear disloyal4 ,,marquet ,p ,footnote ,p3 ,marquet4 ,par ,george ,besson4 ,the best picture by ,marquet ,i ever saw was in the ,grafton ,gallery exhibition of #aiab4 ,it represented a naked woman sitting in a rocking-chair4 ,since then ,i have seen scores of things by him1 admirable1 as a rule1 and invariably brilliant1 but never one that was quite first-rate4 ,and here comes ,m4 ,george ,besson1 with an essay and an album of photographs1 to show us a few works which1 surpassing anything of which we had supposed him capable1 emerge triumphantly from that stream of clever variations on a theme which ,marquet has made only too much his own4 ,anyone who compares these nudes with what ,matisse was doing a dozen or fifteen years ago will not fail to discover a common factor3 neither will he be surprised to learn that at one time these two artists were treated almost as equals4 ,both achieved a strange and disquieting intensity by bold simplifications and distortion1 by concentration on the vital movements and characteristics of the human body1 and by an absolute indifference to its literary and sentimental interest4 ,lorsque je dessine j'ai devant un homme les mmes proccupations que devant un bec de gaz4 ,that is well said3 what is more1 the saying has been put successfully into practice4 ,such pictures as numbers #ai1 #be1 and #bg are entitled to a place beside those of no matter what contemporary4 ,needless to say1 the integrity of ,marquet's vision has considerably distressed those who have no taste for art2 and from one of them1 ,marquet's friend ,charles-,louis ,philippe1 it drew a bit of art criticism that ought not to be lost4 ,le ciel me prserve1 exclaims the author of ,marie ,donadieu1 d'aimer d'un amour total un art dont l'ironie parfois atteint la cruaut6 ,et quand1 tous les usages admis qui veulent qu'on ne prsente un homme que sous ses bons cts1 quand l'amiti mme que j'prouve pour ,m4 ,marquet m'eussent engag1 me taire1 un devoir plus imprieux me sollicitait1 et j'aurais eu le sentiment de me rabaisser moi-mme en y manquant4 ,not even an art critic can be expected to lower himself in his own eyes by turning a deaf ear to the solicitations of imperious duty4 ,so ,monsieur ,philippe very honourably concludes his observations by expressing the opinion that il n'a pas droit toute l'admiration des hommes puisqu'il a t sans piti4 ,the cry of this soft and silly sentimentalist has been neatly put by ,m4 ,besson to the purpose of illustrating1 and perhaps a little exaggerating1 the merits of a painter who is1 assuredly1 neither one nor the other4 ,too clever by half1 that rather is the fault with which ,marquet must be taxed4 ,the artist who has given us a dozen first-rate things--superb nudes1 felt as solid1 three-dimensional forms1 and realized as such--is always being forestalled by an astonishing caricaturist who can knock you off something brilliant1 rapid1 and telling while you wait for the boat4 ,always this brisk and agile person is stepping forward in front of the artist and jotting down his neat symbols in the space reserved for significant form4 ,the landscapes and boats and street-scenes of ,marquet1 with their joyously emphatic statement1 their lively contrasts1 and their power of giving you the pith of the matter in a few strokes1 are about as valuable as the best things of ,forain4 ,they are statements of fact1 not expressions of emotion4 ,marquet1 the inimitable captor of life as it hurries by1 is not much better than a caricaturist2 and as he becomes more and more proficient in his craft he bothers less and less about that to which it should be a means4 ,the art of ,marquet tends ever to become the repetition of a formula4 ,lately1 in ,london1 we have been looking at the works of ,pissarro1 and ,i could wish that ,marquet would look at them1 too4 ,like him1 ,pissarro was a painter of streets and landscapes who returned again and again to the same motif4 ,in the course of a long life he must1 ,i should think1 have painted the ,quai ,voltaire1 the ,quai des ,grands ,augustins1 and the ,quai ,st4 ,michel almost as often as ,marquet has knocked them off4 ,and if ,pissarro never invented a shorthand wherewith to make notes of what was going on beneath his window1 that was because ,pissarro1 for all his impressionist theory1 was less concerned with the transitory aspect of things than with their sthetic significance4 ,he1 too1 approached everything1 men and women1 trees1 rivers1 and houses1 in the same spirit3 he approached them in the spirit of a painter4 ,never for the ugliest harlot1 the sorriest thief1 or the most woebegone gas-jet did he feel that whimpering1 simpering1 sentiment that ,tolstoy frankly admired and ,philippe felt the want of4 ,but always he seems to have seen his motif with the finely disinterested passion of an artist4 ,now1 the passion of an artist is not to be jotted down3 it has to be deliberately transmuted into form4 ,if ,marquet were as familiar with naked women as he is with the hats1 coats1 and petticoats he sees from his window1 doubtless by this time he would have elaborated a set of symbols wherewith to record his sense of them4 ,happily he is not3 so1 before the model1 he finds himself obliged to demand of the artist that is in him some plastic equivalent for his intense and agitated vision4 ,thus goaded and disarmed he can produce a masterpiece4 ,and1 therefore1 were it for me to give advice1 what ,i should say to ,marquet would be--throw away your sketch-book and panel-box1 and settle down in a studio1 with a top light1 a model or two1 and a six-foot canvas4 ,only1 as this must be just what ,m4 ,lhote has been telling him1 naturally he would tell me to mind my own business4 ,his apologist1 ,m4 ,besson1 at any rate1 has no patience with those who would set artists in the way they should go4 ,in this essay he gives them a piece of his mind1 and he does it so well and so gaily that it is a pleasure to be scolded4 ,first1 he has a few words with une dame1 que ,grome fit hritire de ses uniformes et qui devint la muse d'un gomtre-arpenteur de certaine rcente peinture4 7,whom can he mean87 ,je connais l'atelier de ,marquet1 ,madame1 en marge de l',atelier o l'on esthtise1 o l'on fabrique les manifestes et les novateurs de gnie4 ,marquet garde son rle de peintre4 ,il n'est gure pour lui de souci plus srieux que le souci de sa libert4 ,il veut tre libre pour peindre1 libre mme pour oublier la peinture1 libre encore1 libre davantage pour n'tre ni questionn ni consult1 pour ne devenir ni un expert1 ni un ducateur de sots4 ,et voil pourquoi1 vous n'avez jamais fait de confrence en son atelier4 ,and again3 ,pour n'avoir jamais asservi son art la construction d'un systme1 pour avoir senti la vanit des thories1 pour n'avoir pas fait tout les plerinages d'o l'on revient avec des rgles1 l'art d',albert ,marquet donne une impression de peinture heureuse4 ,of course ,m4 ,besson is right4 ,few in this world cut a more ludicrous figure than art-masters2 few things are more deplorable than propaganda4 ,yet ,m4 ,besson should be careful3 one thing there is more ridiculous still1 and that is counter-propaganda4 ,protestantism in art is the devil2 but the devil is not such a fool as to protest against protestantism4 ,he leaves that to the young bloods of the ,rotonde and the ,caf ,royal4 ,by all means let ,m4 ,besson claim liberty for his artist1 but1 in doing so1 let him beware of denying it to another1 even though what that other demands be liberty of prophesying or the right to preach the gospel according to ,david4 ,,standards ,some people in ,england are beginning to realize that while we have been saving civilization1 first from ,germans1 and then from ,bolsheviks1 we have come near losing it ourselves4 ,q ,this disquieting truth has been borne in on them by various signs and portents1 not least by the utter collapse of taste4 ,at life's feast we are like people with colds in their heads3 we have lost all power of discrimination4 ,as ever1 ,dido1 ,queen of ,carthage1 and better things than that1 are caviare to the general3 what is new1 and worse1 to our most delicate epicures bloater paste is now caviare4 ,footnote ,q3 ,written in ,march #aiai4 ,at a ,london dinner-party even a peeress1 even an ,american lady who has married a peer1 dare not commit herself to an adverse literary judgement--except in the case of notoriously disaffected writers--for the very good reason that she does not know where to go for a literary judgement that shall be above reproach4 ,we have as little confidence in our critics as in our ministers4 ,indeed1 since all our officers1 and most of our privates1 took to publishing pages of verse or1 at any rate1 of prose that looks odd enough to be verse1 the habit of criticism has been voted unpatriotic4 ,to grudge a man in the trenches a column of praise loud enough to drown for a moment the noise of battle would have seemed ungrateful and1 what is worse1 fastidious4 ,our critics were neither2 they did their bit3 and no one was surprised to hear the stuff with which schoolboys line their lockers described as one of the truest1 deepest1 and most moving notes that have been struck since the days of ,elizabeth4 ,this sort of thing was encouraging at the time1 and kept our lads in good heart2 but1 in the long run1 it has proved demoralizing to our critics as well as to their clients4 ,for1 now that the war is over1 those who so loyally proclaimed that any bugle-boy was a better musician than any fiddler find themselves incapable of distinguishing1 not only between fiddlers1 but even between buglers4 ,perhaps it was natural that when1 during the war1 ,t4,s4 ,eliot1 about the best of our young poets--if ours ,i may call him--published ,prufrock1 no ,english paper1 so far as ,i know1 should have given him more than a few words of perfunctory encouragement3 natural that when ,virginia ,woolf1 the best of our younger novelists1 and ,middleton ,murry published works of curious imagination and surprising subtlety1 critics1 worn in the service of ,mr4 ,bennett of the ,propaganda ,office and our ,mr4 ,wells1 should not have noticed that here were a couple of artists3 but is it not as strange as sad that our patriot geese1 time out of mind a nation's oracles1 should still be unable to tell us whether ,lieutenant ,brooke1 ,captain ,nicholls1 ,major ,grenfell1 or ,lieut4-,colonel ,maurice ,baring is the greatest poet of this age8 ,and in painting and music things are no better4 ,even our old prejudices are gone4 ,all is welcome now1 except real art2 and even that gets splashed in the wild outpour of adulation4 ,to admire everything is1 perhaps1 a more amiable kind of silliness than to admire nothing3 it is silliness all the same4 ,also1 it has brought taste to such a pass that1 except the ,russian ballet1 there was not last winter ,r in ,london one entertainment at which a person of reasonable intelligence could bear to spend an hour4 ,as for the ballet1 it was a music-hall turn1 lasting fifteen minutes1 which the public seemed to like rather better than the performing dogs and distinctly less than the ventriloquist4 ,the public accepted it because it accepts whatever is provided4 ,nevertheless1 the subtler of our music-hall comedians have obviously been ordered to coarsen their methods or clear out1 and the rare jokes that used to relieve the merry misery of our revues and plays are now dispensed with as superfluous4 ,footnote ,r3 ,the winter #aiah-ai4 ,the war is not entirely to blame3 the disease was on us long before #aiad4 ,war1 however1 created an atmosphere in which it was bound to prevail4 ,active service conditions are notoriously unfavourable to the critical spirit4 ,the army canteen need not tempt its customers3 neither need the ordinary shop under a rationing system3 and1 it must be confessed1 the habit of catering for colonial soldiers has not tended to make our public entertainments more subtle or amusing4 ,but the disease of which taste is sick unto death has been on us these fifty years4 ,it is the emporium malady4 ,we are slaves of the trade-mark4 ,our tastes are imposed on us by our tradesmen1 under which respectable title ,i include newspaper owners1 booksellers' touts1 book-stall keepers1 music-hall kings1 opera syndicates1 picture-dealers1 and honest bagmen4 ,as for the tradesman1 he is no longer an expert any more than the critic or the impressario is4 ,no longer a merchant1 no longer a shop-keeper even1 he is to-day a universal provider4 ,fifty years ago the nice housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for everything4 ,there was a little man in a back street who imported just the coffee she wanted1 another who blended tea to perfection1 a third who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked4 ,all have vanished now2 and the housewife betakes herself to the stores4 ,we no longer insist on getting what we like1 we like what we get4 ,the ,march ,hare's paradox has ceased to be paradoxical4 ,for five years ,europe has been doing what it was told to do2 for five years our experts have subjected their critical sense to a sense of patriotism and a desire to keep in with the majority2 at last the producers themselves have lost their sense of values and can no longer test the quality of their own productions4 ,there are no standards4 ,let no one imagine that standards are1 like police regulations1 things that can be imposed by authority4 ,standards exist in the mind1 where they grow out of that personal sense of values which is one of the twin pillars on which civilization rests4 ,all that authority can do is to stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle education and absolute sincerity4 ,the critic can put good things in another man's way and present them in a sympathetic light2 also1 he can resolutely refuse ever to pretend that he likes what he does not like4 ,standards are imposed from above in the sense that people who have the ability and leisure to cultivate their sense of values will1 if they take advantage of their opportunities1 inevitably influence those less favourably placed4 ,in the fine arts1 certainly1 taste is bound to be very much directed by people blest with peculiar gifts and armed with special equipment4 ,but1 besides taste in the fine arts1 there is such a thing as taste in life2 a power of discerning and choosing for one's self in life's minor matters2 and on this taste in life1 this sense of the smaller values1 is apt to flourish that subtler and more precious sthetic sense4 ,without this taste no civilization can exist2 for want of it ,european civilization is seemingly about to perish4 ,take the thing at its lowest4 ,a rich1 good-humoured fellow1 replete with a fabulously expensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a magnificently ill-furnished and over-lit restaurant1 excited by ,saumur 7recommended as ,perrier ,jouet1 #aiaa7 and a great deal of poor conversation drowned1 for the most part1 by even noisier music1 may be heard to say1 as he permits the slovenly waiter to choose him the most expensive cigar--,that will do1 sonny1 the best's good enough for me4 ,the best is not good enough for anyone who has standards2 but the modern ,englishman seems to have none4 ,to go to the most expensive shop and buy the dearest thing there is his notion of getting the best4 ,you may dine at any of the half-dozen smartest restaurants in ,london1 pay a couple of pounds for your meal1 and be sure that a ,french commercial traveller1 bred to the old standards of the provincial ordinary1 would have sent for the cook and given him a scolding4 ,it is not to be supposed that the most expensive ,english restaurants fail to engage the most expensive ,french chefs2 they are engaged1 but they soon fall below the mark because there is no one to keep them up to it4 ,the clients have no standards4 ,go to the opera and look at the rich ladies' frocks3 they might have come out of an antimacassar factory4 ,they express no sense of what is personally becoming nor a sense of insolent luxury even3 they bear witness to an utter lack of standards1 and they cost a great deal of money4 ,the best is good enough for these fine ladies1 and their best is the dressmaker's most expensive4 ,this is no mere question of fashions and conventions4 ,if standards go1 civilization goes4 ,to hear people talk you might suppose there had never been such things as dark ages4 ,not only have there been dark ages1 there has been an unmeasured tract of pre-historic savagery1 and sharp eyes--notably those of ,louis ,weber--are beginning to detect certain similarities between this age and that4 ,the peculiarity of the historic age1 man's brilliant age1 the age of civilization1 is the conservatism of its technique and its spiritual restlessness4 ,in the pre-historic age man's best energies were apparently devoted to perfecting the means to material existence4 ,improving the instrument was the grand preoccupation4 ,from the old stone age to the new1 from that to bronze1 and from bronze to iron is the story of pre-historic development4 ,then follow some forty centuries during which man rests content with his instrument4 ,between the ,minoan age and the ,industrial ,revolution his technical discoveries are insignificant by comparison with his spiritual adventures4 ,content with the plough1 the wagon1 and the loom1 man turns the sharp edge of his mind to things of the mind1 considers himself in all his relations1 thinks1 feels1 states1 expresses1 concerns himself with spiritual1 rather than material1 problems4 ,with the ,industrial ,revolution begins the third act4 ,again human intelligence and ingenuity concentrate on the prehistoric problem--the perfecting of the instrument4 ,for a hundred years ,europe marches merrily back towards barbarism4 ,then1 at the very moment when she is becoming alarmed and self-critical1 at the very moment when she is wondering how she is to reconcile her new material ambitions with the renascent claims of the spirit1 comes a war that relegates to the dust-bin or the gaol all that is not of immediate practical utility4 ,the smoke of battle drifts slowly away and reveals a situation almost hopeless4 ,we have lost our standards1 our taste in life3 we have lost the very thing by which we recognized that there were such things as spiritual values4 ,in one of his early essays ,renan points out that the proper apology for the old ,french aristocracy is that it performed the proper function of a leisured class4 ,it maintained standards4 ,unlike the ,english1 it concerned itself neither with politics nor with money-making1 nor yet with local affairs3 it stood apart1 formant dans la nation une classe qui n'avait d'autre souci que les choses librales4 ,renan recognized that a leisured class is the source of civilization2 whether he also recognized that there is no earthly reason why a leisured class should be the ruling class is not clear4 ,in ,europe we have now no leisured class2 we have only a number of rich men1 mere wealth-producers1 who perform for high wages the useful functions that miners and milkmaids perform for low ones4 ,our leisured class1 moribund before the war1 died peacefully in its sleep the year before last4 ,there is no class on this side the ,atlantic to insist on quality now4 ,but if1 as ,i am told1 we all owe money to ,america1 has not ,america acquired1 along with her financial supremacy1 certain moral obligations8 ,has she not become the leisured class of the world1 and1 as such1 responsible to civilization for the maintenance of those standards without which civilization falls8 ,if so1 it is for ,america to insist in the fine arts on some measure of talent and intelligence1 in society on decent manners1 in life on a critical attitude3 it is for her to reaffirm those standards of excellence below which neither art nor thought nor manners nor merchandize shall be suffered to fall3 for her to teach us once again to be fastidious1 to embolden us to say to a poet1 a painter1 a politician1 a newspaper proprietor1 or even to a matre d'htel--,this is not good enough4 ,america possesses the means2 she can crack the only whip that carries much conviction nowadays4 ,whether she has the will to use it is quite another matter4 ,,criticism 7,i7 ,criticism ,critics do not exist for artists any more than palontologists exist for fossils4 ,if both critics and artists could recognize this1 how much poorer the world would be in malice and rancour6 ,to help the artist is no part of a critic's business3 artists who cannot help themselves must borrow from other artists4 ,the critic's business is to help the public4 ,with the artist he is not directly concerned3 he is concerned only with his finished products4 ,so it is ridiculous for the artist to complain that criticism is unhelpful1 and absurd for the critic to read the artist lectures with a view to improving his art4 ,if the critic reads lectures it must be with a view to helping the public to appreciate1 not the artist to create4 ,to put the public in the way of sthetic pleasure1 that is the end for which critics exist1 and to that end all means are good4 ,connoisseurs in pleasure--of whom ,i count myself one--know that nothing is more intensely delightful than the sthetic thrill4 ,now1 though many are capable of tasting this pleasure1 few can get it for themselves3 for only those who have been born with a peculiar sensibility1 and have known how to cherish it1 enjoy art naturally1 simply1 and at first hand as most of us enjoy eating1 drinking1 and kissing4 ,but1 fortunately1 it is possible for the peculiarly sensitive1 or for some of them1 by infecting others with their enthusiasm1 to throw these into a state of mind in which they1 too1 can experience the thrill of sthetic comprehension4 ,and the essence of good criticism is this3 that1 instead of merely imparting to others the opinions of the critic1 it puts them in a state to appreciate the work of art itself4 ,a man blest with peculiar sensibility1 who happens also to possess this infecting power1 need feel no more shame in becoming a critic than ,socrates would have felt in becoming a don4 ,the vocations are much alike4 ,the good critic puts his pupil in the way of enjoying art1 the good don or schoolmaster teaches his how to make the most of life2 while bad critics and pedagogues stuff their victims with those most useless of all useless things1 facts and opinions4 ,primarily1 a critic is a sign-post4 ,he points to a work of art and says--,stop6 ,look6 ,to do that he must have the sensibility that distinguishes works of art from rubbish1 and1 amongst works of art1 the excellent from the mediocre4 ,further1 the critic has got to convince1 he has got to persuade the spectator that there is something before him that is really worth looking at4 ,his own reaction1 therefore1 must be genuine and intense4 ,also1 he must be able to stimulate an appreciative state of mind2 he must1 that is to say1 have the art of criticism4 ,he should be able1 at a pinch1 to disentangle and appraise the qualities which go to make up a masterpiece1 so that he may lead a reluctant convert by partial pleasures to a sense of the whole4 ,and1 because nothing stands more obstructively between the public and the grand sthetic ecstasies than the habit of feeling a false emotion for a pseudo-work-of-art1 he must be as remorseless in exposing shams as a good schoolmaster would be in exposing charlatans and short-cuts to knowledge4 ,since1 in all times and places1 the essence of art--the externalizing in form of something that lies at the very depths of personality--has been the same1 it may seem strange1 at first sight1 that critical methods should have varied4 ,one moment's reflection will suffice to remind us that there are often ten thousand paths to the same goal2 and a second's may suggest that the variety in critical methods is1 at any rate1 not more surprising than the variety in the methods of artists4 ,always have artists been striving to convert the thrill of inspiration into significant form2 never have they stuck long to any one converting-machine4 ,throughout the ages there has been a continual chopping and changing of the artistic problem4 ,canons in criticism are as unessential as subjects in painting4 ,there are ends to which a variety of means are equally good3 the artist's end is to create significant form2 that of the critic to bring his spectator before a work of art in an alert and sympathetic frame of mind4 ,if we can realize that ,giotto1 with his legends1 and ,picasso1 with his cubes1 are after the same thing1 surely we can understand that when ,vasari talks of ,truth to ,nature or nobility of sentiment1 and ,mr4 ,roger ,fry of planes and relations1 both are about the same business4 ,only a fool could suppose that the ancients were less sensitive to art than we are4 ,since they were capable of producing great art it seems silly to pretend that they were incapable of appreciating it4 ,we need not be dismayed by the stories of ,apelles and ,polygnotus with their plums and sparrows4 ,these are merely the instruments of criticism3 by such crude means did ancient critics excite the public and try to express their own subtle feelings4 ,if anyone seriously believes that the ,athenians admired the great figures on the ,parthenon for their fidelity to ,nature ,i would invite him to take into consideration the fact that they are not faithful at all4 ,more probably a sensitive ,athenian admired them for much the same reasons as we admire them4 ,he felt much what we feel3 only1 he expressed his admiration and thus provoked the admiration of others1 by calling these grand1 distorted1 or idealized figures lifelike4 ,reading the incomparable ,vasari1 one is not more struck by his sensibility and enthusiasm than by the improbability of his having liked the pictures he did like for the childish reasons he is apt to allege4 ,could anyone be moved by the verisimilitude of ,uccello8 ,i forget whether that is what ,vasari commends3 what ,i am sure of is that he was moved by the same beauties that move us4 ,the fact is1 it matters hardly at all what words the critic employs provided they have the power of infecting his audience with his genuine enthusiasm for an authentic work of art4 ,no one can state in words just what he feels about a work of art--especially about a work of visual art4 ,he may exclaim2 indeed1 if he be a critic he should exclaim1 for that is how he arrests the public4 ,he may go on to seek some rough equivalent in words for his excited feelings4 ,but whatever he may say will amount to little more than steam let off4 ,he cannot describe his feelings2 he can only make it clear that he has them4 ,that is why analytical criticism of painting and music is always beside the mark3 neither1 ,i think1 is analytical criticism of literary art much more profitable4 ,with literature that is not pure art the case is different1 facts and ideas being1 of course1 the analyst's natural prey4 ,but before a work of art the critic can do little more than jump for joy4 ,and that is all he need do if1 like ,cherubino1 he is good at jumping4 ,the warmth and truth of ,vasari's sentiment comes straight through all his nonsense4 ,because he really felt he can still arrest4 ,take an artist who has always been popular1 and see what the ages have had to say about him4 ,for more than two hundred and fifty years ,poussin has been admired by most of those who have been born sensitive to the visual arts4 ,no pretexts could be more diverse than those alleged by these admirers4 ,yet it would be as perverse to suppose that they have all liked him for totally different reasons as to maintain that all those who1 since the middle of the seventeenth century1 have relished strawberries have tasted different flavours4 ,what is more1 when ,i read1 say1 the fantastic discourses on the pictures of ,poussin delivered by the ,academicians of #affg1 ,i feel certain that some of these erudite old gentlemen had1 in fact1 much the same sort of enthusiasm1 stirred by the monumental qualities of his design and the sober glory of his colours1 that ,i have myself4 ,through all the dry dust of their pedantry the accent of sthetic sensibility rings clear4 ,poussin's contemporaries praised him chiefly as a preceptor1 an inculcator of historical truths1 more especially the truths of classical and ,hebrew history4 ,that is why ,philippe de ,champaigne deplores the fact that in his ,rebecca ,poussin n'ait pas trait le sujet de son tableau avec toute la fidlit de l'histoire1 parce qu'il a retranch la reprsentation des chameaux1 dont l',ecriture fait mention4 ,but ,le ,brun1 approaching the question from a different angle1 comes heavily down on his scrupulous colleague with the rejoinder that ,m4 ,poussin a rejet les objets bizarres qui pouvaient dbaucher l'oeil du spectateur et l'amuser des minuties4 ,the philosophic eighteenth century remarked with approval that ,poussin was the exponent of a wholesome doctrine calculated to advance the happiness of mankind4 ,but to the fervid pages of ,diderot1 wherein that tender enthusiast extols ,poussin to the skies1 asserting that one finds in his work le charme de la nature avec les incidents ou les plus doux ou les plus terribles de la vie1 our modern sensibility makes no response4 ,and we are right4 ,the whole panegyric rings hollow4 ,for to visual art ,diderot had no reaction1 as every line he wrote on the subject shows4 ,that devout critic who1 in the reign of the respectable ,louis-,philippe1 discovered that ,nicolas ,poussin tait dou d'une foi profonde3 la pit fut son seul refuge1 is in the same boat4 ,and for companion they have ,mr4 ,ruskin1 who1 being1 like them1 incapable of a genuine sthetic emotion1 is likewise incapable of infecting a truly sensitive reader4 ,so far as ,i remember1 ,ruskin's quarrel with ,poussin is that to his picture of the ,flood he has given a prevailing air of sobriety and gloom1 whereas it is notorious that an abundance of rain causes all green things to flourish and the rocks to shine like agate4 ,but when ,ingres attributes the excellence of ,poussin to the fact that he was a faithful disciple of the ancients we feel that he is talking about the thing that matters1 and that he is talking sense4 ,and we feel the same--what instance could more prettily illustrate my theory8--when ,delacroix passionately asserts that ,poussin was an arch-revolutionary4 ,s ,footnote ,s3 ,for this little history of ,poussin criticism ,i am indebted to ,m4 ,paul ,desjardins3 ,poussin 7,paris1 ,librairie ,renouard74 ,the divergence between the pretexts alleged by our ancestors for their enthusiasm and the reasons given by us1 moderns1 is easily explained by our intense self-consciousness4 ,we are deeply interested in our own states of mind3 we are all psychologists now4 ,from psychology springs the modern interest in sthetics2 those who care for art and the processes of their own minds finding themselves stheticians willy-nilly4 ,now1 art-criticism and sthetics are two things1 though at the present moment the former is profoundly influenced by the latter4 ,by works of art we are thrown into an extraordinary state of mind1 and1 unlike our forefathers1 we want to give some exacter account of that state than that it is pleasant1 and of the objects that provoke it some more accurate and precise description than that they are lifelike1 or poetical1 or beautiful even4 ,we expect our critics to find some plausible cause for so considerable an effect4 ,we ask too much4 ,it is for the sthetician to analyze a state of mind and account for it3 the critic has only to bring into sympathetic contact the object that will provoke the emotion and the mind that can experience it4 ,therefore1 all that is required of him is that he should have sensibility1 conviction1 and the art of making his conviction felt4 ,fine sensibility he must have4 ,he must be able to spot good works of art4 ,no amount of eloquence in the critic can give form significance4 ,to create that is the artist's business4 ,it is for the critic to put the public in the way of enjoying it4 #b4 ,second ,thoughts ,it is becoming fashionable to take criticism seriously1 or1 more exactly1 serious critics are trying to make it so4 ,how far they have succeeded may be measured by the fact that we are no longer ashamed to reprint our reviews3 how far they are justified is another question4 ,it is one the answer to which must depend a good deal on our answer to that old and irritating query--is beauty absolute8 ,for1 if the function of a critic be merely to perform the office of a sign-post1 pointing out what he personally likes and stimulating for that as much enthusiasm as possible1 his task is clearly something less priestlike than it would be if1 beauty being absolute1 it were his to win for absolute beauty adequate appreciation4 ,i do not disbelieve in absolute beauty any more than ,i disbelieve in absolute truth4 ,on the contrary1 ,i gladly suppose that the proposition--this object must be either beautiful or not beautiful--is absolutely true4 ,only1 can we recognize it8 ,certainly1 at moments we believe that we can4 ,we believe it when we are taken unawares and bowled over by the purely sthetic qualities of a work of art4 ,the purely sthetic qualities1 ,i say1 because we can be thrown into that extraordinarily lucid and unself-conscious transport wherein we are aware only of a work of art and our reaction to it by sthetic qualities alone4 ,every now and then the beauty1 the bald miracle1 the significant form--if ,i may venture the phrase--of a picture1 a poem1 or a piece of music--of something1 perhaps1 with which we had long believed ourselves familiar--springs from an unexpected quarter and lays us flat4 ,we were not on the look-out for that sort of thing1 and we abandon ourselves without one meretricious gesture of welcome4 ,what we feel has nothing to do with a pre-existent mood2 we are transported into a world washed clean of all past experience sthetic or sentimental4 ,when we have picked ourselves up we begin to suppose that such a state of mind must have been caused by something of which the significance was inherent and the value absolute4 ,this1 we say1 is absolute beauty4 ,perhaps it is4 ,only1 let us hesitate to give that rather alarming style to anything that has moved us less rapturously or less spontaneously4 ,for1 ninety-nine out of a hundred of our sthetic experiences have been carefully prepared4 ,art rarely catches us3 we go half way to meet it1 we hunt it down even with a pack of critics4 ,in our chastest moments we enter a concert-hall or gallery with the deliberate intention of being moved2 in our most abandoned we pick up ,browning or ,alfred de ,musset and allow our egotism to bask in their oblique flattery4 ,now1 when we come to art with a mood of which we expect it to make something brilliant or touching there can be no question of being possessed by absolute beauty4 ,the emotion that we obtain is thrilling enough1 and exquisite may be2 but it is self-conscious and reminiscent3 it is conditioned4 ,it is conditioned by our mood3 what is more--critics please take note--this precedent mood not only colours and conditions our experience1 but draws us inevitably towards those works of art in which it scents sympathy and approval4 ,to a reflective moralist ,wordsworth will always mean more than a yellow primrose meant to ,peter ,bell4 ,in our moments of bitter disillusionment it is such a comfort to jest with ,pope and ,his ,lordship that we lose all patience with the advanced politician who prefers ,blake4 ,and1 behold1 we are in a world of personal predilections1 a thousand miles from absolute values4 ,discussion of this question is complicated by the fact that a belief in the absolute nature of beauty is generally considered meritorious4 ,it can be hitched onto1 and even made to support1 a disbelief in the theory that the universe is a whimsical and unpremeditated adventure which rolls merrily down the road to ruin without knowing in the least where it is going or caring to go anywhere in particular4 ,this theory is unpopular4 ,wherefore1 absolute beauty is too often fitted into a whole system of absolutes or rather into ,the ,absolute2 and1 of course1 it would be intolerable to suppose that we could ever fail to recognize--should ,i say ,him8 ,unluckily1 history and personal experience--those two black beasts of a priori idealists--here await us4 ,if beauty be absolute1 the past was sometimes insensitive1 or we are3 for the past failed to recognize the beauty of much that seems to us supremely beautiful1 and sincerely admired much that to us seems trash4 ,and we1 ourselves1 did we never despise what to-day we adore8 ,murillo and ,salvator ,rosa and forgers of works by both enjoyed for years the passionate admiration of the cognoscenti ,in ,dr4 ,johnson's time no composition in our language had been oftener perused than ,pomfret's ,choice4 ,if ever there was a man who should have been incapable of going wrong about poetry that man was ,thomas ,gray4 ,how shall we explain his enthusiasm for ,macpherson's fraud8 ,and if there be another of whom the bowling over might be taken as conclusive evidence in the court of literary appeal that other is surely ,coleridge4 ,hark to him3 ,my earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which ,i laboured to make proselytes1 not only of my companions1 but of all with whom ,i conversed1 of whatever rank1 and in whatever place4444 ,and with almost equal delight did ,i receive the three or four following publications of the same author4 ,that author was the ,reverend ,mr4 ,bowles4 ,i was saying that any work of art that has given the authentic thrill to a man of real sensibility must have an absolute and inherent value3 and1 of course1 we all are really sensitive4 ,only1 it is sometimes difficult to be sure that our thrill was the real coup de foudre and not the mere gratification of a personal appetite4 ,let us admit so much3 let us admit that we do sometimes mistake what happens to suit us for what is absolutely and universally good2 which once admitted1 it will be easy to concede further that no one can hope to recognize all manifestations of beauty4 ,history is adamant against any other conclusion4 ,no one can quite escape his age1 his civilization1 and his peculiar disposition2 from which it seems to follow that not even the unanimous censure of generations can utterly discredit anything4 ,the admission comes in the nick of time3 history was on the point of calling attention to the attitude of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to ,gothic1 ,romanesque1 and ,byzantine art4 ,the fact is1 most of our enthusiasms and antipathies are the bastard offspring of a pure sthetic sense and a permanent disposition or a transitory mood4 ,the best of us start with a temperament and a point of view1 the worst with a cut-and-dried theory of life2 and for the artist who can flatter and intensify these we have a singular kindness1 while to him who appears indifferent or hostile it is hard to be even just4 ,what is more1 those who are most sensitive to art are apt to be most sensitive to these wretched1 irrelevant implications4 ,they pry so deeply into a work that they cannot help sometimes spying on the author behind it4 ,and remember1 though rightly we set high and apart that supreme rapture in which we are carried to a world of impersonal and disinterested admiration1 our sthetic experience would be small indeed were it confined to this4 ,more often than not it must be of works that have moved him partly by matching a mood that the best of critics writes4 ,more often than not he is disentangling and exhibiting qualities of which all he can truly say is that they have proved comfortable or exhilarating to a particular person at a particular moment4 ,he is dealing with matters of taste2 and about tastes1 you know1 non est disputandum4 ,i shall not pretend that when ,i call the poetry of ,milton good ,i suppose my judgement to have no more validity than what may be claimed for that of the urchin who says the same of peppermints3 but ,i do think a critic should cultivate a sense of humour4 ,if he be very sure that his enthusiasm is the only appropriate response of a perfectly disinterested sensibility to absolute beauty1 let him be as dogmatic as is compatible with good breeding3 failing that1 ,i counsel as great a measure of modesty as may be compatible with the literary character4 ,let him remember that1 as a rule1 he is not demanding homage for what he knows to be absolutely good1 but pointing to what he likes and trying to explain why he likes it4 ,that1 to my mind1 is the chief function of a critic4 ,after all1 an unerring eye for masterpieces is perhaps of more use to a dealer than to him4 ,mistakes do not matter much3 if we are to call mistakes what are very likely no more than the records of a perverse or obscure mood4 ,was it a mistake in #ahij to rave about ,wagner8 ,is it a mistake to find him intolerable now8 ,frankly1 ,i suspect the man or woman of the nineties who was unmoved by ,wagner of having wanted sensibility1 and him or her who to-day revels in that music of being sthetically oversexed4 ,be that as it may1 never to pretend to like what bores or dislike what pleases him1 to be honest in his reactions and exact in their description1 is all ,i now ask of a critic4 ,it is asking a good deal1 ,i think4 ,to a lady who protested that she knew what she liked1 ,whistler is said to have replied--,so1 madame1 do the beasts of the field4 ,do they8 ,then all ,i can say is the beasts of the field are more highly developed than most of the ladies and gentlemen who write about art in the papers4 #c4 ,last ,thoughts ,already ,i am in a scrape with the critics4 ,i am in a scrape for having said1 a couple of years ago1 that a critic was nothing but a sign-post1 and for having added1 somewhat later1 that he was a fallible sign-post at that4 ,so now1 contributing to a supplement ,t which1 being written by critics1 is sure to be read by them1 ,i naturally take the opportunity of explaining that what ,i said1 if rightly understood1 was perfectly civil and obliging4 ,footnote ,t3 ,contributed to the ,critical ,supplement of ,the ,new ,republic4 ,perhaps ,i shall stand a better chance of pardon when it is perceived that ,i1 too1 am fallible1 and1 what is more1 that ,i am quite aware of the fact4 ,the reader can see for himself that1 from first thoughts to last--in three years1 that is--not only have my opinions on the art of criticism been modified1 but my critical opinions have themselves become less confident4 ,so1 to recall what ,i did say3 ,i said that critics exist for the public1 and that it is no part of their business to help artists with good advice4 ,i argued that a critic no more exists for artists than a palontologist does for the ,dinosaurs on whose fossils he expatiates1 and that1 though artists happen to create those exciting objects which are the matter of a critic's discourse1 that discourse is all for the benefit of the critic's readers4 ,for these1 ,i said1 he is to procure sthetic pleasures3 and his existence is made necessary by the curious fact that1 though works of art are charged with a power of provoking extraordinarily intense and desirable emotions1 the most sensitive people are often incapable of experiencing them until a jog or a drop of stimulant even has been given to their appreciative faculties4 ,a critic should be a guide and an animator4 ,his it is first to bring his reader into the presence of what he believes to be art1 then to cajole or bully him into a receptive frame of mind4 ,he must1 therefore1 besides conviction1 possess a power of persuasion and stimulation2 and if anyone imagines that these are common or contemptible gifts he mistakes4 ,it would1 of course1 be much nicer to think that the essential part of a critic's work was the discovery and glorification of absolute beauty3 only1 unluckily1 it is far from certain that absolute beauty exists1 and most unlikely1 if it does1 that any human being can distinguish it from what is relative4 ,the wiser course1 therefore1 is to ask of critics no more than sincerity1 and to leave divine certitude to superior beings--magistrates1 for instance1 and curates1 and fathers of large families1 and ,mr4 ,bernard ,shaw4 ,at any rate1 it is imprudent1 ,i am sure1 in us critics to maintain so stoutly as we are apt to do1 that when we call a work of art good we do not mean simply that we like it with passion and conviction but that it is absolutely so1 seeing that the most sensitive people of one age have ever extolled some things which the most sensitive of another have cried down1 and have cried down what others have extolled4 ,and1 indeed1 ,i will bet whatever this essay may be worth that there is not a single contributor to this supplement who would not flatly contradict a vast number of the sthetic judgements which have been pronounced with equal confidence by the most illustrious of his predecessors4 ,no critic can be sure that what he likes has absolute value2 and it is a mark of mere silliness to suppose that what he dislikes can have no value at all4 ,neither is there any need of certainty4 ,a critic must have sincerity and conviction--he must be convinced of the genuineness of his own feelings4 ,never may he pretend to feel more or less or something other than what he does feel2 and what he feels he should be able to indicate1 and even1 to some extent1 account for4 ,finally1 he must have the power of infecting others with his own enthusiasm4 ,anyone who possesses these qualities and can do these things ,i call a good critic4 ,and what about discrimination8 says someone4 ,what about the very meaning of the word8 ,certainly the power of discriminating between artists1 that of discriminating between the parts and qualities of a work of art1 and the still different power of discriminating between one's own reactions1 are important instruments of criticism2 but they are not the only ones1 nor1 ,i believe1 are they indispensable4 ,at any rate1 if the proper end of criticism be the fullest appreciation of art1 if the function of a critic be the stimulation of the reader's power of comprehending and enjoying1 all means to that end must be good4 ,the rest of this essay will be devoted to a consideration of the means most commonly employed4 ,discriminating critics1 as opposed to those other two great classes--the ,impressionistic and the ,biographical--are peculiar in this amongst other things3 they alone extract light from refuse and deal profitably with bad art4 ,i am not going back on my axiom--the proper end of criticism is appreciation3 but ,i must observe that one means of stimulating a taste for what is most excellent is an elaborate dissection of what is not4 ,i remember walking with an eminent contributor to ,the ,new ,republic and a lady who admired so intemperately the writings of ,rupert ,brooke that our companion was at last provoked into analyzing them with magisterial severity4 ,he concluded by observing that a comparison of the more airy and fantastic productions of this gallant young author with the poems of ,andrew ,marvell would have the instant effect of putting the former in their place4 ,the lady took the hint2 and has since confessed that never before had she so clearly seen or thoroughly enjoyed the peculiar beauties1 the sweetness1 the artful simplicity and sly whimsicality of the most enchanting of ,english poets4 ,the discriminating critic is not afraid of classifying artists and putting them in their places4 ,analysis is one of his most precious instruments4 ,he will pose the question--,why is ,milton a great poet8--and will proceed to disengage certain definite qualities the existence of which can be proved by demonstration and handled objectively with almost scientific precision4 ,this sort of criticism was brought to perfection in the eighteenth century2 and certainly it did sometimes lead critics quite out of sight and reach of the living spirit of poetry4 ,it was responsible for masses of amazing obtuseness 7especially in criticism of the visual arts72 it was the frequent cause of downright silliness2 it made it possible for ,dr4 ,johnson1 commenting on the line ,time and the hour runs through the roughest day1 to suppose every reader is disgusted at the tautology2 but it performed the immense service of stimulating enthusiasm for clear thought and exact expression4 ,these discriminating and objective critics will always be particularly useful to those whose intellects dominate their emotions1 and who need some sort of intellectual jolt to set their sthetic sensibilities going4 ,happily1 the race shows no signs of becoming extinct1 and ,sir ,walter ,raleigh and ,m4 ,lanson are the by no means unworthy successors of ,dr4 ,johnson and ,saint-,evremond4 ,it is inexact to say that the nineteenth century invented impressionist criticism1 the nineteenth century invented nothing except the electric light and ,queen ,victoria4 ,but it was in the later years of that century that ,impressionism became self-conscious and pompous enough to array itself in a theory4 ,the method everyone knows3 the critic clears his mind of general ideas1 of canons of art1 and1 so far as possible1 of all knowledge of good and evil2 he gets what emotions he can from the work before him1 and then confides them to the public4 ,u ,he does not attempt to criticize in the literal sense of the word2 he merely tells us what a book1 a picture1 or a piece of music makes him feel4 ,this method can be intensely exciting2 what is more1 it has made vast additions to our sthetic experience4 ,it is the instrument that goes deepest3 sometimes it goes too deep1 passes clean through the object of contemplation1 and brings up from the writer's own consciousness something for which in the work itself no answerable provocation is to be found4 ,this leads1 of course1 to disappointment and vexation1 or else to common dishonesty1 and can add nothing to the reader's appreciation4 ,on the other hand1 there are in some works of art subtleties and adumbrations hardly to be disentangled by any other means4 ,in much of the best modern poetry--since ,dante and ,chaucer1 ,i mean--there are beauties which would rarely have been apprehended had not someone1 throwing the whole apparatus of objective criticism aside1 vividly described1 not the beauties themselves1 but what they made him feel4 ,and ,i will go so far as to admit that in a work of art there may be qualities1 significant and precious1 but so recondite and elusive that we shall hardly grasp them unless some adventurer1 guided by his own experience1 can trace their progress and show us their roots in the mind from which they sprang4 ,footnote ,u3 ,happily1 ,i have never laid great claims to that prevalent modern virtue1 originality2 otherwise1 ,i might have been somewhat dashed by coming across the following passage1 only the other day1 in the miscellaneous writings of ,gibbon 7de mes lectures ,oct4 #c1 #agfb73 ,till now 7says he7 ,i was acquainted only with two ways of criticising a beautiful passage3 the one1 to shew1 by an exact anatomy of it1 the distinct beauties of it1 and whence they sprung2 the other1 an idle exclamation1 or a general encomium which leaves nothing behind it4 ,longinus has shown me that there is a third4 ,he tells me his own feelings upon reading it2 and tells them with such energy that he communicates them4 ,impressionistic criticism of literature is not much approved nowadays1 though ,mr4 ,arthur ,symonds and one or two of his contemporaries still preserve it from the last outrages of a new and possibly less subtle generation1 while ,m4 ,proust1 by using it to fine effect in his extraordinary masterpiece1 may even bring it again into fashion4 ,but it has got a bad name by keeping low company2 for it has come to be associated with those journalistic reviewers who describe1 not the feelings and ideas provoked in them by reading a book1 but what they thought and felt and did at or about the time they were supposed to be reading it4 ,these are the chatterboxes who will tell you how they got up1 cut themselves shaving1 ate sausages1 spilt the tea1 and nearly missed the train in which they began to read the latest work of ,benedetto ,croce1 which1 unluckily1 having got into conversation with a pretty typist or a humorous bagman1 they quite forgot1 left in the carriage1 and so can tell you no more about4 ,but this is not ,impressionism1 it is mere vulgarity4 ,if in literary criticism the impressionist method is falling into disfavour1 in the criticism of music and painting it holds the field4 ,nor is this surprising3 to write objectively about a symphony or a picture1 to seize its peculiar intrinsic qualities and describe them exactly in words1 is a feat beyond the power of most4 ,wherefore1 as a rule1 the unfortunate critic must either discourse on history1 archology1 and psychology1 or chatter about his own feelings4 ,with the exception of ,mr4 ,roger ,fry there is not in ,england one critic capable of saying so much1 to the purpose1 about the intrinsic qualities of a work of visual art as half a dozen or more--,sir ,walter ,raleigh1 ,mr4 ,murry1 ,mr4 ,squire1 ,mr4 ,clutton ,brock1 ,sir ,arthur ,quiller-,couch1 and ,mr4 ,mc,carthy to begin with--can be trusted to say easily1 and1 if necessary1 weekly1 about the intrinsic qualities of a book4 ,to be sure1 ,mr4 ,fry is a great exception3 with my own ears have ,i heard him take two or three normally intelligent people through a gallery and by severely objective means provoke in them a perfect frenzy of enthusiasm for masterpieces of utterly different schools and ages4 ,doubtless that is what art-criticism should be2 but perhaps it is wrong to despise utterly those who achieve something less4 ,just at present it is the thing to laugh at biographical and historical critics1 a class of which ,sainte-,beuve is the obvious representative1 and to which belong such writers as ,taine and ,francesco de ,sanctis and all who try to explain works of art by describing their social and political circumstances4 ,at any rate1 it is said1 these are not critics4 ,i shall not quarrel over words2 but ,i am persuaded that1 when they care genuinely for books and have a gift of exposition1 these perform the same function as their more sthetically-minded brethren4 ,i am sure that a causerie by ,sainte-,beuve often sends a reader1 with a zest he had never found unaided1 to a book he had never opened unadvised4 ,there are plenty of men and women1 equipped to relish the finest and subtlest things in literature1 who can hardly come at a book save through its author1 or at an author save through the story of his life and a picture of his surroundings2 wherefore1 few things do more to promote and disseminate a taste for art and letters and1 ,i will add1 for all things of the spirit1 than biographical and historical criticism and the discussion of tendencies and ideas4 ,and this brings me to my conclusion4 ,though the immediate object of criticism is to put readers in the way of appreciating fully a work or works in the merit of which the critic believes1 its ultimate value lies further afield in more general effects4 ,good criticism not only puts people in the way of appreciating particular works2 it makes them feel1 it makes them remember1 what intense and surprising pleasures are peculiar to the life of the spirit4 ,for these it creates an appetite1 and keeps that appetite sharp3 and ,i would seriously advise anyone who complains that his taste for reading has deserted him to take a dip into the great critics and biographers and see whether they will not send him back to his books4 ,for1 though books1 pictures1 and music stand charged with a mysterious power of delighting and exciting and enhancing the value of life2 though they are the keys that unlock the door to the world of the spirit--the world that is best worth living in--busy men and women soon forget4 ,it is for critics to be ever jogging their memories4 ,theirs it is to point the road and hold open the unlocked doors4 ,in that way they become officers in the kingdom of the mind1 or1 to use a humbler and preferable term1 essential instruments of culture4 ,,othon ,,friesz ,friesz is a painter who has come on visibly since the war4 ,he has drawn right away from the field to join those leaders--,matisse1 ,picasso1 ,derain1 ,bonnard1 shall we say1 with one or two more in close attendance--a cursory glance at whom1 as they flash by1 provokes this not unprofitable exclamation3 ,how different they are6 ,apparently1 amongst the chiefs1 that famous movement no longer counts for much4 ,look at them2 to an eye at all practised these artists are as unlike each other as are hounds to the eye of a huntsman4 ,certainly1 they all owe something to ,czanne3 but what other important characteristic have they in common which they do not share with the best of the last hundred years8 ,it was ever thus3 the best1 who are all alike in some ways1 in others are1 from the first1 the most sharply differentiated simply because they are the most personal4 ,also1 as they mature they become more and more peculiar because they tend to rely less and less on anything but themselves and the grand tradition4 ,each creates and inhabits a world of his own1 which1 by the way1 he is apt to mistake for the world of everyone who is not maliciously prejudiced against him4 ,and ,friesz1 whose character and intelligence are utterly unlike those of his compeers1 is now1 naturally enough1 producing work which has little in common with that even of ,matisse-- ,illustration3 ,,othon ,,friesz ,matisse1 to whom1 not fifteen years ago1 ,i saw a picture of his attributed by a competent amateur who was the friend of both4 ,friesz has an air of being more professional than any other artist of this first rank--for ,marchand1 ,i think1 is not quite of it4 ,indeed1 for a moment1 ,friesz may appear alarmingly professional4 ,certainly1 he leaves nothing to chance3 all is planned1 and planned not in haste and agitation1 fingers itching to be at it1 but with the deliberation1 the critical thoroughness1 of an engineer or an architect4 ,there is so much of the painstaking craftsman in his method that for a moment you may overlook the sensitive artist who conceives and executes4 ,but1 in fact1 the effective alliance of practical intelligence with fine sensibility is the secret of his strength1 as ,i realized one day1 when ,i had the privilege of studying a large decoration 7a sketch for a fragment of which is to be seen in this exhibition7 ,v which ,friesz had just carried out4 ,since then ,i have not doubted that he was the man who might give this age that of which the age talks much and gets little--monumental decoration4 ,footnote ,v3 ,at the ,independent ,gallery1 #aiba4 ,large decorative schemes--when they are not1 what most are1 mere wastes of tumid pomposity--are apt to fail for one of two reasons3 either they are too much like pictures or too little like works of art4 ,because very few artists are capable by taking thought of adapting their means to an unfamiliar end1 it will happen that a sensitive and gifted painter sets about a decoration as though he were beginning an easel picture4 ,he has his sense of the importance of richness1 of filling a picture to the brim2 he has a technique adequate to his conception2 but he has neither the practical readiness nor the intellectual robustness which would enable him to adjust these to a new problem4 ,he endeavours1 therefore1 to key every part of his scheme up to the highest pitch of intensity that line and colour can bear4 ,he is attempting the impossible2 his conception is inappropriate2 and1 in any case1 his technique is unequal to so vast an undertaking4 ,he produces something which may be delicious in detail but is pretty sure to be unsatisfactory as a whole4 ,he fails to fill his space4 ,his work has the vice of ,sidney's ,arcadia and the ,religio ,medici3 it is good to dip into4 ,you cannot write an epic as though it were a sonnet4 ,on the other hand1 you must not write an epic as though you were telling a tale in the bar-parlour1 lest you should create another ,earthly ,paradise1 leaving quite untouched the subtler and more energetic chords in your listener's appreciative faculty4 ,the craftsman decorator1 though he may know how to fill vast spaces1 will never fill them with lively images4 ,his plan may be cleverly devised to surmount difficulties of structure and material2 it will not be inspired4 ,incapable of keying his instrument too high1 he will be satisfied with a slack string and abominable flatness4 ,his forms will be conventional2 his handling impersonal2 ten to one he will give us a row of insipid ,gothic figures or something in the pseudo-,veronese taste4 ,almost everyone would admit that1 considered as pictures1 those great decorations in the ,doges' ,palace were a little empty2 no one can deny that as parts of a vast scheme they are superbly adequate4 ,very much the same might be said of the decorations ,i have in mind4 ,it is clear that ,friesz plotted and reasoned with himself until he had contrived a method of matching means with ends4 ,by constructing it out of forms less charged1 more fluent1 and more in the nature of arabesques than those he habitually employs he gave to his scheme continuity and easy comprehensibility3 but never did he allow those forms to subside into mere coloured spaces1 or the lines to become mere flourishes3 always every detail was doing something1 and so the whole was significant and alive4 ,the scheme which was planned with caution was carried through with passion4 ,now1 obviously1 a painter capable of performing this feat must possess a rare1 at this moment possibly unique1 gift4 ,friesz is one who can bring the whole weight of his intellect to bear on his sensibility4 ,that sensibility let no one underrate4 ,before his vision of the external world1 especially before what we are pleased to call ,nature1 ,friesz has a reaction as delicate and enthusiastic as that of an ,english poet4 ,only1 unlike most ,english painters1 he would never dream of jotting it down and leaving it at that4 ,such hit-or-miss frivolity is not in his way4 ,he is no amateur4 ,he takes his impressions home and elaborates them2 he brings his intellect to bear on them2 and1 as this exhibition shows1 without robbing them of their bloom1 makes of them something solid and satisfying4 ,to realize what a power this is we may1 ,i hope without indiscretion1 glance for an instant at another handsomely endowed ,french painter4 ,that ,m4 ,lhote does not want for sensibility is shown by his sketches and water-colours1 that his intellect is sharp enough is proved by his writings2 but the devitalized rectitude of his more ambitious pieces shows how appallingly difficult it is to bring intellect to bear on sensibility without crushing it4 ,the failure of ,m4 ,lhote is the measure of ,m4 ,friesz's achievement4 ,if ,i am right1 it is only natural that pictures by ,friesz should improve on acquaintance4 ,the studied logic of the composition may for a time absorb the spectator's attention and blind him to more endearing qualities2 but1 sooner or later1 he will begin to perceive not only that a scrupulously honest vision has been converted into a well-knit design1 but that the stitches are lovely4 ,in every part he will be discovering subtle and seductive harmonies and balances of which the delicacy dawns on him as he gazes4 ,the more he looks the more will he get of that curiously gratifying thrill which comes of the recognition of unostentatious rightness4 ,but1 though he offers the sensitive amateur an unusually generous allowance of the amateur's most delicate pleasure1 ,friesz is1 above all1 a painters' painter4 ,he has been called a theorist4 ,and1 because he is a painter of exceptionally good understanding1 who thinks logically about his art and can find words for what he thinks1 ,i suppose the appellation is admissible4 ,but1 remember1 he never dreams of trying to convert his theories of art into theories of life4 ,his are not of the kind that can be so converted2 ,i said he was a painters'1 not a journalists'1 painter4 ,also1 unlike the theories of the mere craftsman1 his are based always on the assumption that there is such a thing as art--something that is created by and appeals to peculiar faculties1 something rare and personal1 something not to be had simply by taking thought and pains1 something as utterly unlike honest craftsmanship as it is unlike the cryptic mutterings of boozy mountebanks3 subject1 however1 to this assumption1 his theories are severely practical4 ,they have to do solely with the art of painting2 they are born of his own experience2 and he makes visible use of them4 ,that is why ,i call ,friesz a painters' painter4 ,i wonder whether the ,italian ,primitives1 with that disquietingly unself-conscious inspiration of theirs1 directed with such amazing confidence along well devised1 practical channels1 were not a little like him4 ,the exhibition is fairly representative of ,friesz's later work2 and if it cannot be said quite to summarize a stage of his career1 at least it is a milestone4 ,friesz has arrived3 that is to say1 what he has already achieved suffices to affirm the existence of a distinct1 personal talent entitled to its place in the republic of painting4 ,at that point we leave him4 ,but we may be sure that1 with his remarkable gift and even more remarkable power of turning it to account1 his energy1 his patience1 and his manifest ambition1 he will soon have gone beyond it4 ,,wilcoxism ,to return from ,paris1 full of enthusiasm for contemporary art1 and find oneself forced immediately into an attitude of querulous hostility is surely a melancholy thing4 ,it is my fate2 but it is not my fault4 ,had ,i found our native quidnuncs in a slightly less exalted humour1 had they gushed a little less over their imperial painters at ,burlington ,house1 had they made the least effort to preserve a sense of proportion1 ,i1 for my part1 had held my peace4 ,but1 deafened by the chorus of hearty self-applause with which ,british art has just been regaling itself1 ,w a critic who hopes that his country is not once again going to make itself the laughing-stock of ,europe is bound at all risks to say something disagreeable4 ,footnote ,w3 ,february #aibj4 ,in that delightful book ,the ,worlds and ,i1 for bringing me acquainted with which ,i shall ever be grateful to ,the ,athenum1 nothing is more delightful than the chapter in which ,mrs4 ,wilcox takes us through the list of the great writers she has known4 ,we are almost as much pleased by the authoress's confident expectation that we shall be thrilled to learn any new fact about ,miss ,aldrich1 who wrote one of the most exquisite lyrics in the language2 about ,rhoda ,hero ,dunn1 a genius with an almost ,shakespearean quality in her verse1 or about ,elsa ,barker1 whose poem ,the ,frozen ,grail1 dedicated to ,peary and his band1 is an epic of august beauty1 and whose sonnet ,when ,i am ,dead ranks with the great sonnets of the world1 as she would be surprised to discover that we had never heard of one of them4 ,mrs4 ,wilcox believed1 in perfect good faith1 that the crowd of magazine-makers with whom she associated were1 in fact1 the great figures of the age4 ,she had no reason for supposing that we should not be as much interested in first-hand personal gossip about ,zona ,gale and ,ridgeley ,torrence1 ,arthur ,grissom 7first editor of the ,smart ,set71 ,judge ,malone1 ,theodosia ,garrison1 and ,julie ,opp ,faversham 7even to talk with whom over the telephone gives me a sense of larger horizons7 as we should have been in similar gossip about ,swinburne and ,hardy1 ,henry ,james and ,mallarm1 ,laforgue1 ,anatole ,france1 ,tolstoy1 ,tchekov1 or ,dostoevsky4 ,and1 as ,mrs4 ,wilcox had no reason for supposing that her friends were not the greatest writers alive1 what reason had she for supposing that they were not the greatest that ever lived8 ,without the taste1 the intelligence1 or the knowledge which alone can give some notion of what's what in art1 she was obliged to rely on more accessible criteria4 ,the circulation of her own works1 for instance1 must have compared favourably with that of most poets4 ,to be sure there was ,shakespeare and the celebrated ,hugo--or was it ,gambetta8 ,but what grounds could there be for thinking that she was not superior to the obscure ,john ,donne or the obscurer ,andrew ,marvel1 or to ,arthur ,rimbaud1 of whom no one she had ever heard of had ever heard8 ,mrs4 ,wilcox was not dishonest in assuming that the most successful writer in her set was the best in the world2 she was not conceited even2 she was merely ridiculous4 ,it is disquieting to find the same sort of thing going on in ,england1 where our painters are fiercely disputing with each other the crown of ,european painting1 and our critics appraising the respective claims of ,mr4 ,augustus ,john and ,mr4 ,john ,nash as solemnly as if they were comparing ,czanne with ,renoir4 ,it is more than disquieting1 it is alarming1 to detect symptoms of the disease--this distressing disease of ,wilcoxism--in ,the ,athenum itself4 ,yet ,i am positive that not long since ,i read in this very paper that ,mr4 ,wyndham ,lewis was more than a match for ,matisse and ,derain2 and1 having said so much1 the critic not unnaturally went on to suggest that he was a match for ,lionardo da ,vinci4 ,since then ,i have trembled weekly lest the infection should have spread to our literary parts4 ,will it be asserted1 one of these ,fridays1 that the appetizing novels of ,mr4 ,gilbert ,cannan are distinctly better than ,hardy's ,wessex tales1 and comparable rather with the works of ,jane ,austen8 ,to save ourselves from absurdity1 and still more to save our painters from inspissating that trickle of fatuity which wells from heads swollen with hot air1 critics should set themselves to check this nasty malady4 ,let them make it clear that to talk of modern ,english painting as though it were the rival of modern ,french is silly4 ,in old racing days--how matters stand now ,i know not--it used to be held that ,french form was about seven pounds below ,english3 the winner of the ,derby1 that is to say1 could generally give the best ,french colt about that weight and a beating4 ,in painting1 ,english form is normally a stone below ,french4 ,at any given moment the best painter in ,england is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the ,french second class4 ,whistler was never a match for ,renoir1 ,degas1 ,seurat1 and ,manet2 but ,whistler1 ,steer1 and ,sickert may profitably be compared with ,boudin1 ,jongkind1 and ,berthe ,morisot4 ,and though ,duncan ,grant holds his own handsomely with ,marchand1 ,vlaminck1 ,lhote1 de ,segonzac1 ,bracque and ,modigliani1 ,i am not yet prepared to class him with ,matisse1 ,picasso1 ,derain1 and ,bonnard4 ,having bravely recognized this disagreeable truth1 let us take as much interest in contemporary ,british painting as we can4 ,i will try to believe that it merits more enthusiasm than ,i have been able to show1 provided it is not made a point of patriotism to excite oneself about the ,imperial ,war ,museum's pictures exhibited at ,burlington ,house4 ,as a matter of fact1 the most depressing thing about that show was the absence of the very quality for which ,british art has been most justly admired--,i mean sensibility4 ,mr4 ,wilson ,steer's picture seemed to me the best in the place1 just because ,mr4 ,steer has eyes with which1 not only to see1 but to feel4 ,to see is something2 ,mr4 ,steer also feels for what he sees2 and this emotion is the point of departure for his pictures4 ,that he seems almost completely to have lost such power as he ever had of giving to his vision a coherent and self-supporting form is unfortunate2 still1 he does convey to us some modicum of the thrill provoked in him by his vision of ,dover ,harbour4 ,those thoughtful young men1 on the other hand1 whose works have been causing such a commotion might almost as well have been blind4 ,they seem to have seen nothing2 at any rate1 they have not reacted to what they saw in that particular way in which visual artists react4 ,they are not expressing what they feel for something that has moved them as artists1 but1 rather1 what they think about something that has horrified them as men4 ,their pictures depart1 not from a visual sensation1 but from a moral conviction4 ,so1 naturally enough1 what they produce is mere arty anecdote4 ,this1 perhaps1 is the secret of their success--their success1 ,i mean1 with the cultivated public4 ,those terrible young fellows who were feared to be artists turn out after all to be innocent ,pre-,raphaelites4 ,they leave ,burlington ,house without a stain upon their characters4 ,this is plain speaking2 how else should a critic1 who believes that he has diagnosed the disease1 convince a modern patient of his parlous state8 ,to just hint a fault and hesitate dislike 7not ,pope1 but ,i split that infinitive7 is regarded nowadays merely as a sign of a base1 compromising spirit2 or not regarded at all4 ,artists1 especially in ,england1 cannot away with qualified praise or blame3 and if they insist on all or nothing ,i can but offer them the latter4 ,nevertheless1 ,i must assert1 for my own satisfaction1 that in many even of our most imperial artists1 in the brothers ,spenser and the brothers ,nash1 in ,mr4 ,lewis1 ,mr4 ,roberts1 ,mr4 ,bomberg1 and ,mr4 ,lamb1 ,i discover plenty of ability2 only ,i cannot help fancying that they may have mistaken the nature of their gifts4 ,were they really born to be painters8 ,i wonder4 ,but of this ,i am sure3 their friends merely make them look silly by comparing them with contemporary ,french masters1 or even with ,lionardo da ,vinci4 ,wilcoxism is a terrible disease because it slowly but surely eats away our sense of imperfection1 our desire for improvement1 and our power of self-criticism4 ,modesty and knowledge are the best antidotes2 and a treatment much recommended by the faculty is to take more interest in art and less in one's own prestige4 ,above all1 let us cultivate a sense of proportion4 ,let us admire1 for instance1 the admirable1 though somewhat negative1 qualities in the work of ,mr4 ,lewis--the absence of vulgarity and false sentiment1 the sobriety of colour1 the painstaking search for design--without forgetting that in the ,salon d',automne or the ,salon des ,indpendants a picture by him would neither merit nor obtain from the most generous critic more than a passing word of perfunctory encouragement2 for in ,paris there are perhaps five hundred men and women--drawn from the four quarters of the earth--all trying to do what ,mr4 ,lewis tries to do1 and doing it better4 ,,art ,,and ,,politics ,mr4 ,roger ,fry1 by means of an instructive tale 7,athenum1 ,august #ac1 #aibj71 has shown us that in their dealings with art ,bolshevik politicians remain true to type4 ,like the rest of their breed1 they have no use for it unless they can exploit it to their own ends4 ,for my part1 ,i was never so simple as to suppose that1 if the de facto government of ,russia professed admiration for ,matisse and ,picasso1 that admiration had anything to do with the artistic gifts of either of these painters1 any more than that the respect with which the ,british ,government treats the names of ,raphael and ,michel ,angelo should be taken to imply that any single one of ,his ,majesty's ministers has ever experienced an sthetic emotion4 ,consequently1 ,i was not at all surprised to learn that the sure1 though unconscious1 taste of the statesman had led the rulers of ,russia to reject their first loves2 that instinctively they had divined that both ,matisse and ,picasso were too much like genuine artists to be trustworthy2 and that they had1 therefore1 transferred their affections to the thin1 and fundamentally academic1 work of ,larionoff1 which should1 ,i fancy1 be just the thing for advanced politicians4 ,some time ago1 however1 before ,picasso was found out1 a young ,russian sthete--so ,mr4 ,fry tells us--was licensed by the competent authority to pronounce that artist's eulogy1 on the understanding1 of course1 that the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the opposition4 ,nothing easier3 ,picasso was pitted against ,renoir4 ,picasso was a great artist1 because1 abstract and austere1 he was the man for the proletariat2 whereas ,renoir1 who painted pretty pictures for the bourgeoisie1 was no earthly good4 ,the lecturer1 as might have been expected1 was out even in his facts3 for ,renoir--who came from the people1 by the way--might1 were he less of an artist1 by means of the taking and almost anecdotic quality of his earlier work1 give some pleasure to a working man2 whereas ,picasso--the son of middle-class parents1 too--could not possibly win from an honest labourer1 left to himself1 anything but sarcastic laughter or ferocious abuse4 ,but even if true1 the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point4 ,to say that a work is aristocratic or democratic1 moral or immoral1 is to say something silly and irrelevant1 or rather1 silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art4 ,in the work of ,renoir and of ,picasso1 in all works of art for that matter1 the essential quality1 as every sensitive person knows1 is the same4 ,whatever it may be that makes art matter is to be found in every work that does matter4 ,and though1 no doubt1 subject and to some extent attack may be conditioned by an artist's opinions and attitude to life1 such things are irrelevant to his work's final significance4 ,strange as it may seem1 the essential quality in a work of art is purely artistic4 ,it has nothing to do with the moral1 religious1 or political views of its creator4 ,it has to do solely with his sthetic experience and his power of expressing that4 ,but1 as no politician is capable of appreciating1 or even becoming aware of1 this essential quality1 it is perhaps only natural that politicians should look elsewhere for the significance of art4 ,this painful but certain fact once grasped1 it becomes possible to understand several things that have considerably puzzled critics and historians4 ,for instance1 it is often remarked1 and generally with surprise1 that progressive politicians are commonly averse to new movements in art4 ,the attitude of the present ,russian ,government to the contemporary movement makes neither for nor against this view1 for that novelty it took over as a going concern4 ,let us see how it looks on the next1 which will be very likely a return to the tradition of ,ingres4 ,the example usually cited by exponents of this theory--that progressive politicians are reactionary in art--is the notorious hostility of ,liberals to the romantic movement2 but ,i believe that were they to study closely the histories of the ,impressionist1 the ,pre-,raphaelite1 and the ,wagnerian movements they would find in them1 too1 evidence on the whole favourable to their case4 ,be that as it may1 this theory1 which once seemed paradoxical1 quite loses its fantastic air when considered in the light of our discovery4 ,had art anything to do with opinion it would be strange1 indeed1 if new art were ill-received by those who like their opinions new4 ,but as art has nothing whatever to do with such things there is no more reason why a ,radical should like new forms of art than why he should like new brands of tea4 ,the essential qualities of a work of art are purely artistic2 and since politicians1 if not too coarse by nature1 soon make themselves so by practice1 to apprehend these they must1 unless they can leave art alone1 seek its significance in what is unessential4 ,progressive politicians1 who have a way of taking ethics under their wing and even conceive themselves the active promoters of good1 are apt to seek it in morals4 ,one might have supposed that a message was to be found as easily in new forms of art as in old2 but1 unluckily1 new forms are to most incomprehensible4 ,and though to a hardened sinner here and there what is incomprehensible may be nothing worse than disconcerting1 to him who seeks good in all things1 and is constantly on the look-out for uplifting influences1 whatever disappoints this longing is positively and terribly evil4 ,now1 a new and genuine work of art is something unmistakably alive and1 at the same time1 unprovided1 as yet1 with moral credentials4 ,it is unintelligible without being negligible4 ,it comes from an unfamiliar world and shakes a good man's belief in the obvious4 ,it must be very wicked4 ,and the proper reaction to what is wicked is a blind fury of moral indignation4 ,well1 blind fury is blind4 ,so no one could be much worse placed than the political moralist for seeing whatever there may be to be seen in what is1 at once1 strange and subtle4 ,we are in a position now to clear up another difficulty1 which has distressed so deeply the best and wisest of men that to get rid of it some have felt justified in tampering with the truth4 ,if art had anything to do with politics1 evidently art should have flourished most gloriously in those ages of political freedom which do us all so much credit4 ,the necessity of this inference has been felt strongly enough by ,liberal historians to make them accept without demur the doctrine that the age of ,pericles was the great age of visual art1 and repeat it without mentioning the fact that in that age an aristocracy of some twenty-five thousand citizens was supported by the compulsory labours of some four hundred thousand slaves4 ,the truth is1 of course1 that art may flourish under any form of government4 ,it flourished in the ,athenian aristocracy and under the despotic bureaucracies of ,china1 ,persia1 and ,byzantium4 ,in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it flourished under the feudal system1 and in the fifteenth amongst the oligarchies and tyrannies of ,italy4 ,on the other hand1 neither the ,roman ,republic nor the ,roman ,empire gave us anything much worth remembering3 and no period in ,french history has been less fruitful in art and letters than the first republic and empire4 ,there was ,ingres1 of course2 but the period on the whole was singularly barren1 and it may be just worth remarking that at no time1 perhaps1 has ,french art been so academic1 professorial1 timid1 and uninspired as in the first glorious years of the great ,revolution4 ,here there is nothing to surprise us4 ,but what does1 at first sight1 seem odd is that art should apparently be indifferent1 not only to political systems1 but to social conditions as well4 ,barbarism or ,civilization3 it is all one to art4 ,old-fashioned historians1 who had a pleasant1 tidy way of dealing with the past1 used to plot out from that wilderness four great periods of civilization3 the ,athenian 7from #dhj ,b4,c4 to the death of ,aristotle1 #cbb71 the first and second centuries of the ,roman ,empire1 ,italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries1 and from the end of the ,fronde1 #afec1 to the ,revolution4 ,for my part1 ,i should be inclined to subtract from these the ,roman period1 and add1 if only ,i knew more about it1 the age of ,sung4 ,but accepting1 by way of compromise1 all five1 we find that three--the ,greek1 ,chinese1 and ,italian--were rich in visual art1 whereas ,rome was utterly barren and the eighteenth century not extraordinarily prolific4 ,to make matters worse1 we see in the dark and early middle ages a steady flow of first-rate art from societies more or less barbarous1 while lately we have learnt that black and naked savages can create exquisitely4 ,are we1 then1 to assume that there is no connection between art and civilization8 ,i think not4 ,a connection there is1 but1 as was to be expected1 an unessential one4 ,the essential quality in art is invariable1 and what gives the ,parthenon its significance is what gives significance to a nigger's basket-work box4 ,there is such a thing as civilized art1 but its civility lies in adventitious and subsidiary qualities--in the means1 not in the end4 ,it seems to me we do mean something when we say that ,phidias1 ,sophocles1 and ,aristophanes1 ,raphael1 ,racine1 ,molire1 ,poussin1 ,milton1 ,wren1 ,jane ,austen and ,mozart are highly civilized artists1 and that the creators of the ,gothic cathedrals and the author of the ,chanson de ,roland1 ,villon1 ,webster1 ,rembrandt1 ,blake1 ,wordsworth1 ,emily ,bront1 ,whitman1 ,turner1 ,wagner and the ,congolese fetish-makers are not4 ,but1 whatever we may mean1 assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other4 ,they differ widely2 but they differ in the means by which they compass the same end4 ,it is absurd to argue that civilization is either favourable or unfavourable to art2 but it is reasonable to suppose that it may be the one or the other to a particular artist4 ,different temperaments thrive in different atmospheres4 ,how many mute1 inglorious ,miltons1 ,raphaels1 and ,mozarts may not have lost heart and gone under in the savage insecurity of the dark ages8 ,and may not the eighteenth century1 which clipped the wings of ,blake1 have crushed the fluttering aspirations of a dozen ,gothically-minded geniuses and laughed some budding ,wagner out of all idea of expressing his ebullient personality8 ,it is possible to speak of civilized or uncivilized art and mean something by our words2 but what we mean has nothing to do with the ultimate value of the work4 ,and1 in the same way1 there may be an unessential connection between art and politics1 though more remote and unimportant still4 ,as ,i have explained too often already1 an artist1 before he can create effectively1 has got to work himself into a passion2 by some means he has got to raise his feelings to the creative temperature and his energies to a corresponding pitch of intensity4 ,he must make himself drunk somehow1 and political passion is as good a tipple as another4 ,religion1 ,science1 ,morals1 ,love1 ,hate1 ,fear1 ,lust--all serve the artist's turn1 and ,politics and ,patriotism have done their bit4 ,it is clear that ,wordsworth was thrown into the state of mind in which he wrote his famous sonnets by love of ,england and detestation of ,france1 by fear of revolution and longing for order2 but how much patriotism or constitutionalism has to do with the suave beauty of those harmonious masterpieces may be inferred from the fact that hoarse ,fitzgerald and ,mr4 ,kipling are quite as patriotic and even more reactionary4 ,amongst painters ,david is the conspicuous example of an artist--a small one1 to be sure--intoxicated by politics4 ,david set out as a humble1 eighteenth-century follower of ,fragonard4 ,but the ,revolution filled his poor head with notions about the ,greeks and the ,romans1 ,harmodius and ,aristogiton1 ,cornelia and the ,gracchi1 sic semper tyrannis1 and ,phrygian caps4 ,and his revolutionary enthusiasm changed the whole manner of his attack on that central1 artistic problem which never1 in any style1 did he succeed in solving4 ,but the influence of this new style was immense1 and paramount in ,french painting for the next forty or fifty years4 ,it is to be noted1 however1 that ,david's great and immediate follower1 the mighty ,ingres1 who frankly adopted this style1 redolent of all republican virtues1 was himself one of the most virulent reactionaries that ever lived4 ,and that1 perhaps1 would be all that needed saying about ,art and ,politics were it not that at this moment the subject has an unusual importance4 ,movements in art have1 more often than not1 been the result of an extraordinarily violent preoccupation1 on the part of artists1 with the unessential and insignificant4 ,david rescued painting from the charming and slightly sentimental disorder of the later eighteenth century by concentrating on ,roman virtues and generals' uniforms4 ,the ,romantics freed themselves from ,davidism by getting frantically excited about a little hazy nonsense rather unfairly attributed to ,lord ,byron and ,sir ,walter ,scott4 ,from this the ,impressionists escaped by persuading themselves that they were men of science4 ,and against this my contemporaries set up a conscious stheticism1 slightly tinged with certain metaphysico-moral doctrines concerning the cowiness of cows and the thing in itself4 ,with ,cubism conscious stheticism holds the field1 for the ,cubist theory is1 in the main1 sthetic4 ,that is one reason why ,i cannot think that there is any great future for ,cubism4 ,an artistic movement is unlikely to live long on anything so relevant to art2 for artists1 it seems1 must believe that they are concerned with something altogether different4 ,wherefore1 ,i think it not improbable--indeed1 there are indications already ,x--that1 political progress having in the last few years somewhat outrun civilization1 and the new democracy being apparently hostile to art and culture1 artists will take to believing passionately in what they will call order4 ,if so1 in the name of ,napoleon and ,louis ,,xiv1 but1 let us hope1 with the science and restraint of ,poussin and ,ingres1 they will turn1 most likely1 to the classical tradition and1 while endeavouring to create significant form1 will assert vehemently that they are expressing their political convictions4 ,footnote ,x3 ,september #aibj4 ,illustration3 ,,derain 7,photo3 ,bernheim jeune7 ,,the ,,authority ,,of ,m4 ,,derain ,sooner or later the critic who wishes to be taken seriously must say his word about ,derain4 ,it is an alarming enterprise4 ,not only does he run a considerable risk of making himself absurd1 he may make a formidable and contemptuous enemy as well4 ,on ne peut pas me laisser tranquille6 grumbles ,derain2 to which the only reply ,i can think of is--on ne peut pas4 ,derain is now the greatest power amongst young ,french painters4 ,i would like to lay stress on the words power and ,french1 because ,i do not wish to say1 what may nevertheless be true1 that ,derain is the greatest painter in ,france1 or seemingly to forget that ,picasso's is the paramount influence in ,europe4 ,for all their abjurations most of the younger and more intelligent foreigners1 within and without the gates of ,paris1 know well enough that ,picasso is still their animator4 ,wherever a trace of ,cubism or of tte-de-ngre1 or of that thin1 anxious line of the blue period is still to be found1 there the ferment of his unquiet spirit is at work4 ,and ,i believe it is in revolt against1 perhaps in terror of1 this profoundly un-,french spirit that the younger ,frenchmen are seeking shelter and grace under the vast though unconscious nationalism of ,derain4 ,for the ,french have never loved ,cubism1 though ,braque uses it beautifully4 ,how should they love anything so uncongenial to their temperament8 ,how should that race which above all others understands and revels in life care for an art of abstractions8 ,how1 having raised good sense to the power of genius1 should ,france quite approve sthetic fanaticism8 ,what would ,poussin have said to so passionate a negation of common sense8 ,well1 happily1 we know the opinion of ,molire3 ,la parfaite raison fuit toute extrmit1 ,et veut que l'on soit sage avec sobrit4 ,did ever ,frenchmen sympathize absolutely with ,don ,quixote8 ,at any rate1 because at the very base of his civilization lies that marvellous sense of social relations and human solidarity1 a ,french artist will never feel entirely satisfied unless he can believe that his art is somehow related to1 and justified by1 ,life4 ,now1 ,picasso is not ,spanish for nothing4 ,he is a mystic2 which1 of course1 does not prevent him being a remarkably gay and competent man of the world4 ,amateurs who knew him in old days are sometimes surprised to find ,picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at the ,savoy4 ,i should not be surprised to hear of him in a ,kaffir kraal or at ,buckingham ,palace1 and wherever he might be ,i should know that under that urbane and slightly quizzical surface still would be kicking and struggling the tireless problem4 ,that problem his circumstances cannot touch4 ,it has nothing to do with ,life2 for not only was ,picasso never satisfied with a line that did not seem right in the eyes of ,god--of the ,god that is in him1 ,i mean--but never would it occur to him that a line could be right in any other way4 ,for him ,life proves nothing and signifies not much2 it is the raw material of art4 ,his problem is within2 for ever he is straining and compelling his instrument to sing in unison with that pitiless voice which in ,el ,greco's day they called the voice of ,god4 ,derain's problem is different1 and perhaps more exacting still4 ,it seems odd1 ,i know1 but ,i think it is true to say that ,derain's influence over the younger ,frenchmen depends as much on his personality as on his pictures4 ,partly this may be because his pictures are not much to be seen2 for he is neither prolific not particularly diligent1 and always there are half a dozen hungry dealers waiting to snap up whatever he may contrive to finish4 ,but clearly this is not explanation enough1 and to appreciate ,derain's position in ,paris one should be1 what unluckily ,i am not1 a psychologist4 ,one should be able to understand why his pictures are imitated hardly at all1 and why his good opinion is coveted2 why young painters want to know what ,derain thinks and feels1 not only about their art1 but about art in general1 and even about life2 and why instinctively they pay him this compliment of supposing that he does not wish them simply to paint as he paints4 ,what is it ,derain wants of them8 ,i shall be satisfied1 and a good deal surprised1 if ,i can discover even what he wants of himself4 ,a year or two ago it was the fashion to insist on ,derain's descent from the ,italian ,primitives3 ,i insisted with the rest4 ,but as he matures his ,french blood asserts more and more its sovranty1 and now completely dominates the other elements in his art4 ,assuredly he is in the great ,european tradition1 but specifically he is of the ,french3 ,chardin1 ,watteau1 and ,poussin are his direct ancestors4 ,of ,poussin no one who saw ,la ,boutique ,fantasque will have forgotten how it made one think4 ,no one will have forgotten the grave beauty of those sober greys1 greens1 browns1 and blues4 ,they made one think of ,poussin1 and of ,racine1 too4 ,and yet the ballet was intensely modern2 always you were aware that ,derain had been right through the movement--through ,fauvism1 ,negroism1 ,cubism4 ,here was an artist who had refused nothing and feared nothing4 ,could anyone be less of a reactionary and at the same time less of an anarchist8 ,and1 ,i will add1 could anyone be less gavroche8 ,la ,boutique ,fantasque1 which is not only the most amusing1 but the most beautiful1 of ,russian ballets1 balances on a discord4 ,even the fun of ,derain is not the essentially modern fun of ,massine4 ,derain is neither flippant nor exasperated2 he is humorous1 and tragic sometimes4 ,english criticism is puzzled by ,derain because very often it is confronted by things of his which seem dull and commonplace1 to ,english critics4 ,these are1 in fact1 the protests of ,derain's genius against his talent1 and whether they are good or not ,i cannot say4 ,derain has a super-natural gift for making things3 give him a tin kettle and in half a morning he will hammer you out a ,summerian head2 he has the fingers of a pianist1 an aptitude that brings beauty to life with a turn of the wrist2 in a word1 that sensibility of touch which keeps an ordinary craftsman happy for a lifetime3 and these things terrify him4 ,he ties both hands behind his back and fights so4 ,deliberately he chooses the most commonplace aspects and the most unlovely means of expression1 hoping that1 talent thus bound1 genius will be stung into action4 ,sometimes1 no doubt1 ,achilles stays sulking in his tent4 ,i suppose ,derain can be dull4 ,but what does he want this genius of his to do8 ,nothing less1 ,i believe1 than what the ,french genius did at its supreme moment1 in the seventeenth century1 what the ,greek did in the fifth4 ,my notion is that he wants to create art which shall be perfectly uncompromising and at the same time human1 and he would like it none the worse1 ,i dare say1 were it to turn out popular as well4 ,after all1 ,racine did this1 and ,molire and ,la ,bruyre and ,watteau and ,chardin and ,renoir4 ,it is in the ,french tradition to believe that there is a beauty common to life and art4 ,the ,greeks had it1 so runs the argument1 and the ,italians of the high renaissance1 but the ,english poets tended to sacrifice art to beauty1 and the moderns--so ,derain may think--sacrifice beauty and grandeur to discretion4 ,the motto ,safety first did1 ,i will confess1 just float across my eyes as ,i walked through the last salon d'automne4 ,and1 then1 ,derain may feel that there is in him something besides his power of creation and sense of form1 something which philosophers would call1 ,i dare say1 a sense of absolute beauty in things1 of external harmony4 ,however we may call it1 what ,i mean is the one thing at all worth having which the ,greeks had and the ,byzantines had not1 which ,raphael possesses more abundantly than ,giotto4 ,in ,derain this sense is alive and insistent2 it is urging him always to capture something that is outside him2 the question is1 can he1 without for one moment compromising the purity of his art1 obey it8 ,i do not know4 ,but if he cannot1 then there is no man alive to give this age what ,phidias1 ,giorgione1 and ,watteau gave theirs4 ,the ,french are not unwilling to believe that they are the heirs of ,greece and ,rome4 ,so1 if ,i am right1 the extraordinary influence of ,derain may be accounted for partly1 at any rate1 by the fact that he1 above all living ,frenchmen1 has the art to mould1 in the materials of his age1 a vessel that might contain the grand classical tradition4 ,what is more1 it is he1 if anyone1 who has the strength to fill it4 ,no one who ever met him but was impressed by the prodigious force of his character and his capacity for standing alone4 ,at moments he reminds one oddly of ,johnson4 ,he1 too1 is a dictator1 at once humorous and tragic like the mirific doctor1 but1 unlike him1 infinitely subtle4 ,he1 too1 is troubled1 and not by any sense of isolation nor yet by the gnawings of vanity and small ambition4 ,it is the problem that tortures him4 ,can he do what ,raphael and ,racine did8 ,can he create something that shall be uncompromising as art and at the same time humane8 ,face to face with that problem ,derain stands for what is to-day most vital and valid in ,france--a passionate love of the great tradition1 a longing for order and the will to win it1 and that mysterious thing which the ,athenians called ,greek3 spoudiots2 and schoolmasters call high seriousness4 ,he accepts the age into which he has stumbled with all its nastiness1 vulgarity1 and cheek4 ,he accepts that woebegone1 modern democracy which could not even make its great war fine4 ,he believes he can make something of it4 ,because he has a first-rate intellect he can afford to mistrust reason2 and so sure is he of his own taste that he can brush refinement aside4 ,yet neither his scepticisms nor his superstitions alienate the intelligent1 nor are the sensitive offended by his total disregard of their distinctions4 ,and though all this has nothing to do with painting1 on painters1 ,i surmise1 it has its effect4 ,,plus ,,de ,,jazz ,y ,footnote ,y3 #aiba ,on the first night of the ,russian ballet in ,paris1 somewhere about the middle of ,may1 perhaps the best painter in ,france1 one of the best musicians1 and an obscure journalist were sitting in a small bistrot on the ,boulevard ,st4 ,germain4 ,they should all have been at the spectacle2 all had promised to go2 and yet they sat on over their alcools and bocks1 and instead of going to the ballet began to abuse it4 ,and from the ballet they passed to modern music in general1 and from music to literature3 till gradually into the conversation came1 above the familiar note of easy denigration1 a note of energy1 of conviction1 of aspiration1 which so greatly astonished one1 at least1 of the three that1 just before two o'clock--the hour at which the patron puts even his most faithful clients out of doors--he exclaimed1 with an emphasis in him uncommon1 ,plus de ,jazz6 ,it was the least important of the three who said it1 and1 had it been the most1 ,i am not suggesting that1 like the walls of ,jericho1 a movement would have tottered at an ejaculation4 ,jazz will not die because a few clever people have discovered that they are getting sick of it2 ,jazz is dying1 and the conversation to which ,i have referred is of importance only as an early recognition of the fact4 ,for the rest it was unjust1 as such conversations will be2 the ,jazz movement1 short and slightly irritating though it was1 having served its turn and added its quota to the tradition4 ,but ,jazz is dead--or dying1 at any rate--and the moment has come for someone who likes to fancy himself wider awake than his fellows to write its obituary notice4 ,in doing so he may1 adventitiously1 throw light on something more interesting than the past2 he may adumbrate the outline of the coming movement4 ,for always movements are conditioned partly by their predecessors1 against which1 in some sort1 they must ever be reactions4 ,the ,jazz movement is a ripple on a wave2 the wave--the large movement which began at the end of the nineteenth century in a reaction against realism and scientific paganism--still goes forward4 ,the wave is essentially the movement which one tends to associate1 not very accurately perhaps1 with the name of ,czanne3 it has nothing to do with ,jazz2 its most characteristic manifestation is modern painting1 which1 be it noted1 ,jazz had left almost untouched4 ,picasso8 queries someone4 ,i shall come to ,picasso presently4 ,the great modern painters--,derain1 ,matisse1 ,picasso1 ,bonnard1 ,friesz1 ,braque1 etc4--were firmly settled on their own lines of development before ever ,jazz was heard of3 only the riff-raff has been affected4 ,italian ,futurism is the nearest approach to a pictorial expression of the ,jazz spirit4 ,the movement bounced into the world somewhere about the year #aiaa4 ,it was headed by a ,jazz band and a troupe of niggers1 dancing4 ,appropriately it took its name from music--the art that is always behind the times4 ,gavroche was killed on the barricades1 and it was with his name that ,jazz should have been associated4 ,impudence is its essence--impudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt against nobility and beauty3 impudence which finds its technical equivalent in syncopation3 impudence which rags4 ,the ,ragtime movement would have been the better style1 but the word ,jazz has passed into at least three languages1 and now we must make the best of it4 ,after impudence comes the determination to surprise3 you shall not be gradually moved to the depths1 you shall be given such a start as makes you jigger all over4 ,and from this determination issues the grateful corollary--thou shalt not be tedious4 ,the best ,jazz artists are never long-winded4 ,in their admirable and urbane brevity they remind one rather of the ,french eighteenth century4 ,but surprise is an essential ingredient4 ,an accomplished ,jazz artist1 whether in notes or words1 will contrive1 as a rule1 to stop just where you expected him to begin4 ,themes and ideas are not to be developed2 to say all one has to say smells of the school1 and may be a bore1 and--between you and me--a giveaway to boot4 ,lastly1 it must be admitted there is a typically modern craving for small profits and quick returns4 ,jazz art is soon created1 soon liked1 and soon forgotten4 ,it is the movement of masters of eighteen2 and these masterpieces created by boys barely escaped from college can be appreciated by the youngest ,argentine beauty at the ,ritz4 ,jazz is very young3 like short skirts1 it suits thin1 girlish legs1 but has a slightly humiliating effect on grey hairs4 ,its fears and dislikes--for instance1 its horror of the noble and the beautiful--are childish2 and so is its way of expressing them4 ,not by irony and sarcasm1 but by jeers and grimaces does ,jazz mark its antipathies4 ,irony and wit are for the grown-ups4 ,jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes nobility and beauty4 ,they are the products of the cultivated intellect1 and ,jazz cannot away with intellect or culture4 ,niggers can be admired artists without any gifts more singular than high spirits2 so why drag in the intellect8 ,besides1 to bring intellect into art is to invite home a guest who is apt to be inquisitive and even impartial4 ,intellect in ,jazz circles is treated rather as money was once in polite society--it is taken for granted4 ,nobility1 beauty1 and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled out3 the first two are held up to ridicule1 the last is simply abused4 ,what ,jazz wants are romps and fun1 and to make fun2 that is why1 as ,i have said1 its original name ,ragtime was the better4 ,at its best ,jazz rags every thing4 ,the inspiration of ,jazz is the same as that of the art of the grand sicle4 ,everyone knows how in the age of ,louis ,,xiv artists found in la bonne compagnie their standards1 their critics1 and many of their ideas4 ,it was by studying and writing for this world that ,racine1 ,molire1 and ,boileau gave an easier and less professional gait to ,french literature1 which--we should not forget--during its most glorious period was conditioned and severely limited by the tastes and prejudices of polite society4 ,whether the inventors of ,jazz thought that1 in their pursuit of beauty and intensity1 the artists of the nineteenth century had strayed too far from the tastes and interests of common but well-to-do humanity ,i know not1 but certain it is that1 like ,racine and ,molire1 and unlike ,beaudelaire and ,mallarm and ,csar ,franck1 they went to la bonne compagnie for inspiration and support4 ,la bonne compagnie they found in the lounges of great hotels1 on transatlantic liners1 in wagons-lits1 in music-halls1 and in expensive motor-cars and restaurants4 ,la bonne compagnie was dancing one-steps to ragtime music4 ,this1 they said1 is the thing4 ,the artists of the nineteenth century had found la bonne compagnie--the rich1 that is to say--dancing waltzes to sentimental ,olgas and ,blue ,danubes1 but they had drawn quite other conclusions4 ,yet waltzes and waltz-tunes are just as good as1 and no better than1 fox-trots and ragtime4 ,both have their merits2 but it is a mistake1 perhaps1 for artists to take either seriously4 ,be that as it may1 the serious artists of the nineteenth century never dreamed of supposing that the pleasures of the rich were the proper stuff of art2 so it was only natural that the twentieth should go to the hotel lounges for inspiration4 ,and1 of course1 it was delightful for those who sat drinking their cocktails and listening to nigger-bands to be told that1 besides being the jolliest people on earth1 they were the most sensitive and critically gifted4 ,they1 along with the children and savages whom in so many ways they resembled1 were the possessors of natural1 uncorrupted taste4 ,they first had appreciated ragtime and surrendered themselves to the compelling qualities of ,jazz4 ,their instinct might be trusted3 so1 no more classical concerts and music-lessons2 no more getting ,lycidas by heart2 no more ,bdeker2 no more cricking one's neck in the ,sistine ,chapel3 unless the coloured gentleman who leads the band at the ,savoy has a natural leaning towards these things you may depend upon it they are noble1 pompous1 and fraudulent4 ,and it was delightful1 too1 for people without a vestige of talent--and even then these were in the majority--people who could just strum a tune or string a few lines of doggerel1 to be told that all that distinguishes what used to be called serious art from their productions was of no consequence whatever1 and that1 on the contrary1 it was these1 if any1 that ought to be taken seriously4 ,the output of verse1 which was manifestly much too easy to write and difficult to read1 went up suddenly by leaps and bounds4 ,what is more1 some of it got printed3 publishers1 and even editors1 bowed the knee4 ,naturally1 the movement was a success at the ,ritz and in ,grub ,street1 ,mayfair4 ,on the other hand1 because to people who reflected for an instant it seemed highly improbable that fox-trotters and shimmy-shakers were sensitive or interesting people1 that ,christy ,minstrels were great musicians1 or that pub-crawlers and demi-mondaines were poets1 there sprang simultaneously into existence a respectable1 intelligent1 and ill-tempered opposition which did1 and continues to do1 gross injustice to the genuine artists who have drawn inspiration1 or sustenance at any rate1 from ,jazz4 ,during the last ten years ,jazz had dominated music and coloured literature3 on painting1 as ,i have said1 its effect has been negligible4 ,what1 for want of a better name1 ,i must call the ,czanne movement was too profound a stream to be modified by so shallow a current4 ,all the great contemporary painters are extremely serious2 they make no faces at their predecessors1 or at anyone else4 ,they are not gavroche4 ,surprise is the last emotion they wish to arouse4 ,and1 assuredly1 they have neither gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor shown the slightest desire to amuse them4 ,this is as true of ,picasso as of ,derain3 only1 ,picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the impression of a will to surprise1 while his habit of turning everything to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every new manifestation of vitality4 ,i have seen him enthusiastic over la politique ,lloyd-,george1 and ,i should not be in the least surprised if he found something in it to serve some one or other of his multifarious purposes4 ,if1 however1 surprise were what ,picasso aimed at he could go a very much easier way about it4 ,he could do what his tenth-rate imitators try to do--for instance1 he could agreeably shock the public with monstrous caricatures and cubist photography--those pictures1 ,i mean1 which the honest stockbroker recognizes1 with a thrill of excitement at his own cleverness1 as his favourite picture-postcards rigged out to look naughty4 ,but ,picasso shows such admirable indifference to the public that you could never guess from his pictures that such a thing existed3 and that1 of course1 is how it should be4 ,he never startles for the sake of startling2 neither does he mock4 ,certainly1 unlike the best of his contemporaries1 he seems almost as indifferent to the tradition as he is to the public2 but he no more laughs at the one than he tries to startle the other4 ,only amongst the whipper-snappers of painting will you discover a will to affront tradition1 or attract attention by deliberate eccentricity4 ,only1 ,i think1 the ,italian ,futurists1 their transalpine apes1 a few revolutionaries on principle1 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 ,jazz4 ,on music1 however1 and literature its influence has been great1 and here its triumphs are considerable4 ,it is easy to say that the genius of ,stravinsky--a musician1 unless ,i mistake1 of the first order and in the great line--rises superior to movements4 ,to be sure it does3 so does the genius of ,molire4 ,but just as the genius of ,molire found its appropriate food in one kind of civilization1 so does the genius of ,stravinsky in another2 and with that civilization his art must inevitably be associated4 ,technically1 too1 he has been influenced much by nigger rhythms and nigger methods4 ,he has composed ragtimes4 ,so1 if it is inexact to say that ,stravinsky writes ,jazz1 it is true to say that his genius has been nourished by it4 ,also1 he sounds a note of defiance1 and sometimes1 ,i think1 does evince a will to insult4 ,that he surprises and startles is clear2 what is more1 ,i believe he means to do it3 but tricks of self-advertisement are1 of course1 beneath so genuine an artist4 ,no more than ,picasso does he seek small profits or quick returns2 on the contrary1 he casts his bread upon the waters with a finely reckless gesture4 ,the fact is1 ,stravinsky is too big to be covered by a label2 but ,i think the ,jazz movement has as much right to claim him for its own as any movement has to claim any first-rate artist4 ,similarly1 it may claim ,mr4 ,t4,s4 ,eliot--a poet of uncommon merit and unmistakably in the great line--whose agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse4 ,midwifery1 to be sure1 seems an odd occupation for a lady whom one pictures rather in the rle of a flapper3 but a midwife was what the poet needed1 and in that capacity she has served him4 ,apparently it is only by adopting a demurely irreverent attitude1 by being primly insolent1 and by playing the devil with the instrument of ,shakespeare and ,milton that ,mr4 ,eliot is able occasionally to deliver himself of one of those complicated and remarkable imaginings of his3 apparently it is only in language of an exquisite purity so far as material goes1 but twisted and ragged out of easy recognition1 that these nurslings can be swathed4 ,as for surprise1 that1 presumably1 is an emotion which the author of ,ara ,vos ,prec is not unwilling to provoke4 ,be that as it may1 ,mr4 ,eliot is about the best of our living poets1 and1 like ,stravinsky1 he is as much a product of the ,jazz movement as so good an artist can be of any4 ,in literature ,jazz manifests itself both formally and in content4 ,formally its distinctive characteristic is the familiar one--syncopation4 ,it has given us a ragtime literature which flouts traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic4 ,in verse its products--rhythms which are often indistinguishable from prose rhythms and collocations of words to which sometimes is assignable no exact intellectual significance--are by now familiar to all who read4 ,eliot is too personal to be typical of anything1 and the student who would get a fair idea of ,jazz poetry would do better to spend half an hour with a volume of ,cocteau or ,cendrars4 ,in prose ,i think ,mr4 ,joyce will serve as a1 perhaps1 not very good example3 ,i choose him because he is probably better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar methods4 ,in his later publications ,mr4 ,joyce does deliberately go to work to break up the traditional sentence1 throwing overboard sequence1 syntax1 and1 indeed1 most of those conventions which men habitually employ for the exchange of precise ideas4 ,effectually1 and with a will1 he rags the literary instrument3 unluckily1 this will has at its service talents which though genuine are moderate only4 ,a writer of greater gifts1 ,virginia ,woolf1 has lately developed a taste for playing tricks with traditional constructions4 ,certainly she leaves out with the boldest of them3 here is syncopation if you like it4 ,i am not sure that ,i do4 ,at least1 ,i doubt whether the concentration gained by her new style for ,an ,unwritten ,novel and ,monday or ,tuesday makes up for the loss of those exquisite but old-fashioned qualities which make ,the ,mark on the ,wall a masterpiece of ,english prose4 ,but1 indeed1 ,i do not think of ,mrs4 ,woolf as belonging properly to the movement2 she is not imbued with that spirit which inspires the authentic ,jazz writers1 whether of verse that looks oddly like prose or of prose that raises a false hope of turning out to be verse1 and conditions all that they produce4 ,she is not gavroche4 ,in her writings ,i find no implicit1 and often well-merited1 jeer at accepted ideas of what prose and verse should be and what they should be about2 no nervous dislike of traditional valuations1 of scholarship1 culture1 and intellectualism2 above all1 no note of protest against the notion that one idea or emotion can be more important or significant than another4 ,assuredly1 ,mrs4 ,woolf is not of the company on whose banner is inscribed ,no discrimination6 ,no culture6 ,not much thought6 ,she is not of that school whose grand object it is to present1 as surprisingly as possible1 the chaos of any mind at any given moment4 ,the ,jazz theory of art1 if theory there be1 seems stupid enough--as do most4 ,what matters1 however1 are not theories1 but works3 so what of the works of ,jazz8 ,if ,stravinsky is to be claimed for the movement1 ,jazz has its master3 it has also its petits matres--,eliot1 ,cendrars1 ,picabia1 and ,joyce1 for instance1 and les six4 ,oddly enough1 les six consist of four musicians--,darius ,milhaud1 ,georges ,auric1 ,poulenc1 and ,germaine ,taillefer ,z--chaperoned by the brilliant ,jean ,cocteau4 ,all five have their places in contemporary civilization3 and such talents are not to be disposed of simply by the present of a bad name4 ,for it is not enough to call an artist extremist or reactionary1 ,cubist or ,impressionist1 and condemn or approve him as such4 ,these classifications are merely journalistic or1 if you will1 archological conveniences4 ,it is the critic's business to inquire not so much whether an artist is advanced or ,cubist or ,jazz1 as whether he is good1 bad1 or interesting2 and that is what most critics fail to do4 ,one's general opinion of a movement or school ought not to affect one's opinion of any particular work4 ,one may1 for excellent reasons1 dislike a movement2 one may hold that it hampers or sets on a false scent more artists than it serves2 that it induces students of promise to waste time and energy on fruitless problems2 that it generally fails to get the best out of its most gifted adherents1 while it pumps into a multitude of empty heads so much hot air as to swell them to disquieting proportions4 ,this is pretty much what ,i think of ,cubism2 but ,i am not such a fool as to deny that1 experimenting in these very problems which seem to me to lead most artists into a rather unprofitable world of abstractions1 ,picasso and ,braque have produced works of the greatest beauty and significance1 while those of ,fernand ,lger1 ,jean ,metsinger1 and other avowed ,cubists are of extraordinary merit and deserve the most careful attention4 ,i can think of no movement except that called ,art nouveau1 which has not contributed something to the world's artistic capital and to the great tradition4 ,only1 to realize this1 one must be able to distinguish not only between movements1 but between the artists of a movement4 ,that is what angry critics will not do4 ,that is why the admirable ,mr4 ,dent--whose brilliant lacerations of les six1 and other exponents of ,jazz1 ,i sometimes have the pleasure of translating to his victims--knew no better1 the other day1 than to bracket ,poulenc with ,miss ,edith ,sitwell4 ,confusions of this sort seem to me to take the sting out of criticism2 and that1 ,i am sure1 is the last thing ,mr4 ,dent would wish to do4 ,he1 at any rate1 who comes to bury ,jazz should realize what the movement has to its credit1 viz41 one great musician1 one considerable poet1 ten or a dozen charming or interesting little masters and mistresses1 and a swarm of utterly fatuous creatures who in all good faith believe themselves ,artists4 ,footnote ,z3 ,honegger1 ,i think1 was never officially of the band4 ,the encouragement given to fatuous ignorance to swell with admiration of its own incompetence is perhaps what has turned most violently so many intelligent and sensitive people against ,jazz4 ,they see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and vulgar to fancy that they can understand art1 and hundreds of the conceited to imagine that they can create it4 ,all the girls in the dancings and sportsmen at the bar who like a fox-trot or a maxixe have been given to believe1 by people who ought to know better1 that they are more sensitive to music than those who prefer ,beethoven4 ,the fact that ,stravinsky wants his music to be enjoyed in the cafs gives pub-loafers fair ground for supposing that ,stravinsky respects their judgement4 ,well1 the music of ,brahms is not enjoyed by pub-loafers2 but formerly the concert-goers were allowed to know better4 ,stravinsky is reported to have said that he would like people to be eating1 drinking1 and talking while his music was being played 7how furious he would be if they did anything of the sort671 so1 when a boxful of bounders begin chattering in the middle of an opera and the cultivated cry hush the inference is that the cultivated are making themselves ridiculous4 ,again3 if rules were made by pedants for pedants1 must not mere lawlessness be a virtue8 ,and1 since savages think little and know less1 and since savage art has been extolled by the knowing ones 7,i take my share of whatever blame may be going7 as much as cultured has been decried does it not follow that ignorant and high-spirited lads are likely to write better verses than such erudite old buffers as ,milton1 ,spenser1 and ,gray8 ,above all1 because it has been said that the intellect has nothing to do with art1 it is assumed by the mob of ladies and gentlemen1 who if they wrote not with ease could not write at all1 that there is no such thing as the artistic problem4 ,and it is1 ,i believe1 chiefly because all genuine artists are beginning to feel more and more acutely the need of a severe and exacting problem1 and because everyone who cares seriously for art feels the need of severe critical standards1 that1 with a sigh of relief1 people are timidly murmuring to each other ,plus de ,jazz6 ,and1 indeed1 there are autumnal indications3 the gay papier-mach pagoda is beginning to lose its colours3 visibly it is wilting4 ,when1 a few days after the conversation ,i have recorded1 it was rumoured in ,paris that the admired ,prokofieff1 composer of ,chout1 had said that he detested ragtime1 the consternation into which were thrown some fashionable bars and salons was as painful to behold as must have been that into which were thrown parlours and vicarage gardens when ,professor ,huxley began pouring cold water on ,noah's ,ark4 ,we hurried away to the ,southern ,syncopated ,orchestra1 only to find it sadly fallen off4 ,but had it really changed so much as we8 ,and1 more and more1 immense musical and literary activity notwithstanding1 people are looking to the painters1 with their high seriousness1 professionalism1 conscience1 reverence1 and vitality as the sole exponents and saviours of le grand art4 ,not for nothing is ,derain the most admired of ,frenchmen by the young lite2 for ,derain is humorous without being gavroche1 respects the tradition yet is subservient to no school1 and believes that all the highest human faculties are not more than sufficient to the production of the smallest work of art4 ,what the pick of the new generation in ,france1 and in ,england too1 ,i fancy1 is beginning to feel is that art1 though it need never be solemn1 must always be serious2 that it is a matter of profound emotion and of intense and passionate thought2 and that these things are rarely found in dancing-palaces and hotel lounges4 ,even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual effort4 ,one thing is not as good as another2 so artists and amateurs must learn to choose4 ,no easy matter that3 discrimination of this sort being something altogether different from telling a ,manhattan from a ,martini4 ,to select as an artist or discriminate as a critic are needed feeling and intellect and--most distressing of all--study4 ,however1 unless ,i mistake1 the effort will be made4 ,the age of easy acceptance of the first thing that comes is closing4 ,thought rather than spirits is required1 quality rather than colour1 knowledge rather than irreticence1 intellect rather than singularity1 wit rather than romps1 precision rather than surprise1 dignity rather than impudence1 and lucidity above all things3 plus de ,jazz4 ,meanwhile1 whether the ladies and gentlemen in the restaurants will soon be preferring sentimental waltz-tunes to flippant ragtimes is a question on which ,i cannot pretend to an opinion4 ,neither does it matter4 ,what these people like or dislike has nothing to do with art4 ,that is the discovery4